The door flexes under a palm that wants to be a face. The chorus outside breathes in time with metal.
Rhett lays his hand on the lift motor and listens the way he listened to the hair dryer. Windings. Brushes. Bearings gummy with lint. Belts that will move if reminded they were born to. He cracks the access plate, finds the tensioner by feel, and flicks it until the belt finds teeth.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)][MECHANICAL REPAIR (PASSIVE)]
He doesn't touch the ceiling light. He feeds the motor a taste of life with a hand-crank. The casing shivers, thinks about refusing, then turns like an animal remembering how to breathe. Knuckles rap the workshop door in a rhythm that used to mean a neighbor asking for salt.
He rolls a crate under the hook, threads the chain, pumps the brake. The platform rises. Noise is bait. Distance is life. He lets the frame moan a little as if the load were heavier than it is, then leaves the lift humming like a lure on a line.
He tapes a plastic funnel to his index finger with cloth and gaffer - a ugly little collar that should tighten the bite of air.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Delivery hatch, narrow run, detergent gone sweet. He keeps to the outside edges of his feet so the floor answers in paper, not voice. He passes the glass break room without looking. The man inside has found a new voice and is teaching the walls to say it. Rhett lets the sound slide off him like cold water.
Mail lockers wait like brass teeth. The grid is dead but the latches still believe. He sights down the funnel ring and whispers a bead of pressure into a slot. Not a bark - more like tapping a spoon on a jar lid until it forgets to hold.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He palms the door to kill the squeak and raids the dead mail: lithium packs, charging docks, a power drill with a battery clipped in but flat. He pockets the cells and ties them tight. The lift clanks as the brake slips. The hallway hushes to listen.
Bare feet begin to learn a march.
Backpack under a tangle of sheets in a laundry cart. Push soft. Then run because soft gets you netted.
Two shapes peel off the stairwell like furniture in a flood. One tall and bent as if its own spine were an insult; one small and quick inside a coat it stole. Their heads find him the way a lens finds a face.
He doesn't stop the cart. He vaults it. The cart caroms into legs; he hits tile low and hot and hears denim give at the knee. The small one grabs his ankle. He kicks and misses, kicks again, and feels a wrist change idea.
He sights through the funnel and pulses a short shot into the tall one's knee. It doesn't explode - it quits.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The tall one crumples and takes the quick one's ankle with it. The floor decides to be bad for both of them. The quick one spits a rope of translucent glue; it hits the wall and hangs like a thought that won't complete. He steps aside and spends his whole day behind a pry-bar swing. Steel bites where skull should be thick and isn't. Something crunches; the body shivers like it's being wrung. He slides the bar to the base of the head and levers until the sound tells him to stop.
Knuckles open a door somewhere behind him with careful gravity.
Run. Corridor kink, stairwell, breath on a metronome. His finger tingles cold.
[SPEED: LV.0 30/30][SPEED: LV.1]
He isn't faster so much as cleaner - grit rinsed from the joints. Landings arrive where he wants them. Corners agree to be wide enough.
The loading dock yawns. Corrugated jaw, chain through rusty eyes. He sights on the links and convinces them to forget each other.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Shoulder into door. It gives a finger's width and then hits a dead brake that doesn't care about shoulders. Control box on the wall - LIFTGATE - hasp unlatched because someone thought a power cut was safety. Faceplate off. Spiders of wire. Relay like a tooth. Battery into the drill, self-tapper through two leads, bridge a professional would hate but the motor will respect.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Trigger. The door climbs a palm's width and stops. Upstream, something trips and resets like a house clearing its throat.
They come. A patient tide. Voices built bead by bead on the wrong string.
Rhett plants his feet, points the funnel not at faces but at guts and knees, and chisels lanes open. Move while firing. Step left on recoil, right on reload that isn't a reload, keep stream tight so it's a tool, not a noise.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Bodies tumble into bodies. Hands walk without owners. Floor slickens into treachery.
The door begs one more idea. He looks at the chain he broke, the motor casing, the battery, the bar. He looks at the cart, the sheets, the zip ties.
He zip-ties the battery to the pry bar as a handle, strips two wires with his teeth, and spears the motor leads. He is the switch now. The motor tries, fails, tries again. The door climbs to skin his back and stops as if to say that's kindness enough.
Something fast skitters along the wall like a glass rat. It hits the box and sprays a fan of clear spit. The bridge smokes and dies. He kills the box with one savage swing, then uses the same motion to knock the rat to the floor, where it breaks wrong - too wet, not enough shards - and flops like a bag of bones that thinks it's a fish.
The chorus finds the slope. They ride the handrails and laugh with stolen voices. The headset girl's laugh almost costs him a breath. He plants the funnel to a chest and spends three pulses point-blank. Ribs fold. Space opens. He buys more with metal and motion.
Air that remembers outside touches his mouth through the gap. He rams the cart through so the sheets will snag and hold teeth. He dives after and feels steel comb his spine.
Outside is night and wet concrete and wind that believes in knives. But the air is big. Space is a weapon too.
He snaps the ties off the bar, turns, and chisels the hand that reached too far into three quieter problems.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The bay yawns behind him, chewing cloth and bone on its own time. The alley breathes knives. He sets the cart's wheels and maps the next forty meters: chain-link left, dumpsters right, a service road that points east whether it knows it or not.
He pushes off.