The knob ticks. A breath on the other side tastes the gap beneath the door as if it could drink him through it.
'Rhett. You there?'
He eases the pry bar to the floor, shoulders the backpack, and shifts left so the fridge sits between him and the lock. A match head goes under the hinge plate with a sliver of foil and a ruler bracing it so the metal won't flex. Not a fire trap - just a flash to mark a breach. Two short bursts of aerosol along the jamb lay a solvent stink he hopes smells like a place nothing edible nests.
'Open up,' the voice says, patient as a banker. 'A way to ride the light.'
He sights along his index finger at the hairline gap where the latch catches. He waits until the pulse in that finger syncs with the tick of his watch.
The latch clicks again.
He breathes in. The air on his fingertip tightens.
A dry bark punches through the seam. Wood splinters. Something on the other side makes a sound no throat should practice.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The door hammers the deadbolt. The match head under the hinge plate sparks white, pops, dies. Another hit. Hinge screws sing.
He keeps the finger up and taps again. A clean thunk, and the top hinge spits its last screw across the room.
The door sags.
'That's new,' the voice says from too low to be a mouth near the lock.
It crawls under the door the way a person goes under wire: shoulder first, chin dragging, forearms hauling mass through. Hoodie, jeans - clothes trying to cage something that doesn't agree with their sizes. The hood's drawstrings have cut grooves into the neck as if the wearer swallowed them and pulled tight from the inside. The face knows his name; the mouth is a damp sketch of one.
'Rhett,' it says again, and now the sound does come from that mouth. The lips don't match the words.
He fires and misses by a thumb's width. The air slug tears a V out of the cabinet and turns the paper towels behind it into a snow of lint. The hood falls back. No hair. Scalp glossy like meat lacquered for a museum.
It comes fast.
He doesn't try to muscle it. He hurts it where mechanics fail. He steps across its wrists, brings the pry bar down hard on the outside of a knee, and drops his weight.
The joint pops.
The noise it makes has more than one pitch. It claws at his shin and the hand keeps the shape of his leg for half a second before remembering it's a hand at all.
He shoves the table into it and rides the momentum, trying to be heavier than he is. The edge chews ribs. It laughs - a perfect copy of someone who liked him once - and pushes back with more strength than those angles should allow.
He lets it shove him two steps, then steps aside. The table surges past empty of his weight; the thing stumbles into the space he left and he smashes the pry bar across its head.
'Rhett,' it says softly, like asking a favor.
He hits again. Bone caves. Teeth turn into a field. The mouth unzips wider than the hinge in the jaw should allow, and a second mouth inside tries to decide what to be. He sends wind into the question.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The inner mouth buckles. The back of the skull pulses and fails to remember its old shape. It topples. He rides it down into the corner he prepped with solvent, buries the pry bar at the base of the skull, shifts grip, and does it again. It trembles. It tries to keep trying.
He plants a knee on the neck, wedges the bar into the soft hinge behind the jaw, and levers until something lets go with a sound that makes the air feel fat.
Silence settles.
Elsewhere in the building, something hears anyway. A door on another floor opens and closes with deliberate care.
He counts eight, then ten. Breath steadies. The bone-deep cold in his finger blooms into heat again.
[SPEED: LV.0 29/30]
He blinks the panel away. The bar is stuck; he wrenches it free. The hoodie moves like whatever wore it has decided to contract and stay small. He peels cloth back with the bar's claw. Resin lattice. Thread under skull. The face knows his name because the bones have learned to move without asking.
His stomach tightens and stays where it belongs.
Cleanup. Fast.
Drawstrings off. Hem sliced to swaddle the worst of the head. Chips and tooth swept into a cereal box and taped shut. Solvent along the smear where the glue-rope struck the fridge; it hisses and dies. Spray the corner, the boards, the lock. Roll the broken door with the body inside like a carpet.
The stairwell whispers. Not wind. Weight.
He shoulders the pack, cinches straps until they bite, and opens the laundry closet. False panel out. The chute mouths black.
He hesitates long enough to inventory the room he built into somewhere a person could still be. Then he presses that thought flat. Waiting underground is just a slower kind of dying.
Rope to the anchor. Rope into the dark. Hoodie-roll against the jamb to mask the hole if eyes glance in.
Cold breath rises from the shaft, lint-sour. Far under that - metal. Movement. He can see the basement in his head: cracked tile, carts, the service corridor, the workshop on three, the mail lockers after that -
'Rhett,' a woman says from the hall, not the same woman as before. A different laugh in the word.
He wraps the rope once and goes. The chute skins his shoulders. Heat runs out the soles of his feet into the building's throat. He drops two meters, hits a bracket, stops, tucks, listens.
Footsteps in his room. Counting. The weight pauses at the closet. Solvent hides people-smell, not intention.
'Ride the light,' the new voice says, and the shaft itself carries the words like a string.
He lets another bracket slide by. Darkness thickens into fabric. He finds the next rung with his shoes and drops again. The basement hatch admits a square of a deeper dark. He jams his boots, wedges, reaches with the pry bar, and tests the grate.
Locked.
He levels his finger at the padlock, finds center, and exhales until he is empty of anything but use.
A whisper of air becomes a decision inside the lock.
He swings the grate open a hand's width, listens, then finishes it slow. He lands in a crouch on tile that used to be white and is now a moon's skin.
The basement hums. Not electricity - mass. Laundry carts sit like hulks in harbor. He moves between them with his breath in his teeth and his finger still cold.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He threads into the service corridor, shoulders the fire door with a push that convinces instead of forces, and catches it so it doesn't clap. The slope wants to hurry him. The building's heartbeats talk through his soles. Far above, something finds the closet and puts its mouth over the hole he left and tastes the air.
He turns that knowledge into speed.
The workshop on level three is three turns and a stair flight away. Between him and it: a vending alcove with a sheet of glass spidered into a lattice. A figure behind that glass, not a reflection.
He trusts glass more than open space. Glass tells you what it wants when it breaks.
He keeps to the woolly dark inside the alcove and watches the corridor's angle as if geometry can lie. The figure keeps watching too. When it moves, he moves. When he moves, it moves first.
Not a mirror. A man behind glass in the break room where the vending machines used to be. He must have filed him under furniture at first glance. The man's face sits wrong on his bones. He has written around the room in one long sentence with a marker until the marker bled out, crawling over window, rail, poster about dryer lint fires.
He doesn't read it. He doesn't need to.
The man opens his mouth and nothing comes out, radio between stations. Then something does, and it is Rhett's name, and then the headset girl's laugh, and then Mr. Wynn saying 'fantasy' like a prayer.
Rhett sinks until his calves own his weight. The pry bar slides into his belt. He keeps the finger up. He doesn't make knives out of glass.
Off. The service stairs breathe dust. He rolls his weight onto the outside edges of his feet so the steps answer in paper instead of voice. At the landing he stops with his hand on the hinge and listens like he has to hear himself think.
The stairs above murmur. Not feet. Tongues.
He doesn't waste the breath he has left.
Through level three's door. Run. The body remembers how. He hits the workshop, shoulders it open, and closes it behind him with a kiss of metal on metal.
One lean into the cool of the door. Inventory by touch: motor housings stacked like loaves; wire spools; solder boxes; a battery bench; a mask he can modify; a wheeled crate he'll hate towing and tow anyway.
The hum in the walls grows teeth.
He locks the door. Braces it with the crate. Loads the pack blind. Finds the light switch and leaves it where it is.
A palm flattens on the other side of the door.
He checks for a second exit. There is one: a delivery hatch with a dead lift. Dead in a building without power - unless you are the power.
He lays his hand on the motor casing and listens the way he listened to the hair dryer. The map unfolds under his skin: windings, brushes, bearings gummy with lint, belts that want to work if something will tell them how.
He smiles without showing teeth.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)][MECHANICAL REPAIR (PASSIVE)]
'Ride the light,' says a chorus outside, and the door flexes like a chest.
He feeds the motor a breath and the lift shudders awake.