The right leaf kisses its seat and turns theory into rail. Pawls drop in the tower; a dog barks once and becomes steel again. He's already flat to timber, cheek gritty, ribs on bar, the speeder's note drawn tight. The tank's belly moves across the throat like a sermon with wheels.
Brake tanks go by a hand above his spine—reservoirs, pipes dressed in grime, slack adjuster hanging like a threat. The world is bolts and breath and a number that hates being shared. He sights where a cross brace turns into a hinge and gives the hinge a new job.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Metal revises itself. A hanger twists, buys him a thumb he didn't earn. He takes it without apology. The center sill keeps its secret by a mercy that won't repeat.
Mid-seam, a hook from the catwalk gropes for his strap. He opens the brass regulator to whisper hiss along the lash; glue goes to fish scales and regret. Fingers follow, hungry, sure of their right; he answers with a bar kiss under the hinge and lets bone discover career counseling.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The tank's ladder cage rattles his breath and forgets it owns him. Wheels thunder past to remind the bridge it earns rent. Then the cut is tail lamps and dust, the leaf rails are one, and he is back in a grammar where forward is a sentence you can say.
Far bank frames wait with teeth and a chain belly dressed to say no. A throw man on the near stand raises his palm and not his rifle. Another voice on the tower says 'After rider.' The chain lifts a hand. He drops to boards, lets sparks walk the strap, and threads the gap polite enough to keep friends and rude enough to keep living.
White fades to work—warehouse backs, stenciled bays, cones hiding throwstands that were clever when daylight was cheap. A cable lies across a crossing like an ankle breaker waiting for the wrong game. He puts its U-bolt back into memory and keeps the deck honest.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
A net coughs from a catwalk and falls a second late. He doesn't spend a bead to punish timing; he spends silence, and silence pays.
Chorus sound dilutes behind him into committee voices arguing with frames and law. He steals that debate for minutes and buys distance with it.
The run kinks through an interlocking squashed between factory and river—four points in a cluster, home signal dark but scrubbed. Tongues lie sulking at half. A stand sits behind crash rail with a chain someone promised to use later and didn't. A human in harness plants both boots and looks like a man being graded by a radio.
'Hold!' he calls.
Rhett shows left palm and taps two fingers to ballast. 'East.'
The man hesitates in a way that admits he likes living more than paperwork. Rhett pays the latch pin the coin he's been minting all night.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Pin quits. Lever drops. Tongue kisses stock and becomes truth. The radio at the harness man's shoulder mutters 'After rider' like a prayer that learned to be policy. He doesn't say thanks; he makes the thanks happen by not dying where men can see it.
A shunted flat slides across the far end of the ladder and then pauses. The gap under its center sill is a rumor the size of a rib. He makes himself that size and nothing else. Brake beams pass. A footboard tastes the strap and spits it back whole. The deck forgives him; he deserves it for a breath and not a second longer.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
The line climbs to a viaduct where wind sharpens. Water below moves with a discipline ruin never learned. Salt says hello inside his teeth. He becomes smaller than hunger, elbow locked along lash, body a diagram that fits.
A shutter squats at the far end, spite-bent, trimmed until numbers do the job of malice. A drag board naps against a pier with iron dogs sleeping across it. He bumps it, catches a nail with a strap tail, and lets the plank ride under his chest edge-down. It shaves rope whiskers off the lip and makes arithmetic lean in his favor. The board finds a tie, throws a spark, and decides to die heroically somewhere he will never visit.
The shutter's teeth comb the new strap. The buckle considers betrayal and keeps the marriage. He clears into an industrial throat that remembers forklifts and the etiquette of light. A chalk map on the floor says WATER with an arrow and BATTERY with two; he pockets neither because the only thing he collects is east.
At the next crossing a lazy cable sits middle-chest, dressed to make widows for sport. He sights its belly where plate meets bracket and changes its plans.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Cable snaps like a bad idea realizing it's unemployed. A voice up on a parapet says his name the way kitchens do. He doesn't look because looking smuggles yesterday into today and today can't carry it.
Glue hunts the lash again out of habit; hiss peels it until habit learns manners.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The interlocking leaves him at a single mind of rail with river right and low sheds left. A sign on a pole with the paint worn off everything but intent reads EAST in block letters that prefer schedules to feelings. Wind changes, gets teeth. He stays the size of a rule and lets the deck be the proof.
A short siding peels to the left beneath an overpass where trucks used to pause and barter. The siding ends in bumper timbers bright under old white. He could salvage a belt from the shed that mouths the stub. He stays on the main because staying on the main is why breath still belongs to him.
The corridor squeezes into a cut against the river wall. A catwalk over water throws hands along a pole hook; they fumble his strap and grab air. He gifts them a joint lesson.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Bone revises its employment contract. A hook rings off steel and learns to be a fish story instead.
Ahead, the river makes a right he has to honor. The rail follows on a narrow shelf of fill where the ties show salt scars and the ballast looks like it believed in tides. Foam tongues the sleepers from below—storm surge or infrastructure that forgot the weather.
Under the next overpass the world arranges the last trick: paired crash frames set close as knuckles, chain slung low, teeth eager; beyond them the trench dips where water will be and is already pretending. Men on both stands watch with the posture of rules. Radios say things he can't afford to keep.
He raises left palm. Two fingers tap ballast. 'East.'
One of the stand men looks past him toward the lift and whatever the chorus is trying to be. The other looks down at his rope like it's a vote.
The chain rises a hand. The slot is a theory you could argue in a room with charts. He prefers to argue with ribs.
He tightens the lash one more hole and lets the pry bar find the place under him where pain becomes mathematics. Cheek to timber warm from friction; fingers flat; throat quiet.
The frames start closing again because somebody up there changed their mind or remembered a page in a manual. He doesn't change his. Teeth meet strap. A buckle talks about treason in a language marriage understands and abandons the thought. Sparks write their little letters backward into salt air.
The trench beyond the frames is already wet at the corners. Water climbs the wall like someone learning stairs. His wheels take a slick he didn't order; he keeps the deck inside the line by will and practice and a hand on lash.
[MECHANICAL SCAN (PASSIVE)]
Rail head is clean; chair bolts honest; nothing under him wants to betray him faster than he can forgive.
A wave slaps the sleepers with a palm open and mean and retreats deciding it has time to grow. Salt makes his mouth say yes differently. He stays the size of the map he made of himself an hour ago and refuses to be edited.
A human voice from a stand says 'After rider' again, grudging, professional, the sound of policy losing by design. The chain lifts another thumb. He spends that thumb like money.
A hook from the river side leaps—a hand that learned water. He answers with air because his other hand is holding his life against the deck and he cannot afford to let go.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The wrist goes away. The hook joins the tide's inventory. A boy on the parapet flinches like he's going to remember that sound when a different life asks a different price.
The frames' teeth finish their thought after his spine is already east of them. Strap hums anger, then loyalty. He rises to a crouch and buys sightlines.
The trench runs fifty meters and then kinks under a viaduct whose concrete legs wear tide marks like medals. Beyond, the corridor lifts toward low land that smells of marsh and the memory of trucks. Clouds out east collect themselves into a wall, the color you get when daylight loses the vote.
He gives the motor a little of himself and it returns some improved. Salt spray kisses his cheek and the cut on his lip decides to be a mouth again. He keeps the iron.
The next shutter lives just beyond the viaduct in a freestanding frame planted into sanded concrete. It's trimmed tight, proud of the craft that makes men into numbers. Chalk on the base says STAY ON THE LINE in a hand that didn't finish school because school was busy dying.
He doesn't argue with chalk. He lies back down and becomes the line.
Water noses the sleepers a second time, higher, hungrier. The frames behind complete their meeting and the room he escaped becomes a rule for someone else.
He spends posture like money that has to be moved before a bank closes. Teeth read the strap, read him, read the decision he made when the city still pretended to be a city.
Salt air steals a breath he didn't need and gives him a different one. The shutter lip kisses spine, then battery, then the small machine that insists it can. He lets it insist and promises to argue later if there is a later.
Beyond the lip the trench opens to marsh light and a lane built higher than common sense. The world invites him to find out what the coast calls policy.
He takes the invitation because there are only two answers left and he's been saying the same one all night.