The double horizontal mark. Fourth time.
He had started to trust this mark in a way he trusted nothing else on the bridge. The single line was safe to open but not safe inside. The double line had given him the vine arm, the water pouch, the scooter, the hydraulic arm. He reached in carefully anyway, left hand testing the floor first, because trust on the bridge was a calibration, not a permission.
The helmet was the only thing inside, wrapped in dense grey cloth and seated in a formed recess in the chest's base. He unwrapped it. Titanium, or something close to it, lighter than it looked, the surface a dark matte with a faint geometric texture that ran in fine lines across the crown. The visor was a single piece, slightly tinted, wrapping from temple to temple. He turned it over. On the inner surface, a thin strip of contacts running along the lower edge, designed to sit against the forehead. No visible power cell. Whatever powered it was integrated.
He put it on.
The visor sealed against his face and the contacts touched his forehead and after two seconds the display activated. Not a bright wash. A subtle overlay, grey on grey, the information sitting at the edges of his visual field rather than across the centre. He looked straight ahead and saw the bridge. He looked to the edges and found the data.
His heart rate: elevated but functional. Body temperature: within normal range. Hydration: a bar, roughly forty percent. Fatigue: a bar, roughly twenty percent full, which meant eighty percent depleted by whatever scale the helmet was using.
He looked at the hydration bar for a moment. Forty percent. He had been managing thirst as a variable for days, rationing by feel, and the feel had told him he was doing adequately. Forty percent did not say adequate. He reached for the water container and drank a longer measure than his usual ration. The bar moved to forty-three.
The fatigue bar did not move.
He took in the rest of the display. A compass bearing sat in the lower right corner, steady, not fluctuating. A small icon in the upper left he did not yet understand, a geometric shape with a pulsing outline. He would learn the rest by using it. He started the scooter.
The thermal layer activated when he began moving, overlaying the bridge ahead with a faint colour gradient. Most of the planks read as neutral. The railing posts read slightly cooler than the planks, consistent with their different mass and exposure. The wall stone read cooler still, the rock face maintaining a steady temperature the timber did not match.
He rode slowly, reading the display. He was looking for anomalies, for anything that did not match the baseline temperature of normal bridge materials. He found three in the first hundred metres: two wall holes that read warmer than the surrounding rock by a small margin, the mechanism inside them retaining heat from whatever pressurised system kept them loaded, and one section of planking that read cooler than its neighbours.
He dismounted before he reached the cool section and walked toward it on foot.
The post spacing was normal. The grain ran straight. His flex test on the surrounding planks found nothing. He would have ridden through it on the scooter without hesitation, or walked through it slowly and found nothing, and crossed to the far side believing the section was clean.
He crouched and looked at the planks the helmet had flagged. In the thermal overlay, a thin band of cold ran across the bridge's full width, maybe twenty centimetres across, roughly where two adjacent planks joined. He pressed the planks on either side of the band. Normal resistance. He pressed the band itself, one finger on each plank. The right plank had the fractional extra flex. The left did not.
He used the lock-on function for the first time, fixing his gaze on the right plank's edge and holding it steady. The display zoomed, the visor stabilising the image. The seam between planks was there, but at the edge where the right plank met the left railing post there was a gap, a thin darkness that ran the full length of the plank's width. Not a natural gap. A gap maintained by the mechanism below, the hinge point, the void air rising through it and chilling the wood above.
He went around it, stepping carefully along the left edge of the bridge near the railing, and crossed to the far side.
He looked back at the section. Normal planks, normal posts, nothing his previous tells would have caught. The helmet had shown him the cold signature from five metres away. He stood with that for a moment.
Then he activated the lock-on again and examined the section from his new position. The mechanism was clearer from this angle. The hinged panel, the thin gap around its edges, the crossbeam below that the hinge seated into. He had seen the underside of one of these in freefall and survived it. Seeing one from above, intact, was different. It was a precise thing. Someone had built it precisely.
The section beyond was clean, confirmed by the thermal display, no cold signatures in the floor and no warm ones in the walls. He mounted the scooter and opened the throttle to his usual pace.
The arrow fired from the right wall at roughly the three-hundred-metre mark of the clear section.
The helmet flagged the wall hole as warm a half-second before the snap, the mechanism's heat spiking as it discharged. It was not enough warning to move out of the arrow's path. It was enough warning that his body was already reacting when the snap came, dropping left off the scooter as the shaft crossed the space above the seat.
The scooter veered right without his weight and his left arm shot out to catch the handlebar before it went over the right railing.
He felt the shoulder wound tear. Not the old ache. Something new and wet and immediate, a pulling sensation at the fresh wound site that was nothing like the arrow's long occupancy. He got the scooter's wheel back on the planks and stood still and pressed his right hand to the left shoulder.
The dressing was soaked through when he touched it.
He sat against the left railing post and looked at what he had left.
The numbing agent was gone, used in the extraction. He repacked the wound without it, which was a different experience from the extraction and not a better one. He worked through it by focusing on the sequence: packing seated, pressure applied, dressing over, binding retied. Each step its own task, the pain a variable he acknowledged and worked around. He had done this before. The steps were the same.
When it was done the wound was dressed and the last of the packing was in it and he had nothing remaining from the supplies he had assembled across two chests and two marketplace trades. All of it spent, and the wound was back to where it had been the day before removal except the arrow was out and the channel was closed by packing rather than shaft.
He looked at the scooter's storage slot. Bolt. Wood fragment. Arrow shaft.
He opened the watch. Found the treatment cluster on the list. Scrolled to the wound packing symbol. The number beside it was large. He looked at the arrow shaft in the slot, which was straight and clean and in good condition, and put it on the platform. The shaft compressed and was gone. The packing arrived. A smaller roll than the one he had traded the canister for, but enough.
He packed the wound properly a second time with the new material, over the emergency repacking he had just done. Better now. More even. He retied the binding and sat back.
He thought about the canister he had traded for the first roll of packing, which had been used up. He thought about the arrow shaft, which had been in the bridge's railing and was now traded into the marketplace. The arrow that had been in his body was now, in some form, currency. He did not examine that line of thinking further. It was not useful and it was slightly strange and the bridge was in front of him.
He put the helmet back on. The fatigue bar had not moved. The hydration bar had dropped two points.
He started the scooter and kept moving.