The step that cut off retreat lands and holds. The next is a lie that almost isn't. Wind lifts his jacket as if to show the river where to bite.
He hugs the deep-cycle against his chest and lets elbows carry the weight so his hands can work. Tape bites the finger under the makeshift funnel ring; cold creeps from fingertip to knuckle like a slow blade.
Five ties. Don't rent the rest of the bridge space in your head.
Heel, ball. Ball, heel. The bolt on tie three is proud of itself; it wants his foot. He sets mid-sole to wood instead and slides past the ego.
Behind, the chorus finds a way to agree. They pool at the truss mouth and pick new leaders by who fits first. A laugh tries on the pilot's cadence and almost gets it. Someone says 'fantasy' and the word sifts into dust between syllables.
The river below turns in its sleep. Something big passes under the span without surfacing; it changes the conversation of water.
His knee skims a cross-member. Splinters lift and bake pain into skin. He ignores the itch and counts ties with breath: one on inhale, one on exhale, hold through the next emptiness, don't look—
He looks. People look. Dark folds on dark. The river is a carpet knife rolled the wrong way.
A tie out ahead leans wrong, sagging toward the missing deck. He can step long and pray or make the tie honest. Honest wins.
He eases the battery to the rail head, keeps one hand on it, and saws a length of hose from his coil with the pry bar's beak. Two zip ties bite fast. He loops the hose under the rail and over his wrist, a tether that will stop a fall from being permanent at the cost of a shoulder.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He leans, toes finding the soft tie, and plants the pry bar across two sleepers as a traveler's cane. The tie creaks, thinks about surrender, and then remembers its job.
Bone on metal behind: first pursuer tries rails like balance beams. It bends knees wide, hips crooked, arms up, a gymnast taught by a photograph. It is better at pretending than being.
Rhett sights through the wrapped funnel, draws a breath slow enough to feel ribs argue, and snaps a tight bead at the thing's lead ankle.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The ankle unlearns its day. The body pinwheels. Knees clip rail. The gap teaches a lesson in gravity.
He resets his feet and moves. The deep-cycle shifts and wants to take him with it; he hugs harder until breath is a flattened thing. Tape cuts the finger again; cold drills down the bone.
Two more ties. A cross-bolt where he wants a flat. He adjusts step mid-air and lands too far forward. Wood flexes. A nail flashes out of the grain and tears denim without finding meat.
Voices stack on the lattice until they stop meaning words and start meaning hunger practiced as language. A glass-rat darts along the rail and springs for his knee. He bats it with the battery—just a kiss of mass. It hits the chord of wind and vanishes in glitter that is mostly wet.
The sagging tie ahead yawns. He sets the pry bar like a mast and takes the next step long, heel barely owning wood. The tether goes taut; shoulder fireflies; he swings the battery through and sets it on the far tie with a sound his heart hates.
The river moves again. Not up—sideways—like something big just chose a new lane. He can feel that choice through steel.
Three ties to the plate where decking still knows how to be floor. Rails hum; he tries not to believe it.
The first chorus thing to treat the rails like beams recovers from the fall of its friend by being something else. It lowers onto all fours and steps sideways like a crab taught by a priest. Not elegant. Committed. He takes the elbow this time—a hinge he respects in himself and despises in others.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The arm jerks and under-rotates; the body kisses rail with teeth and hands the river another problem.
His finger stings colder, knuckle numb now. He flexes it once to keep the joint a joint and not a piece of glass.
He clears the last bad tie and spills onto plate. Decking groans but stays. He drops to a knee, muscles burning from calorie math he didn't get to finish at dinner, and hauls the deep-cycle onto safer steel.
The funnel ring has chewed skin. He peels tape, reties short with gritted teeth, and leaves a twist of cloth as padding that will shift at exactly the wrong moment later. He knows this and accepts it.
Second battery? It sits back at the mouth, strapped to the cart like a promise he can't keep without a partner. He imagines the time cost measured in ties and pursuers and chooses to live instead of be noble.
He makes himself small behind a gusset and checks lanes:
East: the truss runs into a berm and then a cutting that slides the line toward tanks and low sheds. Wind pushes his scent that way—bad for him, good for dragging lures off the span once they can sniff where morning might be.
West: the bell keeps preaching. Red eyes throb in a cadence bones obey.
Below: water braids around pylons and forgets names. Something big shears the surface without climbing it.
Three of them reach mid-span. Each trusts a different wrong theory of balance. He answers the one hugging a rail, because commitment deserves an answer. A snap at the elbow. Another at the wrist when the first doesn't persuade.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The body unhooks and goes quiet the way people go quiet underwater before they remember bubbles.
The other two adapt. Skin on steel begins to sing a friction song that will call more if he lets it play.
He pockets the finger, lets it thaw thirty breaths, and uses the pry bar instead. Two fast hacks at a diagonal brace with bolts gone red. The brace shifts, complains, and surrenders a finger's width of rigidity—enough to make the span feel untrustworthy to things that hate surprise.
[MECHANICAL REPAIR (PASSIVE)]
Weight joins from below. The truss hum deepens. The handrail twitches as if alive.
'Rhett,' a voice says from the span—gentle, educated, tired. A breath later it belongs to the headset girl and isn't gentle.
He gives the voice nothing and moves.
He shoulders the deep-cycle and runs bent, keeping rail at hip and river a rumor. Plate yields to fresh ties that have known fewer winters. The cutting ahead tightens sound until his own breath feels loud enough to own.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
At the berm's far end a ladder drops to ballast. He tests the top rung with a heel, hip-checks the deep-cycle across his chest, and goes down sideways to save knees. Gravel slides like an argument; he wins by not arguing back.
The cutting shelters him long enough to buy ten meters. Ahead, the right-of-way funnels between a block wall and stacked pallets wrapped in plastic that the wind has translated into flags. Beyond that: a narrow access gate chained, with a padlock that still believes headlines matter.
He sets the battery down, checks the ring's tape, and sights through the bite at the lock's belly. The bead is dime-small and stubborn. The lock tries to be admirable. It ends up being open.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He threads the gate into a low service lot stippled with puddles. The line carries east along an embankment. A small steel bungalow squats ahead, older paint blistered, door ajar on bad hinges.
Back glance: the truss holds a line of problems. Two are across; more are trying. The bridge hums in a key that makes teeth feel tall.
Inside the bungalow the room is smaller: one battery bank, a relay box with no cover, a diagram taped to the wall with tape that learned to be tar. He doesn't need the diagram; he needs the bus bar. Deep-cycle down. Jump boxes in series. Zip ties clack. Copper kisses copper and flinches. He proof-spins the drill on low. The chuck turns like an old animal remembering how.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He saves the juice. One bell preaching behind is sermon enough.
A tremor climbs the wall through his palms. Not footsteps. Frame resonance.
He peeks from the doorway. The truss darkens as if the river took a breath nobody offered it. Three pursuers spill onto ties that don't know them. One skitters with new confidence and could be a problem in twenty seconds.
He shoulders the deep-cycle and sprints the embankment's curve. A side track dives into brush and dies against a bumper post; the main holds straight. He uses a signal mast as windbreak and collects breath like a rare mineral, then gives it back because minutes build plans and kills build nothing.
His finger aches like glass. He shakes heat into it and gets pain back. You still have the pry bar. You still have legs. You still have minutes.
A dog detaches from brush ahead, ribs laddered. It looks once, decides he isn't worth tuition, and ghosts away. He runs on the thought that something still knows how to choose like that.
The cutting opens to a low trestle over a drainage ditch packed with reeds. The ditch carries a trickle that smells like the river if the river were bored. Beyond: tanks, chain-link, a service road that angles southeast—the way morning might decide to be born if it remembered how.
He sets the deep-cycle on the trestle and inventories: one big battery, jump boxes, hose, brass regulator, wire, fuses, pry bar, drill, ring tape, zip ties, a finger that will complain, a body that will carry anyway.
Behind, the truss begins to talk in harmonic tongues. Not collapse; disagreement. The chorus shifts weight like a crowd asking a bridge for a favor. The river, somewhere under stone and steel, chooses to come up and see who's making noise.
He moves. A strap mouth he knotted poorly yawns. A jump box bounces free, skitters to the trestle's edge, and stops with the bored trickle making little noises at it.
He can let it go and save a minute and a risk. Or keep the box that might open a door he hasn't met.
He plants a boot, feels wood answer, and reaches. Wind takes breath and refuses to return it on his schedule. The chorus clears the cutting mouth behind. The bridge hum fattens. He extends two fingers—the bad one and the good one—and touches plastic.
The plank flexes.
He commits the hand.