"The math answered for him."
The beam slid across the concrete toward their patch of dead grass. The drone's gimbal eye ticked, tasting angles. Hale's whisper didn't move his jaw. "Disable."
Ash exhaled through his nose. "Throw the rock."
Hale's hand made a small arc and let go. The rock clacked off a standpipe ten meters left. The drone slewed like a curious dog, light snapping to the noise.
Ash was already moving. The Silver Stag came up, selector to long-range. Sight, breath, press.
The shot bit the drone's outer ring. The light lurched sideways and jittered. Motors climbed a note. It didn't die.
"Again," Hale said.
Ash compensated for the wobble and pressed a second time. The charge caught the gimbal near-center. The eye erupted into a brief white daisy; the drone spun, stuttered, and began to drop like a coin losing interest.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Field engagement: disable aerial surveillance unit (long-range). Difficulty: mid. +200 Mechanic XP / +300 Basic Mechanical Repair XP.
Mechanic lv3:200/1000.
"Move," Hale said. "Noise brings friends."
They sprinted for the service hatch. Feet on gravel. Breath kept small. Ash held the Stag low, selector safe. Nono skimmed along the wall, wheels whispering, eyes on heartbeat white.
The hatch was a steel square sunk into a concrete plinth. A chain wrapped it with the optimism of rules. Hale put the canvas roll down, flicked it open, and pulled a short pry with a chewed handle. "Keep me covered."
Ash faced the lane, back to Hale, and listened with his whole body. Far off, a shout tried on authority and found it roomy. Boots answered. The drone hit concrete somewhere behind them with a sound like a trash lid giving up.
Hale levered, shifted, and popped the chain through a weak link with a metallic cough. He caught the chain before it could speak again, laid it soft, and lifted. The hatch yawned cold. Air rose that had never learned the sun.
"Go," he said.
Ash dropped first, handed the Stag up to himself by muscle memory, then felt Nono's small weight bump his shoulder as the bot negotiated the lip with stubborn dignity. Hale came last, swung the hatch down without slamming it, and fed the chain back like a man tucking a child in while pretending there had never been a storm.
They stood in a maintenance throat barely wider than Hale's shoulders. Rust flaked like old snow. Their breaths echoed as if they were trespassing in their own chests.
Above, voices arrived at the yard. Flashlights wrote angry punctuation on concrete. Someone found the drone and named their mother.
"Left," Hale said. "Then right at the painted valve. Quiet."
They moved. Nono's treads whispered. Ash's boots chose the dark line where grit had been swept by other feet years ago. The panel hovered politely, a clean rule outside the panic flood.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Evade state: active. Detection risk: moderate. Suggested route: maintenance conduit E-4 → pump hall B.
"Can you read maps now?" Ash muttered.
The panel wrote nothing smug. Good.
They took E-4, which turned out to be a squeezed artery lined with pipe racks, valve tags faded to the color of old teeth. The painted valve had once been yellow; now it was an argument between memory and rust. They went right.
Hale lifted two fingers. Stop. He tilted his head. A voice somewhere ahead said, "You check the lower gallery. I'll sweep the culverts." Another voice answered with the kind of enthusiasm found on paperwork.
Hale leaned close enough that Ash felt his breath. "We cut through the cable chase. It's tight."
"Do it."
Hale slid his pry under a grated panel, lifted enough to make room for decisions, and held it. Ash slotted the Stag into his case and angled himself under, belly to concrete, elbows carrying a weight that didn't want to be carried. Nono flattened itself in a miracle of bad engineering. Hale followed, pulled the grate down with two fingers, and only then let his lungs remember how to be quiet.
Cable jackets brushed their faces like cold vines. Dust turned the back of Ash's throat into paper. He shuffled, inhaled through his nose, exhaled through teeth, and moved until the chase opened into a junction box the size of a confession booth. He eased up into a wider run where the air tasted slightly less of museums.
He reached back for the case. Hale passed it in with an economy that made no noise. Nono popped into the gap like a patient animal. Hale slid in last and ghosted the grate back with a thumb and two knuckles.
Light chased itself across the slots overhead—flashlights, hunting. A beam paused, narrowed, then moved on, unconvinced. Boots scuffed in the far corridor. Voices shrank and went the other way.
Hale tapped Ash's forearm twice. "Go."
They moved, hunched, pace quick enough to be honest, slow enough to let quiet win. Sweat crawled down the side of Ash's face and salted his lip. The rot in his right arm hung like it had always hung; lv3 hadn't negotiated that part of the treaty.
The conduit spat them into the back of the lower gallery—a long, low room full of silent machinery and stale air. On one wall, chalk marks in neat block letters mapped zones in a hand that wasn't Haven's. NIGHTSHADE—EAST SWEEP. NIGHTSHADE—SOUTH DOOR. Hale's mouth tightened, then flattened.
"They're making themselves comfortable," Ash said.
"They're measuring comfort," Hale said. "Different thing."
The gallery's far door bled a thread of daylight under it. Hale pointed. "Out there, cut right, up two flights, we're inside the haven skin. Your shop's five minutes if no one asks questions."
"People love questions," Ash said.
"They love answers more." Hale looked at the Stag. "If we get pinned, you keep the shots clean. Noise is a summons."
"Then we don't miss."
They moved for the door. Nono took the flank like a square cat. Ash felt the Stag's weight, the way the core's hum had vanished into good steel like a secret kept by metal.
The door opened on a service yard narrower than the one they'd left. A fence leaned like it had an opinion about how much longer it should be expected to be a fence. The sky had shifted to that thin gray that means the hour has decided not to commit. They cut right, boots memorizing the list of surfaces without adding their own footnote.
Shouting snapped on their left. Two Nightshade men rounded a corner and froze like they'd been paused. One's hand went for a radio. Hale's hand found the man's wrist before the thought completed. The radio hit the ground and learned about concrete. The other man yanked a baton because some lessons refuse to arrive early.
Ash didn't shoot. He stepped in, put the Stag across the baton man's forearms, rolled the man's wrists down and away, and gave him the ground. The man discovered sky, then floor, then nothing that needed reporting. Hale had the radio man folded into a stack that solved itself without talking.
"Move," Hale said again, not out of habit but because time was a fluid and you had to keep swimming in it.
They hit the stairs. Two flights up burned in the thighs. At the landing, a door frame had given up on its door; beyond, a narrow maintenance walk ran behind a wall of conduit. Ash felt noise approach like temperature—footfalls, wrong cadence, quick.
"Back," Hale said. They melted into the conduit's shadow as a three-man Nightshade team jogged past, eyes forward, rifles at a patrol low. One looked like a boy who had borrowed his father's jaw; he didn't look left. The team took the next corner hard and vanished.
Nono blinked a tiny exclamation point on its screen, pleased. Ash patted its casing with two fingers without looking down.
They took the maintenance walk at a pace that pretended they were allowed to be there. At the end, a steel door offered a familiar lockplate—the kind Ash had taught with to kids who didn't think they were learning anything. Hale produced a key that the admin would have insisted didn't exist and turned it. The door let them through with a sigh.
Inside, the air changed—refuge musk, recycled, human, real. The noise of Nightshade beyond the skin of the haven fell an octave lower, like trouble put behind a wall. Hale shut the door and leaned his forehead against the metal for one second. Then he straightened and didn't admit he'd done it.
Ash's shop wasn't five minutes. It was four if the world left you alone and three if it refused to. They made three. Hale set a palm to the shop door and listened. Quiet. He nodded.
Inside, the floodlight found them and did not object. Ash shut the door and put his hand on the bench the way a man touches a friend's shoulder. Nono rolled to its charger and pretended it had never left.
He set the Stag on the bench and waited one breath for his hands to stop being the kind of hands that shake. They did. He opened the case, checked the selector channel. Clean. The cam face took a fingerprint like it had learned manners.
[SYSTEM PROMPT] Field validation complete. +120 Mechanic XP / +200 Basic Mechanical Repair XP for successful evade and safe return with restored system intact.
Mechanic lv3:320/1000.
Hale shut the blinds that were really sheet metal. "Nightshade will write up a drone," he said. "Men will come read what they wrote."
"They already wrote on our walls," Ash said, thinking of chalk. He pulled the Imperial slate's foam cradle closer on the bench without touching it. The memory of the starfield sat in his head like a map that wanted to be used. Vehicle System. Titan Legion. Names like handles on a locked door.
Hale watched his face the way men watch a stove they've asked to do too much. "You're thinking loud."
"I'm thinking the yard answered the important questions." Ash patted the Stag. "The core holds. The modes switch. Under heat it sings but doesn't scream. I can push parts at this pace."
"And the rot?" Hale asked, because somebody had to be rude when time was mean.
Ash looked at his right hand. It hung. It would keep hanging. "Numbers," he said. "We climb them faster." He didn't say before the elbow. There wasn't room in the shop for that kind of sentence.
A small sound at the door made both their heads turn. Not a knock. A touch. The careful weight of someone who thinks doors are answers.
Hale's hand went to the canvas roll. Ash didn't reach for the Stag. He moved two fingers to Nono, and the bot unplugged without being told.
The sound came again. A little scrape. Then a voice that was trying to be nothing. "Vale?"
Ash didn't recognize it. That wasn't unusual; names didn't matter as much as hands did. He looked at Hale. Hale's face didn't change but his eyes said ready.
Ash lifted his chin toward the door. "Who's asking?"
Silence thought about itself for a long beat. Then: "Admin office. Clerk. I—" The voice stalled, like it had been pushed. "We need repairs faster than the schedule. Nightshade just requisitioned two squads' gear. The— the serum allotments—"
Hale's eyebrow lifted the way mountains do when they decide they're the ocean's business. Ash looked at the bench, at the Stag, at the slate he hadn't turned on again.
The clerk said, very quietly, like someone practicing treason, "There's also a permit they want you to sign."
Hale's head tilted. "Permit?"
Ash's mouth went dry in a way that had nothing to do with dust. Paper could kill you slower than bullets and with better handwriting.
He wiped his palms on his apron. "Open the door," he told Hale.
The bolt slid. The world inhaled.