The jump box tips. Plastic kisses his knuckle and skates again. He hooks it with two fingers, pins it to the plank while wind argues about ownership, then drags it back and snaps the strap with his teeth.
He moves. The trestle's walkway talks in old wood syllables. Behind him the truss hum fattens as bodies learn the wrong ways to cross. Mind is fuel; he keeps it.
The service road angles southeast, the way a map would draw hope if it still believed in pens. Tanks shoulder up like sleeping whales. Chain-link runs until a gate admits defeat. Beyond: low sheds, a sign peeled to bone—BUS MAINTEN—something.
He shoulders the deep-cycle and runs steady, feet honest, shadow where nobody expects it. Finger numb under tape.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
The chorus spills from the cutting and pauses like a class waiting to be called on. Most turn toward the bell that still preaches; a few follow his smell. He adds five meters because five become fifteen if you give them a job.
Bus depot fence. Razor wire crouched on top. The padlock glows in his inner sense—heat stored wrong. He sights through the funnel ring and whispers a bead into the lock's belly.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The shackle forgets its vow. He threads through, closes the chain behind to erase the invitation, and cuts the corner of the lot to stay off open gravel.
Rows of buses hunch in diagonal, noses in. White and blue, some CNG, some with doors yawning. A roll-up bay stands half open, mouth full of dark.
He ghosts into the bay. Diesel and old soap. Racks of belts. Tool chests. On a stand: a bus axle, hub naked. He sorts shapes into two piles—now and later.
Now: a pallet jack. Poly wheels. He drops the deep-cycle onto its forks, straps it quick and ugly, and the cart problem gets less stupid.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)]
He rolls. Quiet. Beyond the bay a parts cage sits behind chain-link. He puts air where the hasp pretends to be brave.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Inside: fuses, hose, clamps, bearings. On a high shelf, two amber beacons on magnetic bases. He pockets fuses and tape, coils two meters of hose, takes one beacon because light can be a lie.
Footsteps outside. One set, slow. It tests the bay threshold with a hand.
Rhett keeps to the racks. The thing leans in: hoodie without a head inside, mouth like a cut in canvas. It tastes the air the way a stove leaks gas.
He sights through the funnel. The bead is small, deep, for a knee. He doesn't wait to see the fall. He slides past an engine stand and lets the pallet jack do the talking.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Wrenches go down in a clanging prayer. More footsteps answer. The depot remembers it has room for a crowd.
Left, not out, into the wash bay where brushes hang stiff with dry soap. A drain the width of a grave runs centerline. He pries a grate up and drops it behind him one stride later—enough to teach ankles humility.
'Ride the light,' a voice says from the door, warm like a friend in a truck cab at dawn. Another voice repeats, wrong by half a syllable, then ten, until the word breaks.
He doesn't donate breath. He looks for wheels.
Behind the wash bay, a yard. Scrap buses. A shed trying to slump off its own walls. Under a tarp: a rectangle on steel with flanged wheels. A maintenance speeder—deck, bench, a cooler-sized motor with pull-start and a carb that expects yesterday's gas.
He throws the tarp aside and tests the crank. Stiff. Plug out: varnish where gasoline used to live.
'Not tonight,' he tells the carb. 'Tonight you drink from me.'
Battery to inverter to drill to belt. He rigs a rope from a serpentine loop and two clamps, loops it around the pulley, and sets the drill to spin wrong-way until compression gets nostalgic.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
He primes with a syringe of clean fuel from a generator can, drips it into the throat, and squeezes.
The motor coughs. Once. Twice. The third time it almost catches and a hand slaps the deck like applause. Fingers spread. The palm stays as the body unspools upward, boneless as rope.
Rhett sights on the wrist and teaches the joint to stop being a joint.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The hand goes quiet. Two more arrive, learning the wrong lesson.
He feeds the motor with the drill. The engine coughs, quarrels, runs. He flips the choke; the quarrel agrees to be work.
The speeder trembles like a nervous dog. He kicks the bench lock, throws the belt free, and drops the drive to the axle. Flanges kiss rail with a sound that belongs to travel.
Outside the shed a pack tries to fit through a one-body door. They wedge, then become water.
He shoves the speeder out with one boot on gravel and one on deck until wheels own the rail. The car noses the yard lead and then the main like it belongs.
'Ride the light,' someone says from his left ear.
He answers with throttle.
The speeder offers motion in return. Ten kilometers an hour. Twelve. Fifteen. Wind slaps his face and takes the taste of depot out of his mouth. Flanges chatter across a frog and the sound adds five beats to his heart.
Behind, the pack spills into the yard and onto ballast. Some try rails, some fail in glitter and red. They do not stop. The bell west still rings its religion and steals part of them back.
He rides a cut that carries sound like a secret. Block wall one side, tanks the other. The motor argues mixture, then forgives him because he is moving and movement is manners.
A mast slides past, eye sockets empty. He considers stealing its ladder and decides he likes being alive.
A small trellis over a drainage ditch. The speeder clacks over; the ditch answers with river stink. Beyond, the line kinks around a warehouse and opens into a run where brush invades ballast. He eases off so scrub slides under the deck instead of shearing ankles.
The motor hiccups. He feathers throttle and choke. The engine forgives him again.
Something paces in the brush, parallel, not chorus. Low, four limbs, decisions of its own. He doesn't gift it his face. He gifts the track attention.
An access gate looms half open, chain dragging, padlock hanging stupid from one link. He ducks, leans, hooks the chain with the pry bar on the fly so it won't jam the axle, and throws it aside.
Grayhaven's east side drops into fields of concrete where industry forgot itself. A water tower stands like a promise too tall to keep. The pack thins behind noise and geometry. Wind carries his scent east, and nothing there is ready to care.
The motor warms. The note smooths. The little car attempts pride and almost earns it. He takes a breath that belongs to nobody else.
Inventory without eyes leaving line: deep-cycle lashed, jump boxes intact, rope loop happy, bar braced, beacon ready if he needs a lie people can see. Finger hurts enough to remind him he paid.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
A highway overpass. Shadow and trash under it. On the far side: a yard switch thrown halfway, points cocked at a siding that dives into scrub and dies. The main is straight. The halfway is death.
He stands and leans, weight on the world, bar ready. The speeder clicks into the points. Wrong. He shoves the throw with the pry bar's nose and hears the points slam home with a clean kiss.
[MECHANICAL OPERATION (PASSIVE)]
'Good dog,' he tells the steel.
Shadow shifts under the overpass. Not pack. People. Three. Faces catch the speeder's light and decide whether to own them. One lifts a hand, palm out—the old sign for a driver.
He can't stop here. He can't not stop here.
He thumbs the beacon and sets it on the deck, wobbling amber that says maintenance in a language cops used to understand. He lets the car roll slow. He lets the decision press his ribs.
'Don't,' one says from shadow. Male. Tired. 'Please—'
A second voice comes in a register that belongs to a girl who pressed her palm to a helicopter window. A third says 'fantasy' with a bored smile.
He doesn't brake. He aims for the gap a car might make if it loved his bones.
Two hold ground. The middle steps back, then forward, then back again. The chorus can fake a hundred things. Weight shift under a human ankle is not one. The middle is real or very good.
Rhett keeps throttle steady and raises his left hand, palm out, the old sign. Two fingers down at ballast. He mouths one word: 'East.'
The middle nods once. The two flanking reach together like a curtain. He sees too much bone in the way their fingers ask.
He feeds the motor breath. The speeder shoulders through. One hand slaps the deck; he hits bone with the pry bar without looking. Something screams in a voice that belonged to a friend ten years ago.
The real one flattens against a pillar and lives. The other two tumble, jointless, learning to be rugs. The speeder clears shadow and eats the main with a relieved click.
An engine note blooms somewhere ahead. Not his. Not big. A generator cough. A light winks low, then steady, somewhere out on the line where the world becomes black ocean.
He crouches to cut wind and keeps his hands where they can choose. The speeder runs true. The line draws a thin promise into dark and keeps drawing.
'Ride the light,' the night says, east to west, like a joke it thinks he'll enjoy.
He doesn't laugh. He lets the promise draw him.