Checkpoint

Two ADVENT troopers stepped out of their prefab booth as our truck rolled to a halt. No urgency in their movements. No visible irritation at being pulled from whatever they did in there during the quiet hours. They moved like men who had done this ten thousand times and expected to do it ten thousand more — unhurried, methodical, utterly indifferent to us as people.

That indifference was the part that always got under my skin.

"Routine scan," the lead trooper announced through his helmet modulator, voice flattened to something barely human. "Everyone out. Hands where we can see them."

We climbed down. I went first, jaw set, schooling my face into the expression I'd practiced: mildly inconvenienced civilian, nothing more. The night air was cold and smelled like pine resin and old diesel. I kept my breathing even and my eyes forward, fixed on the dark tree line beyond the road.

The second trooper swept a scanner wand along the truck's chassis without looking at us. The first moved to Jax. A pat-down, efficient and impersonal — shoulders, sides, waistband, legs. Jax submitted to it with the blank patience of someone who had been through this enough times to stop feeling anything about it.

Then it was my turn.

"Feet apart. Arms out."

I complied. The trooper started at my ankles, working upward in that same mechanical sequence. What struck me — what always struck me, no matter how many times I'd been through a checkpoint — was the absence of any human signal. No grunt of effort, no shift in breathing, no slight hesitation. Behind that visor there was nothing I could read. Just the steady, unhurried progress of gloved hands moving over a body that, to him, was simply an object to be assessed and cleared.

He reached my ribs. My tactical vest had already been confiscated and laid on the hood of the truck. I was in a plain civilian jacket, jeans, worn boots. Nothing remarkable. The scanner wand passed over me with a soft electronic whir.

The two troopers exchanged words then — that clipped, digital-sounding ADVENT-ese we'd all heard but none of us could parse. Wet consonants, flattened vowels, something that sat wrong in the ear, like language spoken with a mouth that wasn't made for it. Whatever they said, the second one moved to the truck bed and started methodically searching the vehicle.

Lira's knife. Of course.

The first trooper's hands moved to my thighs. Still methodical. Still unhurried. But when he reached the inside of my leg, the pace didn't change — and that was somehow worse than if it had. He pressed inward with the heel of his palm, feeling along the seam of my jeans with two fingers, and the pressure was deliberate and slow in a way that had nothing to do with searching for a weapon. He knew exactly what he was doing. He also knew I couldn't react.

I stared at the tree line and breathed through my nose.

The worst part wasn't the touch itself. It was the total absence of acknowledgement — from him, from his partner, from the situation. There was no leer, no comment, no human ugliness I could grab onto and hate with a clean, focused anger. He simply continued. Like I was inventory. Like what he was doing to me was as unremarkable as checking the tyre pressure.

I thought about the rifle sitting in its hidden compartment three feet away.

He stepped back. Held out a hand toward his partner. The knife was placed in it. He turned it once, examined it, and set it on the hood with my vest. Then he looked back at me — or I assumed he did; the visor gave nothing away — and waved me toward the truck.

"Clear."

I climbed back in. Lira was already inside, spine rigid, staring at her hands. Jax said nothing. The truck lurched forward into the dark.

Nobody spoke for a long time. The shortwave scanner hissed static. Finally Lira said, quietly, "They found my knife. They didn't consider it a threat, apparently."

I pressed my forehead against the cold window.

The checkpoint was already half a mile behind us. The troopers were probably already back inside their booth, running through the same sequence with whoever came next. No memory of us. No interest. We were already nothing to them again.

That was the part I couldn't let go of, even as the miles accumulated between us and the roadblock. Not the violation of it. The erasure of it. The way it happened inside a system so total and so practised that it didn't even need to be cruel to be monstrous.

One day, I promised myself, fists loose on my knees. Not clenched — I was past the clenching stage. Loose, and certain.

One day.