[Mechanic (lv2: 0/2000)] hung steady in the corner of his vision, the smallest difference making everything sit a little truer.
He let the body fall by degrees.
A knock cut the drop in half—soft, then harder, then the insistent rhythm of a door being reminded who owned it.
"Of course," he said to the ceiling.
He swung his legs off the cot, boots whispering. Chain off; latch back; he cracked the door on the catch.
"A3," he said.
"Need you," the Nightfall adjunct said. Pale eyes, professional face, breath showing white where the corridor draft found them. "South checkpoint. Med-cooler's screaming. We've got vials sweating through. Our tech's on outer duty."
"Payment?"
"On site." He lifted a small case and tapped it. "Half now if you want to see it."
"I want to fix it," Jace said, and felt the rightness of the sentence click. "You get me back to this door when we're done."
"Not a walk," A3 said. "A return."
Jace shut the door long enough to grab his field roll and meter, a bag of jumper leads, a spare extraction fan that might be bullied into a cooler housing, a strip of rubber sheet, a fistful of screws that had not earned the right to be called new. He looked at the benchtop: canvas hummocks that meant tomorrow. He touched the longblade's canvas once. Stay. He killed the lamp and checked the drawer with the vials without opening it.
Chain off. Latch. Corridor.
They moved.
The vault at this hour had a different quiet—less human, more infrastructure. The ducts spoke in a tired whisper; somewhere water knocked a pipe into remembering a story from when it was young. A3 kept pace without crowding. Jace registered the way Mechanic lv2 sat in his body: breath deeper, feet less clumsy, the tremor in the right hand thinned to a wire he could route around.
"Who flagged it?" Jace asked as they took the second corner.
"Mess runner saw the light go from blue to green to flashing red," A3 said. "Half our doses live in that box until dawn."
"How long flashing?"
"Long enough to argue about waking you," A3 said. "If we lose them, the argument ends ugly."
"Then we don't lose them."
They passed the mess—dark, smelling of metal bowls and a memory of onions—then the armory, a door with more lock than wood. The south corridor sloped, air colder. At the checkpoint, two Nightfall uniforms and one vault guard made a small, bristling triangle of cooperation.
"Mechanic," A3 said. "Make space."
They parted. The cooler was a battered chest with a hospital's idea of paint and a vault's idea of repairs: stickers, tape, two saints of unknown origin guarding the hinge. The indicator light stuttered yellow-red; the condenser fan wheezed like a smoker trying to whistle. Inside, foam trays sweated. Glass sweat wasn't sweat; it was failure announcing itself politely.
Jace set his roll on a crate and took the meter out like it was a talisman he actually believed in. He put his hand flat on the cooler's skin.
"Hot," he said. "Too hot for the fan noise I'm hearing."
"Translation?" the vault guard asked. She had a pen tucked behind her ear and a ledger tablet hugged to her chest like a shield.
"Fan is icing or seizing. Power ripple. Thermostat is lying." He looked at A3. "If the fan stops, the compressor cooks. If the compressor cooks, your doses die. If the thermostat lies, we chase a ghost until someone starts swinging."
"And if we open the lid to check?" A3 asked.
"We add heat. We lose faster," Jace said. "We need to fix from the back."
He pulled the cooler out from the wall on its stubborn wheels. Condenser coils clogged with lint and despair. Fan cage humming wrong. He killed power at the strip, pulled the cage, and found the blade iced with a cuff of frost like bad pastry. The motor felt gritty turning by finger.
"I've got a donor." He held up the spare extraction fan. "Won't mate without swearing."
"Time?" A3 asked.
"Fifteen if it's honest. Twenty-five if it lies."
"We'll get you twenty," A3 said. "Past that, we go to blood and luck."
"Don't," Jace said, because people liked to say that word and mean it.
He worked. He shaved plastic off the donor housing to make the screw pattern line up. He cut a rubber gasket to keep vibration from hammering the motor to death. He filed a slot in the cooler's tired sheet metal because the world never gives you the right hole twice. He pulled the thermostat cover and blew dust off contacts that had become theology. He jumped the leads to test with the donor fan loose.
[Task Registered: Field Repair — Med Cooler][Difficulty Rating: Moderate]
The pane's blue hung, waiting. He clipped the donor in place, tightened until the screws seated and not beyond, and ran power.
The fan tried to spin and sulked.
"Again."
He killed power. He loosened a hair, because sometimes tight is wrong, and tapped the motor casing with the handle of a screwdriver like a doctor coaxing a breath.
Power. The blade stuttered, caught, and climbed to speed. The air from the coil changed from the smell of tired metal to the shape of promise.
He watched the indicator walk itself from stutter into steady yellow. Not blue. Not yet. The compressor needed to forget being scared.
"Thermostat," he said. He pulled the cover again and scraped contacts with the corner of a folded note; the cheap paper squealed and came away dirty. He bent a leaf spring one degree toward obedience and put the cover back like a man closing a secret.
The vault guard watched like she was learning surgery. A3 watched like he learned by counting options that involved guns.
"Back to blue?" the guard asked.
"Back to blue," Jace said, "but slowly. If it jumps, it's lying. We want honest cold."
They waited. The fan sang a middle note and stayed. The red bled back toward yellow like a bruise healing in time lapse. The yellow cooled to green.
The green cooled to blue.
Jace exhaled where anyone could see it. He put his hand to the coil outflow again and nodded at the proof his skin offered his brain.
[Repair Completed.][Gain: Mechanic XP +15][Gain: Basic Mechanical Repair XP +15]
He breathed once more to let the pane's coin-chime settle and then looked at the lid. Condensate had pooled at the gasket; he wiped it, then checked the hinge bolts. One spun useless. He pulled it, sleeved the hole with a scrap of aluminum can, and refit the bolt until it took bite.
"No more bangs," he said to the room. "Close it like you like it. If it screams again, you wake me faster."
The vault guard wrote wake him faster like a law. "Names for the log?" she asked.
"Jace Calder," Jace said. He spelled it because people who held pens wanted words to behave. "Field repair under Nightfall escort."
A3 tapped the case he'd brought. "Payment." He set it on the crate and opened it to show one vial and a punched card. "Half now, half on morning confirmation."
"Half now," Jace agreed. He did not reach until the guard had written paid half on the slate and the slate had blinked its acceptance. He took the vial without looking like he needed to.
"Your tech going to be mad at me?" Jace asked A3 as he rewound his jumper leads.
"Our tech will sleep," A3 said. He didn't quite smile. "Also, we don't have one tonight."
"That would do it."
The guard closed the cooler with two hands that remembered to be gentle. She stood with her ear near the seam and listened to the totality of the fan's honesty. When she looked up, her face did something near grateful.
"You'll be called Jace Calder again," she said.
"Then I'll answer," he said, because pretending cost extra.
They pushed the cooler back into its square where the wall liked it. He swept a drift of lint into his palm and fed it to the trash like it was a beast that wanted small offerings.
"Escort," A3 said, tapping the corridor. "Return."
They moved, the way they had come but slightly warmer—reclaimed heat riding the air the way news does when a thing hasn't failed yet.
"You get outer duty a lot?" Jace asked because he liked the sound of someone else talking when the world had almost gotten away with something.
"When it's quiet," A3 said.
"This quiet?"
"Quiet enough to count your steps and wonder which one goes loud."
The mess whispered. The armory door sat unchanged, which is how doors like to be. Back at Jace's hall, the tape measure still clacked a small metronome against the wall. His door looked like a door; that passed for grace.
"At your door," A3 said. "You'll get confirmation at dawn."
"Don't make dawn a requirement," Jace said. "Make honesty one."
A3 paused. "We tried that before," he said. "The world thought it was funny."
"Then we'll be ruder about it," Jace said.
A3 left him with the kind of nod men perform when all the other things they could say would cost them shifts.
Jace slid the chain back and stepped inside. The bench was still itself. He set the case on the table and watched his hand not shake as much as it used to. He put the vial where the other vials lived and made himself not touch the drawer again.
The pane posted numbers polite as breath.
[Mechanic (lv2: 30/2000)]
Small. Honest.
A folded scrap of paper had been tucked under his door while he'd been gone. He picked it up and read it in the wash from the emergency light.
Allotments audit 0600. Sign before they say you didn't.
Round glasses, ink-stained fingers. He pictured the clerk's hand shaking once and then finding groove. He put the note under the bench magnet where he kept other things he couldn't afford to forget.
He considered lying down. The body considered objecting. They compromised on sitting on the cot edge long enough to let the adrenaline leak without losing the night to ghosts.
He cataloged what the field fix had told him about Mechanic lv2: hands steadier, breath longer, the mental shelf for what goes where when it's wrong expanded by one aisle. It wasn't magic; it was the kind of advantage that compounded if you didn't spend it showing off.
The projects under canvas tugged at the corner of his eye. He lifted one edge and looked at the longblade the way a man looks at a map for a road he can actually travel.
The pane thought about bothering him and chose an approach that sounded like respect.
[Optional: Verify Project Milestones before archiving?][Longblade 3/4; Shotgun 2/3]
"Not tonight," he said. "I just saved the medicine that saves the people that pay me."
[Acknowledged.]
He didn't know if it acknowledged the words or the tone, but it did what he wanted: stopped talking.
He rolled his field bag tight and tied it with a leather strap that remembered being better days. He wiped the bench because that's what made tomorrow work better than today—clean hands, clean surface, tools that were where the hands would reach without asking.
He killed the emergency habit of checking the door twice and then did it anyway, because superstition and safety wore the same jacket here.
On the cot edge, he let the breath go all the way out, and when it came back on its own he accepted that as payment too.
[Mechanic (lv2: 30/2000)] hung steady. The night hadn't ended. It had just gotten thinner.
In the silence after, the vault made a sound like someone turning a book page and then thinking better of it.