The block turns into specifics fast: a crossbar gate settled low across paired frames and, beyond it, a gondola car parked wrong on the main, its belly a black rectangle of brake tanks and linkage. The seam under the rigging is a rumor, not an offer. He drops to timber, cheek against splintered board, and lets sparks read the strap instead of ribs.
The crossbar's near chain shows a plate weld too clean. He buys a thumb of slack.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Air coins hard; the plate gives up a link; the bar sags the breath he needed. The strap kisses teeth, thinks about treason, then keeps the marriage. He reaches the gondola's shadow with his face full of oil and the smell of old ore that lives in wood.
Brake rigging passes inches above his spine—reservoirs, transverse rods, dust packs, a grease stalactite where maintenance once remembered itself. A hand drops from the catwalk and gropes for his head like it bought him with a ticket. He gives the wrist a metal lesson.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Bone revises employment. The hand vanishes. Glue spit strings for the lash like it knows his inventory. He opens the regulator a quarter turn and skims hiss along the strap; the bond goes chalky and lifts in fish scales.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Underframe ends; night returns; he pulls breath in through his teeth so he can hear deck talk. The chorus meets the gate behind and tries to become paperwork. The sound goes wide and then small.
He stands enough to steer the next ten meters and nothing more. Warehouse backs crowd both sides, brick glazed with forklift kisses. A cone-dressed throwstand crouches on the right with a drop-dog levered into the rail like a bad mood. He doesn't have time for wrenches.
Rope round a stub post. Two wraps. Tail to the axle. He becomes a capstan with legs, then tells the motor to be a winch for once instead of a ride.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The dog lifts, snarling steel. He kills rope with a hitch that will hate itself later and rolls the deck through the hole he made while the chorus argues with geometry in three dialects at once.
A low girder bridge hums ahead. Crosswind picks a fight. He flattens, one hand on lash, one on pry, knee a shock absorber he didn't pay for. Under the deck a lure learns he exists, small and thrilled, hands shiny with glue. It wedges to make the wheel climb.
He peels it with hiss, then edits what's left with a bar stroke that would shame a butcher. The wheel stutters and forgives him.
[MECHANICAL FABRICATION: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
The strap has a hot line worn into it from too many teeth. He will not let the next gate read that same inch. A pallet yard opens to his right for five heartbeats, a scatter of ratchet straps and busted winch bars spilled like coins. He risks the smallest sin he can afford—left hand reaches, right knee locks, eyes never leave iron. A fresh strap snatches from gravel; he trades old for new with the deck rolling slow enough to insult physics but not stop.
Tug, buckle, breath. The world keeps its argument going without him.
[SPEED: LV.1 (Progress +1)]
Signs begin to cluster: numbers, arrows, a ghosted WALTON that refuses to die, a stenciled EAST in letters that believe in schedules. The rail fattens into an interlocking, points like fingers laid together across ballast. Signals above the ladder are dark but not dead; glare shields remember purpose.
The first set of points sulk halfway. The throwstand for them sits on a pad behind a crash frame, chain through its throat like policy. A human in a harness stands on the pad with a radio and a look that says he wants ten more people and a different century.
'Hold!' he calls.
Rhett answers with a gift the man doesn't have to sign for. The latch pin through the stand's link shows bright where a wrench loved it last week. He pays it the only currency he has left.
[WIND CANNON: LV.1 (Proficiency +1)]
Pin quits. Lever drops with a thunk that frogs applaud. Tongue kisses home and becomes truth. The human looks at his radio like it lost the argument for him and then makes a face that says, fine, live with it.
'After rider,' the radio crackles. The phrase climbs the ladder like a cat, from stand to stand, policy making room for motion.
A short cut of empties rolls across the far end of the ladder, shunted by a tug that's all torque and opinion. The slot under the center sill of the last car stays black and mean and just big enough to be a theory. He makes himself a diagram again and lets the deck draw it.
Brake beams pass; center sill keeps its secret; footboard steals a sliver of strap by way of warning and decides to be generous. He comes out of the ladder breathing like a man who stole air fair and square and plans to spend it well.
The interlocking drops away into a straight run behind warehouses too clean for ruin. Paint squares mark where forklifts park like chess pieces. A hoist dangles from an I-beam inside one bay with a yellow hook big enough to lift mistakes.
He doesn't slow. He becomes weather again and lets rooms keep their rules.
A crossing cabinet has its door ajar, guts ripped out and tied back neat with zip ties by someone who understood current. He steals nothing. He isn't hungry for metal; he is hungry for east.
The main shoulders into a cut that smells like wet lime, then swells into the mouth of a tunnel with a roll-down shutter sagging half-low. The lip is lined with teeth and hate. On the parapet above, silhouettes lean with rope and cable in their hands like they're about to adjust the world.
Under the lip, a slot exists for a man who is a number and a deck that's an apology. It will be enough if he keeps promises to wood and steel.
He tugs the fresh strap one more hole, lays the pry bar flat under ribs, turns cheek to timber warm from friction, and asks the motor for the same yes it's given him all night.
Hands reach, eager to help the math be wrong. He shows them knuckles and they learn restraint. A knife tries to make the opening smaller and ends up teaching sparks about regret.
The teeth comb the strap and find new fabric, not the scar they remember. A buckle flexes and holds the marriage. Glue spit tries to bond dreams to board; hiss puts it back in the sea.
He threads the first inch and then the second and then quits counting because counting invites fear to have a vote.
On the far side of the lip, the tunnel changes flavor—air colder, water disciplined, walls patched where patching mattered. Somewhere in here a bell claps once and stops like a god went off break.
He rides the note in his chest and the one in the deck and the small one in the chain he loosened back at the crossbar. The silhouettes walk the parapet with the slow dignity of men who didn't shoot today. One leans down and touches the shutter with the back of his hand as if to check its fever.
'On iron,' Rhett says, because he wants the sentence to live here too.
The tunnel breathes back, a long patient lung that belongs to a corridor older than this night.
He keeps the deck steady, hires breath to be quiet, and goes where rail says east is not a theory.