CHAPTER 8 — BASEMENT RHYTHM
By the time the heater kicks on, I can tell what kind of day it's going to be.
This morning, the sound is… acceptable. Not the angry rattle from the first night, not the death-cough from before I opened it up. A low, steady hum rolls through the basement, vibrating up through the cot legs and into my bones.
Good. That means nobody's freezing. It also means I can stop waiting for it to die and pay attention to the rest.
I lie still for a few extra seconds and listen.
Pipes ticking overhead as hot water starts moving. Two different sets of footsteps crossing above—one heavy, one light. The heavy one drags a little on the right side. The light one hops every third step to avoid a squeaky board in the hall. Someone figured out the safe path and someone didn't.
A door on the far side of the basement slams, then bounces back open a crack. The latch never catches right. It's been getting worse.
Add that to the list.
I push myself up, blink against the thin strip of daylight coming in through the high basement windows, and check under my pillow automatically. Fingers close around the fabric pouch before my brain finishes the thought.
Still here.
I pull it out just far enough to feel the shapes through the cloth—pliers, screwdriver, scissor blade, coils of thread and wire. The weight is tiny, but my chest unclenches a little anyway. It's ridiculous how much calmer a handful of metal makes me.
I tuck the pouch into my hoodie pocket and stand. Cots creak in the dim. A couple of kids are still wrapped in blankets, faces turned to the wall. Harris is already up, sitting on the edge of his bed with his bad leg stretched out, tying his boots by feel.
He catches my eye. Gives the usual half-nod.
I return it and head for the stairs.
The breakfast line snakes through the common room, all mismatched coats and sleepy complaints and the smell of instant coffee losing a fight against cold air whenever the front door opens.
I join the line, back to the wall out of habit. From here I can see the whole room: the peeling paint, the heater vents, the emergency exit with the crooked push bar that always squeals. Kids cluster at tables like satellite systems around bigger, louder planets.
Tina is at a table near the center, foot swinging under the bench. Her boot—the one I stitched back together—is holding. No gaps, no peel, no limp. She keeps checking it like she doesn't quite trust it, rolling her ankle, pressing the toe into the floor.
When she catches me looking, she scrunches her nose and taps the heel twice, sharp.
Show-off.
I look away before she can make a face at me.
"Morning, Hoodie MacGyver."
Rae's voice drops in from my left like it's been here the whole time. She's leaning against the wall a few feet down, one boot propped behind her, hands in the pockets of a battered denim jacket with fake fur peeling off the hood.
"Don't call me that," I say.
"Uh-huh," she says, unbothered. "Too late. It's in the wild now."
She jerks her chin toward Tina. "Your fan club's expanding, by the way. She spent like ten minutes last night telling the little gremlins you sewed her foot back on."
"I fixed her shoe."
"Yeah, yeah. Details." Rae smirks. "You planning on fixing anything else today, or was that a one-time miracle?"
The volunteer at the front of the line calls "Next," and the snake moves. I shuffle forward.
"Breakfast first," I say.
"Look at you, with priorities." Rae taps the wall with the back of her head. "Just don't go disappearing. I already had to tell three kids I didn't know your schedule."
My stomach does a weird twist at the idea of anyone thinking I have a schedule. I shrug it off and step up to the counter.
The oatmeal is thick enough to hold a spoon upright. I take a bowl, a slice of toast, and retreat to a table near the back wall where I can face the room. Old habit: never sit with your back to an open space if you can help it.
From here, the building looks… busy. But underneath the noise, you can see the patterns.
The emergency exit on the far wall gets pushed open every few minutes by people sneaking a smoke, then slammed shut hard enough that the latch jumps. No wonder that bar screams. Two of the overhead lights flicker on a rhythm—buzz, dim, flare, steady—that doesn't match the others. One of the vents over the TV rattles whenever the heater kicks up a notch.
More notes for the list.
The list isn't written down. It lives behind my eyes, humming along with the heater: broken latch, misaligned vent, flickering ballast. Potential problems. Potential leverage.
A kid at the next table is struggling with her backpack, yanking the zipper up and down over a bulge where the teeth have separated. I watch her fight with it until the fabric strains.
If she keeps going, the zipper's going to blow out. Then the whole thing's trash.
I could…
No. Not the time.
I drop my gaze back into the oatmeal and eat fast.
After breakfast, people start peeling off—to job searches, to school, to nowhere in particular. The common room empties enough that the echo changes. Quieter. Easier to move without bumping anyone.
Good window.
I drift toward the hallway without making it look like I'm drifting toward the hallway. The staff are busy herding the last of the kids out, wiping tables, arguing with the coffee machine. Nobody stops me.
Halfway down the hall, the crooked emergency exit screams again as someone shoulders through. The sound grates along my spine.
I wait until the door thuds shut and the footsteps fade, then check the corners and step over.
The bar is misaligned. Not broken, just off. The metal tongue doesn't seat cleanly in the frame, so every slam is metal-on-metal instead of latch-on-plate. That's why it howls.
I palm my pouch inside the hoodie, sliding my fingers along familiar shapes. Mini driver. Pliers. Scissor blade. I keep my body angled toward the door, shoulders loose, like I'm just leaning there to rest.
Nobody in the hall.
I pop the end cap of the bar loose with the scissor tip and feel inside for the mounting screws. They're not even that tight. I snug them a quarter-turn at a time, listening to how the bar shifts against the frame. Then I nudge the strike plate on the frame itself, just enough that the tongue won't catch its edge anymore.
Click.
I ease the door open and let it close from a few inches instead of a full swing. The bar lands with a soft, satisfying thunk. No scream.
Better.
I press the cap back on, give the bar a casual push to double-check, then step away just as a staffer rounds the corner with a mop bucket.
She eyes me, then the door. "Huh. Thought that thing was gonna blow somebody's eardrums."
I shrug. "Maybe it got tired."
She snorts. "Wouldn't we all." Then she keeps going.
I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding and move on.
The basement feels different in the daytime.
At night, it's all shadows and cold concrete, the kind of space ghosts would choose if they were picky about ambiance. Midday, the thin windows near the ceiling let in a smear of weak light and the sounds from the street—a bus braking hard, a car horn, distant shouting.
I sit on the bottom stair with my back against the wall and listen to the building breathe.
The heater's still humming. One of the pipes along the ceiling ticks steadily, expanding and contracting with temperature swings. A vent near the far corner buzzes every time the blower kicks on; a loose screw vibrates against the metal cover.
I stand and cross to the vent, boots crunching lightly on grit.
This is supposed to be the part where someone asks what I'm doing. Where a staff member appears and tells me maintenance is off-limits, or a kid demands my attention with something more obvious.
Nobody is here.
Good.
The vent cover hangs crooked, one corner lifted just enough to show dark behind it. The screw on that corner is barely catching the thread. If it shakes loose, the whole grate could drop, and then some kid will probably try to crawl into the duct just because it exists.
I fish the mini driver from my pocket without fully looking at it, using my body to shield the motion from the stairwell door just in case. It settles into my palm like it belongs there.
The screw is something the shelter picked up at a hardware store and then installed badly—soft metal, cheap plating. I tighten it carefully, just until the buzzing stops. Then I add a scrap of folded cloth under the washer, padding it so the metal won't rattle against the vent cover.
The blower kicks on again. This time, the vent just… hums.
I feel that tiny shift in my shoulders, a little drop in tension I don't have words for.
Control, my brain supplies.
It's stupid. It's a screw in a vent. The city is bigger problems stacked on top of each other like a leaning tower of trash and bad decisions. But I can't reach the tower. I can reach the screw.
The stairwell door opens softly behind me. I pivot halfway, enough to see who it is without stepping away from the wall.
Harris stands in the doorway, hands tucked into the pockets of his old army jacket. He takes in the vent, the tool in my hand, the way the cover sits straighter now.
"Place sounds different," he says.
I slip the driver back into my pocket. "Quieter?"
"For the moment." He leans his shoulder against the doorframe, favoring his leg. "You do that to everything you touch, kid?"
"Only the parts that annoy me."
He huffs a soft laugh. "Careful. You start fixing all the little noises, they'll think it's their right the building behaves."
"Isn't it?"
"Maybe." His gaze flicks to the ceiling, like he can hear the rest of the structure creaking above us. "But the world doesn't usually work that way."
He doesn't say don't stop. He doesn't say thanks. He just gives me that half-nod again and limps back upstairs.
I stay a minute longer, listening. The vent hum is now just part of the baseline.
The rest of the day falls into a pattern.
Common room. Hallway. Basement. Repeat.
In the common room, I clear a snag in a chair leg before it splinters. The screw that holds the cross-bar is halfway out; a kid swinging one more time would've split the wood. I tighten it while I'm "moving the chair out of the way."
In the hall, I catch a loose bit of trim that keeps catching sleeves. A small nail and a few taps with the side of the pliers put it back where it's supposed to be.
In the basement, I wipe condensation off a section of pipe with the hem of my sleeve and check for real leaks. It's just sweat—the main's hotter today to fight the cold outside. The joint is holding.
Small things. Easy things. Nothing anyone would notice unless it failed.
People come and go around me, their own patterns slotting into the building's rhythm.
The staffer with the mop always parks her bucket in the same corner, leaving a wet rectangle on the floor that takes forever to dry. Two kids race through the hallway every afternoon, one chasing the other, skidding around the same turn and smearing dirt into a dark crescent on the wall. An older guy with a bad cough uses the elevator even though it makes a horrible grinding sound halfway up.
I map them all without meaning to. Who steps where. Who slams what. Who treats doors gently and who abuses them. Where hands land. Where force goes.
Systems, my brain says. Not people, systems.
It's a lie. It helps anyway.
By late afternoon, the common room fills up again. The light outside turns from gray to the kind of dim that makes everything inside look a little more yellow, a little more tired.
I end up at my usual corner table again, hands wrapped around a cup of something hot that tastes vaguely like tea and faintly like metal. The radiator along the wall breathes heat in waves. I've already reached behind it once today to clear a buildup of dust and paper scraps; the air moves easier now, less choked.
Rae drops into the chair across from me without asking, hood up, curls slipping out around her ears.
"Well, well, well," she says. "Our resident building whisperer. You been busy."
I raise an eyebrow. "That what they're calling me now?"
"Relax, Hoodie MacGyver, it's just me paying attention." She jerks her thumb at the hallway. "Door stopped screaming. Vent stopped rattling. Tina says her shoe doesn't try to kill her anymore. You think nobody connects the dots?"
"I didn't touch the vent," I say automatically.
She gives me a look so flat it might as well be a level.
"Sure," she says. "And I didn't steal the last cinnamon roll this morning. Don't worry, I'm not snitching. Nia likes it when stuff works. Fewer complaint forms."
I sip the almost-tea to buy time. "I don't do it for… forms."
"Yeah, I figured." Rae leans back, balancing the chair on two legs. "You look like the type who'd fix a door in a burning building just so it closes right while you run out."
"That's a waste of time," I say.
"Is it?" Her gaze flicks toward a kid walking past with a backpack that now has both straps intact. "Feels like people walk different when their stuff isn't falling apart."
I don't answer. She shrugs and lets the chair thump back down.
"Anyway," she says. "Just wanted you to know the fan club has advanced from 'wow, that was cool' to 'hey, when's he around.' I'm not your manager, but maybe think about… I dunno. Office hours."
"No," I say, a little too fast.
Her mouth curls. "Thought you'd say that. Chill. I'm just messing with you."
A ball of paper bounces off the back of her head. She whips around.
"Hey! Which one of you goblins just signed up for throw-up night duty?"
A chorus of innocent whistles answers her. Tina peeks out from behind a bigger kid and definitely does not smile in my direction.
Rae shakes her head, muttering something under her breath, and stands.
"Later, Hoodie," she says. "Try not to fix the whole building before dinner, yeah? Some of us like to complain."
She disappears into the swarm.
I stay where I am, cup cooling between my palms, eyes tracing the lines of the room—the cracks, the staples in the bulletin board, the spots where paint bulges over old water damage.
Not my job, I tell myself.
Then someone trips over a warped floorboard near the TV and almost takes the whole stand down with them.
I sigh and set the cup aside.
Add it to the list.
Lights-out comes with the same speech as always: curfew, lights, showers in the morning, no sneaking out, they mean it. The usual.
I stretch out on my cot in the dark basement, hands behind my head, staring up at the underside of the cot above me. Someone carved their initials into the slats long before I got here. Another ghost.
The building is louder at first—people settling, plumbing working overtime as everyone uses it at once. The heater kicks up and then down again. Doors open and close. Footsteps, coughing, somebody's quiet crying that gets choked off and buried under blankets.
Then, slowly, it thins out.
I track the changes without moving.
The elevator makes its final grudging trip and then goes quiet. The heavy footsteps upstairs fade one by one. The heater hums on a lower, steady level. The pipe over my head ticks in a slow, relaxed rhythm.
Baseline.
If something breaks that tonight, I'll hear it.
I slide a hand under my pillow and check the pouch again. The tools are all where they should be, wrapped and silent.
Earlier, part of me wanted to count the things I fixed today. Door, vent, chair, trim, radiator. That floorboard near the TV—I pried it up just enough to clear the swollen edge and set it back so it sits flush now.
It felt… good.
I don't like that word. It's too big. Too bright. It makes things complicated.
Better to file it under fewer accidents, less noise, easier to sleep. Systems operating in spec.
The kids walking steadier, the staff breathing easier, Tina's almost-smile when her shoe didn't fail her—those are… side effects.
I close my eyes.
Tomorrow, the building will wake up and complain in new ways. Vents will rattle somewhere else. A window will crack. Someone will slam a door wrong.
The list will shift. I'll add to it. Cross things off. Keep the rhythm.
I'm nobody here. Just another body in a row of cots. Another name on a clipboard.
But as the heater hums and the pipes tick and the shelter settles around me, there's a quiet, treacherous thought I can't quite shake:
If I stop listening, this place would sound different.
And for now, in this basement, in this city that isn't supposed to be mine, that's the closest thing I've got to belonging.
So I listen.