The bell did not ring.
That was how the day began.
Not with confusion. Not with shouting. With waiting.
Inside the shed, the air still moved. Straw shifted. Someone coughed, stopped, then coughed again harder, like the body had decided the first attempt had been too polite.
No one rose.
They had learned better than that.
The bell rang late often enough now that moving before sound felt like volunteering. And volunteering was visibility.
So they waited.
When the rope finally moved, it came with no urgency. One pull. A pause. Then another, as if whoever held it had to remember why they were there.
The sound rolled through the yard without force.
Eryk stood.
So did Bran.
Tomas sat a moment longer, eyes fixed on nothing, then rose when he saw the others doing it.
Outside, the morning looked unfinished.
Mist clung low and thin. Smoke from the kitchens crawled along the ground instead of lifting. The yard had the look of a place that had been interrupted and never resumed.
No foremen at the gate.
No Gerrit.
No men in newer boots.
The chalk board still leaned where it had been left the day before.
Blank.
Not wiped clean carefully. Empty in the way a thing becomes when it has been ignored long enough.
Men gathered around it anyway.
They did not form lines. They hovered. Drifted. Some stood too close, like proximity might summon instruction. Others stayed back, watching faces instead of the board.
A foreman stepped forward eventually.
Eryk did not recognize him well. Middle-aged. One eye redder than the other. His coat hung wrong on his shoulders, as if he had lost weight too quickly.
He took a piece of chalk from the ledge and turned it in his fingers.
"Quarry," someone said behind him.
"No," another replied. "Intake."
"Pump's still off," a third muttered.
The foreman raised the chalk.
It snapped.
The sound was small, but it carried.
The foreman stared at the broken piece in his hand like it had betrayed him. Chalk dust coated his fingers.
For a moment, it looked like he might try again.
He did not.
He rubbed the board once with his sleeve, leaving a pale smear, then stepped away from it entirely.
"Do what you were doing yesterday," he said, already turning his back.
"Yesterday we had names," someone called.
The foreman did not answer.
He walked toward the tool intake building and did not go inside. He stood in the doorway for a time, looking at the desk, then left the yard altogether.
No one followed.
That was the dead zone.
Not absence of work.
Absence of permission.
Men began to move anyway.
Not because they had orders. Because standing still felt worse.
The pump was the first place bodies gathered.
The beam sagged lower than it had the day before. The groove where the rope rubbed had deepened into something that caught fibers instead of brushing them. The sound it made was wrong now, a wet rasp that did not repeat cleanly.
Tomas noticed it too.
"If it catches," he said quietly, "it snaps."
Eryk nodded once.
They pulled anyway.
Buckets came up heavy and dark. One slipped. Water spilled across the stone and ran into cracks that never quite dried anymore.
A boy reached for a hammer that lay near the pump base.
He hesitated.
Another boy saw him and shook his head, barely moving.
"Don't," he whispered.
The boy pulled his hand back as if the iron had burned him.
Tools lay where they fell now.
At the board, a younger worker lifted a fresh piece of chalk, hesitated, then wrote his own name small in the corner.
No work beside it. Just the name.
A man saw him do it and moved fast.
He did not strike the boy. He grabbed his wrist and wiped the name away with his palm.
"You want them to see you?" he hissed.
The boy's face drained of color.
"No," he said.
"Then don't write," the man replied, and let go.
The board stayed blank after that.
The quarry tiers echoed with uneven sound.
Some hammers rang. Others did not.
At one face, men stood with picks lowered, waiting for someone to tell them whether to continue. When no one came, they struck anyway.
Stone fell.
A man jumped clear too late and twisted his knee.
He sat down hard, swore once, then stopped making noise.
No one logged it.
No one fetched help.
Two men took him under the arms and moved him into shade.
"Stay," one said.
The man stayed.
Eryk watched all of it from intake.
He kept his hands busy. Sorting. Aligning. Moving small things so they would not draw notice later. Making the piles look like someone still cared how they sat.
An older worker came near him.
Not the same one from before. Another. This one moved like he had already decided he would not be here long.
"They're not writing," the man said.
Eryk did not answer.
"They're not counting," the man went on. "That means they already did."
Eryk shifted a crate an inch.
"Means nothing," he said.
The man laughed once.
"Means they don't need to ask anymore," he replied.
The afternoon stretched.
Men drifted toward the gate and then drifted back.
Someone tied a rope across part of the yard.
No sign marked it.
No guard stood by it.
Men avoided it anyway.
A guard appeared briefly near the gate.
He did not call names. He checked the hinges again, oiled them carefully, and left.
The pump beam groaned.
The groove caught once.
Everyone heard it.
Nothing happened.
They exhaled together without realizing they had been holding their breath.
At the kitchen, Hala watched the line and said nothing.
She adjusted portions again.
Less in one bowl, a fraction more in another, the kind of changes you made when you were trying to stretch something that did not want to stretch.
The dead zone was not chaos.
It was triage without speech.
Late in the day, a man tried to leave.
Not through the gate.
Toward the outer path.
A guard stopped him with a hand on his chest.
"Out of the way," the guard said.
The man froze.
"I'm just," he began.
"Out," the guard repeated.
The man stepped back into the yard.
No one spoke to him after that.
As light faded, the cart was still there.
The injured man had not moved.
Someone draped a cloth over his legs without comment.
Eryk passed the cart on his way to return tools.
He saw his own reflection faintly in the metal rim.
A boy's face. A yard's dust. Eyes that had learned to go empty quickly.
The chalk board remained blank.
The bell rang for evening.
On time.
That was worse.
Men returned to the shed in loose clusters.
Inside, the pallets felt closer together.
Not because more had been added.
Because the spaces between them had stopped meaning anything.
Bran lay down and stared at the ceiling.
"They didn't take anyone," Tomas whispered.
Bran shook his head.
"They did," he said. "Just not yet."
Eryk closed his eyes.
Outside, something scraped once along stone and stopped.
The yard settled.
Tomorrow, the bell would ring or it would not.
Either way, the dead zone would still be there.
Waiting.