Yuna woke up gasping.

She sat up swiftly, her hand reaching toward the bunk frame beside her. She grasped it, took deep breaths, and surveyed the room, allowing reality to gradually reassert itself, much like after the worst moments.

The barracks room contained four bunks. She heard the soft sound of Shin breathing on the opposite bunk. Anya’s clipboard rested on the small shelf near her head.

The building was cloaked in a subtle darkness at this hour, not complete darkness, but the dim amber glow from the perimeter panel light seeping under the door from the hallway.

She sat there for a long moment with her hand on the bunk frame and her heart doing what hearts did coming down from something and told herself to breathe properly.

The dream had been as vivid as only those that weren’t truly dreams can be. It wasn’t blurry at the edges or a patchwork of unrelated images like typical sleep; instead, it was sharp, ordered, and rich in texture, with every detail precise.

Her mother cooking at the stove. Her brother with one sock on. The warm canned tea in her hands inside her father’s car. Minjung at the third-floor window.

Her room. Her bed. Her ceiling.

All of it gone.

She examined her hands in the dim light—long fingers and wide palms. Two months ago, she had looked at them in that bathroom mirror without a second thought, but now, lying in a barracks bunk in a building at the edge of the world, she was contemplating everything.

She lay back down and looked at the ceiling of a room that was not her room and listened to the building settle around her and told herself it was just a dream.

It had felt like remembering.

She closed her eyes and somewhere between one breath and the next she fell back asleep and this time there was nothing, just dark and the soft sound of Shin breathing and the building quiet around her.

---

Morning came through the viewport the way it always did, grey and indirect, and the barracks room filled up with the slow sounds of people waking.

Shin was first, sitting up and rolling her neck and standing in one smooth sequence without apparent transition between asleep and functional. She looked at Yuna.

"You okay," she said quietly.

"Bad dream," Yuna said.

Shin nodded and didn’t push it and went to find her jacket and Yuna sat on the edge of her bunk and pushed her hair back and decided that today she was going to do normal things and not think about the dream or the orange sky or her mother’s voice at the end of a hallway that didn’t exist anymore.

She got up and went to the kitchen.

Michael was already on the floor in his spot with the Blueprint Interface open in his vision doing whatever he did at six in the morning that involved staring at empty air with the focused expression of someone reading something complicated. He looked up when she came in.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning," she said and went to the kitchen and started making something because making something was the thing she did when she needed her hands occupied and her brain pointed at a task with a clear outcome.

She worked through the ration components with the particular focused efficiency of someone who had spent thirty five days figuring out how to make them into something that tasted like an actual meal rather than fuel and after about twenty minutes she had something hot and decent smelling in four containers.

She brought one to Michael without commenting on it.

He looked at the container. Looked at her. "You didn’t have to do that," he said.

"I know," she said and went back to the kitchen.

She heard him open it. A pause. Then the sound of him eating and she let that settle somewhere in her chest in the quiet way that doing something useful for someone settled.

[Bond Event — She Made Food Again: Yuna. +1 Bond Point. Current BP: 5 — Yuna.]

---

The apartment filled up gradually the way it did every morning, people appearing from the barracks and the bedroom and occasionally the hallway in the particular sequence that had become routine over the past week.

Dr. Kang was second after Michael, clinic bound immediately, clipboard already in hand. Maya appeared shortly after looking like someone who had been awake for a while but had stayed in bed anyway out of principle. Shin came back from wherever she’d been. Rei emerged quietly and stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the food containers on the counter and looked at Yuna.

"You made enough for everyone," Rei said.

"There’s plenty," Yuna said.

Rei took a container and sat at the table and Yuna watched her eat and thought that Rei had been in this building for less than two weeks and had gone from barely speaking to sitting at the table eating breakfast like she’d always been here and that was the kind of thing that happened quietly and then all at once.

Maya took a container and looked at the contents and looked at Yuna. "How do you make it smell like actual food," she said.

"Technique," Yuna said.

"What technique."

"Heat management mostly. And the order you add things." She looked at Maya. "I can show you."

Maya looked at the container and then at Yuna with the particular expression she had when she was adding something to an internal list. "Yes," she said. "Show me."

---

By mid morning the building had settled into the easy rhythm of a day without a specific crisis driving it which was rare enough that everyone seemed to be handling it slightly differently.

Sera was in the training room. She was always in the training room but today there was no scheduled session so it was just her, working through combinations on the wall pad with the focused private energy of someone maintaining something they’d built over years and weren’t going to let slip.

Yuna went in at ten and warmed up in the far corner and Sera glanced at her once and went back to the wall pad and they worked in the same space without talking for a while which was its own kind of conversation.

After about twenty minutes Sera stopped and looked at her. "Your guard drops on the left when you extend the right leg kick," she said. "Has for two days."

Yuna looked at her. "I know."

"Fix it."

"I’m working on it."

"Work faster," Sera said and went back to the wall pad.

Yuna looked at her for a second and then adjusted her guard and went back to work and thought that Sera’s version of paying attention to you was to notice the specific thing you were doing wrong and say so directly and that was actually one of the more useful forms of attention available.

Anya found Michael on the fourth floor where he was checking Shin’s barrier placements with the particular focused eye he gave to anything structural.

She came up beside him with the clipboard and looked at the barrier arrangement at the corridor junction and then at the blueprint overlay she obviously couldn’t see but had learned to infer from the way he stood and looked at things.

"The medical supply consumption projection needs updating," she said. "We added three people in the last week and a half and I hadn’t fully recalculated for Yuna’s baseline needs."

"Update it," he said.

"I did," she said and held out the clipboard.

He took it and looked at the revised numbers and went through them with the quiet attention he gave things that mattered and then handed it back. "The food projection on the third line," he said.

She looked at it. "I see it," she said. "The greenhouse coming online in two weeks changes it significantly. I have a revised version accounting for that on the back page."

He turned the clipboard over. Looked at the back page. Looked at her.

"You already did it," he said.

"I anticipated the question," she said simply.

He looked at her for a moment and then looked back at the barrier arrangement and Anya stood beside him with the clipboard and they looked at the fourth floor corridor together in the comfortable working silence of two people who understood the same things in compatible ways.

"The junction barrier on the east side needs another layer," he said. "The spacing is too wide at the base."

She made a note without being asked.

---