The chatter continued. I walked down the side of the room, looking, and found myself staring at a young woman, roughly my age. Her expression had caught my eye, angry, but it was her natural resting face. She reminded me of a girl from my Patrol group, Camisola. I moved closer, studying her.

“I see we found someone Glory Girl rates at least a thirteen,” Imp commented.

“Her hair,” I said.

“What about it?” Imp asked.

“It was cut recently. A lot of these others, they have shaggier hair, or you can tell where they had haircuts before but the hair grew in.”

“I noticed something similar with clothes,” Chastity said. “Some of them have had their clothes for a while, or the clothes are one of their regular outfits. Why does it matter?”

“Because.” It was Capricorn who had answered. Tristan. “It suggests they haven’t been sitting here for a while.”

“Clothes are even more telling,” I said. “Show me?”

I flew over to Chastity. She pointed the blunt end of her whip handle at one of the thralls.

Sure enough, the clothes were worn in a way that suggested they’d become comfortable. There were no bulges around the shoulder or middle to suggest that someone else had worn the shirt, but there was wear. That required movement, activity.

“This is good,” I said.

Imp chimed in, “I mean, it’s terrible. Looks like a nurse’s scrubs from the hospital, and white stains so easily.”

“They came here recently, and it’s a change in pattern, they haven’t been… shelved… for long. What if these are Teacher’s evacuated grunts? Facility workers, noncombatant thralls? Facility gets attacked, he sends everyone here, locks ’em up, keeps ’em brain dead to make them easier to wrangle.”

“Doesn’t make sense. Look at the map. Annotated version,” Capricorn said.

I did, bringing it up.

Annotated version. It had suggested area labels, and with the area we’d just left and this storage space all being mis-labeled, I was skeptical of other guesses. There were attack plans, expected distribution of forces from high-security areas, and there were notes on where certain teams might have set up camps to fall back to or areas to stage fights in as they worked their way into the facility.

“What am I looking for?”

“The flow of it. Evacuating like this would mean sending the evacuees against the flow of incoming attackers to get here.”

“He sent them here recently. That can mean three things,” I told Tristan. “Either he knew we were coming and evacuated early…”

“And by doing so, tipped off his hand by having the early evacuees in a place where attackers might see them,” Tristan said. “No.”

“Or he finished whatever project he was working on, and these workers became redundant within a day or two of the first wave attack…”

“A little coincidental, that he’d do it right before we attacked,” Tristan said.