Chapter 73: White Walls, Again
The door finished parting with a breath of conditioned air, and the world dropped its library voice.
White.
Not blank-white. Lived-in white. Polished floors that held the light and returned it without glare. Walls of matte panels stitched with hairline seams. The corridor ran straight for twenty paces, then opened out and kept opening until perspective gave up. Bridges crossed above at clean angles. Elevators rode glass columns like pinned raindrops. Rooms branched and kept branching. The place did not have an end, only more.
Nobody spoke. Even Arashi ran out of commentary.
They stepped onto the threshold as a unit. The sound their boots made here was different - a soft, confidence-making hush that said the floor wanted you to trust it. Kori waited just inside, letting their eyes learn.
"This is the Heart" she said, voice low and clear. "We train here. We plan here. We build here. If the city needs a fist, it beats in these rooms."
Raizen understood the hum now - not with words, but in the way his bones agreed with the air. Somewhere below, the slow song of machines braided with the thinner, higher note he knew from Eon resisting walls. Not everywhere - just in places, behind glass and folded metal, like guardrails woven into the architecture for when power decided to misbehave.
A walkway carried them into the atrium. White platforms nested around a circular shaft, each level offset from the last. Labels glowed soft at the edges - T-03, R-11, OPS-N, FAB-2 - the language of a place that measured itself into usefulness. Far across, a rectangular window showed a room where targets zipped on rails in patterns that would totally embarrass most shooters. To the right, a hall led past door after identical door, each with a small display that read RES, then changed to OCCUPIED, then back to RES as if the Heart was already thinking ahead.
Keahi’s fingers flexed, a soldier’s reflex hunting for a handle. Hikari’s hand found her own sleeve and held on. Esen looked like he might forget to blink. Ichiro watched the moving parts the way engineers pray.
They walked past a glass wall that held a room the size of a gym and not a gym at all. White plates tessellated the far wall in hexagons, each inset with a faint crosshair that shifted when you looked away. The floor was sectioned into rings and lines that could rearrange themselves, grooves waiting for instructions. A control bank lived behind another glass bubble like a mind in a jar, silent and judgmental.
Arashi finally found words. "The Rust Room grew up and paid its taxes."
"Rust Room is for teaching" Kori said. "This is for... Everything else."
They crossed to a balcony that looked down into a shaft wide enough to land a house. Lifts rose and fell in pairs. On a platform three levels below, a group of armored Wardens moved in mirror, the sound of training impacts traveling up like polite thunder. On another, technicians in white coveralls threaded cabling through the spine of a drone the size of a horse, its shell open to show a ribcage of latticed metal.
"Layered" Esen murmured. "How far down does it go?"
"As far as it needs. I mean, realistically, they don’t need THAT much, but oh well..." Kori replied.
They moved again. The Heart liked movement. A room to the left flashed with a grid of pale dots that changed at a gesture from someone in a chair. A room to the right hissed as sterile mist kissed gloves. They passed a door with a warning bar and a strip of amber light. Kori didn’t slow there.
"Why now?" Arashi asked, quietly enough to be respectful. "Why bring us here."
Kori kept walking. "Because you will leave these walls soon." She did not say the word field. She did not need to. "And I’d prefer you don’t go out blind. Or crippled."
Hikari’s breath caught, a small, honest sound. Raizen felt the packet in his pocket like a promise he would need to keep before the world asked for harder ones.
They entered a gallery with windows on both sides. Behind the first, a treadmill built like a runway tilted up and down, sideways and backward, while a mannequin in armor ran against the tilt. Behind the second, a sling hung in a frame while a white-suited tech adjusted its lines, tension numbers in the corner counting in patient pairs. Beyond that, a space held racks of modular weapon parts - not blades, but the things that supported blades: grips, counterweights, mounts, little machines waiting to be told what job they belonged to.
Arashi’s head tipped toward the glass. "May I please touch all of that."
"No" Kori said, at the exact same instant Esen said, "Please do not."
Keahi’s mouth curved. "One day."
"One day" Kori agreed, which surprised all of them and none of them.
They turned a corner and the Heart decided it had been long enough without dramatic timing.
A lift descended in the central column opposite and came to a precise, frictionless stop. The doors parted and a woman stepped into the light like she had hired it for the moment. She wore white that didn’t ask permission from the rest of the room - fitted coat, risky skirt. Glasses with thin frames caught a strip of brightness and threw it back like a wink. She looked thirty-ish and also like she she hasn’t slept well since the age of sixteen because the city asked and she said yes.
She didn’t hurry. She didn’t stroll. She walked as if the floor presented itself to her out of gratitude.
At her shoulder, half a pace back, moved a girl with a slate tucked against her ribs. Saffi. Hair clipped short. Eyes that took photographs without the twitch of a lens. She wore the same white, only plainer, as if the fabric had chosen to be quiet.
"Kori" the first woman said, and the way she said it had history and respect and the faintest curl of a grin. "You finally brought me presents."
Kori’s chin lifted one code’s worth. "Alteea."
Alteea spread her arms to take in the eight, the Heart and the day itself. "So these are my miracles and my headaches. Hello, future paperwork!"
Arashi didn’t trust himself to answer. Keahi blinked once and then remembered how to breathe. Hikari’s posture, which had remembered how to be formal at the library door, tried to be even more formal and failed at the shoulders. Esen’s mouth made a straight line like he might sketch her and then thought better of it. Ichiro bowed a fraction and got a nod back that said she had noticed. Lynea tucked a hair behind her ear and looked at the floor long enough to be rude. Feris’s hands gripped each other so she would not wave like a child.
Alteea stopped in front of them and made a study. Not a long, heavy, calculating stare - a quick sweep like a musician hearing the key before the first note. "I am Alteea Sage. Head of operations. Yes, I am younger than you think I should be. No, I do not get more sleep than I look like." She tipped her head at Saffi. "This is Saffi. She has a better memory than I do. That is a threat and a promise. She got here through the special recommendation you’ve heard about at the exam"
Saffi inclined her head. She didn’t speak. The slate in her hands woke on its edge with a small, internal sigh.
"You were running the Nyx command since you were sixteen?" Arashi asked, the words escaping before the part of his brain that filters pride could reattach.
Alteea’s mouth tilted, shameless. "Stuff was on fire and the people in charge were... Less competent than me." She slid her glasses up her nose with a knuckle. "We do not get to pick our ages when the alarms go."
"Tour first" Alteea said, snapping her fingers gently as if to bring the room into the lesson. "You will see just enough to be scared and just enough to be greedy." She took the lead without asking. Kori let her because letting Alteea lead inside the Heart is like letting water be wet.
They traced a line along a catwalk that skimmed the edge of a room where a dozen balances hung from the ceiling, each with a different kind of harness. "Gait and load analysis" Alteea said. "We teach your body to tell the truth when physics wants to lie."
Esen felt that one.
They paused at a viewing bench where a group in gray uniforms ran silent drills on a white floor that kept rearranging its lines under their feet. Alteea gestured. "Adaptive terrain. We will teach you the map and then take the map away. If you hate me now, get in line."
They crossed a bridge and looked down on a long hall where columns spaced in neat ranks flickered faintly. "Pulse corridor" Alteea said. "You will learn to feel the difference between a something wanting to work and something about to fail. Useful everywhere."
They stopped at a glass cylinder where a trainer in white was adjusting a brace on a student’s forearm, his words too quiet to catch. "Repair" Alteea said. "We are fond of keeping limbs attached."
"Fond is good" Lynea whispered.
"Fond is policy" Alteea said, and actually smiled.
They drifted through a sector where rooms had thicker doors and double seals. A sign above these read CONTROLLED. Kori’s hand touched Raizen’s shoulder for half a second as if to say no one is going in there today without needing to say it. Raizen nodded once. The hum under his skin recognized these walls the way a blade recognizes a whetstone. At the far end of the level, a wall that was not a wall waited. It broke open on a motion sensor and admitted them to a small amphitheater that faced a clean set of controllers and buttons, beneath a row of high displays. None of the screens screamed data. They breathed it - clean rows, little pulses, a slow sweep that belonged to a radar he had seen painted on paper a lifetime ago. A map of the city sat off center. Another map, the land beyond the walls, occupied more space.
Alteea did not linger. "Field will come" she said. "Sooner than you think. I want my hands on your numbers before that."
She turned on her heel. Saffi moved when she did, a shadow with excellent timing.
They ended where the corridor widened and the white floor had a square that had opinions. Lines in the surface arranged themselves and then stilled. A column to the side woke and offered a tray of paper-thin bands like bracelets. The devices had no lights. They did not need to be believed by being pretty.
Alteea stopped with the square at her back. Her glasses caught the overhead strip and put a spark over each eye. "I want everything" she said, and the flirt turned down, the professional turning up like a dimmer. "Height, weight, resting and stress stamina, standing balance, blast tolerance. Skill lists I will get from your instructors." She glanced at Kori like a finger tapping on a remembered argument. "Weaknesses I prefer to hear from you before they slap me in the face."
Kori lifted one shoulder. "They do not know all of them yet." Then, because it was the right room for it, she added, "Neither do I. Every single one we found, they completely obliterated it."
Alteea seemed delighted by that answer. "Good. Curiosity keeps you alive. Or kills you faster, depends"
She flicked a glance at the tray, then at their faces, one by one. Raizen felt those eyes pass over him and stick for the smallest extra fraction, as if she had heard something in the way he kept still.
"And last" she said, as if mentioning dessert at the end of a hard meal, "I’ll need the precise value of Eon output."
The word hung. It did not echo. It did not need to.
Kori did not flinch. She folded her clipboard against her chest like a shield she had decided not to use. "We have never measured that."
"Then that can be fixed" Alteea said, eyes bright but not unkind. "I have a policy disagreement with that decision."
Feris found her voice, and it came out softer than usual. "What does it do?"
Alteea smiled without showing teeth. "It tells me how loud your light is when you stop pretending to be small."