The bridge gave him nothing for a long time.
No chests. No changes in the walls he had not already learned to read. No traps fired, which was the good version of no changes. He rode the clear stretches and walked the sections where the post spacing tightened. The pattern recognition worked, two sections read correctly, both avoided without anything triggering. He noted both and kept moving. There was no satisfaction in it. There was just the next section.
Around the third hour his right shoulder began reminding him of itself. Not the suspension strain, which had been reducing. The ordinary fatigue of holding a posture too long. He shifted his weight on the scooter, found a slightly different grip, and the ache moved back to manageable.
The hydraulic arm was heavy. He had not registered this during the beam clearing, which had lasted three minutes. Over three hours it was different. The weight sat at the top of the left arm where the cuff ended below the arrow wound, a load that the shoulder muscles had been managing all day. Not pain. Accumulated weariness with no clean category. He thought once about removing the arm. Getting it back on had taken twelve minutes and a scooter handlebar. He kept it on.
He ate the last food in the fourth hour. The dried remnant, what was left of it. He chewed slowly, drank a measured sip of water, started the scooter. Hunger arrived within the hour, the way it always arrived when management stopped: persistent, attentional, not yet incapacitating. He gave it nothing. There was nothing to give it.
He stopped the scooter once in the sixth hour for no reason he could name. A clear section, nothing wrong, and he just stopped. Sat on the idling scooter. Thirty seconds. Then he rode.
He caught himself drifting twice after that. Not sleep. The attention going somewhere unspecific while the planks passed under the wheels. He pulled himself back the first time by counting to ten. The second time by pressing his palm against the handlebar hard enough to feel the scar at its heel. Both worked. He kept moving.
Something surfaced briefly in the seventh hour. Not a memory. The sensation of knowing what the next hour would require because the previous hour had been the same. Daily repetition. A rhythm worn into him somewhere before the bridge. It lasted ten seconds and dissolved.
He found a loose bolt on the bridge surface in the eighth hour, worn free from a railing mechanism. He pocketed it without stopping.
He made wall marks when the walls came close enough. He was not always certain the spacing was right. He made them anyway.
The chest appeared in the ninth hour. Single horizontal mark. Food: two blocks. Water: one sealed container. He ate one block before completing the inventory, sitting on the planks over the open chest, and drank half the water. Then he sat with the hunger receding until the receding felt real.
He looked at the section around him. The walls were at their standard spacing, no holes visible for thirty metres in either direction. The post spacing was regular. The planks had passed the flex test. He had been sitting against the right railing post for ten minutes and nothing had changed.
He put his right hand to his jacket pocket. The probe, the antiseptic pad, the numbing agent, the packing. Seven days since the arrow. He was as rested as the bridge was going to allow. He was not sharp, but he was sharper than he had been three hours ago. The section was the quietest he had found all day.
He laid the tools out on the planks in front of him and looked at them.
He started with the numbing agent.
The vial was small and he opened it carefully with his teeth, the same way he had opened the antidote. The smell was different: not sharp, something more neutral, faintly medicinal. He tilted his left shoulder forward, reached behind with his right hand, and found the bandaging. Worked it loose from the entry point without removing it entirely. Exposed just the wound mouth. Then he tilted the vial and let the agent run in slowly along the shaft, a few drops at a time, waiting between each application for it to travel down the channel before adding more. He used most of the vial. Then he sat and waited.
Eight minutes. He counted.
The numbness arrived gradually, first at the surface and then deeper, a deadening that moved inward toward the shaft. Not total. Not painless. But different enough that what had been a constant ache became a muffled pressure he could work around.
He picked up the probe.
The probe went in beside the shaft, right hand, slow and deliberate, feeling for the tissue that had grown around the arrow in seven days. There was resistance. He worked the probe in small arcs, clearing adhesion without tearing, finding the path that the shaft had originally taken. His right hand was steady. He was aware of each increment of progress. The shoulder reported the probe's work as pressure rather than pain, which was what the numbing agent was supposed to achieve.
When he had cleared enough of the channel he set the probe down and gripped the shaft with the hydraulic arm.
This was why he had waited. His own hand could not guarantee the controlled, non-flinching traction that extraction required. The hydraulic arm could. He positioned the finger-guard segments around the shaft above the entry point and applied half his intended force, the ratio he had learned. The grip was firm and even. He breathed out and drew the arm back slowly, steadily, maintaining constant pressure.
The shaft moved.
It came free in one long, slow pull, the resistance releasing in stages as the channel cleared, and at the end of it the arrow was out and in his hand and the wound was open and bleeding.
He pressed the antiseptic pad against the entry point immediately, right hand flat over it, and held. The blood came through the pad quickly, soaking the cloth, and he kept the pressure steady and did not lift it to check. Lifting to check was how bleeding got worse. He knew this. He held and counted and waited.
After two minutes the bleeding had slowed enough to work with. He packed the wound with the roll of packing material, feeding it in carefully with the probe to seat it, then dressed over it with the remaining bandage from the old dressing. Pressed everything flat and retied the binding.
Then he sat with his back against the post and held pressure over the dressing with his right hand and waited.
He sat there for a long time. The wound held. No gush, no arterial pulse, just the slow seep of a wound that had been disturbed and was now managing itself around the intervention. The packing was doing its job. He stayed until he was sure, and then stayed a while longer.
He set the arrow shaft on the planks beside him. Dark wood, still straight, the head dark with seven days of being inside him. He looked at it for longer than he needed to. Then he put it in the scooter's storage slot with the bolt and the wood fragment. Someone on the marketplace might want an arrow shaft in good condition.
His shoulder was sore in a new way. Not the arrow's ache, which had been his constant companion since the corridor. Something more open, a wound that had been closed by the shaft and was now closed by packing instead and knew the difference. He moved the left arm carefully, testing range. Less than before. Expected. The packing was dense and the wound was fresh.
He sat with the absence of the arrow for a little while. Something that had been there was not there anymore. He noted it without building anything around the noting.
Then he started the scooter and kept moving.