The generator note is small and mean, two streets out—higher than a truck, lower than a lawnmower. It nags the air the way a suggestion nags a mind already made up. The speeder takes the curve on tired ballast and the light finally shows: a floodlight tower on a flatbed parked crooked beside a level crossing. Two heads of amber on a mast wink through fog; a cable snakes from the genset to the tower like an artery.
Rhett rolls off throttle and lets the deck talk the rest of the way. The rails ring a little with the car's weight. He feathers choke until the motor idles without question.
[MECHANICAL SCAN (PASSIVE)]
He shades his eyes and looks wrong—past the light, along the shadows where rope wants to be line and line wants to be rope. There—a glint low across the rail at shin height, two meters ahead of the crossing plank. Tripwire to a post, post to an alternator bracket, bracket to a truck strut on a hinge set to whip a steel cable into whatever crosses.
He pads the speeder to a stop where the mast throws a hard edge across the deck. Rope out. Zip ties. A length of hose. He threads hose through a coupler on the frame, ties rope to hose, pays line forward like he's walking a dog that hates him, and clips the rope to the tripwire without letting skin advertise.
Two slow steps back. Three wraps on a cleat. He leans and pulls.
The wire plinks. The bracket snaps. Cable lashes up, misses the shin that isn't there, and hammers the generator housing hard enough to dent. The floodlight mast shivers and lets out a moan like a bridge learning a wrong chord.
'Hands high. Step off the toy,' a voice says from the dark beyond the flatbed.
Another voice, softer, rehearsed: 'We're Ironvale logistics. Safety sweep. You cooperating, friend?'
He lifts his left hand, palm open. The right hangs over the pry bar's grip—a neutral picture if you're a fool, an argument if you're not. Weight-shift gives men away. One shadow near the mast—rifle at low ready. Another by the bumper—legs cocked to push.
'We've got evac corridors east,' the soft voice says. 'For qualified personnel.'
'You want my list of qualifications?' Rhett asks, low.
'Start with your pockets.'
He drifts his gaze down the beam. The far-side tire of the flatbed bulges around a chipped rim. He sights his finger, tape-white funnel ring peeking like an eye.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The slug coughs. Rubber slaps steel. The shadow by the bumper flinches—late.
Rhett is already moving. Deck to ballast, pry bar a fast half-moon that knows where a collarbone lives. The mast man tries to split difference and ends up with neither; steel changes the bone's job description.
The 'logistics' voice shoots too high. The round claps air over the deck. Rhett hooks the pry bar's claw into his wrist and pops tendons past the tooth, takes back distance before the other hand remembers work.
Footing, breath, bar. He sights on the knee because knees tell the truth.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Joint quits. Body gifts its weight to the ground without a receipt. He drops the bar's beak into the soft hinge behind the jaw and twists—once, more, done.
Blood tries to be a road on the ballast. The floodlight swarms bugs to suicide. Far down the street, a dozen windows stay dark like teeth clamped on a question.
He kills the genset—choke, fuel, breaker—and the mast goes blind. Bugs forget they were invited. Silence drops a size.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)]
He cracks the cap, siphons two liters of clean into hose, feeds the speeder something better than fumes. He purges varnish from a line, pockets a belt from the flatbed's toolbox, and peels a rain-ruined clipboard page: OASIS / WHITE DIST with an arrow to I-9 RAMP / 16:00, and half a word that starts IRON— and drowns.
Foot-scrapes come down the block, meat on cinder block, laughter in a shape that learned it wrong. He looks once at the rifle man crawling for a hedge.
'Don't leave me,' the man says.
'Then get small and quiet,' Rhett answers, and the speeder takes him east.
The floodlight dies behind him; the night licks the hole closed. He rides under a dead mast that wants to be a gallows and past a maintenance siding where a tamper sleeps under a tarp that learned to be a skin. Brush leans in and slaps his shins. The deck buzzes across a frog. He looks left—siding into tanks. Right—main into a gentle S and ground that might be a yard throat or only a lie.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
Another crossing. Arms rusted up. Cabinet open, wires like ribs. He leaves a jumper ready at the bell driver—one spark later if the pack closes and he needs a church for ten seconds.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Wind changes smell—river and rust. A culvert mouths under the embankment and tries the word hungry on a tongue made of water. He doesn't look. He keeps iron under him and choices small.
The dark ahead thickens into a shape: tanker down across the main, jackknifed like a killed animal that died on its favorite path. The siding diverges right around it, then falls into trees and a hill's shadow.
A radio of almost-voices finds him from behind. Crossings and curves made distance lie; the lie is shrinking.
He lets the speeder keep headway and steps off when the turnout arrives. The points sit halfway—one tongue kissing, one sulking. He levers the throw with the pry bar and the rod gives him grief before grace. The tongue slams home with a kiss that used to sound like safety in another decade.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)]
The car hums into the siding. Brush owns this track and tells his shins. The tanker's belly scrapes air and gives a long metallic thought. He gives the motor neither more throttle nor less. The siding bends around the obstacle and runs tight along low sheds. Another frog back to main waits ahead. He hits the stand with the bar; the tongue kisses; the deck clicks through.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
Noise changes. Not a generator. A big slow fan coming and going like it turns behind a wall. A clean white light breathes from around the next curve, not fussy, low to the ground.
A platform car sits on a short lead, flood tower bolted to its deck. Cable runs tower to gen-set to a breaker whose contactor has been jammed shut with a screwdriver. Gas cans crouch under a tarp weighted with rocks like a secret saving itself for a friend.
He idles in, tops his tank, feeds a jump box, pockets a spare belt, and cuts the bypass so the tower dies when he wants it to. Foot-scrapes gather in brush beyond. He flicks the tower dark and the fan sighs to a stop. The night's mouth closes.
He pushes off; the motor catches; the curve straightens into a run that heads east like a sentence that skipped adjectives. The tanker becomes memory. The flood tower becomes a solved problem. The bell at his back is a trick waiting to be told.
Something paces along the shoulder, two limbs, then four, then two—trying on coats. He sights on a knee and waits until the joint believes in itself enough to break.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The knee unlearns its story. Stones accept new homework.
The white winks through fog and shows him the rail heads bright. The run opens into a throat that should feed a yard, but a box of dark lies across the main like a thought too heavy to move. He squints until the box sharpens into a derailed car on its side, half on, half off iron.
Three options: stop and manhandle sideways into the weeded service road; bleed speed and trust a frog into a service lead he can't see; or throw the points at the last instant and ask geometry for mercy.
He keeps throttle steady and stands into wind. The pry bar's nose finds the throwstand.
Behind him the almost-voices enter the curve and learn how to harmonize. It sounds like patience getting its diploma.