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 opened the door and waited, confident I had already learned what hesitation cost. Cold air rushed in from the corridor, sharp enough to wake parts of me that had not slept. Rook stirred as I passed.
"Careful," he said without opening his eyes. "They do not reward efficiency. They notice it."
I did not 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 because anything had changed. The tables were where they had been. The crates sat in the same stacks. The lamps hummed with the same dull insistence. It felt smaller because I could see it now. The patterns. Which children were placed closest to the overseers? Which crates were opened first? Which mistakes earned correction and which were quietly ignored? The 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 look up. Her hands moved faster than before, fingertips roughened and red, precise in a way that came from repetition rather than care. I matched her pace without thinking. 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 air changed. Pressure settled between my shoulders, a silent expectation. I corrected my posture and lowered my eyes. My hands did not stop.
The overseer stopped anyway.
"You," he said, pointing the baton toward me. "How many defective clasps in that crate?"
My mouth went dry. I counted in my head, replaying the motions of my hands.
"Seventeen," I said.
He watched as I separated them one by one. Metal clicked softly against wood. When I finished, he counted himself. Slowly. Deliberately.
Seventeen.
He nodded once and moved on.
The girl's hands never faltered, but I saw her jaw tighten. A small thing. Enough.
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, wrapped in cloth already stained through. 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 tightening passed through us, subtle as breath held too long. Furnace work did not kill you quickly. It erased you slowly, layer by layer, until no one remembered what you had 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. Thick air. Burning metal. Hands that would not stop shaking.
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 pause.
"That is useful."
Two names were called.
Not mine.
Relief hit so fast it left me lightheaded. My knees softened. 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 passed between us, close to an apology, 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 rumoured to be, but deliberate. The floors had been scrubbed until the stone showed through. The air smelled faintly of oil instead of rot. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with ledgers, tags, stamped papers arranged with care.
"This is an assessment," the man said. "You will answer questions. You will not ask any."
He gestured to a chair.
I sat. The wood was smooth, worn by other bodies.
"What do you remember about the fire?"
My chest tightened.
"Smoke," I said carefully. "Heat."
"Not why," he corrected. "Sequence."
I described the order of things. The hallway. The sound of wood collapsing. The way the heat pressed against my face. The scream. I did not say my brother's name.
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 looking for 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 was not curiosity. It was dread.
I nodded.
"What did they ask?"
"About the fire."
He laughed softly, without humour. "Of course they did."
He studied my face.
"They did not hurt you," he said. Again, not a question.
"No."
"That is worse," he said.
I lay back on the stone, staring at the ceiling. The crack there looked wider than before. Or maybe I was seeing more clearly.
"Rook," I asked quietly. "What happens when they decide you are 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 that was ever noticed stayed untouched.