[Advisory: Audit Window — 00:30]
The pane posted it before anyone shouted.
Jace set his palm flat to the Admin door and felt the wood's tired grain under the paint. Voices bled through—too many, too tight. He knocked once and pushed in.
The room had the color of headache. A long counter, a wall of pigeonholes, two clerks at ledgers, and behind them a registrar whose posture turned paper into armor. Nightfall was present in the shape of a jacket with a A2 patch and a face that had learned to keep expression expensive. Round-glasses—ink-smudged fingers—stood with a slate clutched to her chest.
"Mechanic Calder," the registrar said, and the way she used Mechanic tried to make it rank. "You touched Nightfall property tonight without prior notation."
"I touched a med-cooler that was killing doses," Jace said. "Notation comes behind breathing."
A2's eyes slid over him like checking a serial number. "We need his signature for the south shipment acknowledgment," round-glasses said, softer. "Then I can sleep without the system saying I was somewhere else."
Jace leaned a hip to the counter and read the slate. Two columns: IN — Anti-Rad Serum (vials), OUT — Repair Hours (Nightfall priority). A signature box next to Nightfall escort present. He signed where the arrows pointed, the way a man signs things that will be held against him later if he blinks.
"Gate?" A2 asked, not a question so much as a step. "My adjunct says it behaves. Confirm."
"Gate runs. Chain wants replacement. I scheduled the window the system offered."
"Offered," the registrar echoed, as if the word had been rude. "Nightfall requests a standing maintenance priority. Any time our seal is on a task, it moves ahead of vault requests."
Round-glasses flinched small, then found center. "That's a policy change," she said. "Policy changes require… policy."
"Survival," A2 said mildly, "is policy."
Jace let silence be a tool until someone reached for it. If I speak now, I spend the breath they want me to pay with.
The registrar tapped a stack of forms. "We are under audit," she said. "The auditor will ask why Nightfall property did not receive priority. Help me write an answer that keeps everyone whole."
"Tonight I kept doses cold," Jace said. "Then I kept the door honest. That answer keeps people whole."
A2's mouth showed a fraction of teeth that wasn't a smile. "We're not here to debate you into a poet," he said. "Sign the priority clause, Mechanic. Or we take our hardware elsewhere and the vault hires a hobbyist."
Round-glasses' knuckles went white on the slate. The registrar's eyes wanted two different days at once.
[Advisory: Audit Window — 00:24]
The pane ticked in the corner of Jace's vision. He scanned the room because looking at the problem and looking around it were two different acts. The allocation printer in the corner—a grafted beast of vault ingenuity and bygone hospital tech—throbbed a little too hot. The airflow path behind its side panel trapped dust lint in the curve; the fan had the pitch of a toy dying with dignity. A stack of forms sat in its tray with a chewed top sheet.
"You trying to print while we argue?" Jace asked, nodding at the machine.
"It needs to spool the ledger copy," the registrar said. "It refuses."
"It refuses because you're asking it to exhale through a blocked nose," Jace said. He set his field roll on the counter. "Can I fix your printer while you decide what you want me to sign?"
"What will that cost?" A2 asked.
"Less than your time."
The registrar gestured with two fingers that meant please in a language she didn't own and didn't like using. Jace popped the side panel and angled it so heat could stop painting itself on the sheet metal. He cleaned the fan with a brush he carried for exactly this insult; lint came out in a gray sigh. The intake vanes hid two screws; he loosened them so the chassis stopped drumming. He pulled the stuck form out with the gentle sternness you use on a splinter that intends to break, then burnished the feed rollers with a cloth and alcohol so cheap it smelled like a bad party.
"Try it," he said.
The registrar tapped a key. The printer hesitated, then took the sheet and lived. Its fan sang a note lower and truer.
[Task Registered: Improvised Repair — Office Printer][Difficulty Rating: Easy][Repair Completed][Gain: Mechanic XP +5][Gain: Basic Mechanical Repair XP +10]
Round-glasses blinked at the pane she could not see. "How did you—"
"I listen to machines the way you listen to rules," Jace said.
A2 studied him the way people study tools: for leverage. The registrar let a breath go she'd been holding since he walked in. Forms marched out, clean edges, columns that would be believed by systems that wanted to believe paper more than people.
"Mechanic Calder," the registrar said, "your gate work will be logged as Nightfall-requested but vault-necessary. Your cooler work will be logged as life-preserving. You will sign that the chain replacement is scheduled for the maintenance window…and you will sign that when Nightfall marks a task urgent, you appear."
"That's two signatures," Jace said. "I'll sign one."
The registrar's mouth pinched like a seam. "You—"
"Let him finish," round-glasses said, soft but cutting.
"I'll sign for urgency if urgency tells the truth," Jace said. "I won't sign a blank tether. You pull me off a safety-critical fix to polish a parade gun, someone dies that didn't have to, and the paper will say I agreed."
A2's gaze did that expensive thing again. "You think we care about parades."
"I think institutions love tools that say yes," Jace said. "I'll be a tool that says what first."
[Advisory: Audit Window — 00:19]
The printer spat the last sheet like a tongue. The registrar arranged them into a story.
"Mechanic Calder," she said, "we will draft the urgency clause to include your language. Safety-critical, life-preserving, door integrity. You will initial every instance."
"I will," Jace said.
"And if Nightfall marks an urgent that fits your words," the registrar continued, "you appear."
"I appear," Jace said. "And I write what I did and what I didn't. Your machine will love the paper and the paper will love me."
A2 almost smiled again and let it not happen. "Sign, then," he said.
Jace signed the chain replacement window and the urgency clause with the inserted words, his initials neat where the registrar pointed. Round-glasses watched the pen, then his face, with the particular hope of someone who will have to defend these pages to a person who likes to say no.
"Confirmation on cooler?" the registrar asked A2 without looking up.
"Holding at blue," A2 said. "We woke no one else."
"That is a first," the registrar said, a thin shard of humor escaping the armor and vanishing before it could be used against her. "Next."
Round-glasses slid him a thin receipt folder. "This is for your records," she said. "And… do you want your name on the chain replacement order as recommending technician? It will make the schedule stick."
"It will make someone I don't like visit me first," Jace said. "Put my name on the work performed line when we've done it."
A2 set a small, sealed envelope on the counter the way men set down small knives. "Since we like explicit terms," he said, "here is one. There's a relay box on the south run that doesn't love the weather. It's writing lies to the sensors, and my people lean on sensors to live. We need it field-fixed at dawn."
Jace didn't reach for the envelope. "What kind of lies?"
"Ghost motion," A2 said. "It sees what isn't there and forgets what is. Doors react. Guns react. People react."
Round-glasses looked between their faces as if the ledger might decide who got to breathe with a coin. The registrar watched the printer because watching men was a luxury she disliked needing.
"Dawn," Jace said. He checked the pane for the future he trusted more than promises.
[Environment Forecast: Fallout Squall — South Run — Window 0700–0830][Advisory: Weather break predicted 0615–0645]
"Your weather," Jace said, nodding at A2. "I have a thirty-minute hole. If I leave in the hole, I fix your lie without becoming one."
"You want escort," A2 said.
"I want honesty. Escort makes the world honest."
"You'll get it," A2 said. He tapped the envelope. "Route, codes, and the fact that this conversation didn't happen."
"Everything happens," Jace said. He slid the envelope into his field roll without looking like it mattered.
[Mechanic (lv2: 120/2000)]
The registrar stacked the forms into a geometry that said this will not fall apart. She stamped one, two, three. Round-glasses slid the acknowledgment across for final touch; Jace signed. The printer cooled a note lower and seemed grateful.
"Is there anything else," Jace asked, "we can fix in here that will keep paper from pretending we never tried?"
The registrar hesitated—the pause between a reflex and a choice. "The courier tube on two jams," she said, almost to the room. "It turns requests into ghosts. That is not a metaphor."
"Show me," Jace said.
Round-glasses led him to a wall box with a slot like a mouth sewing itself shut. Inside, the felt lining had migrated and bunched; the blower rattled with a screw that had fallen where gravity wanted it. He pulled the felt free, reseated it, found the screw's home by the shape of its absence, and tightened until the vibration stopped pretending to be fate.
"Test," he said. Round-glasses slipped a dummy cylinder into the slot. It thumped and went.
[Repair Completed][Gain: Mechanic XP +5]
"Thank you," she said, voice small because the room was large with power.
"I fix what is in front of me," he said. "The rest is for people who like to argue with walls."
A2 watched him like a man choosing a blade. "Dawn," he said again. "South run. We leave on the hole."
"I'll be by the sally port," Jace said. "Bring the crank back if it pleases you."
"It pleases me when doors close," A2 said, which passed for poetry in Nightfall, and pocketed his own words like contraband.
[Advisory: Audit Window — 00:11]
The registrar turned the key that locked the night's paper into the day's story. "Mechanic Calder," she said, "your signature buys me an argument. I would rather be tired than wrong. Go rest."
He lifted his field roll. The room had cooled two degrees—the kind of change only people who lived with machines noticed. He found the door latch with a hand that no longer trembled much in the finding.
Round-glasses hovered a heartbeat. "Thank you for writing safety-critical," she said, low. "It gives me a word to throw at people who don't mind breaking."
"Throw it hard," he said. "Words are heavier than they look."
He stepped into the corridor. The vault breathed the way people do after a close thing—through the nose, slow. He let the advisory count down in his peripheral vision without treating it as a god. On the walk back he passed two men arguing in whispers about nothing they would admit to, and a woman counting out the beats of her steps like it might keep the morning from getting teeth.
At his door, the tape measure clacked once, twice—its own little metronome. He slid the chain, entered, and set the roll on the bench without turning the lamp on.
Canvas hummocks. The longblade and the shotgun waiting under their tarps, future dressed as patience.
The pane brought him the last lines he needed and none he didn't.
[Mechanic (lv2: 125/2000)][Scheduled: Chain Replacement — Maintenance Window 0900–1100][Escort Confirmed: South Run Relay — 0615]
He stood a long moment, a small man in a small room with a number in his eye and a door that had decided, for now, to be a door.
Then he sat on the cot, not to sleep but to fall in a way he could climb back up from when the vault's morning remembered him.
Outside, somewhere in the ductwork, a whisper of grit moved like a message getting its courage together.