The day lifted its next weight.
The clerk in the coat—edges pressed, eyes tired—slid a blue seal strip from his bag, read the twin numbers aloud for Admin's pad, and set the adhesive across Ash's knife switch so the lockout could be seen and not just sworn to. He wrote ISOLATION—MAINTAIN DURING AUDIT in a rectangular hand that belonged to an older world.
"Scope," he said, glancing around the shop without stepping in like a man respecting someone else's floor. "View-only. No attachments absent consent. We sample Lot A—fabricated latch pins and springs—verify tolerances, retention, and basic endurance. We apply traceability—maker mark or equivalent—going forward."
The liaison had his quiet face on. The Nightshade inspector hugged his clicker the way men hug righteous words.
Hale didn't change. His existence kept the doorway the size it needed to be.
Ash touched the red hot-bench flag, confirming it still glowed under the padlock; the blue seal sliced across the knife switch like a polite razor. "You get the numbers," he told the clerk, "and the parts get the work."
"Traceability first," the clerk said. He produced a thin plastic envelope. Inside: a card with fields. MAKER / LOT / COUNT / RETAIN / DATE. "We don't seize; we note. But we need a mark for future incident review."
The mark would be a leash if he let it. A leash can also be a signature if you hold the pen.
"Give me two minutes," Ash said. He glanced to Nono. "Drawer four—hardened rod, the short one."
Nono made a businesslike beep and fetched the stub of hard rod from the scrape bin. Ash set it in the vise, faced the end with the file until it was true, then used a fine triangle file to cut a tiny H over a 7—two lines and a crossbar over a small chevron, H7—shallow, clean. He turned the rod, kissed the sides into a taper so the punch could find itself, then tempered the tip with a little blueing trick: he stole heat from a soldering iron coil, warmed the tip, and let it air cool to harden enough for soft steel without chipping.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Adaptive Fabrication: maker's punch (H7) crafted. Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
He tested it on a scrap washer—tap—a crisp H7 the size of a freckle bloomed on steel.
"Traceability," he said, and the clerk nodded once, something easing behind his eyes.
Ash pulled one of the rifles from the outgoing rack—the last of Lot A—ejected the mag, flagged it, and plucked the latch pin head with his fingernail. He tapped the punch once on the exposed head: neat H7 stamped shallow—identifiable, not intrusive. He did the same with a spring end where a flat ground foot would take it without snagging.
"Retain," the clerk said, and opened a little cloth bag, blue-strip numbered to match his sheet. Ash set aside two pins and two springs from his run, stamped them H7, and dropped them into the bag. The clerk slid in a RET 1 card, sealed the bag with a blue strip, and wrote the number into his form where RET lived. He handed Admin the stub; Admin glued it into his pad with that odd satisfaction people get from rules that still stick.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] QA: retained samples logged/sealed. Difficulty: simple. +5 Mechanic XP / +10 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
"Dimensional," the clerk said.
Ash picked up his caliper—the good one—and measured pin length, step shoulder, diameter. He called numbers, the clerk wrote. The Nightshade inspector's clicker tried to insert itself into history by clicking without purpose. At the third measurement, Ash held the caliper for the inspector to see the digits like a mirror you could argue with. The inspector didn't.
"Spring," the clerk said. "Rate."
"We don't have a scale," Ash said. "We do have gravity."
He clamped a small ruler upright to the bench edge, hooked a stamped H7 spring over a mandrel pin, then hung a wrench—marked mass written on its handle long ago by some honest tech—on the spring's foot. He measured unloaded length and loaded at the wrench. He calculated ΔL in his head and with his thumb, twice to keep his own math honest, and compared to a scrawled chart in a notebook he kept for such sins.
"Within five percent of spec," he said. The clerk looked at the notebook's dirt and the ruler's scars and, strangely, seemed to like them better than a clean lab.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] QA: improvised spring rate check. Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
"Endurance?" the inspector asked, hope trying to be authority.
"We did 500 each on three earlier," Admin said, showing the BENCH VERIFICATION page. "You co-witnessed."
The inspector pinched his lips. "We could do another."
"After we finish traceability," the clerk said, reminding him gently whose seal was blue.
Ash moved through the rest of Lot A, H7 stamping pin heads and spring feet—light taps, consistent, no burrs. He logged counts: 32 pins, 32 springs installed, 2 pins + 2 springs in retain, 3 endurance samples marked PV. The clerk copied the line; Admin stamped LOT A—SEALED beside his own oversight stamp. The blue paper found itself with red friends and didn't complain.
The new cart hummed politely, mast LED white; the clerk flicked a switch on its console and a bar on a small screen grew as it sniffed the air the way dogs sniff doorframes. "Non-contact EM and RFID census," he said. "We catalogue our tags and yours. No clamps."
Ash didn't argue with air being measured. He stepped back. Hale didn't move, which had the same effect as moving, and the cart rolled two inches like a student approaching a stern teacher.
The bar peaked once near the bench leg and made a sound like politeness clearing its throat.
The clerk crouched and found the thing Ash's annoyance already knew: the Nightshade tag wire-twisted on the leg—the INSPECTION PENDING tie the inspector had left earlier—contained a small, flat RFID disk the size of a coin, laminated into the paper seal so it could ping a co-witness quietly all day.
The clerk held it up in two gloved fingers, expression flat. "This is not City-Admin. Remove it, please."
Ash clipped the wire, peeled the paper, showed the disk blinking its little beat like a heart you didn't want. He dropped it into the clerk's open evidence pouch. The Nightshade inspector didn't blush; men like him don't practice that muscle.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Device removed: foreign RFID tag (non-contact). Difficulty: simple. +5 Mechanic XP / +10 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
"Scope remains view-only," the clerk said, standing. He glanced into the shop with a professional hunger that looked more like craft than conquest. "Bernard," he said to the inspector, "you may count. You may not attach."
The inspector's clicker made a noise that might have been a sigh. He counted. "One, two—" Numbers soothed him. Sometimes numbers save men who can't be saved by anything else.
While the clerk and Admin traded seals and stubs, Ash didn't let the bench forget what it was. He took a civilian sidearm from the Admin stack that had found itself third in line and ran rails clean, set dot of oil, cycled—click—tagged.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Repair complete: simple. +5 Mechanic XP / +10 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Hale observed the liaison not moving. The liaison observed Hale doing it. They had a conversation with eyes that stayed civilized because the blue seal had asked the room for manners.
"Finish," the clerk said after the last H7. He held out a final blue strip and the LOT A sheet. "We apply a lot seal—doesn't freeze the bench; it marks the batch as audited. We also tag the micro-jigdo-not-move until dawn as a snapshot of tooling."
"You can tag the vise and the chain," Ash said, not because he feared the tag but because he hated lies. "Not the idea."
The clerk allowed the ghost of a smile. He looped a blue DO-NOT-MOVE through the chain's turnbuckle and the vise ear and wrote SNAPSHOT—JIG CONFIG on his page with the time. He pressed a small paper wafer against the punch's shaft in the jar where Ash had set it. H7 looked back at both of them, permanent now in tiny ways under new rules.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Tool snapshot: micro-jig DO-NOT-MOVE sealed (temporary). Difficulty: simple. +5 Mechanic XP / +10 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
The inspector, having failed to attach to anything that mattered, pointed at the Silver Stag case like a child picking the shiniest toy. "We will inspect that."
"Not part of Lot A," Admin said, already writing OUT OF SCOPE with a speed that had grown during the last hours. "And not attached to any facility system." He tapped the oversight protocol line with his pencil. "Later, maybe. Not today."
The liaison opened his mouth to try a word beginning with provision. Hale turned his head a quarter inch and somehow the word didn't like its odds anymore.
"Lot A," the clerk summarized, "accepted under blue. Retain sealed. Tool configuration snapshot applied. Audit remains open until dawn for observation." He held out his pen toward Admin.
Admin signed his own name like a man who had finally picked it up after finding it on the floor. He stamped ADMIN—TEMPORARY OVERSIGHT APPROVED beside the blue. He wrote CO-WITNESS: NIGHTSHADE INSPECTOR and handed the pad over. The inspector printed his last name like a man swallowing a small bone. The liaison wrote nothing; men like him are careful about fingerprints.
Ash put the sidearm back where it belonged and reached for the next carbine, mind already setting order. The bench light held its square the way a room holds its breath after good news that doesn't know yet if it's permanent.
The radio bit them all at once.
"Range alert—East corridor—live fire," a voice said that belonged to a young guard trying not to be. "Request immediate re-zero assistance—Nightshade patrol says their sights were set wrong by Admin work—they're calling for the mechanic."
The liaison's head tilted like a dog hearing its name. "We'll take half the batch," he said, smooth again. "He accompanies to re-zero."
"Bench is frozen for seal photographs," the clerk said at the same moment, tone neutral, hand already in his bag for the small camera. "Ten minutes no movement while I capture the snapshot."
"Or," the inspector added, sudden courage finding him, "we move the bench under supervision. The seal allows—"
"The seal does not," the clerk said without looking at him.
Hale didn't move, which in this geometry meant everything. "Pick a lane," he said to the room at large.
Admin's eyes flicked between the blue seal, the door, and Ash's hands. "Re-zero claims are pretext," he said, voice ironed but thin. "But the range is a place where accidents get made."
Ash looked at the bench—blue over red, H7 under his fingernail—then at the door where the watcher had been replaced by nothing more than pressure pretending to be air.
"Ten minutes," the clerk repeated gently, as if time were water and he had a cup.
The liaison smiled like gravity. "Now," he said, as if the word's shape changed physics.
Ash felt the weight of both words settle on the bench he'd chained to the day.