Everything is interesting. She looks and reaches her hand from the cradle, and once she can crawl she goes for it, and once she can walk she goes for it with new reach. 

Not everything makes very much sense. Not even minders expect utter rule-abdingness from even mage babies, but she's getting older and there's always some who come slower to it than others, who have it come harder than others, but -

Her caretakers worry. She reaches out a hand when she shouldn't and gets a switch to it, she moves when she needs to stay and gets more, but that happens, and they do their best but it happens and most everyone it happens to gets to grow up anyway. But she is growing, and they try to explain the rules again, again, but she doesn't always seem to understand, and she doesn't always seem to remember, and -

Please. Some of them say that sort of thing, try that sort of thing. She's old enough to talk and she yells at a minder, she's old enough to play with new sorts of toys and she wants one someone else has and she pushes them and grabs, and she's old enough to make games and she tries to make one where she wins. And they can try to comfort her when she huddles in a corner, cries after punishment (can, when it's allowed). Can explain, again. But.

Please. She doesn't mean it. She's sorry, always. She tries to listen when they explain. She's never hidden anything. She's slow at this maybe, but she's so bright in other ways, isn't she. There'll be work she can do, surely. She just needs a little more time, maybe.

Please. Please. She doesn't have to die.

Caretakers are for little children. Caretakers all the time are for littler children.

The mages get bigger.

Rules and obedience and minders are for all mages. She doesn't sit in her place when they're in lessons, and she talks when they're supposed to listen, and she interrupts the others, and she takes a book from someone and then won't give it back. She is punished. She knows what the basement looks like, early. Please, the caretakers say, when they still come sometimes. She isn't dead.

The others try to help. When it's allowed, when they can. Some of them try and stay farther, but some of them hug her when she cries and try to explain and tell her the rules, again, again. (She tries to help. She explains math and makes songs about science that's hard to remember. When she can (a different kind of when she can). (Sometimes she tries it in class. Sometimes she tries and the words don't make any sense to anyone and she throws things she's holding across the room. She is punished.))

They are eight, or something like that (they're grouped by age, of course, but they're not all the same age. Birthdays are human things. There's a record on computers somewhere, dates and measures and numbers. But that's also for humans. They know their group, they know something-like-that, they know if some of them are taller maybe. There isn't a reason for them to know other things. They don't.)

They are switched around again, some, transports and moving and you don't keep all the same mages together for too long. Causes problems.

Her hair is still green, and she is in a new room (that looks like the old one. All the rooms are like that).

Transports are interesting. All the rooms look like the same, but transports look different than that. Sound different, move different. Transports have rules too. Shh, we need to sit down the others said to her, but she didn't do that. The minder isn't patient with her. They are eight-or-something, and most of them don't know shocksticks yet, except for seeing them, except on tv sometimes. She does. She's down on the floor of the transport, and not because someone explained, and the minder binds her down, and others give her sympathetic looks or tremble a little.

Transports aren't very good for punishments right there. This isn't important enough to stop. The transport moves, and she doesn't, and then they are here and up the stairs and the minders take them to the room-that-is-like-other-rooms, and they take her to a different room (it is also like other rooms before), and - wanted to do it the hard way again?

She didn't want, she tells her, she wanted to see. (We don't say that, one of the others might have said, if they were there. They aren't there). The minder does all the explaining.

They take her to the bigger room, and she curls by the wall and hugs a ball that was lying there and cries.