The lift leaf is halfway and sulking, tank bellies riding the main like a dare. The crossbar hangs low across the frames, chains humming with weight and decision. He is already flat to timber; breath thins to a rule; ribs learn the deck again. The lash holds. He spends posture and takes the seam the world swore didn't exist.
A tank's ladder cage comes—bolts, rungs, the stink of old diesel. The bridge kicks, climbing a thumb as the hoist takes slack. He sights past the ladder at the crossbar's near chain where a plate weld gleams cleaner than the rest and buys himself a breath.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Coin-hard air drills the weld. The chain coughs a link; the crossbar sags a hand's breadth. He threads under as the bridge breathes up. The strap kisses teeth and keeps faith. His cheek takes splinters not his mouth. He is arithmetic and stubbornness and a deck that likes him.
Midleaf wind rises. The lift's live chains sing high. Human silhouettes on each bank haul on handwheels that translate sweat to law. A catwalk figure lifts a net, then drops it again because a radio says 'After rider.' Policy, not mercy. That is enough.
He clears the rail joint at the heel block with a hop that isn't bravery so much as refusal. The span keeps lifting in slow inches because the hoist didn't get the memo about anecdotes. He edges the speeder over grating slick with dew and makes for centerline where rails still remember being level.
The pivot house window opens. A woman with headphones leans out into wind, throws him a look that could be anger or faith from this distance, and points down hard. Bridge dogs.
He lets the deck coast, shoulders the door with a hip, and bolts into the house. The ring gear mutters. Four pawls sit proud, waiting to drop into teeth as soon as alignment says please. If they fall now, the span stops wrong and everybody dies politely.
'Hold dogs!' she calls to no one he can see. 'Wheelmen keep it steady!' Her radio answers itself, vowels clipped into duty.
He plants the pry bar under the first pawl and keeps it from falling into truth before truth has a home. The wheelmen grind at the handwheel until rails find rails and the leaf sighs onto heel blocks. He lets pawls down one, two, three, four, each with a clack that means rules live here whether people do or not.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)]
He is running before gratitude invents a sentence. The far frames show their teeth. He takes the slot the sagging chain left him and lets sparks comb back off the strap in a tail of brief stars. The crossbar's belly kisses his ribs like punctuation he didn't ask for.
On the far end a man in a vest half raises a palm. He shows the old palm back and keeps iron.
A derailer shoe lurks ten ties out, tongue cocked to ruin small wheels. He doesn't gift it a story worth telling.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Latch blinks. Tongue flops. The speeder hums over honest steel. Shade under the road deck spits glue toward the lash like it wants to adopt him. He opens the brass regulator and gives hiss along strap; the bond scabs to dandruff; a pry-bar kiss edits the hand that thought it was a clamp.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He runs the viaduct through crosswind that tries to write its name on his jacket. Small. True. Keep the note. Below, cars sleep in rows, flags stiff on mirrors. The city to the west argues with itself; order fades back into the old alphabet of ruin.
Rails slide him into a shallow cut where posters have become ghosts. Above, a pedestrian bridge rattles its chain-link whenever the wind remembers it. A cable has been dressed across the gauge with more hope than math. He puts the U-bolt back into the past and keeps moving.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The cut opens. A sign on a bungalow door says WHITE DIST → in neat hand and, below in a different hand, a swallowed word that might have been ENTRY or MERCY. He doesn't test which. The chorus behind meets the lift and frames and discovers politics; their sound goes from push to committee. Not his meeting.
A truss vibrates like a tuned wire. Midspan something small and eager drags itself up between tie ends with glue-bright hands; he gives it hiss and edits its wrist until it learns being a hand is a job with requirements.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
On the far bank the rail pinches down between warehouse backs and a concrete wall rubbed shiny at hip height by a thousand decisions. Chalk on a tie says EAST and then something else written over itself until the letters turned to paste. He keeps posture, keeps note, keeps the deck the size of a truth.
The next gate is a crossbar in a pair of frames with a slot that exists in theory. A throw man on each side watches him and waits for the radio to become permission. He shows left palm and taps two fingers to ballast. 'East.'
One nods: a full sentence in a small gesture. The bar pauses its drop. He threads the slot with ribs ready to sign in blood if math is wrong.
Teeth comb strap; buckle chooses loyalty. He clears and the bar finishes its thought behind him. The world ahead widens into a long industrial run—tanks right, numbered bays left.
A bell coughs once somewhere west. He doesn't blush for it. Maybe someone else learned the trick; maybe a god clapped.
He wants fuel and a fresh strap hole. He keeps east.
A lazy cable sits over the next pedestrian crossing, dressed to take a man off a deck by the chest. He sights where belly meets bracket and shortens its ambition to memory.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The crossing gives him up to a truss over a creek that never committed to being a river. Wind turns; the deck feels the push as a line he can lean against. The motor hiccups on bad breath and forgives itself with a cough he likes.
A sign far downline ghosts past on a pole: WHITE DIST ←. Another below it with a missing corner says WALTON in paint that remembers shapes. The corridor has the dignity of work done right and then forgotten. He rides it like a man stealing minutes from people who respect minutes.
He is thinking that hunger has shapes you can plan for when the rail ahead says no.
A set of points lie half honest, tongue sulking off the stock. The throwstand wears a chain someone meant to lock and didn't. The angle of the closure rail will knife a small wheel if he lets it. He has time to stop and not die today. He has less time than the chorus behind will gift him.
He picks the latch with air.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The chain unlearns itself. The lever rolls with a sound frogs approve of. The tongue kisses. The speeder thanks everyone involved by not becoming a story.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
The main swings onto a narrow shelf blasted into fill, rail shouldered by wall on the right and nothing on the left but air down to a beltway cutoff full of cars with their doors open. Crosswind hits him in a flat palm. He becomes rumor and rides the idea of rail not the metal.
Mid-shelf a drop-net tries to remember how to be clever. Its cable runs to a cone-dressed throwstand; he does the decent thing and edits the hardware instead of the hands that might be on it.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Net falls crooked and makes a blanket of itself. Someone swears above in a voice too young. He leaves them that lesson and keeps the line.
Wind veers and brings river's cousin again. The rails step onto a long girder bridge with open grating. The deck talks through his bones in Morse. The grating wants his wheels to wander; he keeps them honest by will and habit and a hand on lash.
The rail drops into a trench that tastes of wet lime. Two silhouettes walk the parapet with the slouch of men who have been up since yesterday morning. They watch a man be a line and don't get in the way of math.
He comes out of trench into a cut where the sound lays down under his deck and stays. The note is good. The night goes thin. Somewhere ahead, not far, a horn answers itself twice—low, steady, a throat that carries rules. Not a shunt. A statement.
Then the statement becomes a shape: a short consist nosing a string of hoppers across an overpass on girders. The rail he rides dives under that overpass and then curves to join a ladder on the far side where the consist is already fouling the next switch. The geometry is a dare written in steel.
He can stop and give up the minutes. He can trust slack and seams again and spend bones. The chorus behind has found a new door and is trying keys.
He stays east.
The overpass throws a shadow that eats detail. Under it, someone strung a cable across at knee, then at chest, then left the ends long so they could tie it to belief later. He edits the lowest because that is the one that breaks men.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The cable whips the wall and stops being policy. The chest-high one is a rumor under his belly. He takes the bend past the girder footings with wheels whispering ambition.
The ladder presents a closed point against him. The throwstand for it is twenty meters up and to the right, on a stub protected by a crash frame. A human stands there, harnessed, palm out. He shows his left palm back and counts ties.
'Rider!' the human calls. 'Hold!'
He does not. He sights the latch pin through the stand's throat—bright where someone's wrench loved it last week—and pays it the coin he's been spending all night.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The pin quits. The lever falls under its own history. The tongue pulls over just enough to not butcher a small wheel. He takes the seam as a number and not a gift. The human on the stand looks at his radio as if it betrayed him and then shrugs in a way that says live men are easier paperwork than dead ones.
The consist on the overpass grinds by; dust falls like old prayer. He rides the ladder around its heel and back to the main as if the rail had always meant to let him through without debate.
A last sign nails itself to a post at the curve: WHITE EAST → and, beneath in spray, a single word someone tried to erase and failed: OASIS. He does not take the turn. He does not join anyone's city.
The curve lifts. Beyond it the night collects into a block across the gauge—another crossbar, or a drop-dog, or a train car with no right to be there. He can't tell which until the last breaths.
He feeds the motor a yes that refuses to be a question and flattens to timber again because at this hour of a life like his there are only two answers that matter: forward, or not.
He chooses forward and aims at the seam the world will swear wasn't there.