Morning did not arrive so much as it was imposed.
There was no light change, no softening of shadows. The gas lamps burned at the same sick-yellow pitch they had all night. What changed was the sound. Boots. Keys. The deliberate clatter of iron meant to wake without mercy. Someone down the corridor screamed once—short, sharp—then stopped. I never learned if it was pain or warning. In this place, the difference mattered less than the effect.
A baton struck the bars of my cell.
"Up."
My body resisted before my mind did. Every joint protested as I pushed myself off the stone. The cold had nested inside my bones, settling there like it intended to stay. Across from me, the older boy—Rook, though I didn't know his name yet—cracked one eye open.
"Try not to fall," he murmured. "They don't like wasting time twice."
The door opened. Hands grabbed my arms. The chains were still there, re-fastened with practiced speed. My wrists burned where skin had broken during the night. No one acknowledged it. Pain, I was beginning to understand, was not considered informative.
They pulled me into the corridor.
Other doors opened as we passed. Men and women stepped out, some limping, some blank-eyed, some already bent in ways that suggested the prison had finished explaining itself to them long ago. No one spoke. Silence here was not fear—it was literacy. Everyone understood the language.
We were herded into a wider hall that might once have been a gallery. Tall arches rose overhead, their carvings softened by damp. Whatever art had lived here before had been scraped away, replaced with iron hooks and long wooden benches polished smooth by bodies that had learned how to wait.
A guard stood at the front, reading from a ledger.
Names were called. Not shouted. Spoken evenly, like inventory. Each name stepped forward, chains checked, then guided toward one of several doors along the far wall. No explanation followed. None was expected.
When my turn came, the guard paused.
He looked at the page, then at me. His eyes flicked briefly to my size, my age. Something passed across his face—not pity, not cruelty. Calculation.
"Auxiliary labor," he said.
A mark was made in the ledger.
I was guided toward a narrower door than the others.
Rook's name was called later. He was sent somewhere else. As he passed me, he tilted his head just enough to be noticed.
"Keep your head low," he said softly. "They break tall things first."
The door shut behind me before I could ask what that meant.
Auxiliary labor sounded harmless. Almost helpful. The kind of phrase that suggested assistance, usefulness, purpose.
The room beyond the door was none of those things.
It was a sorting chamber.
Long tables ran the length of the space, scarred and stained. Crates were stacked along the walls, some marked with old district seals, others with nothing at all. The air was thick with dust and metal and something faintly sweet that made my throat itch. Children worked the tables.
That was the first thing I noticed.
Not many. A dozen, maybe. Some younger than me. Some older. All thin. All quiet. Their hands moved constantly—sorting, counting, cleaning, wrapping—never pausing long enough to invite attention. Overseers walked the aisles slowly, batons tucked under their arms like accessories.
A woman with iron-grey hair pointed me to an empty space.
"Sort by size," she said. "Discard anything cracked. If you miss one, it's your fault."
"What is it?" I asked before I could stop myself.
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Doesn't matter," she said. "Your job is to notice."
She moved on.
The crate in front of me held small brass fittings—hinges, clasps, tiny locks. Some were bent. Some blackened by fire. Some still warm, as if they remembered what they had been attached to.
I began to sort.
Time stretched oddly here. Without windows, without clocks, minutes lost their edges. My hands learned the work faster than my thoughts did. Large to the left. Small to the right. Cracked into the bin. Whole into neat rows. When my fingers started to ache, I adjusted my grip. When my stomach growled, I ignored it.
Across from me, a girl with cropped hair worked silently. She did not look up once. Her wrists were scarred, pale lines crossing old burns. Every so often, an overseer paused behind her. She never faltered.
I understood then.
This room was not punishment.
It was selection.
The punishment came later.
They brought him in from the corridor—a man with a limp and blood drying dark along his sleeve. Two guards dragged him to the center of the room and let him drop. The children did not stop working. Neither did I. Something in the air told us stopping would be a mistake.
The overseer read from a slip of paper.
"Mishandling of tools. Loss of materials."
The man tried to speak. A baton struck his ribs. The sound was dull, practiced. He folded in on himself.
"Correction," the overseer continued calmly.
They did not shout. They did not rush. Each strike landed where it was meant to, measured and impersonal. When it was over, the man was hauled away, leaving a dark smear on the floor that someone would clean later.
No one commented.
The girl across from me slid a cracked hinge into the discard bin.
I felt something inside me shift—not break, not harden. Align. Like a joint being set into its proper place, painful but necessary.
This was how order was maintained.
Not through fear alone.
Through consistency.
At what passed for midday, they gave us water and a thin broth ladled into dented cups. We drank standing. I caught my reflection in the surface—hollow-eyed, face smudged with grime. Twelve years old felt like a rumor.
A man in a cleaner coat entered the room then. Not an overseer. Not a guard. He carried himself differently—upright, unhurried. His boots were polished.
The room stilled.
He walked the tables slowly, watching hands, not faces. When he reached mine, he stopped.
"You sort quickly," he said.
I did not answer.
"Accurate, too," he added. He picked up a hinge from my pile, examined it, set it down again. "You notice small fractures."
I swallowed.
"What's your name?"
I hesitated. Names felt dangerous here.
"—"
He raised a hand gently. "No need," he said. "We'll assign you one if necessary."
He moved on.
But something had already been written.
That night, they returned me to the cell.
Rook was there, sitting against the wall, knees drawn up. He looked worse. A bruise bloomed dark along his jaw. When he saw me, he exhaled slowly.
"You made it back," he said. "Good. Means they're still deciding what you're for."
"What happens if they decide?" I asked.
He smiled faintly. "Then you stop being a person."
I lay back on the stone.
The drip continued. The rats moved. Somewhere far above us, something heavy shifted, as if the building were adjusting its weight.
I thought of the ledger. The mark beside my name.
For the first time since the chains closed around my wrists, I understood the truth of the prison.
It was not built to hold bodies.
It was built to sort them.
And I was learning the shape of surviving within it.