The concrete slid a fraction sideways like a rug someone had tugged. He kept walking into the wrongness so it couldn't become a rule, and the hot air fell off him like a coat he hadn't put on.
His shoes took tile that was cleaner than weather allows. Light sharpened into afternoon—cool, high, filtered through panes. Under the glass to either side, a street moved far below, cars gliding like disciplined fish. Wind worked through vent gaps and made the long space feel like a throat.
He didn't stumble. The rectangle rode his palm, ring forward, as if it had always meant to live here.
[ENTRY CONFIRMED]
Text steadied at eye height, white as a dare.
[ENVIRONMENT: SKYBRIDGE MOCKUP][NON-PARTICIPANTS: 2][CONDITION: MAINTAIN OPERATIONAL CONTROL OVER SPECIAL ITEM][OBJECTIVE: SELECT EXIT—YES FOR ONE (1)][FAIL STATE: ITEM LOSS / BOTH SELECTED / CRITICAL STATUS]
The bridge ran forty paces, glass on both sides, steel mullions at polite intervals. At each end, double doors with panic bars, emergency signage pretending to be helpful. The middle carried a low pedestal—black, waist high—wearing two small circles like polite eyes. At the far end, on the left, a man in a maintenance shirt leaned against the rail with the absent concentration of people in pain. Sling on his right arm, face pale with old effort. On the near end, right side, a woman in scrubs gripped a rolling case with a nurse's sure hands; her hair was caught into a bun that had lost a single pin and was pretending not to.
They noticed him as if he'd been there all along.
"Hey," the man said, breathing shallow. "Is this— Are we— locked in?"
"I need to get across," the woman said, crisp, the way professionals hide fear. "They paged me and the other doors were— wrong."
[TIMER: 02:30]
Wind thread-needled along the vents. The city muttered under glass.
Caleb didn't take his eyes off the hall as he spoke. "My name is Caleb."
"Marisol," the woman said. "Dr. Marisol Vega." She lifted the rolling case a half inch to show him it had weight and then didn't set it down gently. "The lab's waiting."
"Eddie," the man said. He tried to straighten and thought better. "Look, buddy, these doors are— I pull the bar and it— it feels like there's a— like it wants a password."
The pedestal's two circles took a step forward in his brain now that the words had names. The left ring wore a soft etched "A." The right, "B." Under each, a second circle—smaller—carried YES and NO in a font that believed in order. The rings weren't paint. They were absence cut into surface so clean his fingers almost itched.
He could feel the way the problem wanted to present itself: pick one. Be a good boy. Don't get clever.
The bridge disagreed with the bridge. Far down on Marisol's side, something flickered against glass—reflection that wasn't reflecting. A human-height blur walked along their world from outside it, keeping pace with her shoulder like a thought she wasn't having. On Eddie's side, the rail hummed as if a hand had just decided to rest there without paying for the privilege.
Caleb broke his stance and moved toward the middle without turning his back on either end. "I need you both to stay by the centerline," he said, calm as a sign. "Put the case down. Eddie, put your left hand on the rail. Not through, on."
He reached the pedestal and lifted the card a half inch, letting both circles see the ring they wanted.
[ADVISORY: SELECTING BOTH WILL RESULT IN LOSS]
"I heard you," he said, because talking is a way to stop yourself from becoming exactly the man a room wants.
Marisol rolled her case to the mullion, then obeyed him and moved inward two paces. Her mouth kept wanting to speak; she made it do nothing. Eddie shuffled, set his hand on the rail, looked at him with the animal caution pain teaches.
"Everyone breathe," Caleb said. "No one gets clever."
He raised the card and touched the YES under "A."
The ring didn't glow. The pedestal did. A narrow line of light ran from the YES down and away beneath the floor plating, a tracer that disappeared into steel as if the bridge were a printed circuit pretending to be architecture.
The door behind Marisol coughed its latch like it had cleared its throat. The panic bar settled with the tiniest willingness.
"Wait," Marisol said, and he could hear the math she was doing with the difference between her hands and her ethics. "Wait."
The blur at her shoulder admitted itself—stepped out from reflection into presence as if the glass had birthed it. Human height, human gait, edges that refused glue. It wore no knife now. Its hands hung empty. Its posture said: I take. It matched her distance like a mirror that owed no one law.
[HAZARD SPAWN: 2][TYPE: BLURRED AGENT][EQUIPPED: NONE][BEHAVIOR: DISARM / GUIDE]
Guide was new. He didn't love new.
Eddie's rail tried to learn the same trick. The blur along that side did not come in yet. It walked, a shadow on the outside of their world, testing angles.
Caleb put his left palm on the NO under "B" and pressed ring-less flesh to absence. Warmth soaked into skin like a held breath. The NO dimmed a fraction as if it appreciated being touched. He didn't trust appreciation here.
He lifted the rectangle again. The bridge's wind made a cross-draft like two air conditioners arguing. The timer scraped a second off the world.
[TIMER: 02:01]
"Dr. Vega," he said. "When I say so, push the bar and go through. Do not thank me. Do not smile. Do not look back. Eddie, you do not move. You do not touch anything but your mouth."
"Why me," Eddie asked, blandly, not offended, just persistent.
"Because she's holding something that makes other people's lives longer," he said.
"And me," Eddie said.
"You are holding you," Caleb said. "Which is valuable and stupidly heavy."
Marisol's face did something he'd seen before—an anger that had decided to be discipline. "Look at me," she told Eddie. He did. "You inhale after five and exhale after seven. He'll get me a door. You'll get the next one. Nobody bleeds because of us."
Eddie inhaled and counted like he was paying a bill.
The blurred agent at Marisol's shoulder put its hand up quietly, palm out, a universal shape: come with me.
Caleb lifted the card and showed it the ring.
The blur's hand twitched, just the one nerve-learning flinch. It didn't back up. It moved instead—gentle pressure, a step to encourage her toward the door he'd half-opened.
"Don't touch her," Caleb said, practical.
His body knew the pivot he had to make before his feet did. He crossed three paces toward Eddie's side, staying inside the bridge's center seam, rectangle level at chest height. The exterior blur there had judged his momentum and decided on honesty; it stepped through the glass a pace ahead of him and materialized inside, not at Eddie, at the pedestal—at the card.
"Guide," he said, taste of the word ugly.
It came for his wrist like a friend with bad advice. He fed it ring to tendon and gave it a clean inch of refusal. It didn't care about pain because it didn't care about pretending; it cared about compliance. It folded around his elbow like water writing its name and tried to make his hand choose.
He chose earlier.
He kept the rectangle glued to his sternum and let the thing's reach make a loop his body didn't enter. The ring grazed tendon again. The hand opened because circles had been written into rules, and rules are better than fingers here. His shoulder got an angle and took it—narrow, hip through, quiet leverage that kept his ribs from the rail. The agent lost the argument by a degree that meant everything.
"Now," he called, not looking.
Metal drank Marisol's hand with a bar's depressed breath. Hinges remembered jobs. The door behind her yielded two feet like an apology.
The agent at her shoulder approached the threshold, slow and sweet, shepherding. It didn't touch. It didn't need to. Its presence was a wall in a room with no walls.
Caleb heard Marisol's shoes on tile turn into shoes on a different tile. The hinge pressed air past his ear. He hoped she hadn't glanced back and knew she had.
The door sighed into the idea of shut.
[NON-PARTICIPANT EXIT: A—COMPLETE]
The second blur found its manners gone. It abandoned shepherd for theft, redrew its intention around his hands. Eddie made a small noise like prayer mispronounced.
"You're next," Caleb told him, and drove his shoulder into the agent's sternum in the same breath. The rectangle slid under the crook of its elbow and made a small, persuasive rotation, and he could feel its precision hate him.
He reached the pedestal with the next step. He lifted the rectangle just enough to kiss YES under "B" and felt the pedestal take heat from his palm, a nickel tang through skin like a battery you hadn't meant to taste.
"Eddie," he said.
The door at the far end coughed its latch. Wind found a new direction.
Eddie ran his left hand along the rail like he could steady the planet. "Man—" he said, and the word meant many things.
The agent he'd just denied made a new choice—the kind bodies make when they forget manuals. It shoved, arms wide, shoulder for his chest. He took the shove into bone the way you take shots you can respect and wrote the force into the mullion. The glass hummed and remembered its tensile scores. The rectangle's ring nicked tendon again as punctuation.
"Go," he said, and the word carried farther than it had any right to.
Eddie limped the first three steps as if a past injury had opinions; then adrenaline bullied him into symmetry. He cut the center seam at a diagonal toward the far door, eyes on the green sign, breath counting in sevens because the woman had said to.
The agent at the end didn't shepherd this one. It planted itself between man and exit with an open-palmed proposition: give me the small circle.
"Not yours," Caleb said, because truth is a tool, and ran.
The bridge offered distance as if it knew what running would do to wind. The agent at his elbow reprioritized—abandoning the card to become a trip-wire. He jumped the angle instead of the obstacle, boots clearing a shin that wasn't a shin, shoulder kissing glass, breath steady because steady is all you have when smart left.
Eddie reached the door; hands on bar; nothing. He hit it again. The panic bar depressed; the latch didn't.
"Hey!" Eddie yelped, twisting. "It— it was open—"
The pedestal blinked a line of text too thin to be polite.
[CONDITION: ONE AT A TIME]
"Of course it is," he said, and shoved the rectangle into the face of the agent guarding the exit—not an impact, a stamp. The not-face didn't flinch the way faces do, but the body stepped exactly one pace backward, as if the stamp had been a rule.
"Step back one," he ordered Eddie, already closing on them.
Eddie obeyed. The bar rediscovered ethics. The latch coughed. The door gave a narrow grin.
"Now," Caleb said, and Eddie went through it in a trip-catch-save that would live in someone else's version of this story as clumsiness and in his as grace.
[NON-PARTICIPANT EXIT: B—COMPLETE]
The bridge tried to congratulate them by changing the air. The change arrived as appetite.
Both agents dropped pretense. They came with wrists and shoulders, quick and ugly, no shepherding, no more attempts at compromise. The rail hummed as if old music had been found under new paint.
Caleb didn't try for the pedestal's circles again; rewards come with bills. He made a narrow question of his body and wrote it into one agent's sternum while the other tried to make his wrist forget whose it was. The ring met tendon; fingers opened; the rectangle stayed close. The glass sang one slender note beneath them as their shoes found traction.
Outside, below, a siren not meant for them braided through traffic and was gone.
The near agent cut for his ankle. He lifted the foot, let it eat air, and came down on rubber studs where ankles go to live another sentence. The other agent reached across in a crossface that wanted to turn his neck into a lever. He let jaw take it, not spine, and drove the rectangle's edge under elbow again, rotating just enough to remind the joint it had a contract.
The blurred bodies recalculated. For one second they made the same choice—to crowd, to crush, to use the bridge like a vice.
He gave up ground he'd already bought and bought something else: angle. The mullion took part of his weight. He let it and felt the city's breeze rake the sweat off his hair, and he didn't think about Detective Stone's hands or Ms. Parker's breath or Brooks's quiet discipline. He thought about this hinge and this step and this breath and the way the rectangle had to keep being where it was or nothing mattered.
The agent on his left tried to peel the card out with a gentle pressure that would have fooled a human. He gave it ring; the gentle died. The agent on his right tried to put a knee into his thigh where men keep their walking. He slid the thigh out of committee and let the knee eat glass instead, and the bridge hummed an offended string.
He saw the door at Marisol's end finish choosing shut and the door at Eddie's side decide to erase its seam. The pedestal, finally satisfied with its own arithmetic, printed a last neat line.
[OBJECTIVE: CLEARED]
He didn't lower the card. He didn't do relief. He stepped into the next fraction of a second and made it his, putting the rectangle to the wrist that kept insisting on the wrong grammar and driving the two of them toward the center seam until the floor under his feet forgot to be tile and chose to be something else entirely.