By the end of the first week, Yasin's body had learned the schedule faster than his mind had agreed to accept it.
He woke at four, always, now, before the bell even finished its first note, some new, obedient instinct already dragging him upright in the dark, the way water finds the low point in a field without needing to be told where it is. Around him, in the bunk room that now held two instead of four, 028 was already moving too talking, actually, the way he did most mornings, a low, half-awake stream of words about nothing in particular that Yasin had learned not to expect a response to. Yasin didn't know his real name. Nobody used real names anymore. But he'd caught it once, murmured to himself in the dark on their second night rooming together Newt and some quiet part of him had filed it away and kept it, the way you keep something you're not supposed to have.
0400 — 0800: Conditioning
The yard at four in the morning was colder than anything Yasin remembered from the land he used to live on, colder in a way that felt deliberate, as if the base itself had decided discomfort was part of the curriculum. They ran first laps around a stretch of packed dirt that never seemed to get any shorter no matter how many mornings passed and then drills, the same motions repeated until repetition stopped being a choice and became something closer to breathing.
His body had changed in a week. Not dramatically. Not yet. But he could feel it in small ways the run that had left him gasping on day one now leaving him merely tired, the weight of the training equipment settling into his hands like it belonged there. Beside him, 028 talked through the drills the way he talked through everything, a running commentary aimed at no one half complaint, half something closer to company and Yasin had started to suspect it wasn't habit so much as armor, a way of keeping the silence from getting loud enough to think in.
0800 — 0900: The hour that felt like mercy
Cold water in a communal shower block, tooth-brushing at a long metal sink with forty other mirrors reflecting forty other tired faces, and somehow, in the space of that hour, something like normalcy tried to happen. A boy two sinks down hummed something under his breath, some tune from wherever he used to be from, and nobody told him to stop. Small mercies. The schedule allowed them, exactly as much as it allowed anything.
0900 — 1000: Breakfast, and the lesson underneath it
They ate in a hall with long tables and no assigned seats, which meant, in practice, that the same small clusters had already begun forming by the end of the first week survivors finding survivors, without anyone deciding to, the way people who have been through the same fire tend to end up standing near each other afterward.
Stolen novel; please report.
The food was plain and sufficient and never quite enough to leave anyone fully satisfied, which Yasin understood, by now, was not an oversight.
1000 — 1500: Classroom
Five hours split three ways, and none of them easy in their own fashion.
Some days it was history the shape of the war, the shape of what had come after, delivered in the flat, careful language of people who had decided long ago which parts of the truth were useful to a room full of five-year-olds and which parts weren't. Yasin understood, listening, that there were things being left out. He didn't yet have the tools to guess at what.
Some days it was the United Front itself what it was, what it wanted, the shape of the new world it was building out of the wreckage of the old one, delivered with the particular pride of people describing something they'd built with their own hands and intended to keep. Nobody explained, in those classes, what any of it had to do with a boy who used to have tomatoes and a father and a name that wasn't a number. Nobody needed to. The unspoken lesson underneath every spoken one was always the same: this is what you belong to now, whether you asked to or not.
And some days it was language of a different kind entirely phrases, codes, the clipped, efficient vocabulary of people who needed to be understood instantly and without confusion in situations where a wasted second could cost something none of them wanted to think too hard about yet. Yasin found, to his own quiet surprise, that this part came easily to him. He had always been good at listening. It turned out listening translated well into learning exactly what a stranger needed you to hear.
1500 — 1600: Rest, technically
An hour that nobody quite knew what to do with, most days. Some slept. Some sat in the yard in silence. Yasin usually did the second, watching the sky change colour above walls too high to see past, thinking about very little on purpose, because thinking about anything specific had started, over the course of the week, to cost more than it used to.
1600 — 2000: Combat
The hardest four hours of the day, by a wide margin, and the ones that left the yard littered, by the end of them, with children who could barely stand and a handful always a handful who moved through the drills like something in them had simply decided this, of all things, was what they'd been made for.
Yasin was neither the fastest to learn nor the slowest. The instructors had already begun to note in the clipped shorthand of people filing reports nobody in the yard would ever read, consistent a word that meant nothing to a five-year-old and, Yasin would understand only much later, meant almost everything to the people deciding his future.
2000 onward: What was left
Dinner. The uniform laid out for the next day one of three, rotated, washed somewhere Yasin never saw and returned each evening folded into a precise, identical square. And then, finally, the bunk, and the particular relief of a body too tired to keep carrying, for a few hours, whatever the mind hadn't finished processing yet.
He closed his eyes most nights before he meant to. It was, he was beginning to understand, the only part of the day the schedule couldn't entirely take from him the brief, unscheduled stretch of dark before sleep actually arrived, where he was allowed, for a handful of seconds, to be nothing at all instead of 027.
Tomorrow would start at four. It always did now. He had stopped, somewhere in the last seven days, expecting anything else.