Ash lunged, hand under the handguard, shoulder into the rifle's line, driving the barrel downrange and the stock out of the pocket. His other hand found the charging handle, yanked, and locked the bolt back before geometry could decide to be tragedy.
"Cease!" he yelled, and the sergeant's echo came a heartbeat behind—"Cease fire!"—which made the air obey.
The trooper's breath was a string pulled tight. His finger had come off the trigger because Hale had taught rooms how to obey don't, and some of that training carries.
Ash kept one palm on the handguard, the other just behind the port. "Mag out," he said. The trooper punched the release; the mag hit the bench, ugly and safe. "Look," Ash said, softer, because voice becomes a tool once danger steps back. He took the bore light from his belt kit and dropped it through the chamber. The throat glowed; the light hit a shadow three inches down the tube and thought that was where the world should stop.
"Squib," Ash said, to the room and to the clerk's pen.
The clerk wrote SQUIB—LIVE-FIRE—EAST in block letters and underlined no injuries before he allowed his hand to shake like a human's for the length of half a letter.
The Nightshade inspector found his voice under a table. "Admin reloads," he accused, because reflex is a kind of ignorance.
"Your lot," Admin said, holding up the box the loader had given and the headstamps Ash had put back. "Your supply chain. Your training. Our safety."
The liaison's mouth did a tight line. He didn't like when rooms did math out loud.
Ash separated upper from lower, set the upper on the bench with the muzzle over the range line and the receiver cradled on a rag. "You don't ram from the chamber," he said to the trooper, because teaching in the second after fear is when lessons stick forever. "You don't pound like a carpenter. You ask."
He took the brass rod from his kit—the one with a softened tip—and eased it into the muzzle until it kissed the bullet's base. He put two fingers on the rod and tapped with the small nylon hammer he kept for coaxing machines that didn't need bruises. The first tap wrote information; the second moved the world a hair. The third sent the bullet back into the receiver throat, where the rag caught it like a small, ugly gift.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Emergency clear: squib removal (brass rod, non-destructive). Difficulty: mid. +50 Mechanic XP / +100 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Ash lifted the bullet with two fingers and showed the base—powder scorched, jacket intact. He took the case the trooper had ejected and weighed it in his palm; it was light in the wrong way. He tapped the primer with a pick; it showed strike, not pierce; likely powder starved or spilled.
"If you hear soft, you stop," he said to the room. "If your dot blooms into blood because you cranked it to sun, you stop. If the recoil lies, you stop. You don't slap. You don't ask God to fix metal for you."
The sergeant didn't nod. He didn't need to. The lesson had stuck in the part of his mouth that talks to men later when he pretends he learned it first.
Ash ran the bore with a patch to sweep jacket dust and pride. He checked the crown by habit. He reassembled, ran a snap cap, dry-fired into the trap, shook the annoyance out of his hands, and set the rifle downrange, flag up.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Safety check: bore clear / function. Difficulty: simple (higher-tier item). +10 Mechanic XP / +15 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
"Field check complete," the clerk said after a breath that lasted the length of a page. He signed INCIDENT LOGGED—NO INJURY, then wrote AMMO LOT: NS-LC where his form asked who would own the next argument.
The inspector tried again. "Your fabricated parts—"
"—kept a latch from drooling a mag during a panic," Admin said, pointing with the pad. "Logged."
"Next," Ash said, and put A-31 back on the bags for a confirm pair after the line had remembered obedience. Two clicks of careful through irons; two prints at center. He mounted the optic he'd corrected earlier, torqued to witness paint, put two more at center and let the inspector's clicker catch up.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Calibration confirm: optic carryover (A-31). Difficulty: simple. +10 Mechanic XP / +15 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
He put A-07, A-19, A-31 back into the rack with their tags marked PV+Z, the clerk's scrawl catching the light. He wiped his hands. The range had gone quiet in that way rooms do when they've seen a bad path and chosen a better one. The patrol picked up their rifles like men who would not waste this hour again.
The liaison stepped into the quiet like a salesman walking into a wake. "Half the batch," he tried one last time, voice something between velvet and teeth. "Your own process proves fitness. We deploy."
"Three," Admin said, tired and immovable. "The rest by rotation. You don't buy a concession by scaring a range."
The clerk looked up from his form. "Scope is met," he said. "Re-zero complete on three, incident logged, no expansion authorized."
The inspector unclicked his clicker one extra time because he needed to hear a sound that meant control. No one corrected him. Sometimes mercy is not pointing to a man's small humiliations.
Ash gathered the belt kit. He put the squib bullet and the empty into a small evidence bag the clerk provided and wrote RANGE—A-?—NS-LC—SOFT so a later day would know which sin had tried to happen.
They walked back through the artery. The clerk's camera took its photos of the blue seal and the red flag and the H7 on the maker's punch, the way you photograph a wedding when you don't believe in marriage but know courts do. The watcher at the shop door had his lean back; it looked thinner since the squib. Hale's shape took up the doorway and made sure the world remembered which side of a line it belonged on.
"Photos done?" Admin asked.
"Snapshot captured," the clerk said. "Audit remains open until dawn. Then I sleep and pretend this city still uses words the way it should."
"Pretending has paid bills today," Hale said.
Inside, the bench looked like what it was: locked, snapshot tagged, jig chained. The blue over red had learned to share space like old neighbors.
The liaison followed, because some men can't imagine leaving a room first. "New scope," he announced, tossing the phrase onto the wood like bait. "Optics serial capture."
"Out of scope," the clerk said before Ash could waste words. "Today."
"Tomorrow," the liaison smiled.
"Tomorrow," Admin said, "we bring filters for our generator and a box of one-lot ammo to zero your rifles so you stop blaming my parts for your screws."
Hale didn't smile either, which made the line funnier.
The inspector edged as close to the micro-jig as the blue DO-NOT-MOVE would allow and read the H7 on the little punch in its jar like a fortune. He did not touch it. Some truths don't need touch to be heavy.
Nono rolled under the bench and emerged with the rag it had caught the squib with, folded like treasure. Ash took it and stowed it in evidence, then patted the bot's square head once. Nono beeped in lowercase.
Admin handed the clerk a copy of the BENCH VERIFICATION and LOT A pages, red and blue stacked like a truce flag. The clerk folded them into his bag with other papers that hoped to be stronger than men.
The corridor's sound changed.
Admin's radio spat a jagged breath. "East Gate," a voice said, teeth on the words. "Movement down the road. Armored truck. Marked Nightshade. Clerk with a box riding shotgun. They're saying the word tribunal into the wind."
Hale's head tilted. He looked at Ash. "We choose where to meet them."
The liaison tried to look like he hadn't just ordered the weather. "Administrative proceeding," he said lightly, as if the syllables were oil.
The clerk checked his watch, which had numbers that belonged to a calendar the city no longer used. "City-Admin audit remains open," he said. "I am on site. If a tribunal tries to convene in a corridor, we make a room and put seats in it."
"Seats break when trucks ram doors," Hale said, almost friendly.
Ash glanced at the bench—the padlock, the blue seal, the H7—and then at the doorway, which had learned the shape of hold by studying Hale. He saw the generator in his head, the bus fuse seated, the pigtail cut and capped, the seal crossing the empty header like a belt.
He set both palms on the bench and felt the grain. The room hummed the way a room hums when it knows it is about to be asked for more than shape.
"Where," Admin asked, "do we make our room."
"East Gallery," Hale said. "Concrete, doors, sightlines, curtain."
The clerk tucked his blue bag tighter under his arm. "Then we walk," he said. "And we bring paper to stand in front of men who think metal is the only word."
The liaison smiled his small knife smile. "We'll bring ours."
Ash lifted the belt kit, checked the Stag's soft case sitting where he had left it, and did not touch it. He looped the kit on his hip, nodded to Nono, and watched the red hot-bench flag glow under the blue seal like a thing that knew the temperature of the day.