Enlightened

I can't read. Can't write. Don't know what rune-patterning is, what a Synker actually feels when the mech takes a hit, or why my mother pressed a socket into my hand and told me it was for nothing yet. I'm twelve years old, and today the Circle takes me from the only six rings of home I've ever known and gives me seven years to become something that can survive what's been eating the Coalition alive for sixty years running. Nobody's agreed on what to call it yet. It hasn't stopped once. The pilots feel every wound their mech takes as their own. That's not a flaw in the system. That's the system working as intended. Two thousand of us got off the same transports today, off strips just like mine. Somewhere in that crowd is the mechanic who's going to spend the next seven years learning to build what I'm about to spend them learning to survive inside. First lesson's at zero-six. I can't read the names cut into the wall on the way in. I'm about to learn to read something else instead.