Rowan tightened the last shackle until the ratchet complained and then clicked with a small, satisfying finality. The mast he’d wrestled down that morning lay in neat, obedient sections on the back of his flatbed—concrete-splintered, cable-twisted, reduced to things that could be stacked and counted. He ran a gloved thumb along a bolt head, feeling for the telltale hairline that would mean fatigue, and then wiped his palms on the dirt-sodden canvas of his jacket. Ritual kept the edges of his nerves blunt: check, measure, mark, and never hurry the sequence. It was how he stayed precise with outcomes that demanded no improvisation.
A street vendor three blocks away was selling smoked figs wrapped in a translucent rice paper the way people in this city still remembered to wrap small pleasures: with a flourish and an apology. The scent braided with diesel and rain from last night, something bright and candied in the sour air. Rowan watched the vendor for a second with the kind of attention he usually reserved for load paths and shear diagrams. He liked this city’s little ritual of food—how it clung to corners and schedules no matter what collapsed or got rebuilt. The vendor nodded at him, as if to say the world still turned and a good fig mattered.
He unpacked his kit with deliberate fingers. Each pouch had its place, every tool nested like a modest, militant religion of iron. He ran a magnet across the sequencer case to make sure no stray filings would upset contacts later. The sequencer was a compact thing, matte-black and pitted from years of pocketed dust; its nickname was stamped on the underside in half-worn tape: BASTILLE. Rowan had stuck it there the first winter he’d called a device ‘reliable’ and it had stubbornly refused to detonate until he’d sworn at it in French and wedged it with a screwdriver. The label was a private joke—absurd and slightly sacrilegious—and it made him smile in a way that felt like a small, secret permission to be human.
He brewed coffee by thumb and habit: a Thermos, a pressed puck of oily grounds, the whole ritual of bad power and better caffeine. The coffee came up bitter and dark; Rowan drank and found the bite expectedly restorative. In the side mirror he watched a busker argue with a pigeon and lose. A little human argument with the day. He shouldered his pack and slid into the driver’s seat. Tires hummed over patched asphalt as he backed out and threaded through the waking blocks, the city knitting its routines around him. He had a night shift on a permit next week he’d been postponing—an old apartment stairwell that needed careful trimming. He’d promised himself he would finally talk to June about it, catch a volunteer meeting. He checked his phone out of habit: three missed messages, the top one from June, timestamped an hour ago. She’d sent a photo of the hall’s bulletin board, the way she did when she wanted to drag him into the world. Rowan thumbed the message closed and told himself he wouldn’t go. He liked being the one who came to clear the risk, not the one who sat in meetings and took minutes.