CHAPTER 4 – FIRST FIX
The next day is colder.
You can feel it in the walls. The brick holds last night's chill like a grudge. Even with the heater running in bursts, St. Mary's has that thin‑ice feeling, like the warmth is only a veneer and the cold is waiting underneath, patient.
By the time evening crowds the windows, the air in the common room is wrong.
It's not obvious at first. People come in from the street with red faces and stiff hands, faces relaxing as they hit the relative warmth. Kids unwrap scarves. Someone complains about the soup. Nia laughs once, the sound tired but real.
But I hear the problem underneath.
The heater cycles unevenly. When it kicks on, the vent above the far table rattles harder than yesterday, metal chattering against metal like teeth. The blower strain has a note in it now, a whine that rides just under the rest of the sound. When it shuts off, the silence afterward is longer. Too long.
I sit at the same spot as last night: back to the wall, where I can see both the door and most of the room. My coffee is mostly for camouflage; the cheap stuff sits bitter on my tongue. What I really want is to listen.
The little girl who sat under the vent before is there again, chair angled toward it like a plant turning toward the sun. The first few cycles, the warm air pushes her hair back from her face. She smiles without realizing. When the blower cuts out and stays out a little longer, the smile slips.
Near the other wall, the old woman in three sweaters has a new blanket over her knees. She still looks cold. Every time the heater stops, she tucks the blanket tighter, like she can hold the warmth in by sheer will.
Staff notice too, in their own way.
"Damn thing," a volunteer mutters, thumping the thermostat on the wall with his knuckles. "I swear it has moods."
"Boiler's old," Nia says, not looking up from the clipboard she's filling out. "City says we're on the list."
"Yeah, 'the list,'" he echoes. "The list that doesn't exist."
He laughs. She doesn't.
I wrap my hands around the mug and watch my breath fog the surface. It shouldn't be cold enough in here for that.
I told the heater I'd fix it "tomorrow." This is tomorrow. It's still alive. Barely.
You could ignore it, the lazy part of my brain says. It's not your building. You did one night in the alley; you know how bad it can get. These people have coats. They'll be fine.
The rest of my brain looks at the kid under the vent, the old woman with the blanket, the set of Nia's jaw, and doesn't buy that for a second.
If the boiler dies in the middle of the night, some of these people won't be fine. They'll get chest infections. Pneumonia. They'll end up in hospital beds they can't afford or cooling on a slab nobody visits. Gotham is good at that.
The heater cuts out again. The vent above me goes from blowing to breathing to nothing. The room holds its breath with it.
I count.
One. Two. Three.
By fifteen, the air feels heavier.
At twenty, the old woman coughs and doesn't stop for a while.
At twenty‑two, I set the mug down and stand up.
Nobody looks at me. Good. I head for the hallway like I'm going to the bathroom, shoulders loose, feet quiet. Once I'm past the doorway, I slip a plain black cloth up over the bottom half of my face. Nothing fancy—just enough that if someone catches me where I shouldn't be, they remember "some kid in a mask," not my face.
The hall is cooler. The floor changes from the rougher, newer surface in the common room back to older linoleum, scuffed and dulled from decades of feet. The walls hum with the building's internal noise: distant voices, plumbing groans, the faint heartbeat of the mechanical systems.
I move by sound and touch. Hand trailing the wall, feeling where the paint is warmer, listening for where the boiler's labored breath is loudest. Heat rises; pipes carry it. You can follow them without seeing them.
At the back of the building, a stairwell drops down into dimness. The air coming up from below is colder than it should be. It smells like dust, metal, and faint oil—mechanical, not human.
Basement. Boiler.
I start down.
"Kid."
The word is soft, but it snaps across my nerves like a wire.
I pause on the landing and look back. Harris leans against the railing at the top of the stairs, one hand on the metal, the other wrapped around his elbow. He must've peeled off from the common room when I did. I didn't hear him follow.
His eyes are sharp, even in the bad light.
"You're not supposed to be down there," he says. No accusation in it. Just fact.
"I know," I say.
His gaze flicks past me, toward the lower door. "You hear it too?"
"Yeah."
He shifts his weight. The steel stair creaks. "They've called the city three times this month. Got the same 'we'll send somebody when we can' all three times. Funny how 'when we can' never shows up until pipes burst or people die."
His voice is quiet. Not bitter, exactly. Just… used to it.
I don't say anything.
Harris studies my face for a long moment. I can feel the weight of it through the mask. He's a vet; he knows the look of someone who's about to do something officially stupid for unofficially good reasons.
"You go down there and get caught," he says, "they'll say you were messing where you shouldn't. Might lose your bed over it. Might worse."
"I know," I repeat.
He exhales through his nose. It's almost a laugh. "You going anyway?"
Silence answers that one.
He looks past me down the stairs again, then back up the hall toward the common room. I can hear the faint, uneven rattle of the vent from here.
"You fall, yell loud," he says. "I ain't young enough to carry you, but I can find someone who is."
It's not permission. It's not not‑permission, either. It's cover. If anyone asks, he can honestly say he "told the kid not to go."
"Yeah," I say. "Okay."
He gives me a small, irritated nod, like he's annoyed at himself for saying anything at all.
I go down.
The basement corridor is lit by a single buzzing fluorescent tube. It throws that sick gray light that makes everything look like an old photograph. The concrete walls sweat in patches. Doors line the hall: STORAGE, LAUNDRY, JANITOR. At the far end, a heavier metal door with peeling paint and a stenciled sign:
BOILER ROOM – STAFF ONLY.
A brick chunks the bottom corner open by about two inches. Someone's idea of ventilation or laziness. Either way, it means the latch doesn't fully catch.
I crouch, fingers brushing the edge of the door and the floor. Cold air pushes out from underneath in little gusts, carrying that metallic, slightly damp smell.
Inside, something groans and clanks, then gives up with a hollow thud.
"Yeah," I murmur, more to myself than anyone. "That's not good."
I straighten and test the handle. It sticks, then turns. The door swings inward with a complaint.
The boiler room is bigger than I expected. Old brick walls, painted over in beige that's flaking off in spots. Pipes run everywhere—along the ceiling, down the walls, into the big metal beast that takes up most of the room. The boiler is a hulking shape in chipped green, its curved sides matted with dust and spiderwebs. Gauges stare out like tired eyes, glass fogged and cracked.
It's too quiet.
Normal, you'd hear a steady whoosh, a constant low rumble as water moves and burners do their job. Here it's a stuttering rhythm: a short, weak roar, a rattle, a rattle, a rattle… then a cough and silence. The pipes vibrate with it, then sit tense, full of surprised heat.
I close the door behind me until it almost latches, leaving a sliver for light and escape. No point advertising.
First rule: don't die.
I find the main switch on the wall—rusted metal plate, rocker with ON/OFF stamped into it. Someone's written DO NOT TOUCH in black marker under it. I hover my fingers over it, listening one more time, weighing whether this thing is about to explode or just starve.
Explosions have a sound before they happen: a certain kind of roar, a build. This doesn't have that. It has the sound of something choking.
I flick the switch down.
The weak noise it was making stutters and stops. The lights don't go out; the boiler's on its own circuit. That's good. Means I can see what I'm doing without also playing "Guess what wires kill the room."
The sudden quiet lets me hear other things: a faint ticking as hot metal starts to cool, distant water dripping somewhere behind the wall, my own heartbeat in my ears.
"Okay," I say under my breath. "Let's see what you're complaining about."
I go to the boiler and lay my hand flat against the metal casing. It's warm, but not hot enough to be working hard for a building this size. I trail fingers along the connected pipes: one feed line comes in hot, another goes out lukewarm, some branches barely above room temperature.
Somewhere in there, the energy this thing makes is getting trapped, misdirected, or bled off.
I follow the hottest line to a pump assembly—a lump of iron and bolts and grease with pipes in and out. Up close, I can see where the paint is bubbled from past overheating. The pump body hums faintly under my hand even with the power cut. Stored heat.
There's a bleeder valve near the top, barely labeled in faded letters. A little rust crusts the threads. There are other valves, joint points, a pressure gauge whose needle hovers near the lower end of safe.
I don't have schematics. All I've got is memory—old apartment buildings back home, fixing pipes so my siblings could take warm baths before anyone noticed something was broken, jobs I followed maintenance guys on for cash under the table, videos I watched on borrowed bandwidth. None of those were this exact system. But pipes are pipes. Fluids are fluids. Air pockets are air pockets.
Air in the lines will make noise. It'll make certain pipes hot and others erratic. It'll make pumps work too hard and then quit. That whining note in the heater upstairs hadn't been metal grinding; it had been cavitation.
Which means: this probably isn't a cracked boiler tank that's about to blow. It's a circulation problem. Maybe a stuck valve. Maybe an air lock.
Fixable. Maybe.
If I had tools.
There's a low shelf along one wall near the door, half hidden under old paint cans and a coil of extension cord. I dig through until my fingers close around something heavy and familiar.
Adjustable wrench. Old, but not dead. The jaws still open and close with a little effort. Next to it is a length of pipe about as long as my arm—probably scrap from some previous repair. I pick that up too and test it over the wrench handle like a sleeve. It'll make a decent cheater bar if I need leverage.
"Thank you," I tell whoever left these here and then forgot them.
Kneeling by the pump, I check the bleeder valve. It's small, hex‑headed, a little rusted. I position the wrench, test the bite. Feels like it'll hold if I'm careful.
"Okay," I murmur. "If you're air, you hiss. If you're water under full pressure, you try to break my face."
I angle my head away out of habit, put both hands on the wrench, and lean.
The valve resists at first, shrieking a little as metal scrapes against metal. My shoulder complains; the bruise from the teleport fall throbs in time with the strain. I put the pipe over the wrench handle to extend it and lean again, using my weight.
Something gives. The wrench jumps a fraction. For a terrifying second I think the head's going to shear clean off, but then the valve turns a quarter‑turn.
A thin hiss snakes out of the opening.
I let the breath I was holding slip out between my teeth. "There you are."
The sound is high and angry at first—air under pressure pushing out. I can't see anything but I know better than to put my face right up to it. After a few seconds, the pitch lowers. There's a spit of moisture, then a steady trickle of water. I give it another small turn, watching the gauge out of the corner of my eye.
The needle bumps up, then steadies. The pipes vibrate differently under my other hand now, the tension shifting.
When the hiss fades and it's just a bead of water forming and dripping, I close the valve back down, just snug, not forcing it. The metal feels a little looser, like it remembered how to move.
"Good," I say. "That's one."
There are other joints I don't trust the look of. A union fitting with fresh rust streaks, a valve with a handle that's been wired in place instead of properly replaced. I tighten what I can reach safely, leaving anything that looks like it'll snap if I breathe on it for another day—preferably one when I have real tools and not just the building's forgotten bones.
I wipe my hands on my hoodie and step back, turning in a slow circle to make sure I didn't move anything I shouldn't have. The wrench and pipe go back on the shelf, close to where I found them but not in exactly the same dust outline—no one's going to notice that but me.
My fingerprints are probably all over everything anyway. Too late to worry now.
At the wall, I pause with my fingers under the switch. This is the part where, if I've messed up, the boiler explodes, or a pipe bursts, or nothing happens and everyone upstairs spends the night shivering.
"Don't be dramatic," I mutter at myself. "You bled some air. You didn't summon demons."
I flip the switch up.
The boiler thinks about it.
There's a click somewhere inside as relays engage. The pump coughs, then starts to spin, slow at first, then faster. The burners catch with a whoomp and a low roar. Flames lick in the viewing port, orange and steady rather than flickering and spitting. The body of the boiler vibrates, humming under my palm in a way that feels… right.
The pipes rattle once, like a flinch, then settle. The sound traveling up them is smoother, the kind of rushing whoosh I remember from systems that worked more often than they didn't.
Warmth starts to build in the room, subtle at first, then more obvious. The air near the ceiling gets thicker, the cold in my fingers easing.
I stand there longer than I need to, hand on the metal, listening. Just to be sure.
Fixing things is always like this. There's the problem, the plan, the work—those are all mental, controllable. Then the moment after, where you flip a switch or open a valve and wait to see whether the universe thinks you're right.
Tonight, it nods.
I swallow against a tightness in my throat that has nothing to do with the cold air. This wasn't my problem. It wasn't my building. I could've stayed in my bunk and pretended I didn't hear it dying.
I wouldn't have slept.
"Okay," I tell the boiler. "Do your job."
On the way out, I risk one more pass of my fingers over the shelf. There's more junk here: nails in a coffee can, a busted tape measure, a rusted multi‑bit screwdriver whose bits are all stripped. Useless now. But they go into a mental file: This is where they leave the things they think are dead. I might come back when I'm not racing a failure.
I ease the door nearly shut behind me, leaving it as I found it: not quite latched, brick holding it open a sliver. My footsteps in the corridor are light. The cold air from the room is already a little less vicious.
At the top of the stairs, Harris is still there. He hasn't moved much, but there's a fresh cigarette behind his ear that wasn't there before.
"Well?" he asks.
"I didn't blow us up," I say.
He huffs a laugh. "I gathered that."
"You'll know in a minute," I add. "If it stays on more than twenty seconds at a time, we're probably fine."
He eyes me. "You sound awfully sure for someone who ain't supposed to be down there."
I shrug. "Old building, old boiler, old air locks. It was mostly complaining, not screaming."
"That supposed to mean something to me, kid?"
"Means whoever installed it cut corners and whoever maintains it is overworked. But it'll hold for now."
His mouth twitches, almost a smile. "You talk about boilers like they're people."
"They outlive most people," I say. "Might as well respect the ones that are still trying."
He looks at me for another one of those long, measuring moments. Then he nods, more to himself than to me.
"Come on," he says. "Let's see if your magic trick worked."
We walk up the hall toward the common room. Before we even hit the doorway, I hear it: the vent's rattle is still there, but it's changed, losing that desperate edge. The blower's tone is smoother. The cycle's longer. When the warm air rushes out into the room, it feels fuller, less like a dying breath and more like a steady exhale.
Inside, the difference is subtle but real.
The little girl under the vent lifts her face into the stream of heat and doesn't flinch away when it keeps going. She relaxes back into her chair, the tension in her shoulders loosening. The old woman rubs her hands together once and settles her blanket more comfortably instead of clenching it like armor.
Nia, passing by with a stack of bowls, glances up at the vent.
"Huh," she says. "Guess the city finally heard us."
"Yeah," the volunteer from earlier says, stretching his hands over his head. "Miracles happen."
They move on. Nobody looks at me.
Good.
Great.
I slide back to my spot by the wall and pick up my abandoned mug. The coffee's gone cold, but my hands aren't shaking the way they were earlier. I sip anyway, just to have something to do.
Across the room, Harris settles into his usual corner chair. He doesn't make a point of looking at me, but our eyes meet for half a second. He gives the tiniest nod.
Not "good job." Not "thank you." Just I saw that. I know.
That's more than enough.
Later, in the dorm, the difference is louder in the quiet.
Where last night the heater's cycles were erratic, tonight they're steady. The vents breathe out warm air at regular intervals. No long, panicked silences. No metallic bangs that wake people up in the dark. The room holds the warmth between breaths like a body that's finally stopped shivering.
I lie on my bunk, on top of the plastic‑crinkling mattress, hoodie still on, backpack under my knees. Above me, faint dust motes spin in the low light from the exit sign.
My mind should be spinning—about boilers, about risk, about getting caught, about the fact that I just reached into the guts of a strange building and trusted I knew enough not to kill anyone.
Instead, it's… quieter.
Not empty. Just… aligned.
Fixing things has always felt like this. Even before Gotham. The world wakes up a little bit more when a system shifts from "broken" to "working because I touched it." It's not pride. Pride feels big and loud. This is small, almost embarrassed. A private click in the chest that says, That's how it's supposed to be.
That thought is dangerous if I follow it too far. It leads to questions about why I care this much, why leaving things broken makes my skin itch, why walking past a leaking pipe hurts more than most insults.
So I don't follow it. I file it under Later and shut the drawer.
Instead, I listen to the building.
The heater hums. Pipes tick as they expand and contract. Somewhere down the hall, someone laughs in their sleep. A baby whimpers and is shushed. The storm outside throws sleet against the window in a steady, impotent hiss.
Nobody here knows I went down to the basement. Nobody but Harris. If the boiler had failed, if pipes had burst, they'd be up right now, scrambling for blankets and extra layers, talking about calling the city again, about "nothing ever works in this place."
Instead, they're sleeping. Or trying to.
That's enough.
As I drift, another thought drifts with me, small but persistent:
You had to borrow their wrench. Their pipe. Their space. Next time it might not be here. Next time it might be a different building. A different system. You can't count on other people's junk forever.
Tools. You need your own.
The idea settles into the same place in my head as the heater did, a structural thing rather than an emotional one. Needs doing. Needs planning. Needs parts.
Tomorrow, I think, as the warmth finally starts to soak into the stiff muscles in my back. Tomorrow, I start looking at what this city throws away.
Up in the ceiling, the vent exhales another breath of warm air, and for the first time since I landed in this universe, I fall asleep in a room that doesn't sound like it's one night away from failing completely.