What Removal Means

Training began at 0500.

By the end of the first week, Maren could disassemble and reassemble a standard surveillance unit in four minutes, run identification protocols for six categories of flagged individuals, and recite Corps doctrine on civilian engagement from memory.

Civilian engagement was the phrase they used for removal.

The doctrine used the passive voice for everything — the subject will be processed, the extraction will be completed, the record will be amended. She noticed, by the third day, that the doctrine was careful never to use the word person.

The other recruits were settling into training with varying degrees of acceptance. Tomas had stopped crying. The girl with the Keeper posture — her name was Sela, and she spoke in precise, careful sentences — had identified the least bad outcome and was working toward it. The two boys from the corner, Finn and Dax, had made themselves useful to the handlers in ways Maren watched with cold attention.

In the second week, they showed them a file.

The file was a real case — active, the handler said, anonymized for training purposes. A woman in the western districts had been flagged for distributing uncertified information: a document suggesting the Sorting algorithm was weighted against certain district bloodlines. The woman had no criminal record, two children, eleven years of Keeper service.

The recruits were told to run the protocol. Identify, locate, extraction plan.

Maren went through the steps. Her hands were steady. She built the extraction plan.

Then she submitted it.

The handler reviewed it in silence. "Correct," he said.

After the session, Sela sat beside her on the cot.

"It's easier," Sela said quietly, "if you don't think of the file as a person."

"I know that's the point," Maren said.

"Is that a problem for you?"

Maren looked at the ceiling. The lights were the same as always — flat, white, without shadow.

"The Sorting weighted against certain district bloodlines," she said. "That's what the woman's document claimed."

Sela didn't answer.

"My mother's people have been Growers for five generations," Maren said. "My father's people too. I went red and no one from my district ever went red." She looked at Sela. "Doesn't that mean something?"

Sela's face was very controlled. "It means you're here," she said. "And the woman in the file is going to be removed."

She got up and went to her own cot.

Maren stared at the ceiling for a long time.

The extraction plan sat in the system with her name on it.

She hadn't broken the protocol.

She'd just understood, for the first time, exactly what the protocol was for.