The second day taught me the danger of competence.
I was taken from the cell before the drip finished its count. The guards did not announce themselves. They simply opened the door and waited, confident I had already learned what hesitation cost. Rook stirred as I passed.
"Careful," he said without opening his eyes. "They don't reward efficiency. They notice it."
I didn't understand then how those words could be a warning and a sentence at the same time.
The sorting chamber felt smaller the second time.
Not physically—nothing had moved—but because I could see it now. The patterns. Which children were closest to the overseers. Which crates were opened first. Which mistakes earned correction and which were quietly forgiven. Order here was not about fairness. It was about predictability.
I was placed at the same table.
That alone told me something.
The girl with cropped hair was already working. She did not acknowledge me. Her hands moved faster than before, fingertips roughened, precise. I mirrored her pace without meaning to. It felt natural, like falling into step with someone walking the same road in the dark.
An overseer passed behind us.
He slowed.
I felt it before I saw it—the pressure in the air, the expectation. I corrected my posture, lowered my eyes. My hands kept moving.
The overseer stopped anyway.
"You," he said, pointing the baton toward me. "How many defective clasps in that crate?"
I swallowed. Counted quickly in my head.
"Seventeen," I said.
He watched as I separated them, one by one. When I finished, he counted himself.
Seventeen.
He nodded once and moved on.
The girl's hands never faltered, but I saw her jaw tighten.
I had crossed a line.
The punishment that day was quieter.
No dragged body. No blood on the floor. Instead, a boy my age—or younger—was brought in shaking. His hands were burned, skin bubbled and raw. He had dropped a tray, they said. Dropped it because his fingers had given out.
"Negligence," the overseer announced.
They did not strike him.
They reassigned him.
He was sent to the furnace room.
The children understood immediately. A collective tightening passed through us, subtle as a breath held too long. Furnace work did not kill you quickly. It erased you slowly, layer by layer, until no one remembered what you'd been good at.
As they led him away, he looked back once.
Not at the overseers.
At us.
I met his eyes.
That night, I dreamed of heat.
At midday, the man with the polished boots returned.
This time, he did not walk the room.
He stood at the front, hands clasped behind his back, and waited. Silence obeyed him. Even the overseers straightened.
"You are doing well," he said, voice calm, almost kind. "Which means you are ready for refinement."
No one reacted.
"Some of you," he continued, "have demonstrated attention. Precision. The ability to observe without panic." His gaze moved slowly across the tables. When it reached me, it did not stop.
"That is useful."
Two names were called.
Not mine.
Relief flooded me so fast it made me dizzy. Then a third name followed.
Mine.
The girl beside me paused for the first time since I had met her. Our eyes met briefly. Something like apology passed between us, though neither of us had chosen this.
I stepped forward.
The room they took us to was cleaner.
Not clean in the way the Warden's office was rumored to be—but deliberate. The floors had been scrubbed. The air smelled faintly of oil instead of rot. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with ledgers, tags, stamped papers.
"This is assessment," the man said. "You will answer questions. You will not ask any."
He gestured to a chair.
I sat.
"What do you remember about the fire?"
My chest tightened.
"Smoke," I said carefully. "Heat."
"Not why," he corrected. "Sequence."
I described the order things happened in. The hallway. The sound of wood collapsing. The scream. I did not name my brother.
He listened without interruption.
When I finished, he wrote something down.
"You ran toward it," he said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Most people run away."
"I know."
He studied me then—not my face, but the space just behind my eyes, as if trying to see what else lived there.
"Do you regret it?"
I thought of the furnace room. Of the boy's burned hands. Of my mother's gloves.
"No," I said.
Another note.
"Interesting," he murmured.
They returned me to the cell at nightfall.
Rook was awake this time. He sat up as soon as he saw me.
"They took you upstairs," he said. It wasn't curiosity. It was dread.
I nodded.
"What did they ask?"
"About the fire."
He laughed softly, without humor. "Of course they did."
He studied my face.
"They didn't hurt you," he said. Again, not a question.
"No."
"That's worse," he said.
I lay back on the stone, staring at the ceiling. The crack there looked wider than before. Or maybe I was just seeing more clearly.
"Rook," I asked quietly. "What happens when they decide you're useful?"
He was silent for a long time.
"When they decide," he said finally, "they stop asking whether you should be here."
The drip resumed its count.
I closed my eyes.
For the first time since my arrest, I understood the real trial had already ended.
I had been seen.
And in this place, nothing noticed ever stayed untouched.