Steel answers through the throwstand. The tongue takes the rail. Rhett keeps throttle steady, one foot on deck, one on ballast, and lets the speeder slip from the main onto the service lead looping past the boxcar on its side.
Brush owns this track. It rakes his shins and strikes sparks on the deck edge. The derailed car's belly looms left like a wall tipped on ribs. The lead squeezes between steel and trees until the night becomes a throat and the rails the only teeth worth trusting.
Points ahead sulk. A nail jams the lock. He drifts off the deck as the car idles, sights along the funnel ring, and sends a dry pulse where the nail made a new religion.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The nail blinks out. The lock quits pretending. He shoulders the throw; the rod groans, then gives. The tongue kisses home.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)]
He jogs the speeder through. Low sheds line the lead—the kind that hoarded switch brooms and spike mauls. One door yawns. Inside: tie wire, stale gas, a bolt cutter. He takes the wire and cutter, leaves the gas to its regrets.
Wind carries old sugar and wet dust over the wreck. Laughing radio voices try consonants, lose them. The chorus is reading the map.
Next crossing: arms up, plank down, cabinet open. A rope lies across the rail at ankle height, rigged to a truck shock that will yank a snare up when a wheel kisses it.
Wire from the shed. A knot on the near eye. Two wraps around a tie plate. He leans.
The snare jumps early and bites its own post. He cuts the rope and signs the scene with silence.
Two men crouch beyond the plank. Not chorus—breath fogs right. One has a taped pipe; the other wears a grin he didn't earn.
'Ironvale sweep?' the grinner reads from a card.
'Safety,' the other adds. The word lands wrong in his mouth.
Their ankles don't carry weight the way human ankles do. Chorus learning people.
He doesn't give them time to get better. He sights the knee that's trying hard and offers it a lesson.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The joint unlearns. The body twists into the ditch and keeps twisting. The second thing rushes with the pipe and a mouth undecided about teeth. He meets it with the bar and spends one clean hit on the hinge under the ear. The pipe clatters; the head refuses to keep a round shape. One boot, one twist, done.
He rolls the speeder on. The lead merges near the boxcar's far trucks; a frog thumps the deck.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
Beyond, the line opens into a shallow yard throat: three converging tracks, throwstands like bent elbows, a bungalow with the door knocked sideways. On the floor: bell wire, contact cleaner. Minutes build trains, not kills. He pockets both and moves.
The bell trick—he sets a fuse at the next mast, clips a jumper, tapes the free end to the deck's edge so one touch will sing ten seconds. He leaves the sermon asleep.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The yard falls behind. The chorus debates the wreck and decides to become a bridge. He keeps east with wind cold at his teeth and the speeder's note smoothing as fuel remembers what it's for.
The line tightens into a cut between a retaining wall and pallets wrapped in gray plastic. Something drops from the wall to his deck with a thud that doesn't belong to a person. Claws find denim and then skin.
He throws his hip into the grab, shoves a quarter of his weight into the deck, and wrenches the pry bar underhand like a hook. The thing on him is wrong in angles—wrist where elbow should be, knee shaped like a hinge. He chisels the joint closest to his face.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Bone forgets to be bone. The mass yawns backward. He slams its spine with the bar and slides it off. Wheels chew reach; ballast accepts homework.
Five breaths to quiet his hands. More ask to the motor.
A short trestle. A tunnel mouth. A roll-down gate hangs halfway, teeth low like a jaw that doesn't want to open. Beyond: black without depth.
He could stop and hand-winch. He could stop and die by committee. Behind, the chorus finds the line and starts speaking patience. Steel learns their voices.
He lets the speeder coast and crouches low. The gate shows a bright scar where tires learned how to duck it at speed. Two handprints lower where someone smaller left permission.
Head lower than heart. Bar flat. Elbows in.
He trims throttle to maybe, lashes the deep-cycle tighter, tucks the pry bar under his chest, face close to deck boards that smell like rain and machine.
The gate comes fast—teeth and oil and the smear where someone taller misjudged. He lays down and the world becomes a line. Metal passes inches above spine. Sparks comb the deck where the battery strap kisses a tooth and chooses not to break. He clears. The sound of clearance is a song he wants to buy again someday if he gets to have days.
Inside, the tunnel breathes—slow, patient, intelligent in a way that doesn't need light. Water ticks. Farther in, a fan that shouldn't have power turns once and forgets.
Halfway, the roof drops where a bracket hangs like a hook. The bar on his chest scrapes and tries to climb into his sternum. He angles steel sideways until it quits.
A figure stands in the headlight spill—coat, goggles, cable in both hands. Weight shifts with truth. Not chorus.
'Don't,' Rhett says, not loud.
The cable whips low across the rails. He throws weight left and lifts the right wheel with a pry against the deck edge. The car rides the idea of flight for a breath and slaps back onto iron.
He shoots the cable where it crosses the web.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The cable parts. Ends kick wrists. The mask turns and learns nothing. A door in the wall swallows the figure and closes on noise that belongs to more than one person. He doesn't follow. The tunnel remains the point.
Light ahead—sodium, from a service gallery. He stays with the main. The tunnel exits with a sigh.
He bursts onto a fill high above warehouses gone to rust. Far below, a service road remembers plows. To the east, stray lights stitched low—maybe houses with stubborn generators, maybe trucks on a beltway that still believes motion is proof.
Behind, the mouth learns chorus again. He feels the sound in the deck.
A dead gantry straddles the line. A body hangs by a harness like a flag. He looks once and promises nothing he can't afford.
Concrete bridge over a flood channel. Water moves like a rumor that hates verification. On the far bank, a bungalow with its guts in a plastic tub—someone moved batteries inside before daylight went on strike.
He wants those cells. He wants them without stopping.
He runs light across the bridge and pulls his bell jumper free so wire dangles by the deck, ready to spark a sermon. The chorus pours onto the fill. He gives them a god west worth worshiping—touches wire to post as he passes the mast. The bell claps once and dies when he breaks the connection. The sound runs along concrete, finds the tunnel throat, and tells it to kneel.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Not all turn. Enough do.
Saplings rake the car in the next cut. Branches draw lines on his arms. Finger up; cold becomes background music.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
A yard sign ghosts past: WALTON INTERCHANGE. The main splits around a peninsula where a turntable used to live. The pit is rebar and rain. To the right, a shed with skylights busted open; to the left, a ballast ramp climbs to a bridge over the beltway he tasted earlier.
The bridge is new concrete on old footings. Half the parapet is gone. Something heavy went through hard.
Across the ramp, just short of the bridge, a roll-down gate like the tunnel's hangs halfway in a welded frame. Under it, a slot no taller than a crouch.
He could brake and winch. He could turn right into dead pit and hunt parts while the city practices digestion. Or he can duck again and spend luck on steel.
He lowers until chest kisses deck, lashes the deep-cycle tighter, lays the bar flat. He holds the motor to a steady, insistent note that equals yes without becoming please.
Black moves on the bridge beyond—something pacing the break, two limbs, then four, then two, undecided about the costume it prefers when it kills.
He breathes into the boards, tastes oil and rain and the iron of his own lip where a tooth nicked it earlier, and makes the decision that keeps the line honest.