The glass was thick enough that we couldn't hear anything from inside. We sat side by side, me and Sherry, watching twelve people prepare for something in complete silence, like the world's most high-stakes dumb show.
Professor Bagins stood a few feet away, hands clasped behind his back, observing with the stillness of someone who had watched this show many times and was now mostly tracking specific details. He wasn't watching the students. He was measuring them.
"What do you think these practicals are about?" Sherry asked.
I turned to look at her. First direct question she'd aimed at me since we left the city, not counting the one-word responses and the meaningful silences, of which there had been several.
"Can't tell," I said. "Any idea?"
"Not really." She almost smiled. "Let's see."
[She's warming up to you. Proximity is working. Keep it going.]
I know. I live here. I can feel it. I focused on the glass.
"Ten minutes," Professor Bagins called. "Level one."
The door on the far side of the glass opened into darkness and the zombies came out. Level one. Slow, directionless, the kind I'd been outrunning since I was old enough to run.
Inside the walls, a controlled number. A manageable problem. A practical. Out on the plain, those things had been my alarm clock.
The seniors moved without hesitation. Annabelle threw fire, clean focused beams, and the first wave went down burning. Her sister Isabelle hit the floor with both hands and an ice line spread outward, freezing anything that crossed it. By the second pass she was skating along it, dropping zombies by touch, grinning like she was having the time of her life.
"Risky," Professor Bagins said quietly. A note, not a warning.
Isabelle did not adjust her behavior. Risk taker, I noted. Interesting.
Further back, two zombies stopped mid-movement and just stood there, locked in place. Mable or May, I couldn't tell which from this angle. Mute flickered in and out, pulling students clear before anything could connect.
"Nice teamwork," Bagins said.
"Are they even real?" Sherry asked me quietly.
"No, they're not real." I said, from experience. Level one infected outside moved with a specific hunger, urgent and relentless. These ones were a half-second too slow. The tells were small but they were there. I had spent years reading those tells in the dark.
Sherry watched for a moment. "Do you think any of them could actually survive outside the walls?"
I scanned the glass. Competent. Several impressive. But competent and impressive weren't the same as functional at three in the morning when something coordinated was tracking you by sound and your backup was already down.
I pointed at Wells. Moving through the arena like he had energy left over, every hit efficient, every beam covering someone else's blind spot. Not performing. Just working.
"Him," I said. "Definitely him."
Sherry nodded. "Agreed."
Ten minutes. Every projected infected dissolved from the floor upward. Confirmed. Not real. Props with teeth and a remote control off switch.
"Level three," Bagins announced.
The door opened. These were different. I felt it before I could name it. Speed first, then coordination, the way they spread across the available space without colliding, angles calculated, pressure applied from multiple directions simultaneously. Level three.
"Who gets bitten first?" Sherry murmured, with the tone of someone who already knew the answer was *everyone, eventually.*
I watched the patterns. Annabelle was aggressive. Good instincts, short awareness radius. Already too close to the nearest one.
"Her," I said, pointing.
The word was barely out. The infected took Annabelle by the arm. Mute teleported to pull her clear and got clipped on arrival. Two down in under four seconds.
"You see," Professor Bagins said, and I realized he'd turned toward us. Not the students in the glass. Us. "They can't survive that level."
"Yeah," I said, because it was true and overselling it would have been rude.
"Can you tell me why?"
I watched for a moment. Wells was still standing, covering ground, but covering it alone now. The group structure had collapsed. Everyone reacting. Nobody anticipating.
"Poor survival instincts," I said. "Excellent abilities. Zero road experience."
Bagins nodded, like I'd confirmed something he already knew. He pressed the remote. The infected dissolved. Students on the floor started getting up, checking for damage that wasn't there, because the teeth hadn't been real. The shock had been.
Sherry leaned forward slightly. "Why train them at all? Do you actually expect the infected to breach the walls?"
I looked at her sideways. Better question than mine. I should have asked it first and I was choosing not to think about that.
"No," Bagins said.
Sherry waited.
"We intend to attack them."
The words sat in the air between all three of us. Attack them. Not hold the line. Not maintain the walls. Go out there, into the plain, into whatever existed beyond the plain, and take the fight directly to the infected.
Sherry started to ask another question but Bagins was already opening the door for the students. Conversation closed. Professionally, efficiently, like it had never happened.
"Excellent work," he told them as they filed out. Without irony. Either he was seeing progress I couldn't see yet or he was a generous grader. Possibly both.
May peeled away from the group and came toward us with the easy confidence of someone who moves toward interesting things and doesn't overthink the approach.
"Easy watching from the outside," she said pleasantly.
We have survived real infected in the open plain, I thought. Not projected ones with a remote control safety net. But this wasn't the moment for that conversation. This was a different kind of moment.
"Yes," I said. "It is." I held her eyes just a half second longer than necessary.
She noticed. I could tell she noticed. Sherry said nothing behind me. I was learning that her silences had textures. This one was the kind that was paying very close attention.
We fell into step heading back to the classroom. May positioned herself beside me naturally, like it had been the plan all along. Behind us, Sherry's footsteps, close enough that the corridor carried everything.
"Have you ever slept with a girl?" May asked.
I processed that sentence twice. Is she making this easy or am I reading into it?
"What do you mean?" I said, carefully.
"Not what you're thinking." She said it without embarrassment, which suggested she'd clarified this before. "Sleeping in the same room. Same space."
"Not really," I said. "My mother. That's about it."
She nodded like that confirmed something she'd already suspected. "Are you okay with it?"
I opened my mouth.
"Tonight," she said, before I could use it, "you're going to have a girl sleeping in your room." And then she accelerated forward to rejoin the group, light-footed, completely unbothered, like she hadn't just said that and walked away from it. I stared after her.
[May. Probability manipulation, level 4. Opportunity detected]
I know. I was there too.
Sherry pulled up beside me. She had heard everything. The angle, the proximity, the acoustics of the corridor. Every word.
"Lucky guy," she said. Actually smiling. The first real one since the gate.
"Tell me," I said.
"What's her ability again?" She asked it with the tone of someone who already knew and wanted to hear me say it out loud.
I thought for exactly one second.
"Probability manipulation."
Sherry's smile widened. I looked at her. Then at the corridor ahead. Then back at the system notification still sitting in my vision.
Interesting. Very interesting.