The map led them, unsurprisingly, to their stomachs first.
P.H. Cafeteria turned out to be one of a dozen scattered across Northstar's sprawl, a wide, high-ceilinged hall already busy with trainees in light green fresh off their own dormitory assignments — some faces Yasin half-recognized from other bases' formations, some he didn't, all of them eating with the particular, unguarded focus of people who had spent a decade being told exactly how much they were allowed and had just discovered, apparently, that the rule no longer applied.
A woman stepped up to greet them almost the moment they'd found a table to claim — brunette, somewhere in her thirties, five foot four, with a smile that gave the impression it had never once left her face and didn't intend to start now. Her eyes flicked to their tags and their uniforms in the same practiced glance.
"Welcome to P.H. Cafeteria," she said. "What can I get you trainees?"
028, noticing Yasin had drifted somewhere behind his own eyes the way he tended to, cut in before the silence could stretch. "Just to clear things up — it's free, right?"
"Well, yeah." Her smile didn't waver. "The military takes care of it. I just need your tag numbers, and that's all."
028 glanced past her toward a table of visibly satisfied trainees pushing away plates stacked high enough to qualify as architecture. "Have whatever those guys had," he said. "Times two."
Yasin gave him a look.
"What," 028 said, entirely unbothered. "It's free."
The woman took their numbers with the same easy smile and disappeared toward the kitchens, and it wasn't long before Yasin understood exactly what 028 had ordered them into.
The food arrived in a volume that made Yasin's eye twitch, genuinely, involuntarily, the first purely physical reaction he'd had all day that had nothing to do with fear or awe. Thick-cut steak, seared dark and still faintly pink at the center, piled beside mounds of roasted vegetables glistening with something that actually smelled like seasoning rather than survival. Fresh bread, still steaming where it had been torn open, next to a bowl of something rich and stewed that neither of them had a name for and both intended to eat anyway. A second plate followed the first — some kind of dense, sauced pasta, a protein shake thick enough to stand a spoon in, and a small mountain of fruit so vividly colored it looked almost fake next to the flat, functional meals they'd eaten for a decade.
They ate like they'd never trust the food to still be there tomorrow, which, for the first nine years of their lives in this system, hadn't been an unreasonable fear to carry. By the time they finally pushed back from the table, both of them uncomfortably, gloriously full, Yasin's stomach ached in a way that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with simple, stupid excess — a kind of pain he hadn't realized, until it arrived, that he'd actually been looking forward to.
They were on their way out, map back in 028's hand, when Yasin caught sight of someone across the hall who stopped him mid-step.
005 — Sera, though nobody here would ever call her that — stood near the far doors, and she wasn't wearing the light green anymore. Green cargo pants, a plain black top, nothing that marked her as trainee or soldier or anything at all except a young woman who'd apparently decided, the first real chance she'd gotten in ten years, to wear something that was hers.
"We can do that too," Yasin said, mostly to himself, working it out slowly.
028 followed his gaze, confused for half a second, then landed on Sera and lit up like the sentence had just been translated for him. "Hell yeah we can." He was already ripping the map back out of his pocket, unfolding it with the kind of urgency usually reserved for actual emergencies. "On to the next destination."
He grinned — the kind of grin that looked like it could genuinely start wars, or at least talk someone into starting one on his behalf — and set off down the corridor without waiting to see if Yasin would keep up.
Yasin followed anyway. He always did.