Noah Two weeks into occupation, and the Kesslers already own half the neighborhood.The big ships never actually land, I've learned by now, just hang there in high orbit where they look like a new, permanent kind of star if you don't know better. What comes down are smaller transports and personnel craft, ferrying Korrathi officials and soldiers to towers they've either built fast with tech no human contractor understands or simply claimed outright from whatever government building used to stand there. Word around the neighborhood is the ranking Korrathi don't even bother with human housing, they've got their own structures going up in the better parts of every major city, something between a barracks and a palace, gated off, humans not permitted past the checkpoint without a reason somebody higher up approves first. The soldiers posted at street level, the ones checking papers and running curfew sweeps, apparently rotate back up to orbit every so often too, like even they don't want

Noah Zenith Integration Academy doesn't look like a school. It looks like something built to be photographed, all glass and pale stone rising up out of what used to be three city blocks of ordinary buildings, bulldozed flat and rebuilt in under two months with technology no human contractor on Earth has access to.Deacon whistles low beside me as we walk up the front steps together, both of us in the required new uniform, stiff gray fabric that feels wrong on my shoulders, nothing like the worn t-shirts I actually own."They really wanted to make sure we knew who's in charge," he mutters, eyeing the massive Dominion crest carved into the archway above the entrance, all sweeping lines and sharp angles that somehow manage to look both beautiful and threatening at the same time.Inside, the lobby's even more overwhelming, ceilings three stories high, some kind of shifting light display overhead that pulses slow and hypnotic like it's breath