Nobody told them how to divide the dormitories, so nobody divided them any differently than they'd been dividing everything for the last ten years falling into the same order they'd always fallen into, without discussion, without needing one.
Yasin and 028 claimed a room the way they'd claimed every room before it, side by side, first come. The door slid open onto something neither of them had a script for.
It was large larger than anything either of them had slept in before, a space that would have comfortably held their old four-bunk room from a decade ago with room left over. A small gym occupied one corner, weights racked in sizes that made Yasin do a slow double-take, heavier sets than any civilian gym would ever stock, clearly built with exactly the kind of strength a fighter type carried in mind. An advanced treadmill stood beside it, along with a scatter of other equipment neither of them recognized on sight but both silently agreed to investigate later. Beyond that, a bathroom with its own shower, actual soap and shampoo lined up on a small shelf rather than doled out in the grey, unmarked bars they'd used for a decade.
Two beds. Not bunks. Two separate beds, set on opposite sides of the room, as if whoever designed this space had already known, somehow, that the people filling it would no longer need to sleep stacked on top of each other to fit.
"This is really something," Yasin said, quiet, and even that small an admission cost him something to say out loud.
"Yes it is." 028 was already moving, checking every corner of the room with the restless, thorough curiosity that had never once left him in ten years — testing the shower, opening the small storage unit built into the wall, running a hand along the treadmill's console like he half expected it to be a trick.
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Yasin sat on the edge of his bed, and then, cautiously, lay back against it.
Soft.
It was the first word that came to him, simple and complete, and he lay there a moment longer than he meant to, letting his whole body register a mattress that gave gently under his weight instead of resisting it, blankets that smelled like nothing at all instead of the flat chemical tang the training-base linens had always carried. Ten years, and he hadn't known, until that exact moment, how much his body had been braced against sleeping on something that didn't fight back.
028 finished his inspection eventually, apparently satisfied that the room held no further secrets worth uncovering, and the two of them stepped back out into the hallway with the base map they'd been handed after Voss's speech — a small, folded printout marking dormitories, mess halls, training grounds, a handful of recreational buildings neither of them had words yet for what those might actually contain.
"We're allowed to just... go," 028 said, testing the idea out loud the way he tested most things, turning the map over once like it might reveal a catch he'd missed. "Get whatever we want. Within reason, apparently."
Neither of them moved right away. Ten years of being told exactly where to be and exactly when had built something in both of them that didn't unlearn itself the moment a door was technically left open.
"Within reason," Yasin repeated, and found, standing there in a hallway that smelled like nothing chemical at all, that some small, unfamiliar part of him actually wanted to find out what that meant.
028 grinned — the first fully unguarded one Yasin had seen from him since the carrier ride — and set off down the corridor without waiting to see if Yasin would follow.
Yasin followed anyway. He always did.