The double horizontal mark again.
Third time he had seen it. The first had given him the vine arm and the water pouch. The second had given him the scooter. He went in carefully with his left hand, testing the floor before reaching, and found three things packed in separate cloth wrappings at different depths in the chest.
The first he unwrapped and knew immediately: a probe, thin and slightly hooked at the tip, the metal smooth and sterile-smelling the way the antidote vial had been sterile-smelling. Surgical. He set it on the planks and opened the second wrapping. A cloth pad sealed between two layers of waxed paper. He peeled one layer back and caught the smell: sharp, chemical, antiseptic. He resealed it carefully and set it beside the probe.
He looked at those two items for a moment. He had the wire he had been meaning to trade for a numbing agent, and the near-empty canister he had been meaning to exchange. The probe and the pad were the last two items he needed. He had not been expecting to find them in the same chest. He had not been expecting a great many things the bridge had done.
He put both items in his jacket pocket, keeping them separate from the food and the other small items he was carrying, and opened the third wrapping.
It unfolded differently from the vine arm. Heavier in the hand, the segments thicker, each one locking into position with a solidity that the vine arm's lighter construction had not produced. When it was fully extended it ran from finger-guard to a wide cuff designed to seat above the elbow, and the whole assembly had a density to it, a mechanical seriousness, that made it feel less like gear and more like infrastructure.
He found the power cell on the inner forearm section: a small rectangular housing, a single indicator light that he pressed and found glowing green. Charged or near-charged. He did not know what the green light would become when the charge dropped, or how long full green lasted. He filed those as things he would learn.
Getting it onto the left arm took longer than it should have.
The vine arm on the right could not help with fine work. The left arm could not assist itself usefully, the shoulder refused the angles required, and the burn, though healing, still made sustained wrist rotation unreliable. He ended up bracing the hydraulic arm's upper cuff against the scooter's handlebar and feeding his left arm into it from below, using his knees and his right forearm to press and guide, getting each segment to click into position through a process that used every available surface except the ones that would have made it straightforward.
Twelve minutes. He had counted.
When it was on it was heavy. Not unmanageably so, but he felt the weight immediately in the left shoulder, a pull at the base of the arrow wound that was distinct from the arrow's usual ache. He rotated the arm slowly. The hydraulic segments moved with it, smooth, each section articulating in sequence, the mechanism quiet except for a faint pressurised hiss that came and went with the larger movements.
He gripped the railing post with the left hand.
The grip tightened far past what his own fingers could have managed. He had intended moderate pressure and the arm had delivered considerably more. He released and looked at the post. A faint compression mark in the wood where the finger-guard segments had closed.
'More force than intended. Less precision than needed. Adjust.'
He practised at half his intended effort for the next ten minutes, gripping and releasing the railing, learning the ratio between what he thought he was doing and what the arm was actually producing. The ratio was roughly two to one: grip at half intention, get the force he wanted. He was not going to remember that under pressure, but he would remember it better having practised than not having practised at all.
He started the scooter and kept moving.
The obstruction appeared forty minutes later, at the edge of where a scooter-appropriate section ended and a section he had been reading as potentially problematic began.
A lateral beam had come down. Not a floor plank, not a railing post: something from the upper structure of the bridge, one of the longitudinal members that ran below the planking, a section of which had broken free and swung down to hang across the walkable width at roughly chest height. Old wood, dark and dense, considerably thicker than the planks underfoot. It spanned most of the bridge's width with its near end resting against the left railing and its far end jutting out past the right railing into open air above the void.
He stopped the scooter and assessed it.
Crawling under it meant pressing his chest and the left shoulder wound against the planks, which he was not going to do. Crawling over it meant lifting his body above chest height with an arm that had an arrow in it, also not viable. The beam itself was perhaps two metres long in the span across the bridge, and he estimated its weight at something he could not have managed with one arm six days ago.
He dismounted and walked to the beam's left end, where it rested against the railing.
He put the hydraulic arm's hand against it. Remembered the ratio. Applied half his intended force.
The beam moved. Not easily, not without resistance, but it moved, sliding sideways along the railing with a grinding sound, the far end swinging out further over the void as the near end pushed along the left rail. He kept the pressure steady and the beam kept moving and after three seconds the near end cleared the railing and the whole assembly tipped, pivoting on the railing edge, and went over into the dark below. No sound came back.
The path was clear.
He stood where he was for a moment. The path had been blocked and now it was not and the arm had done that. He noted it without ceremony and walked back to the scooter.
The push had cost him. The force of the beam's resistance had transmitted back up through the hydraulic arm's cuff, through the elbow, up the left arm, and into the shoulder in a dull rolling pressure that had pulled at the arrow wound in a way that was not sharp but was not nothing. He pressed his right hand to the bandage over the entry point. Dry. No fresh bleeding. The wound had held.
He picked up a block of dense dark wood that had splintered from the beam's end when it hit the railing going over. Heavy for its size, the grain tight and even. He turned it in his hands. The bridge's planking was softwood, pale and weathered. This was something different, cut from older stock. He did not know whether anyone on the marketplace needed hardwood. He put it in the scooter's storage slot.
He stopped in a stable section and traded.
The wire first. He had been carrying it since the chest two days back, coiled in the storage slot, and he had not found a use for it himself. He put it on the platform and scrolled the list until he found what he thought was a numbing agent: a small sealed vial in the treatment cluster, the symbol adjacent to the one that had been the antidote. The numbers were large but the wire had value, and when he placed it the platform accepted the exchange. The vial appeared: small, clear, different in colour from the antidote. He put it in his jacket pocket with the probe and the antiseptic pad.
The near-empty fuel canister next. He had been carrying it since he first topped up the scooter tank, keeping it on the theory that containers had value. He placed it on the platform, scrolled to a wound packing symbol he had identified in a previous browse, and made the trade. A small roll of dense, compressed material arrived. He unrolled a centimetre, checked the texture, rerolled it. Packing.
He looked at what he now had.
Probe. Antiseptic pad. Numbing agent. Wound packing. The complete set of what he needed to remove the arrow. Everything assembled across two chests and two trades, accumulated over the past two days without urgency, without crisis. Assembled deliberately, not under crisis.
He was not going to do it today. The scooter was running, the section ahead looked clear, and the arrow had been in his shoulder for six days without killing him. One more day of travel was not going to change that calculation meaningfully. He needed to be stopped, rested, and stable, not mid-transit on a bridge that had demonstrated a consistent willingness to require the use of both arms without warning.
He packed everything carefully in the jacket's inner pocket and started the scooter.
Tomorrow, or the day after. When the section was right.