The door learned North's shape and forgot it behind them. Steam drifted ceiling-ward and resigned into the paint. The room smelled like metal and tea.
"Not dawn," North said, leaning a shoulder to the wall. "We give dawn to someone else."
"Late morning," Lex said. "Crosswind and boredom." He set the map tube by the pack and sketched an invisible square on the counter with one finger. "Half meter only. If the yard complains, we apologize with distance."
North loosened their mask and let it hang at the neck. "We need chalk," they said. "Witness marks. If you can't trust your eyes, trust the wall."
"Chalk," Lex agreed. "And shims for the shoe that pretends to work." He checked the triangle, the pry bar's tape wrap, a coil of paracord, a short ratchet strap that had once been red. Tools lined in a soldier's row calmed the part of him that wanted every variable dead.
They ate like people who knew food was a line item—two squares of an old breakfast bar, shared water, a pinch of salt. After, they sat back-to-back on the floor and pretended it was a strategy. Sleep came with its boots still on and did not stay.
When the window was just a rumor on the city—no longer night, not yet noon—they moved. Coats. Mask. Rope. The pack felt like a promise.
Outside the building, Greyhaven's light had the color of decisions made in committee. Wind trimmed edges off sound. From far south, the Black Tide pressed the horizon flat and mean.
"Walk like we're supposed to be there," North said.
"We are," Lex said, and made it true in the angle of his shoulders.
They took the dripline alleys, the stairs that didn't breathe, the roofline run that had started to feel like handwriting. At the service gate, the chain took tension off like a well-trained animal. A gull cried once as if to clear its throat and thought better of it.
"Office?" North asked.
"Mirrors," Lex said, watching glass show him sky. "No silhouettes. We keep the crane between us and their patience."
At the crane's ribs the green cabinet waited like a box at confession. Lex opened it and listened for argument. The hum was domestic.
[BREAKERS ONLINE — 12: NOMINAL HUM][NOISE ENVELOPE: +0.0 dB (CURRENT)]
He touched the handle with the back of his glove as if the metal could lie to him about heat. Not hot. He closed the door without letting it latch fully; latched doors invite inspection.
North stepped ahead to the siding and knelt by the truck. "This shoe is honest about being tired." They slid a shim under the edge and tapped it with two fingers—no tools, no noise. "Pretense reduced."
Lex chalked a witness line where steel kissed steel at the coupler. Another on the rail, a hair's breadth behind the wheel. He drew the marks small and mean, the way he liked evidence to be.
"Ready?" he asked.
North's fists closed and opened once, a physical punctuation. "Ready."
He set hands on the coupler and weight in his stance. He breathed into the idea of move without trying to name force. The Wind Cannon wasn't a gun when he used it like this; it was a set of fingers the air grew for him.
The car negotiated. Rust reconsidered. Somewhere a stiff spring decided to remember elasticity. The chalk line at the rail did a thing only chalk can do: it smudged a suggestion of surrender.
[COUPLER STATUS: LOADED][MASS RESPONSE: 0.32 kN → 0.18 kN][NOISE ENVELOPE: +0.6 dB]
"Again," North said, voice flat to keep the air from holding its own breath.
Again.
The smudge thickened. The coupler gave one clink that felt like a swallowed word.
"Half of half," North estimated, eyes on the mark. "Another whisper."
He gave the whisper. He put his shoulder into nothing visible and let the air be guilty for him.
The chalk line split. The wheel crest rolled a fraction over its own ghost. A stone under the ballast clicked like a camera far away.
[MOTION CONFIRMED — 0.52 m][NOISE ENVELOPE: +1.1 dB][LINE LOAD: MINIMAL]
North exhaled a laugh that didn't belong to humor. "Half meter." They touched the rail the way some people touch a headstone. "Witness satisfied."
"Hold," Lex said. "Listen."
They gave the yard the gift of their stillness. From the office: nothing a person could swear to. From the canal road: a small engine fined for existing and then forgiven. From the far fence: the fast, low ripple of the knee-high flock learning shadows and forgetting them again.
A slow tick-tick inside the crane ribs said temperature was picking sides. Lex closed the cabinet fully and pressed a strip of cloth tape over the edge as if it had never been opened.
"Reset the chain," he said. "We walk out like we meant to leave."
They made distance without teaching the world their names. Back at the service gate, North eased the chain to its last honest link and gave it the exact slack it had learned over months. Lex looked once through the wire toward the warehouse ridge.
No watcher. Only the kind of empty that thinks it's polite.
"Window held," North murmured.
"For today," Lex said.
They took the ladder up and let the roof gather them. On the last run, they both flattened on instinct—no signal needed.
A golf cart ticked along the canal road below, orange under dirt, same taped headlights, same two figures. Rafe wasn't between them this time. The passenger wore the vest now, not orange but a brown that thought it remembered orange. The driver scanned the fence with a practiced boredom that can hide anything.
The cart stopped by the gate. The passenger hopped off and tested the chain with a thumb, reading tension like a musician reads strings. Then they looked up.
Lex didn't move. North didn't blink.
The passenger's gaze found the ladder shadow and accepted it as pattern. They got back on the cart. The cart rolled on, coughing self-importance.
"Not Rafe," North said when the sound washed away.
"Not a friend," Lex answered. "But not a hunter yet."
They moved again.
The apartment didn't celebrate. It let them in the way a good shelter does: by failing to notice.
Lex put the chalk on the counter beside the triangle and grease. He wrote numbers the UI didn't keep because paper believes you even when systems don't.
— HALF METER: achieved on siding near crane; no scream; chalk witness confirmed.— BREAKER 12: hum steady; cabinet taped to pass a glance test.— BRAKE SHOE: shimmed, low force; replace or sweet-talk later.— OFFICE: no movement; assume watching.— CART: two-up; not Rafe; chain check ritual persists.
North waited until his pen clicked shut. "You did not say 'we.'"
"We don't both stand on the same ledger line," he said, and hated that the sentence made sense.
North's eyes warmed and cooled in the same second. "Eat something."
They split another square. The bar tasted like sugar's apology. Water washed it into something a body could understand.
"Next," North said around the last crumb.
"Couple and clear twenty centimeters," Lex said. "Not today. Next window. We need the brakes to unclench without advertising."
"Distraction," North said. "Noise somewhere true enough to look at but not close enough to hurt."
"Rafe," Lex said.
"Or the cart people," North said. "They like checking the chain. We give them a chain that needs checking."
He let the idea sit with the others. Ideas breed if you leave them alone.
He palmed the cracked battery from the drawer, let the Mechanical Heart take it apart molecule by opinion.
[DEVOUR SUCCESS. MECHANICAL SOURCE +1.][MECHANICAL HEART: LV.1 — 188/500]
Something small shifted in the corridor. A floorboard decided to have an opinion. They froze.
A shadow passed under the door gap with the patience of someone who measures rooms by air instead of sight. It stopped at the jamb, turned as if listening, then moved on.
North spoke in the voice you use for birds. "Stairs?"
"East stairwell," Lex said. "The soffit that likes breath."
A minute became two. The building remembered how to be a building again.
North tied the mask back up. "We don't have forever," they said. "We have windows and math."
"And a train to build," Lex said.
"Right," North said, and the shard of a grin was back. "Of course you do."
The kettle learned their rhythm, clicked in, and handed steam to the room. He poured without spilling. North took their cup with two hands and didn't pretend it was anything but heat.
The knock—two taps, space, one—wasn't Rafe. It landed too soft, like someone who had practiced on a different door.
Lex didn't go to it. He went to the window first and read the alley. Empty. He went to the peephole and read nothing.
The knock repeated itself, same patient cadence. North set their cup down without sound and braced the wall with one boot.
"Ready," they said.
Lex let the chain stay at respect and opened into an inch of city. Cold came in and argued with tea. A face waited in the gap where caution lives.
Not Rafe. Younger. Mask off. Eyes too bright for someone who ate daily.
"Please," the stranger said. The word didn't try to manipulate anything; it just reported a condition. "You were… on the roofs. We saw." A swallow. "We have a generator that coughs. It wants a… breaker friend."
North didn't move. Lex didn't smile. Somewhere below his sternum, the parts of him that liked puzzles raised their hands and promised to behave.
"What do I call you?" he asked.
"Dima," they said. "My people are at the glass place two blocks east. We don't go loud. We can trade."
North's eyes flicked to the counter where chalk and triangle sat like a thesis. "Glass place sees the yard?"
Dima nodded. Honest, or good at acting honest. "Sometimes the orange cart. Sometimes… the vest."
Lex weighed the word friend and decided not to spend it. "We'll walk," he said. "Not now. When the window opens."
Dima's relief tried to leak out and got stopped by good training. "We'll watch the roof," they said. "When you want us to not watch, you put a light in the far window and we'll watch where you point."
A system shaped itself in the air like scaffolding. North said nothing, which was an argument in favor.
"Bring cable," Lex said. "And grease that still believes in its job."
Dima nodded, stepped back into the hall, and let the silence close the gap.
Lex shut the door. The chain learned rest again.
North picked up their cup as if none of it had happened. "Variables," they said. "You collect them like charms."
"Trains are charms," Lex said. "They keep people moving."
He drank, and the tea made a better argument than the cold. His gaze went to the map tube, to the chalk on the counter, to the window where roofs arranged themselves into options.
"Next window," he said. "We couple."
"And if the nest looks?" North asked.
"Then we teach it to look away." He raised his cup. "To work."
North touched her cup to his. "To work."
[OBJECTIVE UPDATE — YARD COUPLING: STAGE 2 UNLOCKED][REQUIREMENTS: BRAKE RELEASE, DISTRACTION VECTOR, LINE LOAD < 30%][REWARD (POTENTIAL): ACCESS TO CRANE POWER BUS]
The city didn't promise. The map did not either. But the chalk line on steel remembered him, and sometimes that was enough to move tonnage.