The clothes came off first.
Not unkindly nobody hit anyone, nobody shouted, the soldiers doing it had clearly done it before and treated it with the bored efficiency of people stripping crates in a warehouse but there was nothing kind about it either. Yasin's shirt, the one with the hole at the collar his father had never gotten around to mending, went into a bin with two hundred other shirts of every colour and cut and country, and what came back was the same grey, top and bottom, for every child in the yard, whatever they'd been wearing when the world found them. The fabric was stiff and unfamiliar against his skin, smelling of something chemical he would come to associate, for the rest of his life, with the word processed.
He stood in a line after that. A woman with a tablet asked his name, wrote it down without looking up, and moved him along before he'd finished saying it properly. Down the line, names came out in accents he didn't recognize, spelled out letter by letter for people who clearly weren't used to hearing them.
Then the blood. A needle, quick, a soldier's gloved hand steadying his arm without asking permission, a vial filling red and being labelled and vanishing into a tray with two hundred others just like it. It hurt, but it was a small hurt, a familiar-shaped hurt, the kind of thing a scraped knee had already taught him he could survive.
The last one wasn't like that.
They led him to a chair too big for him, built for adults, so that his feet didn't reach the floor and a machine came down from somewhere above his head, an arm ending in something that wasn't a needle exactly, something with more edges than a needle should have. A soldier held the back of his neck, not roughly, just firmly, the way you'd hold a struggling animal you didn't want to hurt but needed to keep still.
"This will feel strange," the soldier said, in the closest thing to gentleness Yasin had heard since the tomato patch. "Just for a second."
None of them were told what it was. It would be years before Yasin understood the shape of the thing that had gone into the back of his neck that afternoon small, precise, wired into something that could be triggered from very far away by someone who had never met him and never would. A leash with no chain attached to it, worn on the inside where no one could take it off. Two hundred and thirty-four children sat in that chair over the course of the day, and two hundred and thirty-four of them walked away from it believing they had simply been marked, catalogued, made part of a system never once suspecting that the system had just given itself the last word on whether any of them would live to see the next one.
It felt like ice going in where ice shouldn't go. Cold that spread from the back of his neck down through his shoulders, down his spine, a wrongness he had no words for yet, gone before he could decide whether to scream. He didn't scream. Around him, other children did a ragged chorus of it rolling down the line as each child took their turn but Yasin sat very still in the too-big chair, the way he'd learned to sit still on the grey mornings, and let it happen.
Later, he would understand this had been the first time anyone had measured him. Not who he was. What he was, or what he was becoming, and how fast and, without his knowing it, how quickly he could be made to stop.
They were gathered afterward in a hall big enough to hold all two hundred and thirty-four of them, standing in loose, uneven rows on a floor that still had the old faded lines of some other game painted into it, some sport nobody here would ever play again.
The man who came to speak to them was not Major Lane.
He wore more decoration on his uniform than Lane had, more years on his face, and he did not walk the rows the way Lane had he simply stood at the front, hands clasped behind his back, and let the silence stretch long enough that even the children still sniffling from the chair found some way to quiet themselves rather than be the only sound in the room.
"You are property of the United Front now," he said. His voice did not rise. It did not need to; the room was already listening with the specific, total attention of creatures who have just learned, in one afternoon, that the world can do whatever it wants to them. "That is not an insult. It is simply the truth, and the sooner you understand it, the easier the next several years will be for you."
He let that sit.
"There is only one law here, and I will only explain it once, so listen carefully." He looked, slowly, down the rows not searching for anyone in particular, just making sure every child in the hall understood the looking was meant for them. "You will wake when I say wake. You will sleep when I say sleep. You will eat when I say eat." A pause, precisely as long as the ones before it. "And you will die when I say die."
Nobody in the hall made a sound.
"Be useful," the general said, "or don't be at all. That is the only rule that has ever mattered here, and it is the only one that ever will. Everything else the training, the schedules, the meals, the beds you'll sleep in tonight exists only in service of that one law. Forget your names if it helps you remember it faster. I promise you, most of this base already has."
He turned to leave, and then, almost as an afterthought, added the only thing that afternoon that came close to sounding like comfort, though it wasn't meant as any.
"Prove useful, and you'll want for very little here. Prove otherwise" he didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. Two hundred and thirty-four hands drifted, without anyone quite deciding to, toward the backs of two hundred and thirty-four necks.
The dormitory was a long building with numbers on the doors instead of names.
Room 41 held four beds two bunks, thin mattresses, one bathroom in the corner with a door that didn't quite close and Yasin was the second to arrive, claiming the bottom bunk on the left because the top one looked like it required a kind of climbing he didn't yet trust his tired legs to manage.
The other three came in over the next hour, herded by a soldier who read names off a list and didn't wait to see if they found their beds before moving to the next room. A girl with short black hair took the bunk across from him without a word, sitting cross-legged on the mattress and staring at the wall like she was waiting for it to explain something her accent, when she finally spoke to no one in particular, wasn't one Yasin had heard before. A boy climbed to the top bunk above her and didn't come back down. The last one, small even by five-year-old standards, sat on the floor by the door for a long time before anyone told him there was a bed for him too.
Nobody talked, not at first, and when they did, it was clear none of them had grown up speaking quite the same way, in quite the same place. Four strangers from four different corners of a broken world, folded now into the same small room, with nothing in common except the cold feeling still fading from the backs of their necks, and a rule none of them would ever be allowed to forget.
Yasin lay on the thin mattress, staring up at the bunk above him, one hand pressed to the back of his neck, and thought about a patch of tomatoes that no one was left to protect.
Somewhere down the hall, the crying from the intake line had mostly stopped. Not because anyone had been comforted. Because there is only so long a five-year-old body can cry before it simply runs out, and falls, without meaning to, into something that isn't quite sleep.