The bell rang on time.
Eryk opened his eyes before it finished.
That was not because he had rested. It was because his body had learned the sound meant movement, and movement meant staying where the light still reached.
Straw shifting. A cough that did not clear. A boy's teeth chattering in sleep.
Then he rose.
The pallets looked wrong again.
Not just fewer. The gaps were arranged. Straw had been swept clean around the empty places, like someone had taken time to make absence look like order. A new boy had been put into one of the spaces, thin as a stick, eyes too large in his face, trying not to look at anyone.
Bran was up, shoulders hunched against cold, hands moving slowly in the dark. Tomas sat on the edge of his pallet with his elbows on his knees, staring at his own hands like he was checking whether they still belonged to him.
No one spoke.
They filed out when the second clang came.
Outside, the yard was gray and damp, smoke crawling low. The smell from the kitchen had changed again. Less bone. More water. Something faint and sour under it, like stew that had been stretched past honesty.
The pump beam still sat wrong. No one had corrected it after the earlier shift. The rope still rasped against wood where it should not, shaving fibers with every pull.
Eryk went to it anyway.
The handle bit his palms. The first draw came up slow and dark, water with grit that clung to the bucket's sides. Tomas worked beside him in silence, pulling hand over hand like a man hauling himself up from a hole.
A boy from the new pallets tried to help, gripping too high on the rope and slipping. The bucket jerked and splashed. He flinched hard enough that his shoulder hit the beam.
"Don't fight it," Tomas muttered, not unkind, not kind. Just instruction.
The boy nodded fast and stepped back, cheeks red, eyes down.
Eryk kept pulling.
The rope moved unevenly. The beam creaked deep. The bucket rose. Water spilled. Nobody commented. Commenting was a way of offering yourself up for ownership.
By the time the first buckets were carried off, the yard had already begun to change.
Not the obvious way. No shouting. No stampede. No sudden violence.
A tightening.
A subtle reordering of bodies. Foremen clustering, then breaking apart. Guards lingering where they usually passed through. Men pausing at corners as if waiting for a word that did not come.
On the way back from the trough, Eryk passed the tool intake.
The upper yard had become busy in a way that did not feel like work. Crates stacked closer together. Rope coils gathered into bundles that were too neat. A post had been wiped clean where hands usually left grime. The intake door was open today, which meant someone inside still cared enough to pretend the desk mattered.
A chalk board leaned on a wooden stand beside it.
Names were scrawled in blocks. Not neat. Not careful. Chalk was for speed.
Beside it: intake.
Below it: pump.
Below that: quarry run.
The work was written like it was stable. Like it would hold through the day.
A man in better boots stood near the board, cloak cleaner than most, hands tucked under his sleeves. He watched the chalk as if the board were a throat he could squeeze. Two guards stood with him, not Gerrit's boys. These ones carried no lash. Their boots were too clean. Their eyes were dull with boredom instead of hunger.
One of them called to the clerk inside.
"Names," he said.
The clerk came out with chalk dust on his cuffs. He looked younger than the men he served, face sharp and strained, like a boy trying to act like a stone.
He read from the board without looking at the yard.
"Rolf."
No one answered.
He paused, then said it again. Louder.
"Rolf."
A man near the crates glanced up, then looked away quickly. Not fear.
Calculation.
As if he had decided that answering wrong could cost more than refusing to answer at all.
The clerk's eyes slid over the crowd. He did not repeat the name a third time. He rubbed it off the board with the heel of his hand and wrote another over the pale smear.
"Rulf," he said.
Two men turned at once.
They looked at each other, both registering the same thing. The one on the left took half a step forward and then stopped. The one on the right hesitated longer, eyes flicking to the clean boots and then to the gate.
The guard with the clean boots pointed without expression.
"You," he said.
The right-hand man went, shoulders tight, jaw clenched as if he could bite through the order. The other man stayed where he was, staring at the chalk as if he could force it to remember him.
The clerk did not correct the spelling. He did not apologize. He rubbed his hands together, leaving chalk streaks on his knuckles, and called the next name.
Eryk walked past without slowing.
He did not want his name held in anyone's mouth longer than necessary.
He returned to the pump and pulled until his shoulders burned.
Later, when the sun climbed enough to thin the mist, the yard began to feel strange.
Not quieter. Not calmer.
Organized.
Not in the old way. Not with Gerrit barking and foremen moving bodies like wedges.
This was different.
The men in cleaner boots lingered near the tool intake longer than they should have. A pair of guards walked the fence line slowly, not watching for theft, only looking at the hinges, the latch, the gate post, as if checking whether the gate still knew its job.
By midmorning, a boy ran a tray of stew bowls across the yard and the smell made heads lift.
It was still thin. Still mostly water. But there was something solid in it. A strip of gristle that could be chewed, a few pale chunks that might have been turnip.
Eryk ate when Hala handed him a bowl.
The warmth sank into him and he felt his stomach tighten with the old instinct to guard it.
Bran ate slowly beside him, eyes not on his bowl but on the yard. Tomas ate fast, as if he did not trust food to remain real if he delayed too long.
"More," Tomas said under his breath, barely moving his lips.
"Not much," Bran replied.
"It's still more," Tomas said.
No one celebrated it. The extra food did not feel like generosity.
It felt like preparation.
After the bowls were collected, foremen shouted for hands to the tool intake. Not into the quarry. Not down the tiers. Just into the upper yard where crates were stacked and rope coils lay in new bundles.
Eryk was sent to intake with two other boys. He carried a sack of cracked wedges and splintered handles, and when he dropped it by the desk, no one looked at it.
The clerk's chalk board was now full of smears, half erased lines, words rewritten over other words until the surface looked bruised.
A second board leaned behind it, blank and clean.
The clerk wrote a list on the first board, read it, rubbed half of it away, and wrote a new list in the same space.
A man in a better cloak stood over his shoulder, speaking too low to hear. The clerk nodded, wiped, rewrote.
The board was not a record. It was a moving mouth.
A foreman stepped forward with a broken hook in his hand.
"Write it," he said.
The clerk looked at the hook as if it were a dead thing someone had placed on his desk.
He hesitated, then shook his head once.
"Not that," he said.
The foreman stared.
"It snapped," he said. "It took a load with it."
The clerk's eyes flicked to the better cloak behind him. Then to the yard. Then back to the hook.
He put it down gently, as if sound itself could attract attention, and pushed it toward the pile without writing a mark.
"Put it with the rest," he said.
"That's it?" the foreman asked.
The clerk's mouth tightened.
"That is what we have," he said, and his voice was flat enough that it did not invite argument.
The foreman could have struck him. Eryk saw it in the way the man's shoulders rose, the way his hand tightened around nothing.
He did not.
He turned away and walked back toward the quarry path, hook left uncounted, failure left unowned.
Eryk's hands moved through intake work: stacking, sorting, aligning handles so the strongest lay near the top where foremen would reach first without thinking. He did it without pausing, without looking like he was doing it on purpose.
A man with dust-white boots came to grab a coil of rope and found the good one because Eryk had placed it at the edge.
That was not mercy.
It was habit.
Another worker saw him do it. An older man, cheeks hollow, eyes red-rimmed from dust and lack of sleep. He came close enough that Eryk could smell the sourness on his breath.
"You," the man said.
Eryk did not look at him immediately.
"You got hands on it before we do," the man said, voice tight. "That is deciding."
Eryk lifted a crate an inch and shifted it, not because it needed to be moved, but because movement made the confrontation less clean.
"I'm assigned intake," he said.
"So was my brother once," the man snapped. "Then they said he was reassigned. Chalk said it. Chalk wiped it. Now he's nowhere."
A second man stood a few paces back, pretending not to listen. His eyes were on Eryk anyway.
The older man leaned closer.
"You don't want people counting your hands," he said, and it sounded like advice and threat at the same time.
Eryk held the man's gaze for a beat. Too long would be invitation. Too short would be insult.
He looked away first.
Not submission. Strategy.
He bent and picked up another bundle of splintered handles, making his body busy. The older man watched him for a moment longer, jaw working, then spat into the dirt and walked off.
Eryk felt his heartbeat in his wrists.
Not fear of being hit.
Fear of being known.
The day continued.
Crates appeared where there had been none. Rope coils were gathered into neat stacks. Chains, the ones that still looked solid, were separated from the cracked ones and placed under canvas. The canvas was tied carefully, knots neat, as if the knots mattered more than the men they were being taken from.
A cart rolled past with a tool chest on it, lid strapped down.
It headed toward the gate.
No one cheered.
No one asked where it was going.
But people watched it as it passed, eyes following the wheels until it disappeared through the corridor.
A man near the fence murmured to another, "New site."
The other man's face changed in a way Eryk recognized. The muscles around his mouth loosened. His eyes lifted a fraction.
Hope.
Thin. Quick. Useful.
It moved through the yard like rope thrown over a ledge. Men did not climb yet. They only looked up.
At midday the chalk board was wiped clean.
Not in the evening. Not at the bell change. Midday, as men still worked.
The clerk took a wet rag and scrubbed hard until the board went dark with water and the chalk ran in pale streaks down onto his fingers.
No evidence. No trail.
He set the rag aside and wrote fresh names.
Different work.
Different pairings.
Eryk watched his own name appear again, this time under a new line: transport prep.
He blinked once.
He had not been told. He had not been asked. He had not done anything new.
His name was there because it was already easy to find.
A boy beside him leaned in, eyes wide.
"What's transport prep mean?" the boy whispered.
Eryk did not answer.
The clerk called names and the clean-boot guards began counting bundles at the gate.
Not searching. Counting.
A man stepped forward with a sack on his shoulder. The guard poked it once with two fingers, not to check what was inside, only to feel its weight.
"Too heavy," the guard said.
"It's my blanket," the man protested.
The guard stared at him with no anger.
"Too heavy," he repeated.
The man's mouth opened as if he might argue. Then he looked at the gate. He looked at the other guard. He looked at the chalk board behind him, already smudged at the edges where names had been rubbed away.
He took the sack down and pulled something out. A rolled cloth. A thin bundle tied with string.
He set it on the ground without looking at it again.
The guard nodded once and waved him through.
Another man approached and the guard misread his name.
The clerk said it once, too fast, and the man did not respond.
The guard called it again, louder.
A different man turned, startled, and stepped forward.
"That's not me," he said quickly.
The guard looked at him. Looked back at the board. The chalk had smeared where the clerk had written too close to an older line.
The guard tapped the board with two fingers, leaving a mark in the dust.
"You," he said.
The man hesitated, face tightening as he realized the line could be his whether it was meant to be or not.
He looked toward the clerk for correction.
The clerk did not look back.
The man went through the gate anyway, shoulders stiff, as if walking might keep the chalk from deciding differently.
Eryk kept stacking tools.
He felt the yard shift around him. Not panic. Not collapse.
A tightening.
The system reasserting itself just enough to move what it wanted to move.
Hala came to intake in the late afternoon, which meant something was wrong in the kitchen, or someone had told her to be here.
She stood by the piles, eyes sharp, and watched men take the best rope and chain without comment. Her jaw worked once, then she swallowed whatever she might have said.
When she spoke, her voice was low.
"You're on that board," she said to Eryk.
He did not pretend not to know.
"Yes," he said.
She looked toward the gate.
"Don't think it's rescue," she said.
Eryk did not answer.
Hala's eyes flicked to the tool stacks again.
"What did you do with the good picks?" she asked.
Eryk kept his face neutral.
"Where they can be found," he said.
Hala made a sound that might have been a laugh if her mouth still remembered how.
"Good," she said. "Then maybe they'll break slower wherever they're going."
She turned away, already pulling her attention back toward the kitchen as if she could not afford to leave it here for long.
As the light dimmed, the guard line near the gate thinned. A few men had gone through. Not many. Fewer than the rumors promised.
Enough to keep the rumor alive.
The chalk board was wiped again.
Not fully. Just a corner.
Two names disappeared.
Eryk saw them vanish under the clerk's hand without being spoken aloud. The clerk rubbed until there was nothing left, then wrote a new mark in the space, smaller, as if trying to make the replacement take up less room.
He did not look up when he did it. His face stayed blank, lips pressed tight, eyes fixed on the board as if the board were the only thing still holding him upright.
Eryk stepped closer without thinking.
Not to intervene.
To understand.
The clerk's fingers were white with chalk dust. Under the dust, the skin looked raw from scrubbing.
Eryk kept his voice low.
"Why wipe it early?" he asked.
The clerk's eyes flicked to him, sharp, then away.
"Because chalk is safe," the clerk said.
"That's not what I meant."
The clerk's jaw tightened.
"People think leaving is rescue," he said, voice barely more than breath. "They think they get moved because someone cares."
He swallowed once, hard.
"It's inventory," he said.
Then he looked at Eryk properly, and for a moment there was something in his eyes that could have become a confession if he allowed it.
He did not allow it.
He rubbed the board again and the moment disappeared with the chalk.
"Go back," he said, and his voice was the clerk's voice again. The interface. The dead mouth of the yard. "If you stand here, they will start to remember you."
Eryk stepped away.
The bell rang for end of work.
It sounded the same.
That was the worst part.
The yard did not erupt. The yard did not grieve. Men did not demand lists or explanations. They drifted toward their pallets and their bowls like water finding a lower place.
At the kitchen, the evening stew was still slightly thicker than it had been last week. A small improvement, held just long enough to keep hands moving.
Eryk ate. Bran ate beside him.
Tomas stared at the gate corridor between mouthfuls, as if he expected the clean boots to return and point at him.
Bran spoke softly when the bowls were set aside.
"They moved three today," he said.
"Three," Tomas repeated, and his voice had something in it that wanted to be hope and could not afford to be.
Bran's mouth twisted.
"It's the reliable ones," he said. "Men that know what breaks before it breaks. Men that know where things go."
Tomas laughed once, short and dry.
"So they take the ones that still work," he said.
Bran shook his head slowly.
"They take what still works," he said, but the words came out fractured, more breath than sentence. "They leave the rest to grind."
Eryk carried his bowl back to the wash line.
Lysa would have been there once, hands red, eyes sharp, tracking who tried to steal an extra scrape. The line was a mess now. A boy scrubbed too little and hoped it would pass. Another scrubbed too much and wasted sand.
No one corrected them.
No one had time.
Eryk washed his bowl until it was clean enough to reflect a faint shape of his own face.
Not because he cared about cleanliness.
Because dirty bowls brought attention.
He returned to the shed as the last light died.
Inside, the gaps between pallets looked wider.
Not more empty.
Wider.
As if the space itself had started to spread.
He lay down and listened.
Outside, the yard settled. Somewhere up the hill, a door shut. Not slammed. Closed carefully. A sound of someone choosing not to be interrupted.
Eryk stared at the rafters until his eyes blurred.
The bell rope would be pulled again tomorrow.
If it was not, the yard would still wake.
Straw would still rustle. Coughs would still rise. Men would still move toward whatever work was nearest, and the chalk board would still be wiped clean of anything that could become evidence.
He closed his eyes.
In the dark, he could still see his name on the board, smeared at the edges.
He could still feel the guard's fingers testing a bundle for weight.
He could still smell chalk dust on the clerk's hands.
And somewhere beyond the walls, tools were already rolling away on wheels that did not look back.