The combat suit fitting happened on the third day.
Ray had spent the first two days in physical assessment, which was comprehensive enough to feel exploratory in the way that scientific research is exploratory they were looking for something specific, he just didn't know what. His blood pressure, reaction time, pain threshold, cellular regeneration rate, and something called an 'Aphelion Signature Index' that the medical technician was very calm about recording and very careful not to discuss.
On the third day, he was taken to the suit bonding facility.
The facility was cool and quiet and lit in a blue-white that made everything look slightly clinical. There were six bonding bays, each housing a different combat suit class. Ray walked past E-Class, D-Class, C-Class standard issue, standard issue, standard issue and the technician leading him didn't stop at any of them.
They passed the Wraith suits. The Phantom suits. They stopped at the end of the bay, where there was no suit on display. There was a case. And in the case, still and matte-black and faintly veined with something that looked like circuitry but moved like water something that didn't look like any of the suits Ray had walked past.
"I've been instructed to have you stand within half a meter of the case."
"Why?"
"Honestly? We don't know. This is the first time we've tried it."
Ray looked at the case. At the thing inside it. Up close, the veining was more visible thin lines that pulsed very faintly, rhythmically, the way a living thing breathes.
It's doing that because I'm here.
He didn't know where the thought came from. He looked at the technician.
"How long has this suit been in this case?"
"Eleven months. Since it arrived from the Forge Division special projects lab. Before that we don't have good records. It was flagged as anomalous during standard testing and removed from the regular bonding queue."
"What made it anomalous?"
"It wouldn't bond to anyone. Every candidate who attempted bonding found that the suit didn't respond. It just sat there. Completely inert."
Ray looked at the case again. The pulsing had intensified slightly.
"Open it."
"Captain von Rhein's instruction was"
"Please."
The technician hesitated. Then he opened the case.
The suit moved.
Not dramatically not the way action works in stories. It shifted, the way something sleeping shifts when you say its name. And the veining along its surface lit up, cool blue-white, exactly matching the light in the room, and then went brighter, and Ray felt something in his chest that wasn't his heartbeat but was close to it, a resonance, a frequency, like a tuning fork struck next to something that vibrated at the same pitch.
The bonding process took twelve minutes. Standard bonding took seventy-two hours.
The technician wrote something in his notes and then crossed it out and wrote it again. Then he sent a message to Captain von Rhein. Then he sent a message to Lieutenant Kitagawa. Then he sat down in his chair and looked at Ray in the completed Genesis Suit black and alive and quietly pulsing and said nothing for a while.
The suit felt like a second skin that was better than his first one.
That was the only way Ray could describe it, internally, without sounding strange. His E-Class trial suit had felt like wearing furniture. The Genesis Suit felt like breathing like something that had been absent had returned, and the absence had been so long he'd mistaken it for normal.
He went to training the next morning and said nothing about any of this.
Lieutenant Kitagawa noticed. Of course she noticed. She noticed everything in the precise, low-key way of someone who has spent years training themselves to see what other people's attention slides over.
She pulled him aside after the morning combat drill a drill in which he had done adequately, not remarkably, because the Genesis Suit was new and he was still learning its language and looked at the suit and then at him.
"The suit read on your biometrics as fully bonded this morning."
"Yes."
"That suit has been in a bonding case for eleven months refusing every candidate they sent to it."
"I heard that."
"Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"That the suit chose me, or I chose it, or both, and that's not how suit bonding is supposed to work."
"That's part of what I'm saying. The other part is that the suit's Aphelion Signature Index reading from your first bonded scan came back with a notation I've never seen before. The notation reads: 'Insufficient parameters measurement ceiling exceeded.'"
"What does that mean?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"It means the suit's reading of your Aphelion Signature is too high for our instruments to measure accurately. Our instruments are calibrated to the highest output any human combatant has ever registered. You exceeded that ceiling on the first scan."
Ray processed this.
"That's not possible."
"No. It's not supposed to be."
She looked at him with something that was not quite concern and not quite fascination and was probably both.
"Don't tell anyone about this yet."
"Okay."
"I mean it. No one. Not Theo. Not your cousin."
"Okay."
"I need to think about what this means before it becomes something we can't control."
She walked away. Ray stood in his Genesis Suit in the middle of the training floor and thought about the word 'ceiling' and what it meant to exceed one.