The general's office was one of the few rooms on base that still looked like something other than a machine for processing children. Old wood panelling, salvaged and refitted, a window that looked out over the yard rather than the wall. He kept a bottle of whiskey older than the war in the bottom drawer of a desk that had probably belonged to some university dean, once, in a version of the world neither of them would ever see again.
"When did the world come to this," he said, not really a question, turning his glass slowly without drinking from it. "Using kids to fight our battles now."
Major Lane sat across from him, uninvited to sit and sitting anyway, because rank stopped mattering somewhere around the third glass most nights. "Well," he said. "I once saw one of those so-called kids flatten a tank with his bare hands. So."
"Fucking monsters." The general poured himself another glass, the bottle's neck clicking twice against the rim. "I miss when it was only weapons we had to worry about. Now we've got to deal with freaks of nature."
"Well." Lane turned his own glass without drinking either. "Glad we have our own freaks."
Neither of them said anything else for a while. Outside the window, far across the yard, a light was still on in one of the dormitory blocks some child, maybe, who hadn't learned yet how to sleep through a first night in a place like this. The general watched it for a long moment, the way you'd watch a candle you knew was going to go out on its own eventually, and didn't say anything about that either.
"Tomorrow's the big one," Lane said eventually, setting his glass down. "Two-thirty-four of them. If the ratio holds"
"It'll hold." The general didn't look away from the window. "It always holds. That's the part that should bother you more than the monsters do."
They woke the children at four in the morning.
Not gently. A hard bell down the corridor, lights flooding on all at once, a voice over a speaker system that gave no explanation beyond a room number and a destination. Yasin was on his feet before he was fully awake, the way one day in this place had already started teaching his body to move faster than his mind could object.
They were gathered in the same hall as the night before, the one with the faded lines of some old game painted into the floor. Major Lane stood where the general had stood, hands behind his back, looking exactly as inconvenienced as he had in the yard the day before.
"Today you find out what you are," he said, without preamble, without the ceremony the general had bothered with the night before. "Two tests. Some of you will pass the first and never need the second. Some of you will need the second and not survive it. I want to be clear about that now, so nobody wastes my morning being surprised later."
A ripple went through the hall not quite a sound, more a held breath multiplied by two hundred and thirty-four.
"You are not citizens of the United Front," Lane continued, in the same flat, administrative voice he might have used to describe a supply shortage. "You were found on land that didn't belong to anyone. That means no one is obligated to protect you through what happens today. I'd suggest you protect yourselves instead, to whatever extent that turns out to mean anything." He looked over them once, the way a man looks over a spreadsheet for an error he already expects to find. "Move them out in groups of twenty."
The room they took the first group into looked less like a hospital than Yasin expected and more like a machine shop that had been asked to do something it wasn't built for.
Twenty beds in two rows, each one fitted with restraints at the wrists, ankles, chest thick enough that Yasin understood, immediately and without being told, that they weren't there for comfort. Above each bed, a helmet on an articulated arm, trailing cables into a bank of humming equipment along the far wall. Technicians moved between the beds with the same bored competence as the soldiers from the day before, fitting straps, checking readouts, not making eye contact with any of the children they were strapping down.
"This part doesn't hurt," a technician told Yasin, fitting the helmet over his head, the visor blacking out the room entirely. "Whatever you see in there isn't real. What your body does about it that part's real enough."
The helmet was quiet for exactly as long as it took Yasin's heartbeat to slow into a false, uneasy calm.
Then the water came.
Not the well from his half-formed nightmares something worse for being so specific, so exactly shaped to whatever fear lived deepest and least examined in him. He was five years old, in the dark, and the ground was gone, and something enormous moved beneath him in water that had no bottom he could find, and none of it was real, the technician's voice was still somewhere very far outside all of this telling him so, and it did not matter one bit, because his body had already stopped listening to anything that wasn't the immediate, total certainty that it was about to die.
He tried to swim. That was the first thing, the only thing, the whole of him narrowed down to the single animal instruction to move arms first, some buried memory of a summer he couldn't place trying to drag him upward toward air that wasn't there and his arms did not move.
He had forgotten, entirely, that they were strapped down. There was no room left in him for the memory of a room, a bed, a helmet, buckles at his wrists there was only water, and the fact that his body would not do the one thing it was screaming at itself to do, and for three, four, five seconds that had no length at all inside the dark, that was worse than the water itself. Not drowning. Being unable to even try not to.
Something enormous brushed against his leg in the black, unhurried, patient, the way a thing moves when it already knows it doesn't need to hurry.
He didn't remember deciding to fight the restraints after that. He remembered the sound they made instead not a snap, more a tearing, thick canvas and reinforced buckles giving way at once, all four points at the same moment, as something in him that had been waiting very patiently for five years finally stopped waiting and simply answered, with more force than five-year-old arms had ever been asked to produce, the only question that had mattered in that dark: let me move.
The helmet came off on its own, torn away by a hand that wasn't quite listening to him yet either. He sat up on a bed that no longer had anything holding him to it, and for a long moment did nothing else at all except breathe fast, shallow, too much air pulled in and not enough of it going anywhere useful, his chest working like it was still underwater and hadn't been told yet that it wasn't. His hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against the thin mattress to make them stop, and they didn't stop, not for a while, not until the room around him had gone very quiet and stayed that way.
He became aware of the rest of the room slowly, the way sound returns after a loud noise. Someone two beds over was crying without any of the shame that usually came with it, open and unguarded, the particular crying of someone who had understood, for the first time in their life, that dying was a real thing that could happen to them specifically, today, in this room. Another child had gone rigid under their restraints, not fighting them, just lying there with wide, unblinking eyes fixed on the ceiling, breathing in the same too-fast, too-shallow way Yasin was, as if some part of them had decided that moving at all might make whatever they'd seen more real. A boy near the door kept whispering something too low to make out, the same few words over and over, and Yasin understood without hearing them that they were a kind of prayer, or a kind of bargain, offered to whatever might be listening in a room built entirely for the purpose of not listening to any of them.
Two beds down, a boy had gone the opposite way entirely restraints untouched, body slack, a technician already checking his pulse with the brisk, unbothered efficiency of someone confirming a result rather than responding to an emergency. Fainted. No sign of anything underneath. He would be moved along to the next room regardless, along with everyone else the helmets hadn't managed to wake something in.
A soldier's hand found Yasin's shoulder before he'd fully caught his breath.
"This way," the soldier said. "You're done for today."
Yasin didn't understand yet what "done" meant, or what he'd just been spared, or what he was about to be made to watch instead. He only knew that the shaking in his hands hadn't stopped, even though the water hadn't been real, and that somewhere down a corridor he hadn't seen yet, something else something that would need to be real, whether it wanted to or not was still waiting for the rest of them.