They led the ones who'd broken free nine of them, out of the twenty in that room down a corridor and into a gallery overlooking a wide, open shaft that dropped further than Yasin's eyes could follow, and past that, to a screen mounted on the far wall, already lit and waiting.
"Everyone who didn't wake up in there," a soldier explained, to no one in particular, gesturing at the screen, "gets one more chance to. This is the one that isn't gentle about it."
Yasin understood, watching the screen resolve into a view of the shaft itself from somewhere near its floor, exactly what "the falling test" was going to mean before anyone said the words out loud.
They dragged a child out who immediately started kicking and screaming and dropped her from a height that would have killed anyone in that gallery watching. The netting far below took her with a sound like a gunshot, the whole rig shuddering on its cables and for one long second nobody moved, not on the screen and not in the gallery, until she rolled off it onto the floor and started laughing. High, disbelieving, half-hysterical laughter, the sound of a body that had just done something no five-year-old body should survive and hadn't caught up yet to what that meant.
The second one did not laugh.
The net took him wrong one shoulder first, then nothing that looked like it should still be called a shoulder and the sound that came through the gallery's speakers was smaller than Yasin expected a thing like that to be, a short, flat crack swallowed almost immediately by the rig's mechanical hum resetting itself for the next drop. Medics moved onto the net with the brisk indifference of men collecting a delivery, and the screen cut, clean and immediate, to the next child already standing at the edge of the platform above, because the test did not pause for what had just happened, and neither, Yasin understood, would anything else in this place, ever again.
Somewhere beside him, one of the other nine who'd passed the first test made a small, choked sound and did not make another one. Nobody in the gallery spoke. Nobody was told they were allowed to look away, and none of them did, because looking away felt, in that moment, like it might be its own kind of failure.
Yasin watched five more fall before the pattern stopped being something his mind could hold at arm's length and started being something his body flinched from before his eyes had even finished processing the drop. Some hit the net wrong and stayed wrong. One didn't reach the net at all a strap failure, a bad angle, something the rig hadn't accounted for and the screen did not cut away fast enough to spare anyone in that gallery what the shaft floor looked like when nothing broke the fall at all. Someone near the back was sick, quietly, into the collar of their own grey uniform, and no one moved to help them, and no one was disciplined for the mess either. Less than half, by the end of it, would walk away from that shaft under their own power.
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He was watching, still, when they brought his roommates to the platform above the drop.
The girl with the black hair went first the one who'd sat cross-legged on her bunk the night before, staring at a wall like it might explain something. She didn't fight the soldier walking her to the edge. She fell with her arms out and her eyes open, and the net caught her the way it hadn't caught the boy earlier cleanly, correctly and still she did not stand up, did not move at all, a small dark shape against grey netting that the camera held on for one second too long before finally, mercifully, cutting away. Something in the fall itself had been enough. Nobody in the gallery needed the medics' verdict to understand that.
The boy who'd climbed to the top bunk and never come down went second, and Yasin found himself gripping the rail hard enough that his knuckles had gone the same colour as the netting below, some part of him already knowing, from the shape of the fall alone the particular, boneless way he turned in the air, already limp before he'd covered half the distance that this one wasn't going to be a laughing one either. The impact, when it came, barely registered as a sound at all. It was the stillness after that told the whole story.
Two out of three. Room 41 had gone from four strangers to two in the space of one morning, and the fourth the small one who'd sat by the door before anyone told him there was a bed for him Yasin realized, scanning the gallery, wasn't standing anywhere near him. He didn't know yet whether that meant the boy had passed the first test in some other room, or hadn't been brought to the shaft at all, or was already somewhere Yasin wasn't going to be told about, in a place that did not put things it didn't need anymore back on a screen for anyone to see.
He didn't cry. He had run out of whatever that would have required somewhere between his father's voice breaking on please and the cold feeling at the back of his neck, and nothing that happened in that gallery gave any of it back to him. He only stood very still, hands white on the rail, and understood, with a clarity that felt far too old for whatever was left of the five-year-old underneath it, that grief was a thing this place had already decided he didn't have room for.
He watched the screen instead, and counted, without meaning to, exactly how many of the ones who went down did not come back up. By the time he stopped counting, he had lost track of the number twice, and started over both times, because some part of him had apparently decided that getting the number right mattered more than anything else he had left to hold on to that morning.
By the time the last group had fallen, the number the general had called a ratio the night before had a face on it, two hundred and thirty-four times over, and Yasin understood, standing in a gallery that smelled faintly now of sickness and the particular metal tang of a machine that had done exactly what it was built to do, that this was the part of the world nobody had bothered explaining to him before it happened.
Nobody explained it after, either. Behind them, someone was already hosing down the netting for the next batch, and the shaft, patient and unbothered.