"Slip," Gavin said. "Left first. Stay small."
The gap took them one shoulder at a time. Clay breathed cool. Rosemary rubbed their sleeves and wrote its oil on them as if to claim. Fence slats rasped Madison's shirt, then the kid's. The easement hush thinned into plant noises—leaf against fence, irrigation line ticking with memory, a skitter that decided not to be bold.
"Left wall," Gavin whispered. "Soft feet. Don't gift gravel a story."
They traced the block with fingers; the block gave back powder. A low, round condenser squatted on a pad—dusty fins, rain-streaked shell; it hummed once in Gavin's teeth and then did not hum [CHECK: power state]. He steered them outside its square shadow. Beyond, a trellis lay tired against the fence, half-rotted lattice making an idiot ladder that begged for a foot and promised a loud opinion.
"Not up," Gavin said. "Low."
The run kinked at a compost tumbler bulging with last year. The air turned sweet-rot. The kid gagged; the woman pressed his sleeve. "Breathe through your teeth," she whispered. He did.
From the left—alley-side—bins belched as someone shouldered past. From the right—a street voice said nothing and meant everything. Theo's flashlight stroked ground somewhere ahead; it never rose to make them blink.
The run narrowed to a man-width. Leaves punished shoulders. Soil turned to root-knuckled tread. Behind, a body chose the seam—elbows rowing, breath low and hungry, the sound of someone who had licensed their crawl. It came flat and fast.
"On me," Gavin breathed. He dropped to a knee, let the shin clear a rooted bump, and met it with the saber's guard. The shin failed like bad furniture. The body's hands kept hope; Madison tapped the ankle and turned hope to geometry. The crawler bucked and tried to be snake. Gavin slid a forearm across a shoulder blade and nudged it sideways into the narrowest part of the run. The body wedged—ribs across root, mouth full of leaves—still reaching, still unteachable. A door that breathed and could not pass itself.
"Go," Gavin said.
They poured past the jam. Win seconds. Stack them. He marked the trellis as a fallback he'd hate.
Ahead, the run widened by an inch and smelled wetter. A kink opened on a yard corner: a square of pea gravel, a coil of hose, a cracked birdbath listing toward failure. A chain-link gate guarded the next seam; its chain was looped twice and then "secured" by its own tail—lazy wrap, gardener's shortcut.
"Chain," Madison murmured.
"Not a lock," Gavin said. He hooked the saber's flat under the loop and lifted the wrap clear so it wouldn't sing. The chain sagged into his hand. He fed it down slow, link by link, catching each so the fence wouldn't gossip.
"Through," he said.
The woman tipped the latch with two fingers. The gate coughed a squeal into its sleeve; Madison pinched the sleeve with thumb and forefinger and killed the note. The gate swung inward enough for one person narrow.
"Order," Gavin said. "Woman, kid, paper, big. I'm rear."
"Paper," the crouched man echoed, something like humor in his dry voice. He went third without stealing room.
They passed into a side strip—mulch thinned to dirt; the chain link became rougher, older. Beyond it, the world sloped down to dark: a greenbelt swale—the neighborhood's throat—lined with scrub and a concrete V. A low guard fence marked the drop the way a parent points at an outlet.
"Cold," Madison said, proof that the rule had become reflex.
"Cold," Gavin said back.
The pea gravel wanted to sing. He put his palm to a round river stone and moved it enough to fit his instep. Your feet tell stories. Make them short. The kid mirrored his step and didn't rattle.
From behind, the wedged crawler found a new shape and tried to learn forward again. It met root, fence, its own shoulder, and made a drain noise. A bin snapped closed somewhere they weren't; Theo didn't speak; his silence grew a shape with patience.
At the strip's end, another gate—this one without chain or lock, just a rusted thumb-latch, the kind that wants to be lifted and doesn't want to move. The latch remembered rain and stuck. Madison took its weight with one finger under the cross-rail. The woman lifted the tongue a hair. Gavin used the saber's guard to show the latch a better angle. The tongue sighed. The gate moved two inches and found a rock.
"Toe," Gavin said. The kid's sneaker nudged the rock a whisper. The gate swung four inches. Through they went, narrow.
Air turned older. The guard fence lined their left; the right grew scrub that had once been ornamental and had achieved autonomy. Below, the swale's concrete channels glimmered with a darker dark. The neighborhood's hum slid downslope and became a throat sound.
"Down at the culvert lip," the crouched man breathed, as if remembering an old map.
"Later," Gavin said. "We stay up until light lies to us."
A motion light on a patio across the swale thought about work and then painted a wide cone—white over grass on the far side. Its beam never reached them; it reached somebody. A figure stood at the far fence, turned its head toward the light like a flower, and then forgot the idea.
"Wall," Gavin said. He kept them between chain link and shrub, letting stems take the scratches that skin would count later. Don't give the night your blood yet. The saber's dull spine rode his forearm, a bar, a memory.
The path pinched at a utility box—green, knee-high, stamped with numbers that meant nothing now. They stepped over it. The kid's shoe clipped plastic; the box clunked and Gavin tasted anger; the night didn't answer. Ahead, the strip bent toward a small service gate in the guard fence. Beyond: a cattail-choked slice of swale, the concrete V dropping under a tiny footbridge, a maintenance path down—and, at the path's mouth, a low flashlight painting gravel in polite arcs.
Theo, gentle as a man showing you a menu. He didn't blind. He invited lanes.
"Coach," Madison breathed, not a question, a pressure.
"Feint right, cut left," Gavin whispered. "We sell road, we buy cold."
Theo's beam moved an inch, as if he'd heard the word sell in a throat. He hears shape. The beam claimed the maintenance steps and stroked the handrail. The shrubs behind them shook as the wedge-body from the run gave birth to a second crawler that had never seen a handrail in its life and didn't need one.
"Play fake," Gavin said. "Madison, big first step right—two counts—then throw your shoulders left into the fence seam and make a hole if it isn't one."
"Copy," Madison said, joy sneaking into the edge of his breath because plays were honest even when nights weren't.
"On my snap," Gavin said.
They ghosted down the strip to the gate. The thumb-latch here had rusted open, tongue dead. The gate hung crooked in a way that promised squeal and then forgot to squeal. Beyond, the maintenance path fell ten angled steps to the concrete V; a footbridge crossed; cattails watched like old men. Theo's beam traced the rail, kind, persuasive.
Gavin lifted his left hand, fingers splayed, the way he had before a silent count under dome noise. One. Two. He caught Madison's weight in the peripheral of a world that wasn't lit and never would be. Three—
Madison threw his shoulders right, big and obvious, foot scraping gravel in a way theater could hear. Theo's beam panned to bless the choice. The kid flinched for road; the woman's hand held his shirt and he learned not to.
"Now," Gavin hissed, and Madison reversed—hips under, shoulders left—into the dark seam under a leaning rosemary. The fence there had been pulled once by a truck bumper and then pushed back by a gardener with a schedule. It had a memory of open and agreed to one more compromise. Madison's bulk became a wedge. The seam became a slot.
"Through," Gavin said.
The woman slid first, braid rubbing wire, shirt giving a button tax. The kid followed, breath as quiet as he knew how to make it. The crouched man papered himself and went with the grateful silence of somebody who had lived at the size of seams. Madison folded and made less man than physics wanted him to be.
Theo's light widened, offering the steps like a gentleman offers an arm. Feet came from behind—scrub crack, soil hush, palms losing patience with plants. The wedge-body found the old gate and tried to teach it its shape.
Gavin came last. The fence wire bit his shoulder through cotton. The saber went flat; the guard kissed mesh; a barb hooked a loop and considered theft. He freed it with a twist and left a ribbon of shirt on the idea.
They stood above the swale's lip now, inside the greenbelt fence, path running left toward a culvert mouth wider than the backyard drains, right toward the footbridge and maintenance steps—white pebbles there showed the beam's caress.
"Left," Gavin said. "Path, not steps."
They moved. Grass here went municipal—stiff, wet, unashamed to tell stories. He kept to the dirt seam where boots had made decisions before; dirt doesn't brag. The concrete V below carried a trickle that pretended to be a river to somebody thirsty enough to drown in a puddle.
Theo let the beam lag, then slide ahead to the footbridge. "Lights are empty," he offered the air—pleasant, patient. "Cold runs out of map."
Maps are ink. Feet are real. Gavin drove them along the fence until the path met a padlocked gate at the bigger culvert's lip—a city lock with a chain around square tube steel. The chain had a gardener's wrap under the city's work and a tolerance for men who didn't rattle.
"Chain," Madison said quietly.
"Lazy under the smart," Gavin said. The saber's flat found the wrap and lifted the chain's first lie. He fed links to his palm instead of letting them sing. The lock itself slept, believing its story.
The gate took a breath and opened the width of a ribcage. The culvert mouth gaped below—taller, cleaner, a rectangle into a throat where the city's hum turned to swallowed thunder. The air was cold and smelled like stone that didn't care.
"Order," Gavin said. "Same. Cold, not road. Hands on wall in the dark. If I say 'down,' be ground."
From the fence outside the strip, soft fingers tested mesh and stopped. From the maintenance steps, the low beam drew a half moon on gravel and waited, not hurrying, a fisherman with too much line. The crawler at the old gate gave up impersonating a hinge and began to learn to climb chain.
"On my snap," Gavin said, blade crosswise, guard on hinge so the gate would not give up a word it didn't need to.
"Coach," Madison breathed, joy folded and ironed flat.
Gavin raised his hand—a silhouette nobody could see—and counted inside a mouth of stone.
One. Grass hissed. A finger slid along mesh.
Two. The beam painted the bridge; a body behind learned kneecaps the hard way and didn't register the lesson.
Three.
They slipped the gate as the mesh on both sides whispered with hands that had opinions about stories.