The shutter's lip is a black ruler laid across the world. He goes belly-low and lets the teeth take paint off the straps instead of skin. Sparks hustle backward. Gravel taps the deck like rain that forgot to cool.
Hands lean from the parapet, curious, not kind. A knife skitters along the lip and tries to make the opening smaller out of spite. He keeps his chin down and his wrists flat and lets the speeder talk in its thin, patient note.
A palm drops to push his head. He sights through the tape-wrapped ring without lifting his cheek and spends air on knuckle.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Bone revises its job. Fingers vanish. The hand goes away, hauling breath with it.
Halfway under, glue spit strings for the battery strap again, white and hungry. He opens the brass regulator and gives it wind; the bond scabs and lifts in papery curls. A face dips, mouth too even, eyes bright as coins under dirty water. It talks in a voice that used to belong to someone he'd have trusted.
'Rhett.'
He answers with steel, not conversation. The pry bar's crown meets teeth. The mouth forgets how to be a tool.
Light changes tenor. The channel beyond widens; the shutter clears his spine with a lick of metal and then is behind him, the sound of clearance shrinking into the kind of memory that shakes later.
The trench keeps a damp wind. Concrete sweats. Something with too many elbows runs along the parapet shadow and tries to stay his mirror.
He gives the motor a measured yes and lets the car roll. The rails shine truer here, as if kept honest by a hand that signs forms. Chalk marks on the ties say EAST and OASIS in different penmanship, as if two cities share the corridor.
A figure steps out from a maintenance niche ahead. Boots, harness, visor, a cable looped like a lasso. The weight shift is right. Human. Tired. The visor hides eyes and makes him a problem instead of a person.
'Stop,' the visor says. The voice is female and sanded down to nothing useful. 'Hands where I see them. East post, checkpoint.'
'On iron,' he says. 'Can't stop.'
'Stop or be stopped.'
The cable snaps across the rail like a tongue. He points a thumb's width early and gives the weld a new biography.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Wire coughs loose. The loop dies at her boots and makes her flinch in a way that admits she didn't want to do this. Another shadow moves at the parapet with the posture of a man who's waiting to deserve a shot.
He keeps the car straight, palm up a second so they see he understands orders. 'East,' he mouths. Two fingers at ballast, the old sign. 'Bell west—use it.'
She looks past him toward the echo behind: chorus finding the trench and deciding to become stairs. The visor tilts a fraction. She decides to live and throws the loop away from the wheel for him. Weight shift returns to human.
He doesn't gift thanks; he gifts motion and lets her keep face.
The trench lets out into a small yard throat bordered by containers turned into walls. A hand-painted sign at a break in the stacks reads OASIS EAST POST, black on yellow, underlined twice. A floodlight tower sleeps, cord cut and coiled neat. Somebody here knows how to make noise and how to keep it in a box.
He keeps the main. The speeder rides the frog with a neat little click that feels like being allowed. A man behind a shipping door shoulder-checks a hoist; a woman with a radio says numbers; none of them step into his lane. He is a weather event they planned for.
Beyond the stacks, the line crosses a ditch with reeds and the bored smell of old water. A bridge mimic crouches on the guard wall, copied from a photograph of a runner at the blocks, knee forward, fingers hooked. It jumps to land where his neck plans to be and dies on schedule when the hinge that makes the pose work changes careers.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He doesn't watch it learn gravity. He watches iron.
A pallet barricade tries to be a habit at the next crossing. Welds hold it brave until they don't. Wood becomes splinters and a rumor; screws ping the deck and then forget they mattered.
The motor wants better fuel and gets it. He nurses the choke and the little engine forgives him for everything but his taste in terrain.
A siren barks twice somewhere behind and then shuts its mouth. The chorus answers themselves with a choir that sounds like large animals learning to talk. He gives the cut more yes.
The rail pinches into an underpass whose concrete shoulders shine with fresh scrapes. A flare burns guttering red on a box, teeth marks in the cap. The man who lit it is learning that courage and hands don't always know each other. He sights where his wrist levers and changes the outcome; the flare slides off the box, spins, and drools sparks into harmlessness.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Past the underpass, chain-link on both sides, the world narrowed to a letter slot. The fence bows where bodies tried to migrate through it all at once. Zip-tied warning boards read NO ENTRY and then stop being convincing.
He hears the river's cousin again—broad drainage rather than channel—off to the right. The world cools in his mouth. Two blocks ahead, a steel catwalk crosses above the line from building to building. Shadow moves along it with the conveyor-belt patience of security walking the night shift. Human, or rehearsing.
The catwalk sprouts a net. It drops lazy and mean, hung on a cable that runs down to a throwstand disguised under traffic cones. The net remembers fishing when everything else forgot. He aims at the cone line and spends the weld that ties cable to bracket.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Cable shears. Net falls crooked, catches its own corners, then kisses the deck with all the menace of a blanket. He faces the hinge where the catwalk's panel wants to swing down and make a wall out of a walk, but it doesn't; whoever runs this corridor ran out of batteries before they ran out of ideas.
A radio on the catwalk says 'East post, corridor clear, rider passed,' and another voice answers without vowels. Oasis lives; it isn't his.
The line bends around a fuel lot where tanks squat white and dented. A two-wheeled dolly lies on its back with one bearing gone and a mouth of hose tie-wired to its frame. He slows just enough to snatch the hose and a pair of clamps from a bin with his left hand while his right keeps the speeder honest. The grab costs a heartbeat. He buys it because a door later will ask for proof he prepared.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
Wind turns; the smell of glue comes with it. The lure under the deck is new, small, enthusiastic; it learns to be a wedge and stuffs itself against a tie so his wheel has to climb. He drags the regulator's hose across its teeth and de-bonds the grin; the pry bar edits the rest. The car stutters and then forgives him again.
Up ahead a concrete berm shoulders the rails into a trench that wasn't in the plan before the plan became survival. The trench mouth wears another shutter, bent, trimmed, proud of how little room it allows. Above it, silhouettes lean as if to help. Beyond the lip: oxygen changes tone and the daylight turns blue around the edge the way it does when you're about to do something irreversible.
He tugs the strap one hole tighter. He lays the bar under his ribs, cheek down to timber warm from friction. He gives the motor a yes that only knows forward.
Hands reach, curious and hungry. He does not shoot them; he has no fingers to spare. He gives them knuckles and they go away.
The teeth comb the strap. One catches the buckle and commits violence. The strap stretches, almost goes, and then decides not to. He makes himself an argument as long as the deck and as soft as a blade.
The lip touches skin where the wood breathes under him. Oil and iron salt his tongue. The space left for him is arithmetic, not mercy. The generator note somewhere east goes steady and low in his head the way a heart should when it knows its job.
He threads the slot and comes out in a blue light that belongs to arc lamps and disciplined fuel. The world widens into a plaza of concrete poured level enough to make a spirit carpenter smile. To the left: containers dressed as walls, stacked three high, paint scrubbed clean and stenciled with arrows. To the right: a line of flatbeds, some with towers, some with tanks, all their cords coiled neat. People move with human weight—there is no rehearsal here—but they keep their distance, as if a man on iron ...
'Hold,' someone calls from a bay, not a command so much as an offer to misunderstand.
He doesn't stop. He can't. He makes his face forget how to be apology and keeps the line.
A boy in a hard hat takes one step toward the rail and a woman hauls him back by the collar with a professional arm. The boy glares at the world with all the anger of someone who was told no for the right reason and hasn't yet learned how to be grateful.
Rhett gives them nothing to remember but the sound of a small motor doing exactly what it's for.
The far end of the plaza narrows into two rails shouldered by bollards and a doorway of air. Above that doorway someone has painted a white disk and a black line through it. No smoking. No flame. No excuses. The smell becomes good diesel burning right; the generator he heard exists and is not an idea. He could ask for fuel. He could bargain. He could steal better and get shot in the back by a rule he didn't bother to read.
He keeps east because not stopping is what kept him alive long enough to have options.
A last sign at the exit reads EAST. Under it, somebody in paint-patient letters has added STAY ON THE LINE.
He does. The rails slide him back out of community and into the city's older alphabet where ruin writes in big block capitals. Distance grows where duty might have been. Behind him the plaza swallows its own light and becomes rumor.
Ahead, the corridor drops into a cutting that smells like wet iron. Water crawls the wall in thin black inks. The speeder's note gets louder against stone, then small again. A bell lives somewhere to the west, clapping once and then shutting up, as if someone back there learned the same trick in a different life.
The cutting kinks. On the far side, a coil pad, gravel carefully leveled, waits empty under a boom that will never move again. He could stop and breathe. He could collapse into the calm and pretend it's safe. He keeps the iron.
Below the next overpass, the world turns to wind and grit. The chorus finds the trench at his back and learns how to be a river. Their patience loses shape and becomes push. He hears them as a pressure behind the sound of his motor and the truth of his bones.
He checks the lash one more time without looking. He drinks air like it might run out. He gives the deck more yes. The city raises another shutter with no right to still work and invites him to be measured again.
He takes the invitation steady, not brave. He goes flat, not low, and lets the teeth read him like a page that refuses to tear.
Behind him, somebody yells 'Ride the light,' and means it like a plan. In front of him, the world narrows to arithmetic and he does the math the way men did before computers learned to do it faster: with breath, with inches, with faith that wood will be wood for one sentence more.