He tightened his grip on the chain and stayed where he was. The phone recorded; the painter's pole rested against his thigh; the incident number lived in ink on the clipboard.
"Sheriff incident one-six-eight-four-three," he said into the morning, steady and boring. "Unauthorized device on utility pole, subject attempting retrieval."
Skinny lifted another rung. The ladder clicked against the creosote. He made the face people make when they find out sticky can be a temperature as well as a feeling.
"Step down," Noah said. His tone didn't change.
Skinny smiled at the pole. "You going to come out here and stop me?"
"No," Noah said. "I'm going to narrate, and then a deputy will stop you, and you'll write your name on something unfriendly."
Skinny's smile thinned. Behind the windshield, the driver in the gray sedan sat in profile. Bix's head turned slightly, as if he were considering a different sport.
Noah thumbed the non-emergency callback, kept the speaker near his shoulder.
"Dispatch," the woman said. "Same location?"
"Same," Noah said. "Subject on the utility pole, two-step ladder, retrieving unauthorized camera. I'm filming from my gate."
"Unit en route," she said. "Hold position."
"Copy."
He held position. The enclosure behind him hummed a steady cool. The manometer's blue columns sat where he'd left them. The towel under the hood lip pressed forward like a dog on a leash.
Skinny reached for the strap. Tires whispered on gravel. A sheriff cruiser slid into the near turnout and parked in a way that did not ask permission. The deputy from the gate standoff got out, posture unhurried and convinced.
"Sir," the deputy said to Skinny. "Hands off the pole. Down now."
Skinny froze; not because he respected the words but because his body remembered that gravity had a vote. He climbed down, feet squeaking. The deputy stepped between him and the ladder and moved it aside with one smooth motion that made the next choice simpler.
"Unauthorized attachments on utility property are illegal," the deputy said. "That includes your Polaroid in a box."
Skinny opened his hands as if he'd been given a balloon and was disappointed to find air. "Just cleaning up litter."
"Good," the deputy said. "The utility will clean up their litter when they get here. You'll leave it alone."
Bix finally rolled his window down two inches, enough for a voice to escape without committing to the world. "We're all very civic," he said.
The deputy looked at the sedan. "Sir, if you're with him, you're also leaving."
Bix's smile wore its paperwork shape. "We were just sightseeing."
"Sightsee somewhere else," the deputy said, and his lack of volume did more work than other people's shouting. "I'll be around for a while."
Bix let the window rise. The sedan backed away with theatrical patience. The ladder stayed on the ground with the kind of humility ladders learn when uniforms are present.
The deputy took three photos of the camera on the pole, then one of the whole intersection, then wrote something on the tablet that made the morning feel measured. He looked at Noah. "You did right staying behind your gate," he said. "Don't touch the device. Utility will remove it. If they don't make it by dark, call us again."
"Appreciate it," Noah said.
"Got any more of those guys?" The deputy meant neighbors with grins and spare time.
"I have work," Noah said. "They have hobbies."
"Stay with the first one," the deputy said. "We'll run patrols through." He set the ladder against the fence on the far side of the road, out of easy hands. "Have a quiet day."
He left in a slow exhale of tires. The road sighed, then learned silence again.
Noah put the phone down on the post and let his fingers unfurl from the chain. He set the painter's pole inside the door and felt the decision he hadn't made—step out or stay—go still in his ribs.
[External pressure: low.][Note: camera removal ticket pending (utility).]
"Seen," he said to the HUD and to the morning. He pocketed the brass lock's key and went back to the machine.
Inside, the cooling indicator had fallen into the safe band.
[Thermal residual: safe.][Lockout may be cleared.]
He unlocked, removed the tag, and slid it back onto the lanyard. The enclosure lid stayed down; the hood kept breathing; the manometer sat at 0.8 at eighty percent fan, which his jaw believed.
"Resume—P-001," he said.
[Program P-001: resume.][Thermal: 8.5%. Vent capture: good.][Cycle time estimate: 10 m 56 s.]
The hand found the clamps; the cutter kissed pilots; the capped emitter traced lines that knew where they were going. He let the tray fill and swapped bins when weight told him to. Every clang that lived in the bin was a sentence he wouldn't have to argue later.
He carried the first full set of brackets to the steel table and laid them out in pairs. He brought two rails from the rack, wiped them with acetone, and ran his fingers along the edges until they stopped lying. A pack of hardware came out of a coffee can labeled GOOD BOLTS.
"Hand," he said. "Hold here."
The hand palmed a rail as if it had been made for it. Noah fished bolts through bracket ears into slotted holes and tightened them until metal spoke in the language of torque. He kept the wrench sensible; this was a dry-fit, not an oath.
When the backbone stood across two sawhorses without asking permission, he stepped back and looked at it the way a person looks at a new sentence.
It wasn't the future. It was the shape of a future that didn't need permission. It was steel arranged so that other steel could move correctly inside it.
He slid a caliper along a gap and found satisfaction measured to a number he liked.
The tray chimed out the last piece of the second set. He set the backbone aside and stacked the next parts in the order his hands would want them later.
The phone buzzed with the cheerfulness of a text that hadn't read the room.
UNKNOWN (number from earlier Bix texts): "Tonight your fans sleep. Buy candles."
He stared at the message one beat too long. The hood breathed; the towel flattened and played at flickering; the manometer columns held where he'd put them.
He typed two letters: OK, then deleted them. He typed nothing. He took a screenshot and titled it Threat 12:28 and sent it to his own email and to the incident thread with dispatch. A quiet log is better than a loud one.
[Suggestion: increase resilience—backup ventilation; perimeter cameras.]
"Yeah," he said to the air and to himself. The painter's pole leaned where he'd placed it, a joke and a lever both.
He could keep running P-001 and fill three more bins before dinner. He could rewire the buffer into a dedicated hood UPS, bolt the inverter onto a separate feed with a manual transfer, add a second fan in series, and mount two off-the-shelf cameras on poles where the hedge could not lie.
He could do both if the day had more hours than men.
He looked at the bins and at the quarter-turns on the cap and at the NOTICE sticker on the door. He looked at the small, dumb manometer with its blue water like a mood ring for grown-ups. He felt the weight of air as an ally that could be taken away.
He opened a crate with the heavy battery he'd been pretending wasn't a project. He set it on a low dolly and rolled it to the service corner. The hand steadied the inverter as he flipped the manual to the page that made smoke optional.
[Buffer currently wired for whole-shop ride-through.][Option: reconfigure—dedicated hood UPS with isolation (estimated downtime 20–30 min).]
He checked the clock in his head and the numbers on his bins. He checked the note from Utility—voluntary curtailment until fourteen hundred—and the line about spot checks may occur. He checked the level in the manometer and the angle of the towel and the list he had taped under the SOP.
"Either we cut now and pray they don't pull the street," he said, "or we take thirty minutes and make the hood breathe when the world coughs."
The program finished another sheet with sound that made his shoulders drop. He could load the next and be less behind. He could shut the program down and be less scared of the dark.
He set the new sheet on the feed rollers. He set the battery next to the inverter. He laid the heavy-gauge cables out like sentences he could live with.
The door buzzed—two short, neighborly taps. Elliott stood there with a coil of chain over one shoulder and a little solar camera in a box in the other hand.
"Thought you might use these," Elliott said. "Cousin had extras. Wants an invoice number, not a bag of money."
Noah looked at the chain and at the camera and at the battery and at the bin of brackets. He smiled—small, real.
"Thanks," he said. "You just made my decision harder."
"Good," Elliott said. "Decisions that matter tend to be like that."
He set the camera on the bench and the coil of chain on the floor. "I'll go mind my gravel," he said. "You mind your air."
Noah watched him walk away until the lane knew only the smell of heat and dust again. He picked up the camera box, then put it down. He picked up a lug wrench, then set it on the inverter.
The hood drew its steady line. The enclosure waited for a choice that would tell it whether it would keep breathing when someone else decided breathing was optional.
He had two things he could build in the next thirty minutes: a stack of brackets that would become movement, or a battery-backed fan that would make movement safe when men got clever.
He reached for a tool.