Wind touched the sweat at his temples and made a small decision to be kind. The rooftop equipment hummed like domesticated thunder—boxy HVAC units, a squat intake with a grill big enough to swallow a stray hat, cable trays marching across pea gravel toward a parapet that held back sky.
He kept moving. No stance, no silhouette; stillness here looked like a target. The card rode his right hand, ring outward. The token pressed a cool coin-shape against his left pocket like a reminder he hadn't earned yet.
[ENVIRONMENT: ROOFTOP MOCKUP][NON-PARTICIPANTS: NONE][CONDITION: MAINTAIN OPERATIONAL CONTROL OVER SPECIAL ITEM][OBJECTIVE: DEPLOY EXIT TOKEN → SECURE EXTRACTION][FAIL STATE: ITEM LOSS / CRITICAL STATUS]
Concrete pavers made a path between equipment. He followed the path with his eyes and his feet and not his trust. The parapet's inside ledge wore a strip of aluminum flashing scored with tiny maintenance scratches. Near the corner, a square plate had been bolted into that flashing and then painted over—flat gray on flat gray. In the center of the square, an absence the size of his thumbnail waited: a white ring with the confidence of ritual.
The wind lifted, tested his shirt, found it boring, moved on.
[TIMER: 02:52]
He exhaled. Time enough to do a simple thing badly.
A shadow shifted between two units to his right. He saw it because he had trained himself to be rude to shadows. He didn't look straight at it. He let peripheral honesty do the math. There—the slightest wrongness where sun on gravel should have been a uniform noise.
"Don't," he told the wrongness, softly.
The wrongness chose to be a person after all. A shape—human height, human stride, edges that refused names—peeled out from the lee of the HVAC. It held no knife and no pipe this time; both hands were empty and impatient. It moved like men who had practiced closing space in ways that made judges bored.
[HAZARD SPAWN: 1][TYPE: BLURRED AGENT][EQUIPPED: NONE][BEHAVIOR: DISARM / GRAPPLE]
He angled toward the parapet plate, keeping the card between them like a rude invitation. The gravel squeaked under his shoes. He could feel the exit token like a coin trying to declare itself legal tender.
"Two mistakes I won't make today," he said, mostly to himself. "Running, and letting you touch this."
The agent quickened by degrees. Its shoulders said it knew about leverage. Its hands opened in the universal shape of a problem that wanted a shoulder and a wrist.
He reached the parapet plate and let the card's ring kiss the absence there.
Nothing happened.
He didn't swear. He put two fingers on the plate's edge and felt paint that had been paint too long. The square didn't want to move. Between it and the flashing, a seam of old caulk had set as hard as self-esteem.
The agent approached at a distance designed to be safe for it and offensive for him. It didn't commit yet. It wanted his attention to split; it wanted the world.
"Say please," Caleb told the plate, and his left thumb dug into the caulk seam. Dry brittle gave like old promises. He put the card down for exactly the amount of time it took to get the coin out of his pocket without taking eyes off either problem. The token sat on his palm—a perfect circle of matte with the hairline ring engraved like a secret identity.
The agent saw the change and accelerated. It didn't sprint. It didn't have to. Five steps. Three.
He raised the card again and showed the ring. The agent's hands twitched, the way the human startle response would have if this were a human. Old conditioning is useful even in a fake body. It checked its reach by an inch. He used the inch and pressed the token's edge into the scored seam, levering not with strength but with stubbornness.
The plate lifted a hair, then another. Air from outside wanted the job more than glue did.
The agent committed. It came in on a line that would pin his right wrist to the parapet, own the card, and make every other noun irrelevant. He let it think it had the wrist. He slid his elbow along the stone to where wrists go to die, and the agent's hand clamped closed on wall instead of bone. Its other arm wrapped for a body lock. He dropped his hips a fraction and turned, the way you turn doors that don't fit their frames, giving it space where it wanted contact and contact where it wanted space. The card kissed the inside of the agent's forearm, ring first. The forearm flinched. The wrap fell to the level of a suggestion.
The token had a third of itself under the plate now. He flicked his thumb, felt the sharp ring bite and drag, and the plate came up with a paint-peeled sigh. Underneath, a recessed slot waited, exactly token-width, exactly token-deep. The bottom of the slot was matte and not metal. The white ring inside it was so thin it might have been an idea.
"Finally," he said.
The agent made a clean decision to be violent.
It hit him with a shoulder that belonged to men who remembered football pads. He accepted the hit with the part of his body designed for agreeing with impacts—shoulder to shoulder—and let the force travel into the parapet instead of into the token. Concrete said a small offended thing. His back foot found less gravel than it expected and readjusted.
He drove the token into the slot and felt the physics correct themselves. The coin sank flush, stopped, then rotated one precise quarter-turn under the pressure of his thumb, like a key that had always belonged to the lock it pretended not to be.
[TOKEN DEPLOYED][EXTRACTION PREPARING][HOLD POSITION: 00:45]
He laughed once, short and unmusical. "Of course I'm a statue now."
The agent didn't care about instructions he received and kept trying to write the older ones. It went for his wrist again. He gave it his forearm instead and put the card's face to the inside of its elbow, then rotated. Joint remembered dignity. The agent stepped to keep its arm.
He stepped with it. They slid along the parapet like a bad dance taught by necessity. The token's ring glimmered, a hairline of white in gray metal, satisfying as a tidy expense report.
"You can leave," he told the agent.
The agent tried to put its knee into his thigh with the kind of efficiency that gets applause in rooms without windows. He took a half-inch of distance and the knee bruised wall. It adjusted instantly, planted a palm on the parapet to push and re-angle, and risked a grab for the card with the other hand.
He gave it ring again. The fingers jerked back as if touching an old stove.
[HOLD POSITION: 00:31]
Wind rose and pawed at hair and shirt and the idea of balance. The HVACs sang a note no one asked them to. Out past the parapet, the city moved. He didn't look at it. He let the horizon be a rumor.
The agent changed tactics. Its hands became soft hooks, not grabs; it tried to drag the card toward an opening instead of snatching. He tightened his grip without tightening his forearm—small muscles instead of big ones—and let its pull be a thing his hand acknowledged while the rest of him didn't.
"Sir," he said to no one and to the idea of a detective with brown eyes, "I am holding very still."
The agent didn't like stillness. It preferred mistakes.
It tried to back-heel his ankle. He let his ankle not be there. It tried a crossface—forearm across cheekbone to turn his head and steal spine. He let his head turn and not his spine. It brought its weight forward without a plan that cared about gravity. He ducked under, rose, and found himself behind it, his chest to its back, the card flat against its sternum through cloth that wasn't cloth. He lifted the card a centimeter and then brought it down a centimeter like stamping a document.
The agent stumbled, not because physics required it but because rules had been written in rings and it remembered it was a participant in a grammar it didn't design.
[HOLD POSITION: 00:14]
He breathed. He did not count. The token's faint white circle did that for him, visible in the seam, thin as a line drawn on the inside of a lens.
The agent did the irrational thing all disciplined systems eventually try when the manual fails: it tried everything at once. Hands, shoulder, hip, a small uncontrolled noise. He shifted, held, refused to supply the failure it wanted.
The wind pulled a loose paper tag off the side of the nearest unit and took it toward sky. The tag fluttered, a dumb white rectangle in a dumb blue field, and disappeared.
[EXTRACTION LIVE]
The white ring inside the token widened like an iris opening. Not light. Direction. The air near it acquired purpose. The parapet under his hand felt subtly more correct, as if the building had received an email about its posture.
The agent felt the change. It hated the change. It tried—last try—to push him sideways, to break his feet, to own the space.
He was tired enough to be honest. He stepped off the parapet line a fraction, let it have the space, and made sure he still owned the rectangle that mattered.
Behind them, the slot whispered. The ring brightened to something that wasn't brightness but would make a different man say the word anyway.
He didn't move. He held position as instructed for once and let the system do the physics.
A sound like a big door figuring out its hinges came from the parapet plate. The token rotated itself the rest of the quarter-turn with the neat authority of an office stamp.
The agent slashed an arm across his chest in one more social lie that pretended to be a fight. He answered by setting the card to its wrist again and applying exactly the amount of pressure a rule requires.
Its hand opened involuntarily. He pushed the hand away, easy, polite. It took a step because he asked it to with his bones.
The ring completed its work.
The rooftop didn't vanish. It simplified. The air around the plate shaped itself into a throat, narrow and undeniable. The movement wasn't wind; it was permission moving sideways and then up, not suction but preference. Gravel whispered as some of it decided to be elsewhere.
"Hold," he told himself, and found he had been holding for years.
The agent lost balance for the first time. Not because of him. Because the rooftop voted. It pinwheeled a hand in reflex and caught nothing. It made the mistake of trying to catch the card. He gave it ring one last time. The flinch looked like a man remembering a childhood stove and a dumb choice.
[EXTRACTION: NOW]
He let go of the parapet and didn't fall. He let the doorway that wasn't air and wasn't light take him. He kept the card at his chest because contract is contract, and he felt the world change its mind about him again.
Behind, something hit the parapet with inconvenient force. The concrete under his palm jumped as if it had been surprised, and dust baptized his face in a small gritty blessing as the roof chose to be one thing and not another.