The first chest of the day had a single horizontal mark and contained, among other things, a sealed container of dense salve and a roll of fresh bandaging.
He recognised the salve by its weight and the way the container resisted the pressure of his thumb slightly, the contents viscous enough to hold their shape. He opened it and smelled it. Different from the antiseptic pad: warmer, less sharp, something almost resinous underneath. He pulled back the cloth covering on his left forearm and looked at the skin.
Still tight. Still shiny in the places where the blistering had been worst. The texture of something that had healed incorrectly, skin that had closed faster than it should and lost its elasticity in the process. He had been working around it for so long that the limitation had become ordinary. He applied the salve in a thin layer along the full length of the affected area, working it in with his right thumb, and almost immediately felt the skin respond: a slight give where there had been no give, the tight surface accepting the salve and beginning to soften at the edges.
He sat with his arm extended for a few minutes, letting the salve absorb. The change was small and early but it was real. He covered it with the fresh bandaging, lighter than the old cloth, and pulled the hydraulic arm's segments back over it. The shoulder wound dressing he replaced with the remaining bandage from the roll. Cleaner than what had been there.
He closed the chest and kept moving.
The suit had changed how the bridge felt under him.
Not the bridge itself. The bridge was identical to what it had always been. But the HUD's thermal layer caught the cold signatures before his feet did, the lock-on let him read mechanisms from a safe distance, and the steam core's warmth against his chest was a constant that the bridge's ambient cold could not fully reach anymore. He was warmer than he had been since the cave. He had not noticed how much the cold had been costing him until it stopped costing him.
The vine arm and hydraulic arm ran without drawing down the individual cells. He had checked the cell levels twice since the torso activation and both sat unchanged. The core was supplying everything. He did not know its capacity. He watched the pressure gauge in the HUD's left panel when he thought about it and the level had not moved in two days.
He was moving faster now, covering more ground per day than in the early sections, the scooter handling the clear stretches while the suit handled the trap sections more reliably than he had managed without it. The marks on the walls were closer together in time even if the distance between them was the same. He was burning through the bridge at a different rate.
The second chest appeared mid-morning.
Single horizontal mark. He ran the checks and opened it.
The pistol was the first thing he saw, lying in a formed recess in the chest's base with a holster-clip beside it and a second charge cell nestled in the clip's side pocket. Compact, roughly the length of his forearm from grip to emitter, the casing a dark composite with a grip section that had been designed for a human hand. He picked it up. Lighter than it looked. The emitter at the end was a small aperture, recessed, the lens behind it clear.
He found the charge indicator on the grip's side: a small strip of cells, five of them, all lit. Full. He checked the spare cell in the clip. Same. He turned the pistol over and found the safety, a simple toggle, currently engaged. He left it engaged.
He set it on the planks in front of him and looked at it.
Then he looked at the bridge around him. The grey planks, the railing posts, the cavern walls with their holes at intervals. The void on both sides. He had been on this bridge for what he estimated was three weeks now. Every threat he had encountered had been built into the structure: mechanical release mechanisms, spring-loaded needles, pressurised nozzles, hinged panels. Nothing had moved toward him with intention. Nothing had required him to move toward anything. Everything had been a matter of reading the bridge correctly and reacting or avoiding.
'A pistol was for something else.'
He sat against the railing post and held the pistol in his right hand without pointing it at anything.
The bridge had been giving him things in a sequence he had not understood until the vine arm and hydraulic arm connected to the steam core and the suit became something with its own logic. Looking back now the sequence was visible: each piece had arrived before the problem that required it. The vine arm before the floor drop. The hydraulic arm before the beam. The helmet before the traps his other tells would have missed. The torso before the sections that were demanding both arms simultaneously.
The pistol had arrived before whatever required it.
He turned this over. Three weeks of mechanical traps and then a weapon. The traps had required reading, endurance, the right gear. The weapon required a target. He had no target. He had not had a target since he woke up in the cave. The marketplace showed him other people existed, hundreds of them once, fewer now, their listings appearing and vanishing. He had not crossed paths with any of them. The bridge seemed to run each person through their own section, independent, the only connection between them the anonymous market.
He considered the people on the marketplace. He had been thinking of them as fellow travellers on parallel bridges, somewhere in the system, accessible only through the watch. The pistol raised a different possibility: that paths converged somewhere ahead, that the bridge's separateness was temporary, that at some point the trials brought people together in a space where not all of them were going to be friendly. He had been shot at by the bridge's mechanisms. Being shot at by a person would be a different category of problem and would require a different category of response.
He sat with that and did not find it comfortable.
The other possibility was simpler and worse: something ahead was not mechanical and not human. The bridge had traps. Something ahead had teeth.
He had no evidence for this. He had the pistol, which was evidence of nothing except that whoever had designed the system expected some people to need a weapon at some point. That was a fact about the system's design. It was not a fact about what he was going to face. He could not know what he was going to face.
You cannot prepare for what you cannot see. You can carry what the bridge gives you.
He attached the holster-clip to the right side of the torso plate, where it locked into a receiver he had not noticed before, a receiver that had clearly been designed for exactly this fitting. The pistol seated in the holster and he checked the draw once, right hand, smooth enough. He re-engaged the safety and left it there.
He did not test-fire it. He did not know the cell's exact capacity. Every shot spent on a railing post was a shot not available for whatever the pistol had been provided for. He would learn to use it when he needed to use it or he would not use it in time. Either way, wasting charge on practice felt wrong in a way he could not fully justify but trusted.
He looked at the spare charge cell in the holster's side pocket. Small, dense, the same dimensions as the primary cell but unattached to anything. He had seen energy cells on the marketplace list in his earlier browsing, in the lower section where the numbers were larger. He left the spare cell in the pocket. He was not going to trade the backup for a weapon he did not yet understand how to use for something he might need instead. But he noted the cell's presence and its likely value the same way he noted the hinges and the wood fragment and the bolt. Things that existed, that had potential, that were worth remembering.
He had been doing this longer now. The keeping, the evaluating, the rough market awareness running underneath the survival awareness. It had become part of the same process rather than a separate one. He did not examine the change. It was just how things worked now.
He started the scooter.
The pistol sat at his right hip, safety on, charge full, pointing at nothing. The bridge went on ahead. Somewhere further along it there was something that had made the system decide he needed a weapon. He was going to find out what it was by continuing to move toward it, because there was no other way to find out, and because stopping had never been an option.
He kept moving.