Round-glasses' footsteps faded down the hall with the message he'd given her. The bench waited. The chain waited. The vault did not.
Jace set the bad link back in the discard dish and zipped his field roll shut. "Window holds," he told the empty room, as if saying it turned it into law. He added a small tube of chain lube, a pair of master links, blue chalk, a short length of paracord, two wedges he trusted, and a rag that didn't lie about what it had cleaned.
Lamp off. Chain; latch. Corridor.
The vault's morning had teeth now. Ducts pushed air with intent; the mess clattered awake somewhere to his left; voices kept their heads down. He crossed to the sally port with the roll on his shoulder and the decision sitting in his ribs like a weight he could carry.
The window clerk clocked him, gave the tired little nod that meant paper met time. "Maintenance window," she said through the grill, and slid the worn brass key that let reality become a checklist.
[Scheduled: Chain Replacement — 0900–1100][Task Registered: Maintenance — Outer Shutter Chain][Difficulty Rating: Hazardous]
A3 stood by the inner door with a different adjunct—a woman with windburned knuckles and eyes that counted hardware first. A3's pale gaze did inventory and found the chain kit. "You're early," he said.
"I like doors that live long enough to be boring." Jace set the roll on a crate and clicked the lockout bar onto the motor's breaker. "Your message got to Admin. Admin said hold. I'm holding."
The adjunct inhaled like a person about to argue. A3 cut her off with a small hand tilt. "He's already working," he said. "Talking is slower than metal."
"Power is killed," Jace said for the room, because saying steps made panic smaller. He hooked a red LOCKOUT/TAGOUT card to the breaker and wrote time and initials blocky and neat. "No one touches this switch until I sign the card off."
The clerk nodded like a priest at ritual. A3 said nothing. The adjunct looked like she had a list of reasons to hurry and swallowed them for later.
Chain guard off: four screws—two honest, two chewed by someone who had learned patience from the wrong teacher. He set the guard aside, chalked a baseline mark across chain and sprocket so he could see drift later, and tested the counterweight by hand. Heavy, aligned, willing. He tied it off with paracord and a wedge because machines tell the truth and gravity doesn't apologize.
"Jog test is dead," he said, tapping the lockout for emphasis. "We're in hand-world now."
The old chain told its story in oil and stretch. Links at the pull side were thin at the throat; rollers ovaled. Whoever had been here last winter had robbed slack from the counterweight cable instead of addressing the chain, and the door had learned to hate.
Jace found the master link, marked it with chalk, and broke it with a pair of pliers that liked his hand. He snaked the dead chain free an arm's length at a time. Each length had a weight that promised to turn fingers into lessons if you forgot where they fell. He didn't forget.
"Count," he told himself, and the numbers made a rope for his mind to hold. Slack off. Weight safe. Sprocket free.
He checked teeth. Hooked—worn toward the pull. Not today. He wrote sprocket replace in the chalk right on the guard so future eyes would have to look at it, then laid the new chain along the floor in a straight line and walked it like a wire.
Machine Affinity sharpened the small things. Pitch against pitch—true. New master links—two, in case the world had ideas. He fed the clean chain up and around the sprocket, kept his fingers where the teeth weren't, and made the join. The master clip clicked in with the smug little sound of a thing that liked its job.
"Tension," he said, and backed the adjuster until slack measured where he wanted it—enough to live, not enough to climb. He looked at the chalk line: still a line. Good.
He thumbed lube along the run—thin, because fat oil just invites grit to dinner—and worked the chain by hand so it could drink.
"Limit switch," he said, and popped the cover. Cam dry; contacts clean because he'd cleaned them last night, which meant this part could keep its word. He set the down-stop a hair conservative and the up-stop a hair generous—doors that pride themselves on crisp stops shake bolts loose.
"Guard back on," he said. He hated putting guards back on out of habit; guards made the next fix slower. Guards also turned nine fingers into ten. He lined the chewed screws carefully so the threads would catch, then swapped the worst two for his own stock so the next person—probably him—wouldn't have to swear.
A3 watched with the patience of a man who measured risk by who bled when it failed. The adjunct watched with the impatience of a clock.
"Before I take the lockout off," Jace said, "we're going to talk like people who want to live. During jogs, no feet near the threshold. No hands past the guard. If you feel the urge to help, you help by not being clever."
"I can be not clever," A3 said.
"Good."
He uncrooked the tag and took the bar off the breaker. "Power live," he said, and the clerk set her palm on the glass like ritual.
[Maintenance in Progress][Advisory: Jog test first; monitor counterweight sheaves]
He jogged DOWN for half a heartbeat. Chain seated. Weight moved smooth. Stop. He jogged UP for the same. No climb. No grab. The chalk line on the sprocket looked like a chalk line should—strange how often that wasn't true.
"Full cycle," he said. He nodded at the clerk. The motor took the load; the chain translated torque into simple work; the shutter slats sang the low note of a thing being useful. On the bottom stop it kissed the threshold and stopped without banging; on the top it stacked without swagger. He ran it twice more. If you only run something once, you earn luck and call it skill.
The pane chimed like a coin on a clean table.
[Repair Progress Logged][Gain: Mechanic XP +15][Gain: Basic Mechanical Repair XP +15]
Heat off the motor: acceptable. Smell: honest. Counterweight sheaves trued last night kept their path and didn't try to remember old grooves.
He reached for the chalk to put a final line through sprocket replace—not to delete it, but to mark that he'd told the truth out loud—when the door sang a wrong note.
Not the chain. The track.
"Hold," he said, and his hand hit EMERGENCY STOP before his mouth got the word out.
The shutter froze a hand's width above the threshold. A3's hand was already near the crank. The adjunct's boots were well behind the line.
"What," she said, not a question so much as a refusal.
Jace crouched, palms on his knees, and peered along the track. Something said no where yes lived five seconds ago.
He found it: a strip of cloth folded twice, tucked into the guide where slats ride—a silent wedge that would pinch on the way down and jerk the chain's temper on the way up. Not dropped. Placed. The cloth was too clean to have lived there long; no grit embedded, no old oil stain. A message.
He held up a hand without touching. "Don't move."
A3 didn't ask what is it—he tracked Jace's eyes and found the cloth. His face didn't change. The adjunct swore under her breath like a person discovering their list had left something off.
The pane didn't beep. It did what it did best: named the thing plainly.
[Advisory: Foreign object in track][Risk: Slat binding / Chain shock][Action: Remove obstruction manually; re-verify track]
"Lockout," Jace said. He re-hung the bar and clipped the card; the clerk nodded hard enough to fog the glass. He eased the cloth out with two fingers, careful not to change the track's mood, and showed it to the room.
"Someone wanted a bad day," he said.
A3's pale eyes measured the cloth and the space it had pretended to own. "Or a test," he said. "See who touches what and when."
"Don't love either," Jace said. He ran a fingertip along the guide to feel for burrs or a bend—none. He checked three slats up and three down for dings that would turn into stories later—clean. He took the flat file and kissed the tiniest edge where paint had raised.
"Power stays dead until I say," he added, because moments like these wake the kind of impatience that likes to wear competence as a mask.
He stood and let the body tell him if it shook. It didn't much. He folded the cloth, placed it on the crate beside the chain guard, and wrote obstruction found on the lockout tag with time and a box for a signature that wasn't his.
"Jog," he said when the bar came off again. The shutter remembered its song and sang it without the hitch. He ran a full DOWN/UP pair, watched the counterweight sheaves at the top of travel, and kept his palm near the stop because faith is not a tool.
[Repair Completed][Gain: Mechanic XP +20][Gain: Basic Mechanical Repair XP +15][Basic Mechanical Repair — Skill Up (lv5 → lv6)]
The skill-up landed like a shelf adding itself to his head. Torque specs that had been numbers became feel; sounds shifted from noise to verdict. He exhaled slow.
[Mechanic (lv2: 210/2000)]
The clerk sagged in a way only the glass could see. The adjunct let out air she'd been holding hostage. A3 looked at the folded cloth again.
"Keep that," Jace said to the clerk. "Log it. If someone asks, the paper will know it existed."
"Will do," she said, voice steady because the ritual was steady first.
A3 glanced at Jace's chalk on the guard—sprocket replace. "You want it now?"
"Today I want it scheduled." He tapped the chalk. "Chain is new. Bad sprocket eats new chain like candy. But I'm not burning my window to pull teeth when the door just told us someone wanted it to bite us."
"Plain language," A3 said. "I like it."
The adjunct didn't look like she liked anything. "We had no one near the door," she said, preemptive denial tasting like metal.
"Then we'll figure who did," A3 said, not letting the statement go where it wanted to go. "Mechanic's right. Schedule teeth."
Jace wiped the chalk dust onto his rag and signed the LOCKOUT/TAGOUT card off neat. He set the guard back where it belonged, once more for the habit of keeping hands.
He pointed to the groove where the cloth had been. "If that had ridden up into the slats, we'd be pulling people out from under a door that no longer knew how to be a door. Next person who says now when the paper says window can come help lift."
The adjunct's jaw worked and then found a safer place to be silent.
The pane offered its small, bureaucratic mercy.
[Archive Bench Log?][Maintenance Report Filed: Chain replacement + Obstruction removed]
"Archive," Jace said.
[Archived]
He rolled his shoulders once and let the new skill settle until it felt like it had always been there. Level two in the body; level six in the hands. He didn't allow himself the luxury of thinking safe. He allowed possible.
"Anything else while I'm here?" he asked the clerk, the way the old man had taught him to give the day a shape it could keep.
"The door is a door," she said. "I'd like it to stay a door."
"That's the plan." He nodded at A3. "If you want a copy of the obstruction log, send someone with a pen who can be quiet."
"I know a person," A3 said. "I'll borrow their quiet."
They left the chamber together. The inner shutter lifted; the vault's breath met them and decided not to argue.
On the walk back toward Admin—because there would be forms, there were always forms—Jace kept the cloth's weight in his mind. It weighed less than a bolt. It weighed enough to ruin a morning.
Round-glasses met them halfway, slate hugged to her chest. "Your message got there," she said to Jace. "The registrar said bless the man who writes the word integrity in ink. Nightfall said fine, but count faster."
A3 half-smiled the way a man does when humor arrives in a day that doesn't deserve it. "We'll count faster when numbers stop lying," he said.
Round-glasses looked at the folded cloth in Jace's hand. "What's that?"
"Reason to write more forms," Jace said. "Log it as obstruction in track. Put the time next to the lockout card. If anyone wants to tell a story about how doors just fail, make them spell cloth first."
She breathed out like she'd been allowed to. "I'll make it ugly on the page," she said, which in Admin meant hard to wiggle around.
The pane set its last small line for the job.
[Mechanic (lv2: 210/2000)][Scheduled: Sprocket replacement — Maintenance Window pending]
He could feel the projects under canvas waiting at the bench, patient as steel. He could feel the south run relay holding its breath like a thing not used to being believed. He could feel the vault thinking about the cloth the way a body thinks about a splinter the day after—small, mean, unforgettable.
A3 peeled away at the junction toward the armory. Round-glasses dipped her head and took the corridor to the registrar. Jace walked the last thirty feet to his door with the sense that the day had decided to pretend to be calm.
He slid the chain, stepped in, and set the folded cloth on the bench without letting it touch the longblade's canvas.
The pane, which preferred honesty, posted a new subject line in small, polite blue.
[Advisory: Possible Interference — Investigate source | Optional: Request camera scrap at sally port]
He looked at the cloth. He looked at the door. He looked at the canvas hummocks that were tomorrow and the tools that were now.
"First I finish the teeth I promised the door," he said. "Then we go hunting for hands."
He reached for the chain kit again.