For the next four days he did nothing. He only watched.
The Tower floor ran on a fixed rhythm. Breakfast came at the darkest hour — two handlers, iron buckets, twenty minutes from first cell to last. Midday was skipped, though sometimes in the afternoon they circulated a piece of something dried and hard and indefinable. Supper mirrored breakfast, and occasionally there was a broth with a disc of fat floating in it, which meant someone upstairs was satisfied with the day's results.
He had the patrol patterns mostly mapped.
Three checkpoints in the corridor below. The nearest rotated every two burning-sticks of incense; the gap between shifts was roughly forty breaths, and in those forty breaths the passage was empty. The far checkpoint, near the storeroom, ran irregular — sometimes an hour, sometimes barely twenty minutes. That guard was lazy. His schedule followed his mood.
He catalogued the people.
Twelve had been in this cell. With Bunk Three gone, eleven remained. Three warranted particular attention.
First: the middle-aged man nearest the door, whose name Pei Jin had no interest in learning. He thought of him as Doorman. Doorman always sat close to the iron bars, always turned to watch the handlers' faces when food came in. That was an informant's habit. Pei Jin had seen it before.
Second: the young man in the corner with the burn scars — several of them, the mottled kind that came from alchemical fluid rather than flame. He shouldn't still be mobile. He was. That kind of recovery didn't happen on its own. Pei Jin filed him away.
Third: the woman by the far wall who never spoke and whose eyes never stopped moving. That sort was either the most dangerous person in the room or the most useless, depending on what she was actually watching.
On the morning of the fourth day, Doorman came to him.
"You alright? After the injection — you looked off."
Pei Jin looked at him once. "Fell asleep."
"Right." Doorman settled beside him, voice dropped. "You notice the mages have been coming through more? Last two days, standing at the door, looking in. Like they're trying to find someone."
Pei Jin said nothing.
"Word is," Doorman leaned in, "that batch had something special in it. Only a few people got it. Something that triggers a gift — a real one. The ones it triggers, they get taken upstairs. Trained, supposedly." A beat. "Your reaction wasn't like the others."
Pei Jin waited.
"What I'm saying is —" Doorman smiled, a small, practised thing — "if you did trigger something, maybe there's a path up from here. I've been in this floor almost two years. I know some people. If you ever need —"
"No."
Doorman took his smile back. Nodded once. Got up and walked away.
Pei Jin didn't watch him go. He had what he needed: confirmation that the mages were actively searching, that he was not the only anomaly, and that there was at least one person down here actively feeding information upstairs.
Doorman was first on the list.