The soldier who stepped up after Lane left was not built for speeches the way Lane was. He had none of the major's easy, bored authority his voice was flatter, younger somehow despite the grey at his jaw, a man reading from a script he'd clearly given a hundred times before and had long since stopped bothering to make sound like anything other than a script.
"As the major said." He didn't look up from the tablet in his hands. "Your names are meaningless here. From this point forward, you go by numbers."
He said it the way you'd announce a schedule change. Nobody in the hall reacted, which was its own kind of reaction — eighty-seven children who had already, in the space of two days, learned that reacting rarely bought them anything worth the cost of it.
"When your name is called, move to my colleague." He tipped his head toward a second soldier standing at a folding table near the far wall, a tray of small metal tags laid out in front of him in neat, gleaming rows. "Collect your tag. Wear it at all times. You lose it”, He paused, not for effect, just the pause of a man checking his own wording against the script in his head. "You die. Understood?"
Nobody answered out loud. Eighty-seven heads nodded, or didn't, and the soldier didn't seem to require more than that.
Names came off the list one at a time, and Yasin watched the hall thin out in small increments, child after child crossing to the folding table, collecting a tag, coming back changed in some way that had nothing to do with the tag itself heavier, somehow, like the metal weighed more than metal should.
"Yasin Antanovich."
He crossed the floor when his name was called, the last time, he understood without being told, that it would ever be used to call him anywhere again. The soldier at the table didn't look at his face. He checked a list, found a line, and set a tag on the table in front of him small, stamped, colder than the air in the hall had any right to make metal feel.
027.
"That's you now," the soldier said, already reaching for the next tag on the tray, already halfway to forgetting Yasin existed at all. "Wear it. Always."
Yasin picked it up. It was lighter than he expected, for something that had just replaced everything he'd ever been called.
The soldier with the tablet continued once the last name had been read, once eighty-seven tags had found eighty-seven necks, eighty-seven names folded away into whatever drawer this place kept the things it no longer had use for.
"Your number will guide you until training is complete," he said. "Where you sleep. When you're needed. What's expected of you, and when. Learn it the way you'd have learned your own name, because from this point forward, it is your name, as far as anyone here is concerned."
He glanced up, briefly, the first time his eyes had actually found the crowd rather than the tablet.
"Once you're finished here, you'll be redirected to the dining hall, where you may take breakfast." A pause, and this one, unlike the others, felt deliberate. "Note this, and remember it, because I will not repeat it again today. You eat when you've earned it. Not sooner. Nothing here is given. Everything is earned, starting now, you are allowed to eat because you passed the test and nothing more”.
He tapped the tablet once, satisfied with something only he could see on it.
"Further directives will be announced to you as needed."
He didn't dismiss them. He simply stopped talking, the way a machine stops once its cycle finishes, and turned to go and eighty-seven children, none of them older than five, none of them still carrying a name anyone in this building intended to use again, understood, without needing to be told, that this too was a kind of order, and filed out behind him all the same.
Yasin closed his hand around the tag at his neck as he walked. 027. He tried, once, quietly, to remember the shape his own name used to make in his mouth, and found, with a small, cold surprise, that some part of him had already started letting it go.