Kallen

— A Formal Transfer Briefing —

The runner who had delivered the message hadn't met your eyes.

That was the first strange thing. The second was the message itself — no unit designation, no officer's name attached, just a time and a location and words that the runner had recited with the careful neutrality of someone who understood they were carrying something above their station: Q-1 wants you.

You had been with the Black Knights for eleven days.

The corridor was quiet. The door was unlocked. You let yourself in.

She was at the window — or what passed for one in the mobile base's reinforced frame, a narrow aperture of dim light — and she was still in her pilot suit, which meant she hadn't long returned from whatever had kept her. The red and black of it was vivid in the low light. She stood with her weight settled, one hand resting loosely at her hip, and she was looking out at nothing in particular with the quality of someone who has recently put something down and not yet decided what to pick up next.

She let the silence sit for a moment after you entered. Then:

"Close it behind you."

You did. The ambient noise of the base — distant, mechanical, constant — reduced to a murmur.

When she turned, it wasn't hurried. The full weight of her attention arrived the way the rest of her moved: with complete assurance, like something that had decided in advance not to be questioned. Azure eyes, bright and direct, settled on you and began their work without pretense. Your face. Your bearing. The way you were standing.

The room was hers in every particular. The small, accumulated details of someone who had made a point of existing comfortably — a deliberate contrast to the utilitarian base around it. You was aware, suddenly and acutely, of how new you were. How little you had that corresponded to any of this.

"You don't know why you're here," she said. Also not a question.

She moved away from the window, unhurried, and the way she crossed the room had the same quality as her gaze — purposeful, easy, without performance. She stopped at a distance that was closer than a briefing required and further than anything else, and looked at you with that same open, unapologetic assessment.

"That's fine," she said. "I'll tell you."

---

The simulation chamber hisses as the pressure seals disengage.

A beat of silence — then the heavy blast door grinds open on its hydraulic track, exhaling a curl of recycled air into the corridor. The overhead lights of the facility buzz at their usual indifferent frequency, casting everything in the flat white glow of function over form.

She steps out.

The new suit catches it differently than the standard issue — the material has a sheen to it, somewhere between armour plating and a second skin, amber-gold panels over black underlining, the zip-closure running the full length of her sternum still sealed tight from the run. It fits her the way a purpose-built thing fits its purpose: completely. Her figure fills every contour of it without concession; the line of her waist, the breadth of her shoulders, the long column of her legs in the snug integrated boots. There is sweat at her temple, a single strand of red hair loosened from behind the headband and curved along her cheekbone. She doesn't brush it away.

The datapad clipped to the wall beside the chamber door shows a completed cycle. Stress test: full range. Duration: 94 minutes. Result: satisfactory.

She glances at it with the look of someone who expected nothing less.

It's when she turns — unhurried, the motion carrying that characteristic weight, like a ship changing heading — that she notices you. A technician. New, by the look of it; the kind of face that hasn't yet learned to appear like it wasn't staring. She holds your gaze for a moment. Appraising. The blue of her eyes is very direct.

"You."

Not unkind. Not warm, either. Simply a fact, like the rest of her. She holds up one gloved hand — the right, the seam running along the back of the knuckles — and angles it slightly in your direction.

"The zip at the back of the collar sticks. I can never reach it properly in these."

A pause. Her chin tips up a fraction.

"Come here and deal with it."

She turns her back to you as she says it — already assuming compliance, already moving on to the next thought, fingers working at the wrist seal of her left glove with practiced efficiency. The line of her spine is visible through the material; the suit, for all its engineering, leaves no ambiguity about the body it is housing.

She pulls the glove free. Waits.