"First I finish the teeth I promised the door," he said. "Then we go hunting for hands."
He reached for the chain kit again. Not to open the door—window was done—but to log the sprocket order in ink that even liars respected. He wrote sprocket replace — pending on the guard, transcribed it to the bench book with time and initials, then slid the book under the magnet because paper that stuck where you put it saved lives.
The pane offered the next small thing.
[Advisory: Possible Interference — Investigate source][Optional: Request camera scrap at sally port]
"Do that," he said.
He pulled a courier cylinder from the wall box, wrote in block letters—REQUEST: SALLY PORT CAM FEED, OUTER TRACK, 08:58–09:12. INCIDENT: CLOTH IN GUIDE.—and added CHAIN OF CUSTODY: ADMIN + NIGHTFALL because shared truth made fewer enemies than private truth. Felt lining reseated (after last night's fix), cylinder in; the blower made the right vowel this time and swallowed it.
While the vault and its tubes worked, he went back to the little world he could make honest by hand.
Canvas back. Longblade center. Shotgun to the right where he could see it and not touch it—pattern verification live still inked on its tag like a dare. He set the longblade in the cradle and checked what he'd left: chain running, alignment true, light-steel cut passed.
"Oil and clutch," he said. "Then you're a tool, not a story."
[Project: Longblade // Milestones (3/4)][Next: Oil feed slope; safety clutch slip test]
The oil feed had the personality of a bored faucet. He tore the line, cleared sludge with a strand of wire, re-angled the reservoir a hair steeper with a shim cut from an old plate, and bled the line until a bead formed where it should. He tuned the needle until the bead learned to be a line—thin, honest, enough to keep teeth from turning to heat.
"Clutch."
He marked the sprocket with chalk and brought the chain to a working hum. Then he introduced a controlled bind—just a wood wedge to the side of the bar, nothing heroic—enough to ask the clutch who it thought it was. For a breath the chalk marks married; then the sprocket's stride led and the bar lagged. The clutch slipped, polite and early, the way clutches behave when they want you to keep your fingers.
He killed the belt and let the assembly settle. Smell: warm, not scorched. Chalk: honest story.
[Longblade — Milestone 4/4: Oil feed & clutch verified][Gain: Mechanic XP +15][Gain: Basic Mechanical Repair XP +10]
He wrote tested on the tag with the date and underlined verify live small—not to be brave, but to keep courage and stupidity in different boxes.
The shotgun looked at him with one round steel eye. He lifted its tag: Milestone 2/3 done. He touched the selector ring, felt the mechanical honesty he'd built in the linkage, and put it down.
Live patterning or it doesn't count.
The tube in the wall coughed like a messenger clearing its throat. He popped the hatch and caught the cylinder. The slate from Admin was clipped to it with an elastic someone had sworn at this morning. Round-glasses' handwriting: ATTACHED: STILL FRAMES x6. SOURCE: SALLY PORT CAM 2. NOTES: RESOLUTION POOR (FALLOUT). TIME MARKS VERIFIED.
He set the slate on the bench and peeled the prints open like medical pictures no one wanted to see. Grainy gray, the kind of smear that made certainty expensive. First: empty hall. Second: inner door open; clerk's arm a blur at the controls. Third: a figure half in frame—a sleeve and a gloved hand, crouched at the track. Fourth: the same hand easing away, a rectangle of shadow in the guide where cloth would be. Fifth: empty hall again. Sixth: Jace in frame, lockout tag already in his hand.
He put a finger on the sleeve seam. Not vault cloth—too tight a weave, not the usual work cotton. Not Nightfall gray either; the exposure washed it to a middle that could be anyone. A strip of tape on the glove's knuckle—habit or field fix. He'd seen A3 tape a knuckle once, but A3's tape job had been clean and small; this strip ran long and wrinkled like someone who solved problems with force first.
He didn't say Nightfall out loud. He didn't say Admin either. He said, "You."
The pane did its job.
[Evidence Logged: Cam stills (6) — Obstruction placed prior to window][Chain of Custody: Admin/Clerk → Mechanic → Nightfall A3][Advisory: Do not circulate copies outside chain]
He repacked the prints and clipped them to the slate.
Knock—clerk-soft. Round-glasses, hair escapee strand and ink on the fingers again. Behind her, A3, pale-eyed and neutral, jacket zipped to the throat as if not taking sides could be a garment.
"Inside," Jace said, and slid the chain. He shut the door with the deliberate care you show a thing you just taught to behave.
Round-glasses put the slate down without trying to own the room. A3 stayed near the hinge, gaze census-taking: bench, canvas, chain kit, folded cloth in the dish.
"So," A3 said.
"So," Jace said back, and showed him the third frame—the gloved hand at the guide. A3 looked at the tape on the knuckle the way a man looks at his own hands for crimes he didn't commit. He did not reach for the print. Round-glasses did not offer it. Chain of custody stayed a line instead of a stain.
"We log it as sabotage," Jace said. "Not 'maintenance anomaly.' Not 'random debris.' A deliberate wedge, placed inside the audit window to make a door fail loud."
Round-glasses winced small. "The registrar will want three synonyms that mean deliberate," she said. "And a sentence that doesn't name a faction."
"Write 'foreign object placed with intent to compromise door integrity'," Jace said. "Add 'timing suggests knowledge of maintenance schedule'."
A3's eyes were pale ice now, not indifferent—cold because heat would cost him power. "Nightfall didn't author this," he said, and the way he said it made it sound like a fact he was willing to spend shifts defending. "But I'll be damned if I let the paper forget it happened."
"Good," Jace said. "Because paper that forgets is paper that lets it happen again."
Round-glasses looked between them. "Chain of custody?" she asked softly, practical.
"Admin to Mechanic to Nightfall," Jace said. "Keep it tight. If copies start breeding in the ducts, you'll spend your week arguing with ghosts."
"We are already arguing with ghosts," she said, a humor-shard escaping the armor. She tucked it back in before it could cut her.
The pane posted a next step without pretending it was a command.
[Optional: Request short-term camera focus on sally port tracks][Optional: Place tell-tale]
A3 watched the blue in Jace's field of vision he couldn't see and nevertheless seemed to sense. "What does your… panel… suggest?" he asked, almost lightly.
"It suggests we stop trusting luck," Jace said. He set the prints back in the cylinder, wrote RETURN WITH CUSTODY SIGN on the sleeve, and pushed it into the wall box. "And we bait a hand that likes doors."
Round-glasses straightened a fraction. "Define bait."
"A tell-tale," Jace said. He reached for the chain guard and picked a single hair of blue chalk off the edge. "A fine thread over the track, invisible unless you know it's there. Breaks if someone reaches where they shouldn't. Or a dust pattern scuffed into a small geometry that misaligns if you touch it. Nothing that jams the door. Something that tells the truth when we come back."
A3's mouth twitched—the ghost of approval a man gives another man's craft. "You plan to sleep here again," he said, not a question.
"I plan to work," Jace said. "And to listen. You can call it sleep if that helps your forms."
Round-glasses worried a thumbnail with ink. "The registrar will sign a 'security notice' if we keep the language clean," she said. "She will not sign 'sting operation'. We don't have a 'sting' field."
"Call it integrity verification," Jace said. "We like that word today."
A3 shifted, a small animal deciding not to show its teeth. "We can assign a guard who doesn't talk too much," he said. "Far corner of the hall, eyes on door, not on you."
"Eyes on the track," Jace said. "If they watch me, they'll miss the hand."
Round-glasses wrote as if the pen itself were keeping the peace. "Then: Integrity Verification Notice; Camera Focus Temporary; Silent Guard," she murmured. "Chain of custody stays tight. If anyone asks why the camera blinked, we say 'maintenance calibration.'"
"Say door integrity check per maintenance log," Jace said. "The word maintenance makes most people stop reading."
The tube coughed again. She caught the cylinder, thumbed the registrar's stamp at the bottom of a note:
RECEIVED / LOGGED — CAM 2 FOCUS OK — CUSTODY: ADMIN.P.S.: DON'T NAME THEM UNTIL YOU HAVE TO. PAPER REMEMBERS.
Round-glasses allowed herself a breath. "You have your focus."
A3 looked at the folded cloth in the dish. "You keeping that?"
"I like evidence that can't evaporate when a server sneezes," Jace said. "Once Admin logs it, they can lose it officially instead of quietly."
Round-glasses took the cloth with two fingers into a clear bag and wrote the time, the place, and a word—found—that wasn't as simple as it seemed.
"While we wait," Jace said, "I finish the bench. And you two practice pretending this is boring, because boring keeps people alive."
A3 nodded once. "I can be boring."
"You're a natural," Jace said, and the deadpan passed between them like a handshake.
They left him with the door as a door and the bench as a world he could keep.
He strung the tell-tale: a single hair of blue chalk mixed with a whisper of oil, laid across the lip where a careless hand would snag it; a dust mark in a geometry only he cared about; two screws at the track edge turned a quarter against each other so a glance would say untouched and his eye would say a liar moved them.
[Optional Task Registered: Integrity Verification — Sally Port Track][Guidance: Do not impede operation; verify after each cycle]
"Noted."
He checked the longblade one more time and slid it under canvas, not to hide it, but to make the room look like a room someone could under-rate. He tucked the shotgun beneath, tag visible: verify live. The bench lamp found a compromise angle that didn't tell the corridor what he owned.
The pane, which valued small truths that added up, dropped one more.
[Mechanic (lv2: 225/2000)]
He finger-tested the purple edge under his sleeve—wire, not whip—and let the arm tell him it would do one more hour without turning spiteful. Finish this. Then you lay down and let the building breathe through you until the hallway says your name again.
Knock—one tap, a pause, one. The sally port clerk: "Camera focus set. Guard posted. Door cycles in ten for a patrol." She didn't say we're scared. She didn't have to.
"Open it," Jace said, "and close it like you like it."
He stood where he could see the track and not be seen from the hall. The shutter rose, the corridor's air changed shape, the guard at the far corner looked like a shadow that had a job. The door made its now-familiar song. The shutter kissed the threshold and came up again. He waited for the hiss of grit like a whisper working up its courage.
Nothing touched the tell-tale. Nothing lied to the geometry.
For now.
The pane offered the line that sounded like a coin placed on a quiet table.
[Integrity Verification: Cycle 1/?? — Clean]
He let a breath out slow enough to not teach his ribs bad habits.
Then he put the cylinder in the wall again, wrote NEXT: CAM 2 TIMESTAMP CHECK 09:30–10:00, and sent it through. Outside, the vault moved its grit like messages that might find their words later.
A3 would knock again. Round-glasses would bring forms. The registrar would sharpen a sentence into a weapon that kept its edge in the drawer. Someone would reach where they shouldn't. Or they wouldn't—because the world had learned they were watching.
Either way, numbers and doors would be honest, or the lies would have a shape he could fix.
The pane asked a question he'd already answered with his hands.
[Proceed: Bait plan active. Remain on site?]
He looked at the track, at the tell-tale thin as a hair, at the longblade asleep under canvas, at the day that liked to pretend it was done.
"Remain," he said.
[Acknowledged]
He took the stool by the bench, angled so he could see the door without seeing it too much, and he put a file to a tooth that had wanted a little more of him yesterday than he liked to give.
The vault breathed. The guard breathed. The door breathed.
And Jace waited to see if a hand would try to teach a door how to lie.