Wind lifts grit in the loading bay and salts his eyes. Behind him, the dock jaw chews cloth and something that once was a hand; metal gnashes, then settles into a hungry stutter.
He pushes the cart into the alley's throat. Concrete sweats; a gutter gargles stale rain. Chain-link to the left glints in blink-and-you-miss-it light from a sky that doesn't agree on color. To the right, two dumpsters lean together like drunks trading secrets.
He steers for the dumpsters and parks in their lee. The bay door shivers once more and goes quiet in a way that is not peace.
Time to change the smell.
He digs in the cart: deodorizer can, a cracked timer from a plug-in air freshener, one lithium cell in blister, a handful of zip ties, a nub of copper wire, and a food wrapper that still remembers sugar. He strips the timer, bridges the cell with a wire and a bent staple, and tapes the wrapper over the can's nozzle so the blast will carry sugar-sweet solvent when it primes. A zip tie pulls the trigger halfway; the timer will finish the job in thirty seconds.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He sets the lure at the alley mouth, points it toward the service road, and ghosts back to the dumpsters. The timer clicks. The can hisses. The wind takes solvent and candy and throws them down the street like a rumor.
The chorus that has been pawing at the bay door forgets what it wanted and remembers hunger instead. Footfalls go from patient to eager. They pass his hiding place in twos and threes, breath going loud in throats that haven't earned it.
He waits until the last set of feet becomes a hush. A paper cup does a slow tumble down the street and comes to rest like it's listening.
He moves.
The service road opens to a low strip mall: metal grilles down, signs flayed by weather. He ignores the payday loan office and bee-lines for the parts store with a parking-lot banner still promising 'Winterize For Less'. The roll-up grille is chained but not locked; a padlock hangs open because someone trusted the power more than the chain.
He threads the chain aside and presses his ear to the metal. Inside is a different silence. Not empty—just paused.
Lithium cells slip into the drill he pocketed. He sets the funnel-ring on his finger and breathes into the hinge seam as if fogging glass.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
A rivet quits. A second pulse and the bracket forgets it's a bracket. The grille rises by hand with a reluctant yowl. He catches it high enough to slip under and pulls it down behind him until it almost seals.
The air inside is dust and rubber. Rows tight as teeth: belts, hoses, fuses, sealant, clamps, a shelf of small inverters and emergency jump boxes that might be jelly inside but might not. He moves fast, not loud. Belts and fuses go in the pack. Sealant in three tubes. Two inverters. Four jump boxes. A roll of fuel-safe hose because you steal what the future might ask for.
The lure outside runs out of story. The silence changes shape. He hears the kind of footstep that belongs to bare skin deciding whether it wants to be a foot today.
He hugs the wall and glides toward the back. The fire door has a push-bar and the bar has a chain. He sights along his finger and taps the chain where it kisses the jamb.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The link blinks wider. He slips into a narrow service arcade where every shop's back looks like a mouth sewn shut. Something at the far end bends and unbends as if testing a new angle on a spine.
Left turn. Dead end. A stairwell pit holds water and, under the water, a patience he doesn't want to meet. He backs off, handing the wall a little of his weight so his feet will talk softer.
A voice to his right tries out a laugh a pilot once used. Another tries 'fantasy' and the word turns to powder between syllables.
He doesn't give them his face. He keeps his eyes on where he wants to put his feet.
Back of the strip: knee-high windows of cinderblock and wired glass. One pane is already broken, edges taped with blue painter's tape that did not help. On the other side waits a pharmacy aisle that looks like a throat with teeth knocked out. He slides the pry bar under the frame and wags the window into a wider idea. The glass sags; he stuffs his jacket across the shard-lines and rolls under on one shoulder with the cart's strap biting his palm.
The pharmacy stinks of sugar in a way that is not candy. He doesn't read the smear on the counter. He doesn't read the slogans on the posters. He steps between endcaps of vitamins that have outlived their use case and heads for the stock door.
The door is latched from the other side with a hasp he can feel by pressing his palm against the wood. He builds the lock's shape in his head and puts the air where the pin will be after the pulse.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
A small, embarrassed yawp answers. The hasp relaxes. He slips through.
The store's front windows face the parking lot like a dead aquarium. Outside: a wide slant of asphalt, a row of light poles that forgot their job, and beyond them the service road curving east like a suggestion. A supermarket marquee farther down the line still wears ghost letters. Under it, a cluster of shapes that could be people and might not.
He crouches behind a seasonal display of lawn chairs twined together like cages and unrolls a paper map someone abandoned at the register. It's a store layout, not a city—useless for streets, perfect for exits. Two loading doors, one side door with a panic bar, roof access up a ladder behind customer service. He inventories it like it's worth money.
Movement ripples in the window's reflection. He doesn't look with his eyes. He looks with the idea he has of the space behind him. Two lures at the entrance he came through. One outside, testing glass with its tongue as if glass will give up its name.
He picks the roof.
The ladder is aluminum riveted to a wall pocked with old gum. It groans. He tells it to be a whisper by climbing with weight in the balls of his feet and his hands being something other than fists. At the top he palms the hatch. It is rust and a bolt and the bolt is a prayer to a god that doesn't live here anymore.
He sets the funnel ring and answers the prayer with a dry breath.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The bolt gives. He eases the hatch up enough to be nobody's silhouette and rolls onto gravel and HVAC bones.
Wind hits him full and clean. It smells like rain that has forgotten how. It pushes west to east as if the air itself is ready to go where he's going.
From here, Grayhaven is a black lake with buildings set like pilings. Two streets over, a big-box storefront with a blue stripe wears a banner he recognizes even at this distance: WHITE DISTRICT WALMART. A memory of the radio tries his ear—sixteen hundred, bring arms or stores, one family member if you've got enough to be useful.
He watches the parking lot without blinking. Figures move in groups. Too regular to be aimless. Not disciplined enough to be a unit. A convoy stage is a mouth; it chews what comes to feed it.
He folds the option and puts it away. Not today.
To the east the ground buckles into an overpass. Beyond the overpass, an industrial swath with tank silhouettes and a line of poles that run parallel like ribs. Between them, low glints that are not water.
Tracks.
He logs the shimmer and refuses to be romantic about it. Tracks are not safety. Tracks are a line. A line is a start.
He drifts across the roof to where the pharmacy shares a wall with a party store. The party store's roof hatch is open and the hatch is not breathing. He drops in and lands in a confetti of tissue paper and plastic tutus. A wall of helium tanks stares him down like a brass organ.
Helium won't light, but the regulators are brass and the hoses are hoses. He steals a two-stage regulator and three meters of good line. Tonight is not for balloons; it's for pressure.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He exits through the party store's back to a catwalk that leads to a service stair over the alley. The cart bumps each step like a heartbeat. His finger tingles cool, recovering.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
On the alley side, a fence. Beyond it, the overpass approach and the kind of shelter that only looks like shelter if you're tired. He hooks the cart's front over the top rail, climbs, and pulls the cart through with his whole back until the ribs in the fence squeal and then decide not to. He drops the cart and lands after it with his knees primed to take the argument.
He jogs the shoulder of the overpass with his head down and his eyes up, the way you run a wall in a school with too many cameras. The wind works for him. It takes his scent into lanes no one is using and brings him the stink of anything alive to his left.
Halfway up, he hears the chorus find the strip. It discovers the scent lure was a trick and forgives the trick because it found a door that remembers how to bite. The sound builds and falls away like a wave collapsing on broken steps.
The overpass levels. He post the cart behind a concrete jersey barrier and crawls to the edge.
East is a string of loading docks and pallets grown soft with weather. Past them, a dark run that points clean between storage lots and tank farms. Along that run: a ribbon of steel that gleams in the bad light and curves like a promise he won't say out loud.
Something moves under the overpass—careful, not a pack. Testing the shade.
He breathes once, slow enough to taste cold on his teeth. Two choices: drop to the service road and cut east along the tanks, or keep high, run the overpass, and look for a stair that will set him down nearer to the metal.
He shoulders the pack, drags the cart up, and starts a quiet run that keeps his feet on paint and his shadow where nobody expects it. Behind him, a fence complains about something climbing that didn't ask permission.
He doesn't look back.