The gate's bottom lip throws a line of oily shadow across the ramp. Wind tries to lever him off the deck. Beyond, the bridge parapet breaks where something took a bite and left jagged concrete like teeth.
He lowers until sternum kisses boards, bar flat under him, fingers pinched white on the battery lash-down.
The speeder whispers yes through the note he's taught it to trust. Boards quiver against his ribs. The shutter teeth scrape the straps and choose not to saw. Sparks feather out behind; burnt rubber ghosts the air.
A shape paces the break—two limbs, then four, then two again, deciding its costume. It chooses a crouch as he slides under. The deck clears; the shape commits, dropping into his lane with both hands open as if to greet.
He sights down the tape-wrapped funnel and spends a bead he measured three ties ago.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Knee unlearns. The body meets concrete edge bad and folds wrong, then slips into the flood channel with a slap that doesn't echo because the water hoards sound.
Crosswind hits the bridge. The speeder skates a centimeter on iron and remembers. He breathes through teeth. The break's missing parapet gives a one-floor view of black water stitched with trash. He keeps his eyes on steel and his weight low.
Halfway across, a lure that learned to be small edges out from under the deck on the right, arms like cable, fingers shiny with glue. It spits, a rope that wants to be a weld, and the strand finds the battery strap with fast hunger.
He drags his elbow so the rope stretches over deck not under, palms the brass regulator he stole from the party store, and twists open the valve into hose that lives coiled at his feet. A flat hiss punches air along the strap line. Glue goes white and scalps off in flakes.
He answers with steel. The pry bar kisses knuckles until they resign.
The thing screams in a register that makes the rail hum. He sights where wrist turns to hand and changes the curriculum.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Hand stops being a plan. The body slides under wheels. The car bumps and forgives itself for bumping.
The ramp drops from the bridge into a run shielded by warehouse backs. Two tracks part: main line east and a short spur knifing into a brick building with tall doors and a roof that still believes in itself. Machine shop signs ghost the brick: stencils, arrows, NO SMOKING in red that sun forgot to eat.
He feathers throttle and noses the speeder into the spur. Door's roll-up hangs a meter open—someone dug at it, then ran out of strength or time. He ducks, clears, and the sound inside is a good sound: concrete, tool shadow, air that remembers hands.
He can't give up the east. He can make the east slower for whoever follows.
Rope, pallet jack wheel, a stub post by the wall: capstan in three moves. He loops rope twice around the post, takes slack to a chain brood of links that hang from the door track, and tells the speeder to be a winch. The axle becomes a hand; the rope bites and pays; the door groans down until it kisses concrete and becomes a line nobody casual crosses.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He kills the rope with a half-hitch and a wish. Out in the run, chorus learns the ramp shape and starts the long, patient climb. A bell-blip now would buy more minutes than a kill.
He rolls the speeder through the shop with lights off. Benches, pegboard skeletons, a press so heavy it will live here forever. On a cart: belts still in plastic; two drums of cutting fluid; hand scribbles on a whiteboard that say CHECK PINS and LOCK OUT in block letters. He pockets belts. Cutting fluid is future; he lets it be future.
Back wall—another roll-up, smaller, east-facing. Padlock without a hasp because somebody hated the wrong part. He sights at the anchor bolt that keeps the track honest.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Bolt changes its mind. Track writhes. He works the handle by hand; the door rises a palm, then a hand, then a hand and a half, then refuses. Motor box dead, chain slack on the loop because the reduction's seized with the kind of glue time makes.
He checks lanes: west is the door he lowered; chorus can cut chain but not fast. East is the wedge he made in steel. Outside, he hears patience assembling teeth. He needs the wedge to become a mouth.
He opens the motor box. Gear train brown with old oil; a contactor welded into forever; a 120-volt motor expecting a grid that isn't coming.
He doesn't need a grid. He needs motion.
Jump box. Spare belt. He lash-bridges motor leads to the jump box through a salvaged fuse because blowing up a shop isn't the plan. He loops the belt around the pulley and the speeder's axle, lifts the car with his thigh an inch to make the belt love friction, and whispers the drill-on-axle trick again but bigger.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)][MECHANICAL REPAIR (PASSIVE)]
The door rises half a hand and groans. The belt squeals. He gives the jump box more ask. The door rises to a hand-span and finds resistance that sounds like a bolt head dragging rust. He risks a single bead into the track where the drag sings loudest.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Metal chips like ice. The door rises to two hands and holds.
Boots in the alley. Real gait, wrong rhythm—chorus wearing people again. He palms the bell jumper wire he taped to the deck and brushes it across the posts of a shop mast he rewired on the way in.
The bell claps once. The alley repeats it like a joke it believes. He breaks contact so it doesn't become a sermon.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Some of the feet head west toward the remembered god. Some commit to the door. He has the height he has.
He rolls the speeder back, lowers to boards, and shoots the gap.
Deck squeals. Battery strap kisses steel. A bolt bug scratches his cheek. He is tar under a car. Outside is cold and changes the taste in his mouth.
He stands and the world is alley flashed with light from the shop for a breath; then the door drops, and his rope hitch holds, and the alley remembers to be dark.
The spur runs twenty meters along brick and dives back onto the main through a frog that needs grease and diction lessons. He kisses it through and lets the speeder take him east with a note that says we're still us.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
The route narrows to a cut where rebar wakes from concrete in a crown. Wind turns and lies. He picks the rail with his eyes and trusts the deck.
Behind, the bell hears its own echo, and voices agree to go where worship lives.
A cluster of mail carts welded into a barricade sits crooked over a pedestrian crossing. He doesn't stop. He sights for a weld point and moves it from weld to dust.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The carts buckle, enough hole to fit motion. He bleeds no speed he doesn't have to.
The cut opens to a low overhang—another roll-down gate strung in a frame bolted to a concrete box at the foot of a gentle curve. This one hangs lower, bent where someone rich with bad decisions tried to ram it. Under the lip, clearance is crouch minus a breath. Beyond, the curve glows a little with light not his. Shadow moves between light and wall like people guarding a mouth.
No time for winch. No time for niceties. He lashes the deep-cycle tighter, lays the bar flat, and drops to boards. He sets throttle to the kind of yes that forgives mistakes if you make them quickly.
The shutter teeth begin to scrape and then complain in a way that says they remember bone. Sparks spit backward. He tucks chin, turns cheek away from grit, and keeps fingers out from under things that shear fingers.
The lip catches a strap buckle and chooses violence. The strap stretches; the buckle skips along teeth; the battery bites back at physics.
Halfway, hands—human hands—snatch down at the edge as if to add an inch of hurt. Skin, not glue. Nails bitten raw. He snaps a short shot at the closest knuckle without showing them his face.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Finger bones revise their beliefs. The hand vanishes with a shout that remembers swear words. Another hand stays, braver or dumber; he ignores it because the strap still lives.
The speeder clears. Boards stop threatening to thresh him. He breathes, and the breath has metal in it.
Beyond the gate, three figures stand where the curve begins—two shoulder to shoulder, one high on the wall with a length of pipe across the rail held by a loop of cable. Weight shift under the pair's ankles: human, tired. The high one tests the cable's slack with an eager bounce that feels like a plan practiced badly.
He lifts his left hand, palm out—old sign. Two fingers down to ballast. 'East,' he mouths, once.
The wall man starts to yank. Rhett sights the cable where it makes a black line against clean rail.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Cable parts. The pipe falls and makes a noise that belongs to schoolyard fences. The high man loses balance and scrapes down the wall in a curse he didn't plan to say that loud.
The pair hold ground until the last meter, then split like doors opening to let a stretcher through. Human. Scared. Learning. He lets them keep breath.
The curve gives him a view of an open lot where a freeway once shouldered trucks. In the lot, floodlight towers sleep with their heads covered and their cords cut. A trailer sits nose-down as if trying to drink the earth. Past it, the rail threads between two office blocks whose first floors have been clipped into cargo bays. Light lives there: steady, sodium, low. Shadows cross that light with intent.
He could kill the speeder and go to feet. He could blow past and make distance worth more than curiosity. He could try for one more salvage, one more battery, one more belt.
Wind carries a chorus scrape from the other side of the second gate—pursuit delayed, not stopped. He gives the motor a little more of himself and keeps to the iron.
The office blocks compress the world into a corridor half a city wide and five meters high. Inside that mouth: pallets stacked to waist height, a forklift frozen mid-lift, a generator housing big enough to hide a person inside. The generator does not run. The forklift's mast sags a centimeter every minute and then remembers shame.
On the floor someone has chalked arrows and words. OASIS points along the loading dock and out; IRON— points the other way and fades under shoe scuffs and grit; EAST has been written three times and underlined until chalk became paste.
He keeps eyes on rail and hands where they can choose. Light shows silhouettes two bays down—people or rehearsals for people.
A shadow moves with a hunter's economy along the parapet above the rail at the far end. Another low shutter hangs there, buckled and still proud of it, trimmed to barely a chest.
He can dump deck and drag the speeder under by force and sacrifice skin and time. He can aim the nose and trust velocity to argue. He can brake and ask the room for parley.
He tightens the strap on the deep-cycle by one hole and sets the bar under his ribs. Blood salts his tongue from a cut lip he never babied. The shadow above resolves, then twins, then resolves again. The shutter lip shows a tooth where bolt meets bend.
He chooses iron and inches and asks the line to remember men survive by both.