The shutter takes a last tooth of paint and lets him through. He breathes against timber, ribs learning the deck again, then lifts enough to get eyes. The white ahead is not a trick: a pole taller than anything nearby, four heads of sodium on a lattice, humming the way honest work hums. The horn that answered rests its throat somewhere in that light.
The corridor narrows to commit the world to rail. Chain-link grows taller; razor sits its crown like winter grass. On both shoulders, crash frames wait folded. Ballast flattens between them. Somebody sweeps here. Somebody decides which noises live.
He feeds the speeder a measured yes. Behind, patience stacks in the dark and calls itself a choir. The gate ahead wears a sign: WHITE DISTRICT. Under it, in steadier hand: STAY ON THE LINE.
Two men appear on a parapet catwalk, radios and inherited rifles. A third stands at a throwstand with a cable loop and a hand-lamp. The lamp finds his face and makes him less rumor.
'Hold,' the lamp says. A woman's voice. The word lands like an offer, not a shot.
He doesn't brake. He shows left palm and tips two fingers to ballast.
'East,' he mouths.
The lamp pauses on his palm, slides to gauge. She reads the lash-down, the tape around his finger. The loop twitches as if deciding whether to be law.
'Gate,' a catwalk man says into his radio. 'Single rider. Not chorus. On iron.'
Behind him the chorus enters the last curve and practices agreement. Sound finds chain-link and becomes a crowd learning doors.
The woman lifts her lamp and draws a small circle, yard sign for keep moving if you can make it work. She sets the loop down instead of across.
He gifts her nothing but obedience.
The line draws him under the sign and past a crash frame bolted into good concrete. A flood tower sleeps beside it with cords coiled in figure-eights that would make a sailor nod. A drop-net rig hangs above and does not fall. Humans here are tired, not sloppy.
A small engine not his own turns over once and dies. Diesel burned right salts the air.
Beyond the gate the corridor lifts onto a concrete trestle over drainage that wants to be a river. The trestle carries a swing span—center pivot, rails on a deck that can turn. Locks throw bright; a bar through ears on either end promises honesty. He is small enough to cross while the world is willing to be a bridge.
On the far bank, crash frames stand in a staggered pair. Between them: a yard light tower and a bungalow with its door on a latch, a polite mouth waiting to be rude. A maintenance spur peels off around the light and into a shed that doesn't remember windows.
He pushes onto the swing span, rubber humming, wind arguing ownership. Halfway, a figure steps from the far bungalow with a cable in two hands and the posture of someone following a list. The cable drapes across the gauge loose, not set, as if waiting for confession.
He sights where belly meets rail and gives the cable a new story.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The line coughs loose from its bracket and writes sparks in the air. The figure flinches, takes one wrong step, then remembers to be human. A second shape—shorter, shoulders tight—leans out with a fire ax as if a handle can solve corridors.
'On iron,' he says. 'East.'
'On iron,' the shorter echoes, tone flat, testing words against a mouth that doesn't like them.
The speeder kisses the frog onto the bank. He gives the motor apology and it returns motion.
The crash frames loom. The gap they leave is small as stubborn. He lashes the strap a hole tighter, bar under ribs, cheek back to timber. Teeth try his name and miss. Sparks make small meteors.
A hand reaches and reconsiders with its bones. He does not spend a bead; he spends shoulder. The hand goes away.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
White grows brighter until it becomes task: a yard head with four lamps, a generator on a skid strapped to a flat bolted to concrete. Cables sling to panels anyone with lockout tags would respect. A woman sits on the flat's tongue with radio and helmet, a wrench across her lap like a measure.
She looks at him as if he is weather. That is all he has asked from people lately.
'Keep it moving, rider,' she calls, not loud.
'East,' he says.
'Then east,' she answers, pointing at rails.
He doesn't turn toward the generator to see what she'd do.
The corridor narrows to a concrete throat shouldered by warehouses cut into bays. The bays show pallets, drums, and people shaped by work. A forklift sits with forks down and tape across its key. Chalk on the floor writes numbers and WATER in block letters.
Shadows above—catwalk, radios. The radios say Oasis on vowels and make east into schedule. Nobody fires at his back.
A bell coughs once behind him. Maybe the woman with the wrench knows that trick too.
The throat spills him onto a run that feels like rail moved from one world into another. Ballast levels, ties square, rail head clean. White on his left, ruin on his right.
The chorus peels at the first frames like sea at a breakwater. Some become rumor threatened by distance. Some commit and stop being individuals.
He is almost free of the white when the world adds another test.
A pair of derailer shoes sits where the run slips under a highway ramp. One tongue lies against the web with its latch showing. The other sits cocked, a chore unfinished. He spends the cotter pin that pretends to be yes.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Metal forgets loyalty. The shoe drops off steel and goes to sleep. He pays the second the same coin.
A shadow slides under the ramp and tries to be human. It tries too hard. He gives it the knee it thinks it owns.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The joint resigns. The body accepts a new job where ballast judges.
The run climbs onto a viaduct that feeds a small river with indifference. Wind argues louder. He becomes small enough to be rumor. Midspan, glue spit hunts his lash-down again. He doesn't let it buy him.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Hiss peels bond to confetti. The pry bar edits a hand until it decides to be unoccupied.
On the far side, a side lead peels right into a yard whose sign someone scraped and replaced with a white disk and a black line: no flame in geometry. He keeps the main.
A siren barks once behind. Men with radios become a crew again. The white dilutes to city dark, and the city remembers hunger.
A truss so low he counts ribs again by feel; then pylons, dead lamps, a stack of containers painted WHITE on one face and DIST on the other. He is thinking about fuel when the road remembers cars.
The horn returns, not ahead but left, across a beltway cut to two lanes and a lie. A road switcher noses its long hood past gabions, two flats, then a tank caged like a pet. Its headlight puts a cone on a patch of night and waits with the patience only mass owns.
Between him and the train a small bridge leaps the road. Rail kisses the bridge, then stairs down to meet the bypassed main. Someone set a crash frame at the far end and left it open by grace of a missing pin.
The pin lies on the deck like an idea that didn't stick.
He can stop and give the white his name and get fuel and rules. He can blow past on his small deck and keep being weather that doesn't respect clipboards.
He runs the bridge. The speeder rides iron the way a hand rides a suggestion. A figure on the far bank reaches for the frame and reconsiders because the frame is heavy and his arm is only a man's arm.
The pin looks like a pin and is secretly a crowbar with a hat. Rhett doesn't slow to argue physics. He drops to boards and gives the frame his sternum for measurement. Teeth decide not to count him wrong today.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
Beyond the beltway, rail takes him past low housing that never got siding. Windows glow behind blankets; people here remember light discipline. A child runs two steps toward the gauge; an adult hand lifts him back. The lesson lands faster than speech.
He doesn't look long. Looking makes a person.
Ahead: a low shed with a door open the size of a train. Inside, a tower head and a skid and the smell that means yes. A cable runs from skid to panel to conduit that snakes toward the throat. A young man on a stool fights a yawn with a clipboard.
'Hold,' the young man says, because that's the sentence his mouth knows.
'On iron,' Rhett says.
'On iron,' the mouth agrees, already bored enough to survive.
He does not steal. He has no hands for it. He remembers what order looks like and stays moving.
The corridor collapses to a final test before it gives him back to ruin. Two crash frames stand in a freestanding pair, staggered tighter than any yet. Under the lip of the right frame a cable ties frame to post so no impatient hand can kill the hinge's loyalty. The left frame's tooth line dips lower like a smile that likes blood.
On the parapet above, three silhouettes lean like coaches. One holds a radio. One a rope. The third a rifle cleaner than its owner.
He tightens the strap one last hole. The bar nests where bone says yes. He lowers until deck is horizon. The speeder gives the note he trained into it.
He spends posture as currency and asks teeth to be accountants with mercy.
The right-hand cable trembles. The rope-holder gives it half a thought and none of the consequence. The left frame combs the strap and gets ambitious. He gives it ribs and hears wood choose loyalty over splinters.
He has one breath to turn this into a different story. He doesn't. Steel chooses him; he lets it.
The speeder fits the seam. The strap moans and retires from crisis. The frames pass like two thoughts that could have killed him and decided to wait.
He clears into night with the white at his back and a horn up the line ahead that is not a shunt anymore but a full voice getting ready to mean something larger. Rails show a curve that lifts and then drops in the style of a bridge that moves.
Beyond that curve a block of dark sits where air should be. Either a drawbridge is up, or a gate is down, or a train is across and doesn't care about his inch math.
He keeps the deck true and hires breath to be quiet. He gives the motor one more yes, not for speed but for certainty, and goes to meet the shape that thinks it is the horizon.