Level Zero

There were nine of them.

Maren counted in the first five minutes, which the handler with the shaved head said showed initiative. She said it the way you'd say it about a rat learning a maze.

Nine recruits. Five boys, four girls, ages sixteen to eighteen, all sorted red that morning, all pulled from their ceremonies before the next name was called. All sitting on cots in a dormitory that smelled of industrial cleaner and something metallic beneath it.

The dormitory was underground. Maren knew because there were no windows, the air tasted recycled, and the ceiling was exposed pipe and bare concrete. The lights didn't vary — the same flat white whether it was day or night, so you lost track of which it was within the first few hours.

A boy named Tomas was crying quietly into his knees. A girl with Keeper-district posture — straight back, controlled expression — sat on the cot across from Maren and stared at nothing. Two boys in the corner were already talking in low voices, making alliances, which Maren recognized from her district's council politics.

She sat on her cot and did not cry and did not talk.

The handler gave them an hour before orientation.

Orientation was a room with a long table and chairs designed to be uncomfortable — she was already learning to read environmental design, how spaces communicated what was expected of you. Sit up. Pay attention. Don't ask what you're not yet supposed to know.

The senior handler spoke for forty minutes.

The Eraser Corps served the Republic of Calder. The Republic required stability. Stability required management of elements that could not be managed through ordinary civic means. Erasers were trained to locate, surveil, and neutralize those elements. The work was classified. Their families had already been notified that they were serving in a restricted civic role — no further communication permitted until training was complete, timeline unspecified.

No one asked what neutralize meant.

Maren asked.

The handler paused. He was a thin man with eyes the color of old cement, and he looked at her for a moment before answering.

"Removal," he said.

"Removal from where?"

"From the census."

Tomas made a sound. The girl with the Keeper posture went very still.

"You will understand the full scope of your duties once your training reaches the appropriate stage," the handler said, and moved on.

Dinner was protein and carbohydrate and a supplement they were told to take without asking. The lights didn't change. Maren lay on her cot in the flat white dark and thought about her father's fields, the way the wheat looked in early morning, and the word scratched into the wall at the loading bay entrance.

RUN.

She hadn't. None of them had.

The door at the end of the dormitory was sealed with a keypad.

She'd watched the handler enter the code.

She'd memorized it.

She didn't use it.

Not yet.