Chapter 5: Training Score, or What the Examiners Made of Silence

The assessment room smells of chalk dust and metal shavings and something underneath both that Hamlet cannot name but files under: the residue of sustained violence against hard surfaces.

He stands at the threshold for three seconds before the door slides shut behind him, cataloguing. The room is vast and deliberately so — the ceiling vaults upward at a height calibrated to diminish, the walls lined with weapons racks and training stations and suspended targets that rotate slowly on mechanical arms, as though even the equipment is performing for some invisible audience. Which, he supposes, it is. Cameras everywhere: seven that he can count in the first sweep, two more he suspects in the lighting fixtures. The floor is padded in a grey that matches his District Zero uniform with a precision he doubts is accidental.

At the far end, elevated three steps above the training floor on a curved platform, the Gamemakers sit behind a long curved desk.