The assessment yard was outside.

  This surprised Ronald more than it probably should have. He’d constructed an image of this place as entirely interior — controlled environments, artificial lighting, the kind of facility that didn’t need windows because windows implied the outside world had relevance. But the guards led the new intake group through a series of secured corridors and then through a heavy door that opened onto actual sky, actual sunlight, and a yard that was roughly the size of a football field surfaced with compacted grey material that wasn’t quite concrete and wasn’t quite rubber and was probably optimized for people bleeding on it.

  The sun hit him and he stopped for half a second.

  He hadn’t seen sky since he died.

  He filed the feeling away — something that wasn’t quite emotion but was adjacent to it — and kept walking.

  There were twelve of them in the assessment group. Ronald had noted this during the corridor walk, along with the fact that the guards had reorganized them subtly by size coming out of the pen, largest at the front, which suggested the people running this assessment preferred to process physical data visually before anything else. Lysandra was three people ahead of him. Gorin was near the front. The informant near the door had not been included in this group which either meant he was on a different assessment schedule or his role here excused him from the gladiatorial pipeline.

  Probably the latter. Informants were more valuable in the pen than in the arena.

  They were arranged in a loose line facing a raised platform at the far end of the yard. On the platform stood two people. One was a broad man with a clipboard and the expression of someone whose enthusiasm for this job had expired several years ago. The other was a woman.

  Ronald looked at her the way he looked at everything in a new environment — comprehensively, quickly, without appearing to.

  Octavia Rhen was somewhere in her late thirties, lean in the way that suggested function rather than aesthetics, with dark hair pulled back in a way that was entirely about keeping it out of her face and nothing else. She wore clothes that were practical without being a uniform — dark, fitted, nothing that would restrict movement, nothing decorative. She was standing with her hands clasped behind her back looking at the twelve people in front of her with the patient attention of someone who had done this many times and had learned that the first ninety seconds of observation were worth more than the next ninety minutes of testing.

  She hadn’t looked at the clipboard once.

  Ronald decided immediately that Lysandra had been right about her.

  “Assessment is in three parts,” the broad man with the clipboard announced, in the tone of a recording that had been played too many times. “Physical evaluation. Chip calibration and response. Combat trial. You will be scored on each. Scores determine placement tier, training assignment, and sponsor eligibility.” He looked up from the clipboard. “Questions before we begin will not be answered. Questions after we begin will not be answered. Questions in general are discouraged.”

  Nobody asked any questions.

  Octavia said nothing throughout this. She was still looking at the line of people with the same quality of attention. Ronald had the distinct impression she had already finished drawing preliminary conclusions about most of them and was now refining.

  Her eyes moved to him.

  He looked back at her with the same neutral assessment he’d given everyone else in the yard. Not challenging. Not deferential. Just observational.

  She moved on.

  The physical evaluation was exactly what it sounded like and Ronald got through it with the focused attention of a man taking a car for a test drive in a vehicle he’d been given without a manual. Running — the body was fast, considerably faster than he’d budgeted for, and he had to consciously moderate his pace to avoid showing a ceiling too early. Lifting — easy, and he was less careful here because raw strength was less tactically revealing than speed and agility. Flexibility and range of motion — the body’s joints moved with an ease that still struck him as faintly miraculous, and he allowed himself one private moment of appreciation for a spine that didn’t sound like a percussion instrument when he bent forward.

  The broad man with the clipboard made notations. Octavia watched from the platform without making notations, which meant she was either keeping it in her head or had already decided the physical data was secondary to something else.

  Gorin performed well — powerful, controlled, with the practiced economy of someone who’d done physical assessments before and knew how to present without overextending. Lysandra performed competently without distinction, which Ronald suspected was a choice rather than a limitation. Two of the others performed badly enough that the man with the clipboard wrote something that looked longer than a number, which probably wasn’t good news for them.

  Ronald performed adequately. Not impressively. Not poorly. The kind of performance that produced a middle-tier score and attracted no particular attention.

  He was fairly certain Octavia didn’t believe a word of it.

  The chip calibration was conducted by a technician who arrived from a side door wheeling equipment that looked considerably more sophisticated than the implantation setup in the medical facility. Each person in the group was connected briefly to a monitoring system while a series of stimuli were delivered through the chip — not painful exactly, but intrusive in a way that was difficult to describe, like someone flicking lights on in rooms inside your head that you hadn’t known existed.

  Ronald sat through it with his hands on his knees and his expression unchanged.

  The chip’s combat prediction overlay flickered on briefly during the calibration and he got a half second of tactical data overlaying his vision — distance markers, movement probability indicators rendered in pale blue lines across his field of view — before it cut out again. In that half second he catalogued the position of every person in the yard, the two guards at the door, the technician, and the distance from his current position to the platform where Octavia was standing.

  Seventeen point three meters. Three seconds at a controlled run. Less if he wasn’t being controlled about it.

  He noted this with the automatic thoroughness of a man who had spent decades noting exit routes and attack angles as a basic cognitive function, the same way other people noted where the bathrooms were.

  The technician reviewed his calibration data and wrote something down.

  Octavia had descended from the platform during the calibration phase and was moving slowly along the line of seated people, watching the calibration process for each one. When she reached Ronald she stopped and looked at the technician’s screen without touching it.

  Whatever she saw there produced no visible reaction.

  She moved on.

  Ronald breathed slowly and wondered what his calibration data looked like to someone who knew how to read it.

  The combat trial used a section of the yard that was marked off with paint lines and contained a rack of practice weapons along one edge — weighted approximations of actual weapons, the kind of thing designed to train with rather than kill with, though Ronald had killed with worse in his first life and suspected the distinction was more administrative than practical.

  They went in pairs, which the broad man assigned with the randomness of someone reading names off a list and not particularly caring about the outcomes.

  Ronald was paired with a young man approximately the size of a refrigerator who had performed extremely well in the physical evaluation and had the eager forward-leaning energy of someone who believed that being large and willing was most of what combat required.

  It wasn’t most of what combat required.

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  Ronald selected a short weighted baton from the rack — nothing flashy, nothing that required technique to be impressive — and stood at his mark on the painted line while the large young man selected something longer and heavier and practiced a swing with it that was genuinely powerful and took approximately twice as long to complete as it needed to.

  The broad man said something that meant begin.

  The large young man came forward with the confidence of someone who had never been in a situation where confidence wasn’t enough.

  What happened next took eleven seconds.

  Ronald didn’t fight him. Not exactly. He moved around him — not away, not retreating, just consistently not where the large young man expected him to be, using angles and timing that had less to do with the body’s capabilities and more to do with five decades of understanding how people with more size than experience committed to movements they couldn’t recover from. He absorbed one glancing hit on his left forearm that he’d allowed because avoiding it completely would have required showing more lateral speed than he’d demonstrated in the physical evaluation, and he filed the small bloom of pain away as a calibration point — the body’s pain response was faster and sharper than his old one but recovered quicker, which was interesting data.

  He ended the trial with the baton pressed to the side of the large young man’s neck, at the specific point where pressure rather than impact produced immediate cessation of resistance. The large young man froze. His weapon was on the ground three meters behind him. He wasn’t entirely sure how it had gotten there.

  Eleven seconds.

  Ronald stepped back and returned to his mark.

  The yard was quiet in a specific way — the quality of quiet that followed something that people were still processing.

  He looked at the ground in front of him and kept his expression neutral.

  He had been, he reflected, somewhat less careful than planned. The body had moved before the plan had finished forming, which was going to require adjustment. Fifty years of instinct recalibrated to twenty years of physical capability was a combination that apparently required conscious management or it would simply express itself.

  Something to work on.

  He risked a glance at the platform.

  Octavia was no longer watching the trial in the general sense of watching proceedings. She was watching him specifically, with the focused quality of attention she’d given the line during those first ninety seconds, the preliminary conclusions phase, except this time the conclusions were clearly not preliminary.

  He looked away.

  After the trials the group was given water and made to wait while the broad man with the clipboard disappeared inside and presumably compiled scores. The twelve of them stood or sat in the yard with the low energy of people who had exerted themselves and were now in the uncomfortable position of waiting to be judged.

  Lysandra appeared beside Ronald with a water container and the studied casualness she seemed to use as a default register.

  “You were careful,” she said quietly.

  “Not careful enough apparently,” he said.

  “No.” She paused. “Eleven seconds.”

  “The body has opinions.”

  She looked at him with an expression that suggested this answer was both insufficient and somehow exactly what she’d expected. “Rhen clocked it. She has a timing device she doesn’t show.”

  Ronald drank his water and said nothing.

  “The man you were paired with — Baren — he’s been here three weeks. Two Stage One wins. He’s considered one of the stronger prospects in the current intake.” She let that sit for a moment. “You put him down in eleven seconds without appearing to try.”

  “I appeared to try,” Ronald said.

  “To everyone else,” Lysandra said.

  He looked at her.

  “I told you,” she said simply. “She notices things. The question now is what she does with what she noticed.”

  The answer to that question arrived approximately ten minutes later when the broad man returned with the clipboard and began reading tier assignments with the enthusiasm of a man reading a bus schedule. Most of the group received Tier Two or Tier Three designations. Gorin received Tier Two. Lysandra received Tier Two, which confirmed Ronald’s suspicion that her physical evaluation performance had been a choice.

  “Draven,” the broad man said. “Tier One. Direct assignment to Senior Training Track. Report to Training Hall C at sixth hour tomorrow.”

  The yard absorbed this with the specific silence of people recalibrating their understanding of the social landscape they were living in.

  Tier One apparently meant something.

  Ronald accepted the designation with a nod and nothing else and did not look at the platform.

  Octavia found him after the group had been returned to their respective pens, in the corridor between the assessment yard and the main facility. She appeared from a side passage with the directness of someone who had positioned herself specifically to intercept him, which meant she’d left the yard before the tier assignments were read and had still known exactly where he’d be.

  The two guards escorting the group stopped when she raised a hand. They waited at a distance of about eight meters, which was close enough to respond and far enough to indicate this conversation was intended to be private.

  She looked at him for a moment without speaking.

  He waited.

  “Eleven seconds,” she said.

  “He was slow,” Ronald said.

  “He was fast,” Octavia said. “For a twenty two year old with two arena wins he was fast.” A pause. “You made him look slow.”

  Ronald said nothing.

  “Your physical evaluation scores were middle tier,” she said. “Your chip calibration data suggested average integration. Your combat trial suggested something I don’t have a classification for.” She tilted her head slightly. “Who trained you?”

  “No one worth mentioning,” Ronald said.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “It’s the answer I have.”

  She studied him with the patient attention of someone who was accustomed to people not telling her things and had developed methods of obtaining information through observation that didn’t require their cooperation. Whatever she was looking for she appeared to find enough of it to make a preliminary decision.

  “Tier One direct assignment means you train separately from the general intake,” she said. “Better equipment. More intensive preparation. Higher sponsor visibility.” She paused. “It also means I have direct oversight of your development rather than delegating it.”

  “Is that a warning?” Ronald asked.

  Something moved across her expression. Not quite amusement. Recognition, maybe.

  “It’s information,” she said. “What you do with information is generally more revealing than the information itself.”

  She looked at him for one more moment with the quality of attention that he was beginning to understand was her default mode — not hostile, not warm, just comprehensively observational in a way that most people found uncomfortable and he found professionally familiar.

  Then she walked back the way she’d come, unhurried, without looking back.

  The guards resumed their positions and the corridor resumed its function and Ronald walked the remaining distance to the pen with the particular quality of thought that accompanied the recognition of someone genuinely worth being careful around.

  He’d known three people in his entire first life who had looked at him the way Octavia Rhen had just looked at him.

  Two of them had tried to have him killed.

  The third had been his employer for eleven years, which in his line of work amounted to the same thing eventually.

  He reached the pen, found his corner bunk, and sat down.

  Tier One, he thought. Direct oversight.

  He’d been less careful than planned and now a woman who noticed things was going to be watching him at close range indefinitely.

  He looked at the drain in the center of the floor.

  Second life, he decided, was going to require considerably more discipline than the first.

  The first one had killed him, so the bar wasn’t especially high.