The transport doors opened onto grey.
Not the grey of his father's quiet mornings. A harder grey concrete and steel and a sky the colour of unwashed metal, stretching over more buildings than Yasin had known existed, arranged in rows so straight they looked drawn with a ruler rather than built by hands.
He was not alone in the yard, and he was not alone in being a stranger to it. Other transports sat in a long, idling row behind his a dozen of them, more and from each one, more children climbed down blinking into the grey light. He heard voices around him in shapes he didn't recognize, words that weren't his father's words, accents that folded differently in his ear. A boy near him wore a coat too heavy for the weather, the kind of coat you'd wear somewhere with real winters. A girl clutched a scrap of fabric that might once have been a scarf, patterned in a way Yasin had never seen fabric patterned before. They had not all come from the same place. They had not all come from the same kind of place. Some still had dust from broken cities on their shoes; some had the wind-chapped look of children who'd grown up somewhere with nothing around them for miles. The only thing they had in common, standing in that yard, was that none of them had chosen to be there, and all of them had already lost something to get there.
Two hundred and thirty-four, a soldier would say later, checking a manifest, in the flat voice of a man reading out a delivery count gathered, Yasin would understand only much later, from a dozen different corners of a broken continent, wherever the machine that made them had happened to reach that year.
The base itself took shape slowly as they were marched in through the gates, and even at five, even numb with fear, Yasin couldn't help but look.
It had been something else once the bones of it were old, grand in a way that didn't match the grey uniforms and the grimness of everything happening inside it. Tall stone buildings with the kind of high, arched windows you'd expect from someplace built to educate rich men's sons a hundred years ago, the sort of place that might once have had ivy on the walls and bells that rang for class. Some of that old architecture still stood, half-swallowed now by newer construction bolted onto it without much concern for how it looked — steel walkways bridging the gaps between old stone towers, reinforced concrete bunkers dug into what had probably once been a courtyard, antennae and comm arrays sprouting from rooftops that had never been built to hold them. It looked like a school that a war had grown out of, the way a tree grows around a fence it was planted too close to the old shape still visible underneath, but no longer the point of the place.
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The walls around the whole compound were nothing like a school's walls. Triple-layered, high enough that Yasin had to tip his head back to find the top of them, topped with coiled wire and sensor arrays that swept slowly back and forth like something patient and awake. Guard towers rose at intervals along the perimeter, and between them, further out, he saw shapes moving along the tree line that his mind struggled to file under any word he knew.
They were not soldiers. They were shaped like soldiers, in the broadest sense two legs, two arms, a head-shaped housing on top but scaled up wrong, three, four times the height of a grown man, moving with a heavy, deliberate grace that didn't belong to anything alive. Armor plates shifted and locked as they walked. One of them turned, slow and mechanical, and for just a second Yasin thought he saw a person sitting inside it, high up in a lit compartment behind the head, steering the great metal body the way you'd steer a much smaller thing.
"Sentinel-class," the soldier beside him said, catching him staring, not unkindly. "Keep the wrong people from getting curious about a place like this. You'll get used to seeing them."
Yasin did not believe, in that moment, that he would ever get used to anything again.
The man who came to look at them did not look like he wanted to be there.
He was tall, grey at the temples though his face wasn't old, and he wore his uniform the way some men wear a suit they've stopped noticing like it had simply become his skin. He walked the front row of children with his hands behind his back and his jaw set, the way Yasin's father used to look at a fence that needed fixing and didn't want fixing today.
"Major Lane," the soldier beside him said, for the benefit of no one in particular. "Two-thirty-four in this batch, sir. Pulled in from eleven different regions. Biggest haul yet."
"Wonderful," Major Steve Lane said, in a voice that suggested it was not wonderful at all. "I have a budget meeting in four hours and I'm standing in a field counting children from eleven different corners of a continent that can't agree on anything else."
He said it like a complaint about weather. Not cruel, exactly Yasin would spend a long time later trying to decide if Lane was cruel, and never quite land on an answer just deeply, thoroughly inconvenienced, the way a rich man is inconvenienced by a delayed flight. Lane had not clawed his way to this uniform, this rank, this name people said carefully in hallways, in order to stand in a yard smelling of diesel and fear, babysitting two hundred and thirty-four five-year-olds who cried at different volumes depending on how recently they'd stopped.
He did not crouch down to any of their heights. He did not need to. His voice carried without him raising it.
"You are here," he said, to the whole field of them, "because something happened to you that hasn't finished happening yet. We are going to find out what. Cooperate, and this is simple. Don't, and it will still happen it will simply be less comfortable for you while it does."
Somewhere down the row, a child started crying properly. Lane's eyes moved toward the sound, then away, the way you'd note a leaking pipe you didn't personally have to fix.
"Process them," he said, already walking, already somewhere else in his head. "I want numbers by evening."