The team crowds into the shed, boots scraping concrete, shoulders bumping in the narrow space. Someone reaches back and pulls the door shut. It lands with a hollow thud that hangs in the air, as if the shed wants credit for the moment.

  Outside, the city keeps going. Traffic slides past. Voices blur. A siren drifts by, uninterested.

  Inside, the air settles.

  Cool by design. A temperature chosen by people who understand tolerances. The kind of cold where metal behaves as long as you don’t surprise it.

  Hydraulic presses sit sunk into concrete. Welding rigs rest where they were last dropped, cables scorched stiff. A vice dominates one wall, heavy enough to feel structural. Tools line the walls in exact order — close enough to grab without looking, spaced so nothing collides.

  Nothing here is decorative.

  Nothing here performs for approval.

  Taylor takes it in, his grin thinning as the room explains itself.

  “This is not a shed.”

  Leo drifts to the bench, lifts a wrench, weighs it, turns it under the light. His thumb finds the stamp near the jaw and lingers there.

  “Clean,” he says. “Which makes me nervous.”

  The rest of the thought arrives a beat later.

  “Silas didn’t buy this at B&Q.”

  Taylor exhales. “Smurf account. Someone parked serious gear where nobody would ask questions.”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Marcus scans the presses. “Like hiding a gun in a biscuit tin.”

  Kam barely hears them.

  The space presses against him — too still, too cold for what he knows he’s carrying. His skin prickles, waiting for permission to misbehave. He looks down and notices the floorboards, old and swollen, dark at the seams. He crouches, drags his fingers across the wood. Heat slips out of him without effort. Smoke curls up, thin and sour, smelling of wet pine and old varnish.

  Something shifts under his hand.

  A hatch.

  He pulls.

  Beneath the floor sits an engine block.

  A cast?iron V8 sunk straight into the earth. Not hidden — installed with intent. Heavy enough that the shed feels built around it.

  Cold.

  The room stills, not because anyone chooses silence, but because the quiet seems to be doing something useful.

  Kam sits on the edge of the opening, legs dangling over iron.

  “Wire me up.”

  Leo freezes. His eyes flick from the engine to Kam, then back again, checking the order of operations.

  “…Okay,” he says, slowing himself down. “But we’re being clear about expectations.”

  He handles the cables with new precision.

  “It’s going to drink the heat,” he says. “Hard. Like it’s been waiting.”

  Taylor shifts his weight. “That’s comforting in a very specific way.”

  “Don’t fight it,” Leo adds. “If you fight it, it wins.”

  Kam nods once.

  The clamps close around his wrists. Cool. Then warm. Then hot as the circuit completes. He lowers his boots onto the iron.

  Steam erupts.

  The shed fills with it — sharp, constant, the sound of a bad idea proceeding exactly as designed. The sensation hits all at once. Vertigo, not relief.

  The heat is pulled out of him, uneven and greedy. Kam gasps as the room tilts. His shoulders sag. His breathing stutters. His skin dulls, colour draining into something ashy.

  Marcus tightens his grip on the rivet gun until the frame creaks.

  “This is usually where I say something reassuring,” he mutters.

  No one asks him to try.

  The steam thins. Kam’s chest rises. Then again.

  “It’s quiet,” he says.

  Quiet like a factory after shutdown.

  “I didn’t know it was that loud.”

  Maya watches the engine, eyes steady. “You never do. Not until it stops.”

  Taylor studies Kam’s face. “You look like a haunted heirloom.”

  Kam huffs once. It costs him.

  The engine keeps pulling, even without his push — a steady, patient hunger.

  “We take things apart,” Maya says.

  Kam lifts his head.

  “We crash it.”

  Leo nods. “If we’re stopping the Spire, we need a spike.”

  On the wall hangs the pile driver. Fifty kilos of scarred steel. Grips wrapped in tape. Wiring biting into old metal like it’s holding on out of spite.

  Kam reaches for it. The metal warms under his hands.

  The engine keeps drinking.

  He looks down into the hatch. The block sits there, anchored and waiting. A solution that only works if he lives long enough to unplug himself.

  Kam tightens his grip on the spike.

  “We can do it.”

  Leo watches the copper at Kam’s wrist, the absence of glow.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Just not like this forever.”

  Kam doesn’t answer.

  He stays wired into iron, holding the spike. The shed remains cold. The engine keeps drinking.

  Somewhere outside, someone laughs at something small and irrelevant.

  FADE OUT.