After Sheila's briefing, the southern gate stopped being a place where exhausted students gathered simply because they had nowhere else to stand. It began, slowly and unevenly, to become a checkpoint.
The change was not clean at first. Students had to be redirected more than once, because relief made them careless. Some tried to drift toward the gate for a better look at the Mauler corpses. Others wanted to sit wherever their legs gave out, even if that meant blocking a path that needed to remain clear. A few kept asking whether they could go inside now that the Alpha was dead, as if one corpse meant an entire fortified settlement had surrendered.
Edith handled most of that with a patience that looked calm from a distance and increasingly sharp up close. She placed students in lines, separated those needing treatment from those fit enough to work, corrected route markers, and made sure Sheila's orders did not dissolve into nervous chatter.
