He gives the air its task and the air obeys. A coin of force hits the chain's welded smile. For a breath it is all light and noise and grit; then the weld lets go, the links flash slack, and the drop-bar belly slams down so fast it bounces.
He stands into the slack and threads the speeder under as the bar rebounds. The tube kisses the deck and takes a shaving the length of his forearm. A link whips his shoulder and writes fire there. He does not gift it a sound.
Up on the parapet, the radio man panics wrong. He drops early, legs scissored, aiming to be a hero in the kind of story people tell about dead men. Rhett angles his forearm and lets the man lose against the pry bar's crown. A tooth clicks off stone. The harness bangs steel. The man rolls toward ballast, geography finally teaching humility.
The chorus hits the viaduct mouth as a body with too many opinions. Wind stacks their voices and makes patience sound like a choir. Some take the parapet route and learn gravity; others try the rail and discover knees.
Rhett rides the far side for ten meters, lungs clawing iron, then gums the throttle down and lets momentum carry. He hops off on the run, shoulder to the drop frame, and shoves the freed bar back into place until the ear finds the hinge with a clack that wants to be law.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)]
A chain dangles from the post like a question. He forks it through the bar's belly and smashes the pin with the bar's heel until metal decides to agree. Behind, the first ranks of chorus decide not to jump the parapet after all. They hit the bar in a slow wave and begin to pile. Limbs make choices that bones never meant to honor. The sound is sacks of meat on rebar and the kind of laughter that hasn't earned the right to be laughter.
A face rises out of the heap wearing a friend's voice perfectly. 'Rhett,' it says, as if his name were a door key. He answers with motion.
Back onto the deck. Throttle. The motor clears its throat and agrees to live. The chain bruise in his shoulder beats time in its own language. He feeds the speeder line and lets the viaduct give him distance for free.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
Industrial flats take over—low tanks, the scrawl of ducting, rails stamped with dates that remember better winters. A turnout arrives with points half a lie. He sights on the sulking tongue and corrects its honesty.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Metal blinks. The tongue kisses. The frog thumps true. He rolls the switch stand with a boot to be cruel to whoever follows.
A bungalow sits in a ditch at the next curve, its door tied open with wire like a promise to no one. Inside: bus bars stripped bare, labels faded, a bench sticky with old flux. Under the bench: a toolkit in a blow-mold case and two ceramic fuses that still look proud. He steals the fuses and a roll of cloth tape, leaves the case because it squeaks like guilt.
From behind and above, patience learns volume again. The drop-bar has become a problem to solve, and problems make cultures. He takes the speeder out of the ditch with a shove and a curse he does not waste syllables on.
The line climbs onto a steel trestle that spans factory yards gone to seed. Crosswind comes in clean and tries to rent his attention. Halfway over, glue-bright spit strings across his shin and snatches for purchase on deck board. He answers with the brass regulator and a flat hiss that peels the bond like a scab.
He gives the hand that follows a new assignment.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The wrist fails. The rest rides the chord of wind down into thorn and bad drainage.
Beyond the trestle, the main splits around a gravel pad where somebody once loaded steel coils. A roll-down gate crouches on the far end of the pad, low as a threat. Beside it: a crash-frame with an empty slot where a bar once lived. He hears engines that belong to no car and no generator—just fans somewhere inside walls, turning because no one reminded them not to.
He could go wide and hunt the access road. He could lose the hours he has left being careful for men with radios.
He takes the slot between gate and frame. He lowers to boards and lets the teeth comb straps until sparks follow and then fade. The deep-cycle shivers under him like a dog that wants off the table. He pets it with his sternum and doesn't stop breathing even when breath feels optional.
On the far side, a man stands with a road flare, its cap off, its sulfur belly waiting for friction. His weight shift tells the truth: he wants to look brave more than he wants to live. Rhett does the kind thing and makes the decision small for him. A bead into the wrist and the flare becomes a stick again.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The speeder clears into a run between warehouses with windows painted dead. Chalk on the pavement says EAST three times again, newest layer heavier than the last, as if someone kept trying to convince a room that never wanted to be convinced.
He wants fuel and belts and a chance to make a bigger plan than 'east'. The city has other ideas.
The run narrows into a slot with a drain down the middle. A curve throws him at a stack of pallets that pretends not to be a barricade. He sights for the welds and moves them from history to rumor.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The hole he makes is ragged. Wood claws at his knees and at the jump box cable. He feels the tug and gives slack without granting it permission to own him.
He comes out onto a wide apron of concrete where trucks used to reverse in straight lines. A forklift sits canted with its forks through the side of a trailer. A flood tower lies on its face like a dead giraffe. The tower's cables have been rolled and stacked like they were always rope.
He slows just enough to steal. The trailer door hangs in rags; inside: plastic bins of clamps and wire, a jug of two-stroke that tears his nose the right way. He siphons a liter into the speeder's tank, pockets clamps, pockets a handful of machine screws, and leaves the jug where it won't fall on its own shadow.
Voices ripple from a stairwell above the dock—human, tired, none of them singing patience. He does not give them a reason to learn his silhouette.
The main line kisses the apron's edge and dives into a shallow cutting topped by a pedestrian bridge whose deck is chain-link dressed in banners turned to rags. A cable is strung from the bridge down to a throwstand, then across the rail like a bowstring. He could stop and cut. He could not, and trust the thumb and the funnel.
He takes the trust.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
The cable is a black line on bright iron. He sights it just ahead of where speed will put it and gives the air one coin more.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The line parts. The bowstring slaps the throwstand and rings like a cheap bell. A shadow above flinches and ducks too late. He hears knuckles learn humility against chain-link and lets the lesson stand.
The cutting deepens and cools. On the far end, a machine shop spur kisses the main through a rusty frog. The shop's roll-up is down and dented; a sliver of light lives under it. He could stop and pry. He could save it for men who matter less.
He saves minutes.
A sign flashes past: WHITE DIST →. Another: WALTON INTERCHANGE with a number scuffed off. The rails here feel truer, the ballast less like knives and more like arguments you can win if you talk right.
Ahead, the ground falls away into a broad drainage, not a river, but its cousin that never went to school. A two-span bridge crosses it, concrete wearing steel like a belt. Midspan, a shape stands on the handrail in the wash of a portable light—a person or a rehearsal for one. It turns its head toward him and the motion is too smooth.
The thing drops and lands on the rail with hands and feet and a grin that shows too even, teeth printed from a tray. It stays crouched in his lane, arms open the way men at checkpoints used to stand when there was still a word for checkpoint.
He answers with the hinge that makes the pose work.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
An elbow changes its career path. The thing tumbles, folds, and goes off the edge like a bag that forgot it used to be a dog. He holds the deck steady through the shiver that follows because forgiveness is for later.
The far bank gives him a yard throat with throwstands standing at attention and a bungalow door ajar in invitation. He could pull more wire. He could pull himself apart chasing it.
He slips past. Distance is the only honest wealth.
The sky over the warehouses to the south learns a new color: not dawn, not fire—arc light white, the kind that comes from a tower someone fed correctly. Wind carries the smell of diesel burned right. Somewhere out there, not far, a genset runs and nobody has told it not to.
A radio voice pops on the wind—female, young, clipped. It says 'Oasis east post' and then a series of numbers that were meant to be coordinates and became hope instead. Another voice answers without vowels, all consonants and teeth, and then the frequency goes to chewing sounds that learned words wrong.
He lets the sound exist and doesn't change his plan.
Ahead, a concrete trench takes the line and offers him one more low shutter just before the exit. This one is bent like a smirk and trimmed to a hole that is absolutely not enough for a man on a deck with a deep-cycle under his chest. On the parapet above the shutter, three silhouettes drift and settle like crows that haven't picked a story yet.
He could scrape it. He could dump the battery and push and lose the kind of minutes you don't get back from a city like this. He could stop and talk and learn the temperature of a gun he can't see.
He lays himself down in the math. Strap one hole tighter. Bar flat. Chin tucked. Throttle at a yes that calls itself inevitable without becoming desperate. He aims the deck at the lip and quietly asks steel to love him more than it loves the idea of measuring men.
The parapet crows lean in as if to help.
He spends all the inches he has left and goes to meet them.