Chapter 257: Selection Process

Chapter 257: Chapter 257: Selection Process

The Confederation did not wait for the world to calm down.

By the morning after the announcement, the Federal Palace in Bern had been transformed. Clerks hurried through its marble corridors with armfuls of documents. Couriers came and went in a steady stream. In the great Chamber of Neutrality, the seven members of the Federal Council sat behind a long oak table with the doors thrown open, facing a hall packed with the envoys of every nation on Earth.

President Annelise V?geli did not stand. She laid both hands flat on the table, looked out over the crowd with her dry, gray, unflinching eyes, and began to read.

"The Tower has transmitted the rules of the Millennial Planetary Wars to all registered worlds," she said. "The transmission arrived in the early hours of this morning, sealed under Confederation key, and has been verified by our own institutes. I will summarize its contents. I will not soften them."

The hall went still.

"The first rule concerns eligibility. Only individuals under the age of thirty are permitted to compete. Only individuals at or below Level fifty are permitted to compete. There are no exceptions, no waivers, and no appeals." She paused. "The Tower has made clear that this is not a recommendation. It is a boundary of the Wars themselves. No world may field a representative beyond it."

A murmur rolled through the room, like wind through dry grass.

"The second rule concerns selection. Each world is permitted a delegation of one hundred representatives. The method of selection is left to the world itself, and the Tower will enforce whatever method is chosen." She glanced down at her papers. "By unanimous vote, the Federal Council has accepted responsibility for administering that selection on behalf of Earth 1078. We do so as a neutral party, because no other body on this planet holds the trust of all its nations."

"And the third rule?" called a voice from the back.

President V?geli did not answer at once. She looked, for a long moment, at the man who had spoken, a tall, sharp-faced envoy from one of the southern republics. When she spoke again, her voice was lower.

"The third rule concerns the nature of the Wars themselves. The transmission includes a historical appendix. It records the outcome of every previous cycle, for every participating world." She drew a slow breath. "It records the fates of their delegates."

Nobody moved.

"I will say only this," said the President of the Confederation. "The Tower does not lie. It does not exaggerate. And of the delegates sent into the First Round across the last nine Cycles, the number who returned is, according to its own records, extremely small."

She closed the folder.

"Death is not a possibility in these Wars. It is the expected outcome."

The news reached the world in less than an hour.

It did not move like a rumor. It moved like a flood, rushing out of Bern along every wire and signal and courier route, pouring into every capital, every city, every village. By noon, it had been translated into forty languages. By evening, it had been read aloud in town squares and church halls and market stalls on every continent, and a quiet, helpless horror had begun to settle over the Earth.

It was a simple arithmetic, and everyone could do it.

Under thirty. Level fifty or below.

Almost every young person on the planet fit that description.

In the great square of Sol Aethel, a woman stood frozen beside a fruit stall, her basket hanging forgotten on her arm. She was perhaps forty, plain and weathered, and she was reading the announcement on a cracked device with her lips moving soundlessly. At her side, a boy of fifteen tugged at her sleeve and asked what was wrong.

She did not answer. She pulled him against her ribs, fiercely, with both arms, and held on.

In the academy dormitories, a hundred students gathered in the common hall and stared at one another. No one spoke. Some were crying. Some were pale and still. A girl in the third row, nineteen, brilliant, sharp-tongued, with ink-stained fingers and a top ranking in her class, began to laugh in a thin, strange, breaking voice, and could not stop.

In a church in the capital, an old priest knelt in front of a candle with his rosary wound around his fingers and said the names of the young people of his parish, one after another, until he ran out.

In the markets of the south, a line formed outside every registry office, stretching around the block. In the north, in the refugee camps along the Vostravan frontier, a thousand voices rose at once in a sound that was not quite a wail, and not quite a prayer. In a hospital in Bern, a nurse of twenty-six sat on a bench outside the ward, with her hands pressed over her face, listening to the PA system read out the rules for the third time.

And in a thousand villages and a thousand cities, in kitchens and workshops and classrooms and fields, a single thought crossed the mind of every parent, every sibling, every child, every lover, like a cold wind through an open window.

It could be mine.

By the third day, the fear had begun to curdle into other things.

The first protests broke out in the capital of a southern republic, where a crowd of ten thousand marched on the presidential palace carrying signs and candles and photographs of their children. The government sent soldiers to disperse them, and the soldiers, many of whom were under thirty themselves, refused. In a northern port city, a mob stormed a registry office and burned its records. In a mountain province, whole villages vanished overnight, their young men and women slipping away into the forests with whatever they could carry.

The black markets thrived. Forged certificates appeared, claiming that a person was thirty-one, or fifty-two, or Level fifty-one. Quiet whispers spread of healers who could age a body for a price, and of alchemists who could force a level beyond the limit with dangerous, forbidden compounds. Most were frauds. A few were worse.

And behind it all, from the tall windows of the great houses and the fortified keeps of the old regimes, the powerful watched, and said nothing.

That was the cruelest part, and everyone saw it. The dukes of Vostrava, at their Level seventy and eighty, were beyond the limit. So were the great generals, the ministers, the guild masters, the veteran champions of every nation. The rulers and the powerful and the strong would not be sent. The Wars were for the young and the unproven, the ones who had not yet climbed high enough to refuse.

"It’s a cull," said a student in the academy, in a low, bitter voice, to anyone who would listen. "They want the weak ones to go first."

"It’s not a cull," said a quiet, older voice behind him. "It is a test."

He turned. Headmistress Elena stood in the doorway of the common hall, her hands folded in her sleeves, her face composed. She looked at the dozens of frightened faces turned toward her, and her eyes were gentle.

"The Tower measures worlds by what they can grow," she said. "Not what they can protect. The Wars are not a punishment. They are an examination." She paused. "That does not make them kind. But it does make them fair, in a cold, terrible way. And it means that those who go will not be selected for weakness. They will be selected for potential."

"That’s no comfort," said the student.

"No," Elena agreed. "It is not."

She said nothing more. But after she had gone, the hall was quiet for a long time.

The selection process began on the fourth day.

It was a model of efficiency, which was perhaps the most unsettling thing about it. The Confederation had built, in less than seventy-two hours, an apparatus capable of reaching eight billion people. Every registry office on Earth had been connected to a central ledger. Every eligible citizen was required to report to their nearest Tower-approved assessment station within ten days, where their age and level would be verified by a standard resonance scan. Those who failed to report would be flagged. Those who falsified records would be prosecuted by their own governments, on pain of Confederation sanctions.

From the ranks of the verified, the selection would proceed in three stages.

First, volunteers. Any eligible person who wished to represent Earth 1078 could step forward, and their names would be added to a list. It was expected to be small.

Second, nominations. Every nation, guild, and academy would be permitted to nominate candidates of exceptional promise, up to a fixed limit.

And third, the draw.

The draw would be random, publicly witnessed, and conducted in Bern under the eyes of the entire world. It would fill whatever places remained. There would be no exceptions, no appeals, and no way to buy one’s way out.

"It’s the only way to make it fair," President V?geli said in her address on the fifth night, her voice tired but steady. "If we let the powerful choose, they will choose the powerless. If we let the market decide, it will choose the poor. If we let the Tower decide, we do not know whom it will choose." She paused. "A lottery is blind. It is the only blindness we can afford."

Nobody applauded.

In the farmhouse at Sunny Vale, Rowan sat at the kitchen table and read the rules for the fifth time.

He had come home two days before, after a long council in the capital that had ended without any decisions. The Emperor had spoken of preparation, of unity, of the strength of the Empire. The ministers had murmured. The generals had argued. And in the middle of it all, Rowan had sat very still, and felt, with each passing hour, the weight of a single, quiet, inescapable fact settling over him like a stone.

I am sixteen.

I am Level forty.

I qualify.

The kitchen was warm and bright. Martha stood at the stove with her back to him, stirring a pot she had been stirring for twenty minutes. Arthur sat by the window, his hands folded on his knee, looking out at the dark. Sophia had retreated to the porch with her ledgers. And on the far side of the table, in a basket of woven reeds, Lily slept with a tiny fist curled against her cheek and a single green shoot nodding gently over her head.

No one had said it aloud. No one needed to.

"Rowan," said Martha, at last, without turning.

"Yes, Mom."

"If they draw your name..." Her voice caught. She cleared her throat and started again. "If they draw it, I want you to know that your father and I..."

"Mom."

"I want you to know that we will always..."

"Mom." He rose and crossed the kitchen and put both arms around her from behind, his chin on her shoulder, his hat knocked askew. She stopped speaking. She stood very still, and then, slowly, she let her head fall back against his chest, and her hands came up and gripped his forearms.

"I’m not going to die," he said quietly.

"You can’t promise that."

"No." He closed his eyes. "But I can promise that I’m going to do everything in my power not to."

She let out a long, shaky breath. Behind them, in the window, Arthur did not turn around. But his shoulders had begun to shake, very slightly, and his hand, resting on his knee, had curled into a fist.

On the table, Rowan’s device chimed.

He did not move at first. Then, gently, he released his mother, crossed to the table, and looked at the screen.

It was a message from Seraphina.

The Confederation has opened the volunteer registry. I am putting my name down. I would like to know whether you intend to do the same.

He read it twice. A third time.

Outside, in the garden, a vast, gentle shape rumbled softly in the dark, and a white aster bloomed beneath its hand.

Rowan set the device down on the table. He looked at his sleeping sister, at the green shoot above her head. He looked at his mother’s back, and his father’s shoulders, and the lamplight gleaming gold on the old wooden floor.

A random draw, he thought. Blind. Fair.

Or I could simply choose.

He sat for a very long time, with his hand over his eyes, in the warm, quiet kitchen.