Sparks sifted around their shoulders while the dock decided whom the car belonged to. The agent came with empty hands and an honest plan: make his center into a handle. He let it take his sleeve and made the sleeve a lie. The rectangle rose a heartbeat ahead of fingers; the ring kissed tendon; the hand forgot its job.
The clamps pressed, pads settling with the tidy malice of machinery. Rubber met steel with a long, careful sigh. The doors held an inch apart like a mouth caught between words. White lived in the gap, not light so much as direction, whispering its preference onto his skin.
He kept his boot wedged and his spine braced to steel. The agent tried the near-old trick again—forearm across the throat to bend him into cooperation. He turned his jaw to bone and not windpipe, took the pressure as data, and answered with a small, precise rotation under its wrist, the kind joints respect because joints like working tomorrow.
The ring under tendon made the fingers open by rule.
The dock answered with choreography. Above the doorway, an indicator strip went from mute silver to a thin, expectant white. The ceiling rail hummed and the second clamp crept closer, its pads articulating as if tasting the air. Thin circles glowed on the dock wall in neat pairs, shoulder height and knee height, waiting the way forms wait for signatures.
"Of course you want me to sign," he said.
The agent heard the sentence as lack of attention and punished it. It drove a shoulder into his back to paste him across the seam, timing the bump to the clamp's hiss so the machine would say it had done the hurting. He bent the way hits bend people and didn't let it finish the thought. The card crossed his chest and found the inside of a wrist on instinct; the ring touched nerve and unmade the grip. He used the inch that bought and doubled it with posture.
The dock's indicators pulsed in a quiet pattern, left column then right, knee then shoulder. A sequence asking to be read.
He kept his eyes on the not-face in front of him and learned the rhythm sideways. Left knee, left shoulder, right knee, right shoulder—four beats, then a hold, a simple dance that wanted a hand.
He didn't have one to spare unless he found it.
"Move," he told himself, and did.
He slid his wedged boot back to buy space and sucked the door an extra half-inch open with the leverage. White tugged harder. The pads creaked in complaint. He got his foot out and the seam snapped another quarter inch toward shut, the clamp asserting custody. He let it try. He drove his hip forward and set the rectangle to the door's low inner circle, a quick stamp. The circle cooled, dimmed. The door remembered shame and froze in that not-open, not-closed truth.
The agent read the flicker at his hip. It abandoned the pleasant choreography and reached: two hands, perfect circle, the shape of a world wanting his smaller one. He didn't give that geometry room to exist. He went narrow—elbows in, sternum behind matte—and let the ring kiss tendon once, then again, a double tap that turned greed into spasms. Empty hands found air.
He made a hand free by not wasting the moment. Left knee marker first: thumbed with the heel of his palm as his right hand kept the rectangle between bodies. The circle went out under his touch like an ember he had denied oxygen. Left shoulder next—quick rub with knuckles through the gap, the dock marker cooling to a contented gray.
Right knee was farther. He had to lean and he hated leaning in front of something that loved it when people did. He stole a half-step by baiting the agent forward, then and only then slid low. The fake body took the bait with a credible punch for his ear. He was already not there. The ring nipped tendon and the fist missed on principle. Knuckles reached the right knee circle. It dimmed. Right shoulder last. He stretched up across the seam with his left hand and felt the clamp's pad brush silk against his sleeve like a threat in satin. His fingers found the ring and pressed.
White steadied along the frame.
The dock tone changed from "asking" to "expecting." The pads broadened their pressure, sealing hardness into a new go. The car shrugged under his ribs.
The agent understood that this was the part where it lost if it didn't cheat. It let go of the idea of taking and tried something baser—shove him into the mouth so the dock could do theft for it. It crowded all at once—hips, shoulders, weight couched in ugly truth.
He let himself be a hinge that opened the wrong way. Elbows inside. Card high. He took the shove into the lintel instead of the white and fed it back through synthetic sternum. The pads flexed around them like lips around a stubborn sentence. Sparks crawled lazily again across rubber and steel and hair. His skin prickled and decided to continue being skin anyway.
He needed the sequence's end. He didn't know if there was an end.
The indicator strip above the gap decided for him. It printed a word so thin a person could have missed it if a person hadn't been hoping for it.
READY.
The second clamp finished rolling into place at the gangway and settled its pads with more authority than the first. Something heavy in the rail system locked with a snick a spine recognizes. The car went still in a way motion can't fake.
A flat metal plate slid out from the bay wall like a bureau drawer and presented a slot with the modesty of a priest. It was token-sized. He had no token left to give. A smaller ring glowed beside it, white as milk.
"Fine," he said, and brought the rectangle to the ring.
A wash traveled the doorway—the breath machines take before they choose. The slot retracted, unimpressed. The ring stayed lit but put on a little blink, as if embarrassed to have asked the wrong man for a coin.
The car's floor lifted under his left foot and dropped under his right a width of a fingernail. The dock was aligning tolerances, or perhaps the world was stepping on a scale it feared. The agent chose that wobble as opportunity and looped an arm behind his knee to take it from him.
The ring kissed tendon, brisk and mean. Fingers twitched that couldn't twitch because they weren't fingers and the knee stayed his.
The overhead ad frame tried one more joke and flashed a headline again: WHITE, stark and institutional. He didn't bless it with the dignity of a glance.
A soft chuff issued from somewhere behind the bulkhead—the sound of a pump making up its mind. The indicator strip filled with a bar that walked from left to right. Two dots remained unfilled.
He took one for him.
"Let go," he told the door's inner low circle, and the door's inner low circle obeyed, extinguishing whatever appetite had been attached to it. The bar on the indicator crept a dot and waited.
The agent had learned a good lesson badly. It stopped trying to take the rectangle and instead tried to own bone and breath. It came in to pin his elbow and starve his lungs. He didn't give it lungs. He stole a place between arm and chest, set the card to the inside of elbow and rotated tiny. The arm opened. He breathed anyway because pettiness is religious in small spaces.
He looked for the second dot. The dock offered no kindness. The only other live circle inside was the tiny one sunk into the door's far jamb, opposite him. He would need to cross the seam to reach it or ask the agent to help.
"Help me," he told the liar in front of him, and made it so.
He stepped into the not-face and gave it his weight—just enough to move both their centers one inch into white. Pads strained; rubber smudged rubber. The dock reacted like a gate taught good manners. The far jamb moved that inch closer to him. He pressed the ring to the tiny circle while the fake body grappled because sometimes procedure blesses violence.
The last dot filled. The indicator strip blinked and resolved to a neat, satisfied line.
The clamps let breath out. Pressure eased a measurable fraction. The white beyond the seam shifted deeper, not brighter. Direction gathered.
A line printed above the gap: HOLD.
"I am," he said, and held.
The dock made a sound like a lock turning somewhere inside a throat. The pads retracted a hair. The door seals relaxed toward open by an act of will not their own. Air tugged with intent, less preference now than promise.
The agent tried to go where promise lived. He bounced it off the frame with his shoulder and kept the rectangle at sternum height because faith is not a strategy. The car trembled once, hard, as if something under it had bitten something else under it, and then stopped pretending it wasn't finished with this part.
The doors opened to the width of a body and waited for the correct noun.
White breathed on his teeth.
"After you," he told the problem and didn't mean it.
It came anyway, because habits read politeness as admission. He fed it their combined inertia and turned so that his spine was not the first thing white touched. The ring kissed tendon again. Hands opened as rules require. He pivoted around its arm, inside its chest, made a very small choice with hips that converted forward into aside, and introduced not-flesh to the door edge in a way that convinced not-bone to rethink enthusiasm.
He stepped. One heel into white, then the second. The pads didn't compress him; they remembered their job and pretended to be furniture.
The agent recoiled into the car and spent a furious, economical second choosing between pursuit and pride. Its hands flexed. They chose nothing useful. It tried to cross the seam with arrogance instead of permission.
The dock remembered the word READY and changed it to NO without needing letters. The boundary solidified into the kind of certainty you can test with your face. The agent hit that certainty with shoulders drawn and discovered physics had lawyers.
He didn't watch it argue; he couldn't afford curiosity. The corridor beyond was a narrow, glossy throat with printed foot patterns aimed ahead. His shoes found one and then the next. The ring marks along the walls tasted his presence and did not ask for more.
Behind him, the car breathed one more engineering sigh and began to slide away on the clamps' rails, a centimeter at a time, reclaiming itself from the dock or being reclaimed—there was no point assigning verbs to machines. The doors folded with the tidy satisfaction of clerk work completed.
He kept walking until the white narrowed into a smaller decision and his hand found a vertical pad that wanted a palm. He set the card there instead. The pad cooled. A panel ahead parted like a lateral eyelid, slow and neat, revealing a rectangle of honest daylight too bright to belong to this system.
He didn't step through yet. He listened. No new footsteps. No dull pipe whisper. No HAZARD, at least not of the kind with wrists.
He looked down at the matte rectangle in his palm and then at the printed footfalls leading on, small ghost shoes marching toward a sun.
"Okay," he said, to the only witness that mattered here, and put his weight into the threshold.