He glanced at Bray, who swept his hand toward the machine in invitation. Cavalon ground his teeth. His first Imprint experience had been borderline-blackout painful.
Wringing his hands, he shuffled forward, sucking in a long breath and letting it out through his teeth. He sat on the stool in front of the machine and a panel slid open, revealing a clamp recessed beneath the glowing glass counter.
The computer’s voice returned. “Please place arm in the Imprint chamber.”
Cavalon eyed the gold and bronze squares on his right arm, then shifted and laid his left into the clamp. Cold metal closed around his forearm and the machine whirred to life, buzzing and clicking. A series of thin red beams shone from each of the articulated limbs, and they positioned themselves noisily until the lasers lined up with their reference points.
“Please hold still during the Imprint process,” the computer said.
White-hot beams shot into Cavalon’s arm and searing pain engulfed his senses. He gritted his teeth and withheld a groan as the lasers danced across his skin, burning and smoldering until his arm felt like it’d caught fire.
Just as he started to think it might be a good time to pass out, the heat from the lasers dissipated along with the radiating light. His jaw slackened, teeth aching from prolonged clenching.
Dozens of polished obsidian squares lay across the irritated, bright pink skin on his forearm. He opened and closed his fist as the new Imprint tattoos folded and unfolded of their own accord. They hummed as they streamed past his elbow and up his bicep.
He twisted his arm to glance at his first set of Imprints. The gold and bronze squares lay dormant in their default arrangement—a tidy series of lines that ran from wrist to shoulder. These new Imprints crawled up his skin and fell into formation in a latticed grid on his left tricep, with a single dotted line of black squares trailing to his wrist.
“Imprint application complete,” the computer chirped. “Control protocols updated.”
Cavalon gulped. Control protocols? He ran his fingers along the new markings, then took a breath and tried to access them, call out to them and command them like he could his royal Imprints. But they didn’t stir. They might have looked similar in appearance, but they were something else entirely.
His stomach knotted. Having a set of Imprints he couldn’t control disconcerted him, to say the least. Who knew what these things could do to him?
“Come on, tough guy.” Bray gripped Cavalon’s shoulder and lifted him from the stool. Cavalon followed numbly, flexing his sore arm and scratching the irritated skin.
Inside the next small room, Bray pressed his thumb into a screen and a panel in the wall opened, revealing a pile of navy-blue clothing and a pair of black boots.
Bray grabbed the stack and shoved it at Cavalon. “Suit up. Boss is incoming.” A door on the opposite wall slid open, and Bray left.
Cavalon called after him, “I thought we’d already moved past respecting each other’s privacy…” The door slid shut, leaving him alone in the changing room.
He eyed the pile of clothes in his arms—standard, Legion-issue, dull navy blue layered with more navy blue. The centerpiece was a hooded, double-breasted vest which fastened high across the chest with two long straps. A single, narrow sandy-brown bar pinned to the left arm of the long-sleeved shirt indicated his rank of oculus.
His palms began to sweat as he pulled the clothing on piece by piece, trying and failing to not think about what stood on the other side of that door. Like every other kid in the System Collective, Cavalon had played the game of Sentinel at the Divide, but never during his opulent childhood did he think it a fate that would actually befall him.
The door opened and Bray stuck his head inside. “Soldier.” It was a single-word command. Cavalon wiped his sweaty palms down the front of his vest and took a deep breath.