The bell rang into a morning that smelled wrong.
Not smoke. Not stew. Not the familiar sourness of too many bodies pressed into too little space.
Metal.
Cold iron carried on damp air, the kind that sat in the nose and stayed there, the kind that made the inside of the throat feel scraped even before work began. Eryk felt it when he stepped out of the shed and drew his first breath. It was faint, but it was sharp enough to notice. Blackstone had always smelled like stone dust and damp wool and boiled bone. Metal belonged to the quarry lip, to chains and hooks and old tools that should have been replaced. It did not belong in the yard at dawn.
The yard moved anyway.
It moved with the same shapes as always, but those shapes had grown thinner. Men crossed paths without speaking. Boys carried buckets without jostling for place. Foremen stood in small knots, their voices low, not because they were being kind, but because low voices carried different kinds of authority. Loud meant panic, and panic was expensive.
Hala was already at the pot. The fire under it was lit, but it burned weakly, as if someone had fed it only what they could spare. Steam rose in a steady column and then flattened under the low sky, drifting sideways.
Her hands were wrapped at the knuckles. The cloth was clean in places, stained in others. She had the look of someone who had decided there would be no extra motion today.
"Pump and carry," she said as the boys gathered. Her voice wasn't a bark. It was a cut. "Quarry run. Then back. No one eats until the first loads go down."
Someone shifted behind Eryk, a sound that might have been a complaint or might have been hunger making itself heard.
Hala didn't turn.
"If you want to argue with stone," she added, "you can do it with your mouth full of snow."
The line broke and reformed without anyone calling it. Eryk moved with it like he had learned to do, eyes down, hands ready, face blank.
Bran drifted close enough to brush Eryk's sleeve. The contact was brief, almost accidental, but Eryk felt the warning inside it.
"Keep your head down," Bran murmured. "Today's one of those days."
Eryk didn't ask what kind. Asking invited answers. Answers invited attention. He nodded once and kept moving.
At the pump, the beam complained on the first pull.
Not the usual tired groan, the familiar protest of wood and iron that had been abused for years. This was deeper. Wrong. The sound of something being asked to do work it no longer had the shape for.
Eryk set his hands and leaned his weight into the handle. The wood was rougher than yesterday. Raised grain, dried out too fast. His palms caught on it.
The rope rubbed the groove unevenly. He could feel it through the handle, a small hitch that traveled into his wrists and up his forearms. The bucket rose in faltering jumps instead of a steady climb.
Men took the water without looking at the beam. No one studied the rope. No one traced where it scraped. Looking meant seeing. Seeing meant being the first person who could be blamed for not saying something sooner.
Eryk kept pulling.
The bucket came up dark and smoking. Steam curled off the surface in quick wisps. The water smelled like iron.
He poured it into the waiting buckets and watched the surface settle. Not because he thought it would change, but because he needed his hands to do something while his mind registered the wrongness.
"Don't stare," Bran said quietly beside him.
Eryk blinked and shifted his grip.
"I wasn't," he lied.
Bran didn't correct him. Correction was its own kind of attention.
They hauled and carried until Eryk's shoulders warmed and then burned, until his breath came in measured pulls that did not waste air. The yard's noise rose and fell around them without ever becoming loud. It was the sound of a machine running with fewer parts than it was designed for.
By midmorning, quarry teams formed up early.
Chains rattled as men took their positions. Carts waited under loads that were just heavy enough to be called standard. The kind of weight foremen demanded because it made their numbers look better even when the day was already rotten.
Eryk was folded into the flow without anyone needing to point. A foreman's hand made a small motion and bodies shifted, a space opening and closing around him like a mouth.
"Water and tools," someone said, not a command so much as a sorting.
Eryk took a bundle of wedges and a coil of rope that felt damp with old melt, then grabbed a bucket in his other hand. Bran took the second bucket. They moved toward the upper descent.
The quarry yawned as it always did. Stepped stone, jagged cuts, dark mouths where the lower tiers disappeared. The drop pulled at the eye even when you didn't look straight at it. Eryk kept his gaze on the path, but he could still feel the emptiness to his left, the way the air thinned near it.
The sound down there had changed.
Hammer strikes overlapped poorly, as if men were working out of rhythm. There were gaps between strikes that lasted too long. A foreman's voice cut through once, sharp and irritated, then died. A cough answered, wet and slow, like someone trying to swallow pain.
Metal.
Iron.
Chain.
The smell grew stronger as they neared the upper working tier.
The crane stood with its hook hanging. Men had stacked stone in a cradle beneath it, a routine lift being set. No ceremony, just practiced coordination. Hands moved in familiar patterns. Bodies stepped into the same places they had stepped into a hundred times.
Eryk set his buckets down and stepped back. Bran did the same. They waited with their hands empty, listening, because listening was safer than watching.
The chain tightened.
Metal spoke.
A high sound, thin and stretching, like breath held too long.
Eryk felt the yard tighten before he understood why. Men's shoulders rose in unison. A small collective flinch, not from fear, but from recognition.
Something was about to fail.
The chain snapped.
It didn't stretch and creak and give warning like wood. It didn't slowly tear the way rope did. It broke cleanly, a sentence cut off mid word.
The load dropped.
Stone fell with a dull, terrible weight and struck the edge of the tier. Dust jumped up in a pale burst. The crane jerked hard as tension vanished.
Two men were beneath the swing.
Not directly beneath the load at first. They had been guiding it, hands on the line, feet planted, doing the work the way it was always done. When the chain snapped, the cradle didn't just fall straight down.
It swung.
The stone pivoted, taking their bodies at the side and driving them into the low barrier with a sound that didn't belong to anything living.
One man's arm flailed once, fingers opening as if he could let go of what had already crushed him.
Then the arm vanished under stone.
The other made a single noise. Not a scream. A short surprised exhale, like his lungs had tried to speak and failed.
Then nothing.
Dust rose in a pale bloom and drifted over their shapes like a sheet being pulled.
For a moment, no one moved.
Not because they cared.
Because they were calculating.
A foreman swore under his breath. Another one's mouth opened as if to shout, then shut again. Shouting didn't fix chain. Shouting only made eyes turn.
Someone finally ran.
"Canvas," a voice snapped. "Canvas. Now."
Canvas came.
A rolled length, dragged up by two men who did not look at the crushed bodies until they were close enough that looking could not be avoided. They unrolled it fast, hands practiced. They did not kneel like men tending a friend. They crouched like men handling meat.
The bodies were not lifted like bodies.
They were gathered.
Arms tucked in. Legs bent. Cloth wrapped around shapes. Quick tying of corners. The work was efficient in the way work becomes efficient when it has been done too many times.
Not to preserve dignity.
To stop anything from falling out on the path.
A man near the edge made a small sound, half gag, half sob. It might have been grief. It might have been the smell. It didn't matter.
The foreman turned and struck him once with the flat of the lash.
Not hard enough to break bone. Hard enough to remind him he was being seen.
"Move," the foreman said.
The man moved.
The bundled canvas was lifted and carried off in the direction of the upper yard, two men in front, two behind. Dust fell from the cloth as they went, a faint trail.
The broken chain ends hung from the crane like dead snakes. They twitched once as the last tension bled out.
Below, hammering resumed.
It had paused for a breath. It returned as if nothing had happened, the lower tiers continuing their work because stopping would not bring anyone back and would definitely get someone punished.
Eryk's mouth was full of dust. He swallowed and tasted grit on his tongue.
Bran stood beside him, hands loose at his sides, too loose, like he didn't trust them to do anything useful.
"Don't look," Bran said again, quieter.
Eryk didn't answer. His eyes stayed on the path anyway. He had learned how to obey instructions like that while still seeing the edges of things.
They were waved back to their tasks before the cradle was even fully cleared. The crane stood idle, the broken chain still hanging, its snapped end tied off with scrap rope like a wound wrapped without cleaning. The rope looked ridiculous against iron, a cheap bandage on an amputation.
Work resumed with a new pace.
Not order.
Pace.
Men moved faster now, as if speed could erase what had happened and buy back lost time. Foremen's voices sharpened. Every instruction was shorter. Every correction was harsher. The air filled with dust and sweat and something faintly sour that came from bodies pushed too hard.
Eryk and Bran carried water up and down until Eryk's arms felt like they belonged to the buckets more than they belonged to him. The rope burn on his palm deepened. He didn't feel it until he looked down and saw the skin split, a thin line that had bled and dried.
He kept moving.
They did not eat at midday.
Hala had said they would not, and Hala's promises were one of the few stable laws in Blackstone.
Hunger didn't arrive as a dramatic pain. It arrived as a quiet subtraction. A little less warmth behind the ribs. A little less patience in the muscles. A little more cost to every movement.
Eryk felt the absence of food in his body like an empty pocket. It didn't stop him from working. It just made everything cost more.
When they finally ate, it was late.
The stew pot had been kept moving, but the broth inside it had thinned further, more water than anything else. The smell was there, faintly. Boiled bone. Salt. Onion if you were willing to imagine it.
Hala ladled fast, not looking at faces long enough to be accused of favor.
"Eat and move," she snapped when a boy tried to scrape the bottom too long. "You want more, go lick the quarry wall."
The boy swallowed and hurried away.
Eryk took his bowl and drank. Warmth spread for a moment, small and temporary, then faded as the cold reclaimed it. He ate the few soft pieces that sank to the bottom and felt hunger remain, not sharp yet, but present.
He didn't complain. Complaints didn't add food to the pot.
"What happened?" Hala asked when he returned his bowl.
Her eyes did not soften. She asked the way she might ask how much water was left.
Eryk hesitated for less than a breath.
Not because he didn't want to tell her.
Because he could already see the lie forming above the event, like frost forming over water.
"Chain snapped," he said.
Hala's face didn't change the way it would have months ago. No shock. No pity. Only calculation.
"How many?"
"Two," he answered.
Hala nodded once as if that were a number on a sack.
"Were they yours?" she asked.
Eryk almost didn't understand the question. Then he realized she meant something else.
Were they from their shed. Their kitchen line. Their small circle of familiar faces that passed bowls and buckets back and forth.
"I don't know," he said.
Hala's mouth tightened.
"You don't know because you didn't look," she said.
Eryk looked at her then.
She wasn't accusing him of cowardice. She was accusing him of waste. Not looking meant not counting. Not counting meant being surprised later.
"I didn't see," he corrected quietly.
Hala studied him for a long moment. Steam from the pot drifted between them.
Then she looked away.
"Good," she said, and it wasn't kindness. "If you keep seeing everything, you stop moving."
She turned back to the pot and shouted for the next line.
Later, he was sent to the tool intake with Bran.
The upper yard had regained its pace. Not its order.
Men moved like they were trying to outrun the day. Foremen's voices cracked from shouting. A cart wheel squealed where someone had forgotten to wedge it. It kept squealing until someone kicked it into silence.
At the desk, the younger clerk was writing.
His quill moved too fast. Ink stained his cuffs. His eyes were fixed on the ledger as if looking up might cost him more than it cost the men in the yard.
The older clerk was still gone.
The steward stood behind the desk for a time, watching numbers and murmuring corrections in a low voice. He didn't raise his head. He didn't look at the quarry lip. He looked at the page.
Eryk kept his posture neutral.
He watched the steward's hands.
Ink stained the steward's fingers more deeply now. The stain wasn't just on the tips. It had crept into the cracks of skin, into the lines of knuckle and joint, as if the ink had decided to live there. The steward's hands looked older than the rest of him. Like hands being consumed slowly by the thing they used.
A foreman stepped up and slammed a broken chain link onto the desk.
The sound made a few heads turn, then turn away.
"What happened?" the clerk asked without looking up.
"Equipment failure," the foreman said.
The steward's quill paused.
For a moment, the yard's noise seemed to thin, as if everyone had leaned in without meaning to.
Eryk looked at the steward's face.
The steward's expression didn't change. No irritation. No alarm. No concern. Only that same flat attention, the calm of a man who believed the page mattered more than what fed it.
"The lift failed," the steward said calmly. "The lift is what is recorded."
The foreman's mouth tightened.
"And the two?" the foreman asked.
The steward looked at him as if the question were irrelevant.
"The lift failed," he repeated, and in the repetition there was something like doctrine. "The lift is what is recorded."
The foreman swallowed once. His jaw worked. His eyes flicked, just for a breath, toward the path where canvas had been carried. Dust still marked it if you knew where to look.
"You saw them," the foreman said, voice shaking slightly now, anger and fear braided together. "You saw the canvas come up."
"I saw canvas," the steward replied. "Canvas is not a name."
The foreman stared at him like he might strike him.
He didn't.
He couldn't.
Not in this yard. Not with ink watching.
The steward's gaze slid toward Eryk for a heartbeat, then away, not focusing, only checking, as if confirming there were still hands nearby that could be used if needed.
The foreman stepped back.
"Under review," he muttered, and walked away.
The clerk wrote it down.
Equipment failure under review.
Not chain snapped.
Not two men crushed.
Not canvas carried.
Eryk felt something settle inside him.
Not surprise.
Expectation.
This was the first time he had expected the lie before he saw it, and then watched it form anyway, clean and dry on the page.
He watched the clerk's hand continue to write.
He watched the steward's quill resume its steady movement.
He watched how neither of them looked toward the quarry lip again.
And he noticed something else, something small and worse.
The clerk didn't leave a blank space for names.
He didn't mark a pending line.
He didn't write temporary placeholders to be filled later.
He wrote only what could be carried safely into the ledger.
Under review.
Then he moved on.
Eryk understood then that this wasn't a man making a mistake.
This was a system deciding what truth it could afford.
He turned his gaze away from the ledger.
Not because he was afraid to look.
Because he now knew where the truth would not be.
He watched instead who avoided writing.
A boy carrying chain links with hands wrapped in cloth stepped up and set them down without reporting the crack in one link. Without logging it. Without making it someone's problem.
A foreman returned a broken wedge and spoke quietly to the clerk, not demanding, almost asking permission to pretend the wedge was still usable.
The clerk nodded without making a mark.
They were all learning the same lesson.
If it wasn't written, it wasn't owned.
If it wasn't owned, it could be left to fail later.
By evening, the yard was quieter.
Not because the day had softened.
Because bodies were empty.
Men moved with less excess. Less talk. Less anger. A kind of dull efficiency that looked like discipline from a distance and felt like exhaustion up close.
Eryk returned to the shed with his hands stiff and his mouth tasting faintly of iron.
Inside, the air was muted. Coughs sounded farther apart. Straw shifted softly.
One pallet had been removed.
Not packed away gently.
Gone.
The space where it had been looked too clean, as if someone had swept around absence until absence blended into the wall.
Tomas lay on his back staring at the rafters.
No one asked him what he was thinking. No one asked him what he'd seen.
Not because they didn't care.
Because names were dangerous now.
Eryk lay down and listened to the shed breathe around him. Coughs. Shifts in straw. The creak of old wood. Somewhere in the yard, chain rattled once, a loose sound that didn't settle into rhythm.
He thought of the chain snapping.
He thought of the bodies being wrapped.
He thought of the steward's voice, calm as weather, saying canvas was not a name.
He thought of the ledger line.
Equipment failure under review.
It would look so clean on paper. A neat problem to be resolved. A delay. A number.
It would not look like a crushed arm disappearing under stone.
It would not look like dust settling over an open eye.
It would not look like a boy trying not to gag while carrying a canvas bundle that leaked.
Blackstone still moved bodies and stone and food from one place to another.
But it had stopped trying to tell the truth about what it consumed.
It was no longer mistaken.
It was no longer behind.
It was deliberate.
Eryk closed his eyes.
Survival would not be about finding justice inside a system.
It would be about learning to live in the space where the system refused to look.
Because that space was growing.
And sooner or later, everything would fall into it.