The morning headcount is the worst part of the job. Not because it’s tedious — though it is. Not because the sun comes up mean and flat over the fence line and makes every face look the same shade of grey. It’s because counting people means looking at them, and looking at them means remembering they’re people, and that’s a habit Reeves has spent two years carefully breaking.

He’s almost got it mastered. Almost.

He catches you in his peripheral vision before he consciously registers it — the way a man notices a flame in a dark room, involuntary, inconvenient. You’re in the return line from the outer work detail, filing back through the east gate with the others, head down, arms folded against the morning cold. Nothing remarkable. Nothing that should snag his attention the way it does.

He looks away. Marks his clipboard.

Keeps counting.

Forty-one. Forty-two.

He looks back.

He doesn’t know your name. He knows your face the way he knows a handful of others — repeat presences in his daily rotation, background furniture. You keep quiet, keep moving, don’t cause problems. The kind of survivor the camp grinds down to nothing inside of six months.

He’s noticed you’re still standing.

He tells himself that’s the only reason you register at all.

The commotion starts near the scanner arch — a guard’s voice going sharp, the shuffle of the line stopping. Reeves is moving before the radio crackles, crossing the yard with his hand already on his baton out of muscle memory. The crowd parts around the disruption the way crowds always do here: fast, silent, eyes down.

And there you are. Standing in front of Harwick, who’s holding up the cloth bag they pulled from under your jacket. Two cans. A roll of cloth bandaging. Small enough that you probably thought the scanner would miss it, or Harwick would, or that someone would look the other way like they sometimes do on quiet mornings.

Bad morning to gamble on quiet.

Your chin is up. He’ll give you that. You’re not crying, not begging, not doing the performance of innocence that most of them try. You’re just standing there with your jaw set, and something about it — the stubborn, stupid dignity of it — lands somewhere in his chest like a splinter.

He pulls out the baton immediately.

Harwick looks at him when he steps up. Waiting. Because this is how it works — Harwick finds them, Reeves handles them. That’s the reputation he’s built here, brick by brick. The one that keeps the 200-odd people in this camp moving in straight lines and quiet voices.

He can’t afford exceptions.

He looks at you. Just for a second — a flat, professional assessment, nothing more. Your eyes meet his and he sees it: you already know. You knew the moment Harwick grabbed the bag. You’re bracing for it.

“Everyone back from the gate, four steps,” he says, loud enough to carry. “You’re going to want to see this.”

He doesn’t look at your face again after that. He looks at the space in front of him — the ground, the gate, the geometry of the lesson he has to teach. The watching eyes of forty-odd people who will carry this image back inside with them and think twice. Three times. It’s not personal.

That’s what he tells himself when he moves.

The baton cracks across your shoulders and you go down hard onto your hands, a sound leaving you that he doesn’t let himself hear. The cans spill out across the dirt. Someone in the crowd flinches.

Good.

The second strike catches you across the back — measured, visible, exactly as brutal as it needs to be and no further. He’s not an animal. He’s a deterrent.

When it’s done, he steps back.

“Log it,” he tells Harwick. “Contraband confiscated, violation noted. Standard rations suspension, three days.”

Harwick nods and starts moving people through.

Reeves doesn’t look down at where you’re still catching your breath on the ground. He turns toward the gate, clipboard back in hand, the morning resuming its shape around him like nothing happened.