Chương 73: 29.Talk of the Base 29-3

"He's not afraid you won't bring a brain," Jess picked up immediately, that decent-but-only-to-other-people smile resurfacing.

"He's afraid you'll waste your entire weight allowance on cherry cola and force us to dig twelve cans of liquid sugar out of your pack the night before a firestorm, then collectively decide to bury you as a landmark." I looked at her.

"First, not twelve cans. Second, why are you assuming you'd be looting my pack instead of me braining you with empty cans first?"

"Because you're weak," Jess said.

"Because you're short," Harvey added. I stopped walking and stared at both of them.

"Are you two coordinating today?"

"No," Jess said, all innocence.

"You're just very entertaining." Harvey didn't bother giving me an expression. Hands in his jacket pockets, he kept walking toward the Lower House mixed dorms. He moved like a utility knife with no decorative features — quiet, thin, carrying a faint undertone of if disciplinary codes didn't exist, I'd have disassembled all of you already. Jess and I followed. The route from the gate to the mixed dorms passed the Lower House equipment sheds, then curved along a half-worn path toward the residential blocks.

The Upper House buildings were white enough to suggest recent brainwashing, sunlight hitting them with an inhuman fastidiousness. Down here, things were normal — scuffed corners, peeling railings, drains that clogged periodically. The wind carried detergent, machine oil, sweat, and the crackle of ration wrappers. Not pleasant, but at least it smelled like living people. The three of us walked this very human road, discussing how not to die like instructional material at Forest School.

I pressed the clipboard tighter under my arm and finally asked.

"How much do you actually know?" Jess made a questioning sound.

"Forest School," I said.

"Don't give me the version where there are firestorms and jungle and hunters chasing you. That level of intel is available in three versions at the laundry room." Harvey didn't play dead this time.

"Simple version first." He kept his eyes forward, tone flat as reading a materials list.

"Tropical rainforest planet. Wet, hot, rotting, insect-heavy. Three weeks. Survive on your own. Make it to the end and you pass."

"I know that much," I said.

"You know the recruitment poster version," Jess cut in.

"Harvey's about to give you the one that reads more like a final will appendix." I ignored her. Harvey continued.

"Three weeks isn't the point. The cycle is. Every seventy-two hours, a major firestorm. Not a typhoon, not a forest fire. High-temperature, high-wind weather event carrying combustion particles and plasma wake. Peak wind velocity around three hundred kilometers per hour. Outer instantaneous temperature can spike to nineteen hundred degrees." He delivered this with no more inflection than reading product specifications. I couldn't help it.

"You say nineteen hundred degrees like it's the dorm hot water limit."

"Because numbers exist to dismantle fear," Harvey said mildly.

"When you actually see the fire wall coming, you won't be doing math." Jess walked backwards with her hands behind her head.

"And don't let 'every seventy-two hours' fool you. That doesn't mean the seventy-two hours between are for sleeping, eating, and developing romantic subplots. The real problem is atmospheric changes before and after the storm. Humidity, pressure, thermal currents, particle density, visibility — all of it destabilizes."

"Plus residual surface heat," Harvey said.

"A lot of areas look walkable after a storm passes. Step on them and it's like stepping into a skillet. You need shade, rock layers, wet zones, and you need to avoid thermal sink pockets." My scalp prickled.

"So the point isn't just surviving the storm itself," I said.

"It's spending three weeks organized around it."

"Right." Harvey nodded.

"You're finally using that brain you bought yesterday." I clicked my tongue. Jess looked delighted, like watching someone get precision-skinned.

"Supplies?" I asked.

"If this is a survival exercise, they're not letting us drive a truck in." Jess beat Harvey to it. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

"Obviously not. If the school let you drive a truck, it wouldn't be Forest School. It'd be Lower House Summer Camp." She counted off on her fingers.

"Version I heard: each team has a total weight cap, individual carry limits too. Food, water treatment, medical, tools, shelter gear, fire starters, rope, moisture barriers, cold-cutting discs, position markers — all of it comes out of the same allowance. One extra snack box might cost you a roll of medical tape. One extra knife might cost you a pack of purification tablets."

"Ammunition?" I asked. Harvey glanced at me.

"Depends on the school's mood and mission framework. Live rounds won't be heavy — the core isn't combat, it's survival. Jäger (hunters) will push you to run, force exposure, make you burn cover early, or drive you out of safe zones right before storms. They don't necessarily need to punch through you head-on."

"And," Jess added cheerfully, "if you actually spend your whole weight allowance on ammo, you'll probably starve before the Jäger (hunters) even find you." I wanted to argue, but thinking about yesterday's two dozen cherry colas, I decided to preserve some dignity. The path sloped toward the mixed dorm block. A few grey uniforms ahead were moving equipment crates. Farther along, two people were nearly coming to blows over the hot-air dryer cabinet.

That texture of daily life made Forest School's distant casualties feel more real — not epic, just an inconvenient appointment that was going to land on us. I asked the most important question.

"Groupings?" This time Jess went quiet for a moment. She dropped her hands and pulled back the smile a fraction.

"That's the worst part." Harvey made a sound of agreement. Rare synchronization.

"First round won't necessarily be full strength," he said.

"What's full strength?"

"Standard is eight, depending on the year's course design. But first round usually won't give you that clean a number." Jess said.

"First they mix, then they improvise, then they throw. They're watching whether you scatter under pressure, who holds, who drags, who can't stand each other but has to work together anyway." She said it lightly, like saying it too seriously would make it arrive faster.

"So first deployment is probably four to six people," Harvey continued.

"Enough to be functional. Not enough to be comfortable. Too few and the team doesn't cohere. Too many and the school can't tell who's carrying whom." I ran the numbers quietly. Four to six. Every position matters. Which also meant every bad personality trait gets amplified.

"How do they decide groupings?" I asked.

"Draw lots? Performance scores? Whoever the instructor feels like torturing that week?" Jess laughed.

"That last guess has real Academy spirit." Harvey said: "Official criteria will be something presentable — course performance, functional complementarity, class mixing, Upper and Lower House observation lists."

"Translation?" I asked.

"Translation," he said, glancing at me, "is that the school wants to see which combinations are most likely to generate problems without immediately wiping each other out." Very Federation. Jess supplied the sharper version.

"Translate it even more honestly: they're looking for which combinations best reveal who's worth keeping." That landed, and I suddenly understood why this morning's faculty office visit wasn't random. They weren't suddenly concerned about me. They were starting the real sorting — the kind that touches liability, enrollment status, evacuation clearance, medical lists, and yes, who claims the body. So they needed my file complete first. Not care. Pre-accounting. I made a sound. Jess tilted her head.

"Who are you cursing now?"

"The school."

"Too broad," she said.

"Be specific."

"Whoever founded this place."

"Now that has historical weight." Harvey ignored our exchange and kept going.

"One more thing. Firestorms aren't the only rule. The real problem is the Jäger (hunters)."

"Military hunters," I said.

"Right." He nodded.

"Not always direct engagement. Usually they push you wrong directions, cut your water lines, force premature exposure of shelter, or drive you out of safe zones right before storms hit." Jess wrinkled her nose.

"Simple version: high-end herding."

"And we're the sheep?" I asked.

"No." She looked at me and smiled.

"You're probably the kind of sheep that talks back and kicks the sheepdog on the way out." I didn't like that description, but I couldn't say she was wrong. Harvey added flatly: "So every team needs three types of people. Someone who reads the sky. Someone who manages supplies. And someone who can hit walls in ways that are actually worth something." I turned to look at him immediately.

"You're already assigning roles?"

"What else would I be doing?" His tone was completely ordinary, like sorting screws by specification.

"The rainforest isn't a classroom. Bring a group of people who only know how to pass exams, and one firestorm saves the school an entire semester of roll calls." Jess snorted.

"If the Upper House whites heard that, you'd have three duel requests by tonight."

"They can survive the first grouping round first." I watched Harvey and realized something. This person who normally seemed to have limited patience for humanity — the moment he started talking about tools, environments, and survival, he became more alive than usual. Also more dangerous. Because it meant he didn't just fix things. He understood exactly how people broke. We passed through the mesh gate at the front of the Lower House as the building shadows came down. The sun was still bright, just not as sharp.

People started looking out from the corridors. A few who saw the three of us together got that look of animals catching fresh gossip scent. Without thinking, I knew: by tonight, there'd be at least five versions of my morning.

"So," Jess said, pulling the thread back.

"Two things you need to start thinking about."

"Which two?"

"First: whether you want to become the kind of person everyone wants on their team but nobody can actually control." She held up one finger.

"Second," Harvey took over, "how you're configuring your Forest School pack. Cola is not a food group." I glared at him.

"Do you have a personal grudge against my cola?"

"No." Deadpan.

"I just respect physics." Jess laughed hard enough to shake her shoulders, then patted me companionably.

"Condolences. You're not just the most interesting person in the Academy now. You're also the first person to get publicly called out by the logistics faction before Forest School has even started." I looked at these two — one calibrated for precision damage, one constitutionally incapable of not finding this funny — and something became very clear.

If I was actually going into Forest School, if I was actually going to be chased by firestorms, herded by Jäger (hunters), ground down by three weeks of humid heat and exhaustion until I forgot how to speak properly — then I didn't have time to wait for the school to assemble me a perfect team. I needed to start reading people myself. Who was useful. Who would break. Who would fall apart before the first storm even hit.

Who, even if they couldn't stand you, would drag you through the last stretch of mud when you were almost done. Walking down this dirty, very alive Lower House path, I found myself thinking that those two dozen cherry colas probably really couldn't come with me. Which was a shame. They were one of the last things I'd trusted civilization to get right.