Chương 62: 26.Off-Base Supply Run 26-2

When the morning assembly whistle went off, my first thought wasn't getting up. It was that the Federation had finally decided to move our execution up. Unfortunately, no. I opened my eyes to the cold white light in the dorm ceiling and Jess on the opposite bunk already sitting up, tying her hair. Then I remembered: supply run day. On the rare occasions the Academy shows mercy, it usually isn't mercy. It's just the system deciding to change observation conditions and see what kind of stupid you produce.

"If you don't get up," Jess said around the hair tie in her mouth, words muffled, "and you're late for formation, you'll get written up by Disciplinary before you even touch your pass. That'd be one for the scrapbook." I pushed myself upright. My shoulders still carried yesterday's heavy-armor ache, like someone had welded lead plates straight into the joints. D's shield might not have hit me, but the recoil had logged itself into every muscle by other means. Outside, the sky was still grey.

The wind between the school buildings felt washed — clean, cold, and completely devoid of humanity. Ten minutes later we were in grey uniforms on the morning parade ground. The Lower House always looked like a box of cheap parts just out of wrapping, still not assigned their final use. They were lined up, sure. The issue was everyone also looked halfway to scrap.

Up front, a temporary registration table had been set up, Student Council members handing out passes and area restriction maps with all the warmth of a relief station distributing emergency rations. The Disciplinary Committee wasn't at the front today, but two members of the enforcement squad stood off to either side, quiet reminders that even on days without checks, the system was never asleep. The instructor went through the rules in that same tone that could turn breakfast into a last will and testament.

"One-day outside access. Fixed return time. You may purchase daily-use items, maintenance supplies, and personal hygiene products. You will not enter restricted zones. You will not disappear from your group. You will not drink and cause disturbances. You will not engage in any idiocy that requires Academy intervention." He paused, scanning the field of grey.

"The absence of inspections today does not mean you've suddenly become trustworthy. It means the Academy wants to see what kind of mess you make when no one's got a hand around your throat." That was, annoyingly, accurate. The Federation's understanding of human nature was always uncomfortably on point. When I got my pass, I glanced at the active timer and the return deadline stamped on it. It felt like holding a short-term parole slip with the countdown pre-installed.

Jess slid her pass into her sleeve pocket and bumped my arm.

"Where to first?" I was about to answer when Harvey appeared behind us. He'd actually bothered to make his uniform look halfway decent today. The zipper was at an acceptable height, and the armor liner wasn't the same falling-apart tragedy from yesterday. But the moment he opened his mouth, he was still Harvey.

"First, the shop."

"Which shop?" Jess asked. Harvey gave me a look like I was a new recruit who didn't yet realize what I was about to die from.

"The supply store. Old town. Hermann's Surplus. We replace everything we can on that issued junk you're wearing." I looked down at myself. Grey uniform, standard-issue boots, standard liners, standard belt, and a whole array of Federation-standardized straps, clips, and pouches. Not useless, exactly. But if I died in the field because of any of it, whoever filled out the report would probably just tick the box for "acceptable attrition."

"Everything?" I asked.

"Not everything," Harvey said.

"Only the parts that'll kill you first." Jess snorted.

"He's been sitting on that lecture since yesterday. Holding it till now counts as restraint." Harvey ignored her and continued, his tone as flat as if he were reading off a parts list.

"Laces. Standard socks. Standard waist cinch. Shoulder padding. Glove liners. Knee and elbow straps. Clips. Tool attachment points. That filter pouch of yours. There's one thing Academy-issue gear does well: it's cheap. The downside is that 'cheap' is its only quality." I almost said that at least this set of junk hadn't dismembered me on the spot, but thought it over and decided that wasn't exactly a hill worth dying on. Once they cleared the gate, the students spilled out like water.

The Upper and Lower Houses split into different streams by unspoken agreement, as if even the act of breathing outside air had to maintain class separation. The access road outside the gate ran straight toward the city's edge, flanked by dust barriers, old streetlights, and faded military wayfinding signs.

Farther off, the shopping sheds and low buildings of the commercial strip were already glowing in the early light, like a cluster of temporary organs wired up behind the front line to keep a minimum of blood moving between the Academy and the outside world. D walked alongside us, a rucksack on his back big enough to fit a small corpse, taking strides like the whole road was his. It only took a few minutes for Jess to start grumbling. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen.

Report the violation.

"I still think this is suspicious."

"What is?"

"Letting you out and not checking your bags." She tugged at her strap.

"That level of lenience doesn't match the school's overall personality."

"Maybe they just want data on which methods of future suffering we're willing to pay for," I said. Harvey cut in from ahead, dry as ever.

"If you start by replacing those standard socks, you can postpone the suffering by half a day." He walked like he'd done this a hundred times, not like it was his first. The shops closest to the Academy mostly catered to tourists, family members, or anyone still naive enough to romanticize the place: mugs with the school crest, cheap pins, prettily wrapped nutrition bars, and tactical jackets that looked like they'd split a seam during their first real sprint. Harvey didn't even bother glancing at them.

He led us straight into a side street, then through a narrow alley paved with cracked stone. The shops there were old, cramped, and brutally practical — faded numbers on the doors, old-style blast lamps over flaking signs, the air thick with leather, machine oil, and damp fabric.

"Here," Harvey said, pushing open a heavy glass door. The brass bell overhead rang once, reluctantly acknowledging a customer. The shop went deep, shelves running all the way to the back wall. Boots, straps, tool pouches, sheaths for cold-cutting blades, abrasion-resistant webbing, tarps, old canteens, stripped-down field kits, and piles of gear whose names I didn't know but that all looked much more likely to outlive a battle than anything the Academy issued us.

Behind the counter stood an old man, hair white as frost, back still straight. He took one look at our grey uniforms, didn't bother to adjust his expression, and snorted.

"From the Academy?" he said.

"You can tell?" Jess asked. The old man flicked his gaze her way, calm, with the patient fatigue of someone who'd seen too many idiots.

"I can tell. That set of issued crap you're wearing? Only the Academy still hands that out as if it's real equipment." I liked the old man immediately. Harvey was already at a rack of liners, moving along it like he was inspecting his own territory.

"Start with the worst." The next half hour was the first time I realized Harvey's scariest skill wasn't fixing things. It was turning "buying gear" into surgery.

"Not that pair." He plucked the glove liners I'd been eyeing out of my hands and dropped them back on the shelf.

"Stitching's too tight. Once they're wet they'll dry slow, stew your hands for two days and you'll rot before anything hits you."

"This waist cinch works." He tugged a strip of dark grey webbing free.

"Material's thick, buckles bite. Not like the standard ones — two laps and you're questioning your life choices." D was off trying on reinforced palm guards. The owner took one look at his hands, bent under the counter, and pulled out a bigger pair, adding, "This size isn't for normal people. You're an exception and a half." Jess had an armful of supplies, insisting she was "just browsing" while her hands kept tossing in dry bags, quick-dry shirts and pocket med kits.

When she passed me, she spotted the new socks in my hand and couldn't resist a jab.

"You finally look less like you're planning to drown yourself in Academy-issue."

"You've got serious trauma around standard socks."

"Because they earned it," she said.

"Their only tactical function is training cadets to maintain loyalty to the Federation while their feet are blistered to hell." I ended up replacing more than I'd planned. New boot liners, abrasion-resistant socks, a double-layer belt, replacement straps for my elbow and knee guards, glove liners, two sets of extra attachment points, a better-designed filter pouch, a quick-dry undershirt — I even swapped the clips on my tool bag for composite metal-resin ones.

The owner stacked everything on the counter piece by piece, his movements as practiced as if he were selecting nails for a coffin.

"Academy-issue isn't completely useless," he said while packing.

"It's just that the design premise isn't your comfort. It isn't your longevity either. The premise is: there'll be another batch after you." The shop went quiet for a second. If an instructor said that, it would get framed as military education. If a student said it, they'd get written up for ideological deviation. Out of an old surplus dealer's mouth, it sounded like a weather report. He was only stating what everyone knew and never had energy to say.

I looked down at the bag of new gear and realized Harvey really wasn't nitpicking. He was keeping us alive.

"And—" Harvey reached up to the top shelf and tugged down an old recorder, setting it in front of me with a thunk.

"What you wanted." The thing was even older than I'd imagined. The casing was worn to a dull shine, the ring around the lens had a scratch that didn't affect function, and it radiated the air of something very experienced in minding its own business.

"Offline," Harvey said.

"Doesn't talk to the Academy sync, separate storage module. Whatever you record, it won't go off and report on you by itself." I glanced at him.

"You say it like you're encouraging crime."

"Not crime," Harvey said, completely level.

"Documentation. You live in this place long enough, you learn to keep your own record." He was so annoyingly right I couldn't even figure out where to start arguing. By the time we were done and back out on the street, my bag was a lot heavier. My mood wasn't. It was lighter than when we'd left the gate. Not because spending money feels good, but because for the first time, someone had explained survival to me in terms of fabric, stitching, buckles, and refusing to settle.

Jess stretched in the doorway and looked up at the light already heating the mouth of the alley.

"Alright. Now you finally look more like you're here to buy supplies and less like you're here to die." D swung his bag onto his shoulder. The hardware inside clanged dully. Harvey pushed his safety glasses up the bridge of his nose, voice as flat as ever.

"Now we're done with the serious shopping, you've earned the right to go buy your two dozen cherry colas." I thought about it and realized the sentence carried a weird sort of ritual weight. Coming out of the surplus store, I finally looked more like someone planning to stay alive, rather than a Federation-issued teaching specimen waiting to be slowly disassembled by the environment.

The new liners and belt hadn't fully settled against my body yet, but at least I'd lost that sensation of every step sharpening a knife on the quartermaster's conscience. The bag of new gear pressed solid and real in my hand — the weight of someone finally deciding we were worth equipping with things that actually worked, instead of stitching "there'll be another batch after you" into every square inch of fabric. The wind at the street corner was warmer than inside the Academy walls, and dirtier.

Sunlight came in at an angle from above, skimming across the old district's tangle of awnings, faded signboards, and metal shutters mottled with age. At the end of the alley, a delivery truck was reversing with mechanical beeps. From the main street came the robotic drone of vendor recordings, looping through today's specials on filter cartridges, medical spray adhesive, and quick-dry compressed rations — the kind of sound that, after long enough, starts working like city-specific hypnosis.

The street was busy, but almost no one was idle. Family members, veterans, traders orbiting the Academy, upper-year students who'd slipped out on leave to breathe — everyone looked like they had their own deadline to beat.