"Why did you send me this? This kid has lived in monitor zones her whole life and the monitor report file's empty. If she wasn't good enough for the first pass filtration -"

"It's not empty."

"It's not taking up more space on the drive than its filename -"

"There's a line of text in there, open it, why are you complaining to me without even looking?"

"...'Monitoring attempts failed'. What's that supposed to mean?"

"Early-onset mutant. Telepaths can't touch her, neither can monitors, they tried two in case it was a hardware bug and they didn't even know they were installed. She doesn't have any outputs she doesn't control."

"They don't do psych tests good enough to make do without a monitor in monitor zones, so that's disqualifying anyway."

"They don't. She does."

"Talk English."

"She writes. About herself. It's occurred to her that someone could read it - hasn't occurred to her yet that anyone would want to, so we're getting unguarded self-analysis, and she's good at it, one of the psych boys fed her files into a predictive model and it's almost as good as a monitor report, better than a psych test. We know this kid."

"And you want her for Battle School."

"We do."

"What's the rundown on how to approach, then?"

"Bypass the parent, whichever she's with when you grab her - catch her somewhere they're not for at least the first minute. Give her a Battle School syllabus. Ask her if she wants smarter friends. Tell her she can keep the exo before she can worry about it enough to ask. Answer her questions, no bullshit, she doesn't need to be seduced, what we actually have is good for her and she knows what's good for her, she's bored and she's not looking likely to get unbored before she can test into university. She'll talk her folks into it for you, they're wrapped around her finger."

"If only they were all that easy."

"And next time read the damn files before you call me."

"Yessir."