Eighteen came on Wednesday.

Not for one person - for all of us at once. That was how the system worked: no birthdays, no personal dates. A birthday is a name, and names are not needed here. The system kept count in its own way: you entered the dome, the dome counted six years, and the system updated your status. On Wednesday morning the voice announced wake-up - as always, flat, emotionless - and added:

Cohort Seven-AK. Age assigned. Status: draft-eligible. Assembly in the central hall at 09:00.

I lay there staring at the ceiling.

For six years I had waited for this day. Thought about it like people think about something large and distant - you know it will come, but you cannot imagine how it will happen. And now there it was. Wednesday. 6:00. The system voice, exactly as always, only with one new word: draft-eligible.

“Kael,” I said.

“Heard it,” he said.

We did not speak again. Got up, dressed, went.

The new suits lay in the central hall on the same steel racks as six years ago.

But these were not those suits.

I stopped when I saw them.

Not worn down. Not repaired. Not gray with age - gray intentionally, evenly, that was the color of the material, not the color of neglect. The armor plates lay flat, without dents. The seams were uniform, neat, with no trace of patching. On the chest plates, the numbers were stamped once, deep and clean, with no one else beneath them.

I found mine.

7-AK-441119.

Only my number. Nobody else’s.

A technician helped me put it on. The locks snapped shut - shins, thighs, torso, shoulders, helmet - and I felt the difference immediately. Not the weight. Not the tightness. The opposite - the suit settled on me like a continuation, as if it had been made specifically for me. Thermal regulation engaged at once, quietly, without effort. The smell - clean metal and neutral resin. No foreign sweat. No foreign lives.

I took a step.

The suit moved with me.

Not me after it - it with me. Exactly that. After six years, I finally understood what Iskhak had felt from the very first step.

“Good?” Iskhak asked beside me.

“Yes,” I said.

He was already walking. Just walking - freely, as always, as if the suit weighed nothing. But now I looked at him and understood what I was seeing: not natural talent, but six years of work. Six years of dialogue with metal, every day, in different suits, under different conditions.

We had both arrived at the same place.

By different roads.

The instructor - the last time, probably, that he would ever be an instructor - stepped in front of the hall and announced the route.

The transport took eight hours.

There were about three hundred of us - the entire draft cohort from the dome, everyone whom the system had assigned age to on that Wednesday. We sat in the hold of a cargo shuttle, in our suits, and stared at the wall, or the floor, or nothing. No one talked much. When you fly eight hours toward something you have never seen, words do not really come.

I looked out the viewport.

The dome receded. Became smaller, then tiny - a gray hemisphere on a gray planet, one of hundreds like it. I had lived in it for six years and had never seen it from outside. It had been enormous when I was inside. From outside, it was small.

That was an unpleasant feeling.

“You looking?” Iskhak asked.

“Looking.”

“Small.”

“Yes.”

He turned away from the viewport before I did.

The station looked like a station should look in the mind of someone taught that aesthetics are waste.

Metal, metal, metal. Long corridors with not a single unnecessary detail. Even, white lighting. Personnel in identical gray coveralls, with no insignia except a code on the sleeve. They led us into a large hall - no racks, no suits, just an empty hall with rows of benches - and told us to sit.

An officer stepped out before us.

Not an instructor. An officer - different breed altogether, obvious at a glance. Straight, sharp, movements without waste. His face had neither hardness nor softness. Just the information he was about to give us.

“You are here for modification,” he said. “Not for explanations, not for questions. For modification. The procedure will alter your biology. After it, you will live longer, move faster, endure what would kill you now. This is not an improvement - it is a remaking. A painful and unsafe remaking.”

He paused.

“Some of you will not survive the procedure. That is accounted for in the plan.”

The silence in the hall was absolute.

“Questions?” he asked.

No one said anything.

“Good. To your sectors - for preparation.”

They divided us into groups.

Then into smaller groups. Then into pairs.

Me and Iskhak - together. I do not know whether that was coincidence or whether the system had recorded somewhere that we functioned better side by side. I would like to think the system is smarter than it looks.

Preparation took three days.

Tests, scans, something they injected into the vein that sent heat through the whole body. Medics in gray coveralls, silent and precise. They did not explain what they were doing - just did it, and you lay there and allowed it. Three days of that, and by the end of the third I no longer thought about what would happen. I just waited.

Iskhak was quiet during those three days.

Not defeated - quiet. He watched. Watched the medics, the equipment, the way they worked. Memorized it. Sometimes traced something on the sheet with a finger. Old habit.

I did not interrupt him.

The procedure lasted twenty-two hours.

I will not describe it in detail - not because I do not remember, but because some things are better not translated into words. I will only say this: the officer had not lied. Painful. Long. At some point I stopped understanding where I ended and where what they were doing to me began.

Then it was over.

I lay staring at the ceiling and felt that something had changed. I cannot explain how exactly - only that it had. As if for six years I had been looking at the world through glass, and now the glass was gone.

Beside me, Iskhak was lying there.

Alive. I checked immediately - just looked at him and exhaled.

“Alive,” I said.

“Alive,” he said.

Seventeen people from our cohort did not survive the procedure.

We were informed the next morning. The same officer, the same even voice. Seventeen out of three hundred - that was fewer than the projected losses, he said. A good result.

I stood there listening and thought about the seventeen people who had lain beside me three days before. Heard the same explanations. Waited the same way. Wanted Paradise the same way.

Seventeen people I did not know by name.

Only by number.

“They didn’t even start,” I said to Iskhak later, when we were walking to the residential section. “Six years of preparation. Six years. And that’s it - here. They didn’t even make it to the first battle.”

Iskhak walked beside me in silence.

“Seventeen people,” I said. “Seventeen people who were waiting for this day like we were. Who thought they’d make it too.”

“Kael.”

“What.”

He stopped. Looked at me - calm, straight, without a smirk.

“What can you do,” he said. “At least we’re alive.”

I looked at him.

“And now what.”

“Now we keep going.” He shrugged - already lightly, already in the new body. “That’s all there is left to do.”

I thought about that.

About the fact that he was right. About the fact that he was always right in the most inconvenient places.

About the fact that the seventeen had also thought they would keep going.

“Iskhak,” I said.

“Mm.”

“We’ll reach Paradise.”

He looked at me for several seconds. Then nodded - the same short nod he had given six years earlier on the cold floor of the third maintenance corridor.

“We will,” he said.

We kept walking down the station corridor.

We were eighteen years old and seven days.

Ahead of us was what they had remade us into - bodies capable of living a thousand years, if the war allowed it.

Behind us - the dome, the third maintenance corridor, the names on the wall, the empty seat by the window.

We did not look back.

No point.