# Chapter 7
# Chapter 7: The Tear Behind the Laundromat
The seam, as it turned out, was behind a laundromat.
"I want to be very clear," William said, staring at the mural spray-painted on the alley wall — a faded, decade-old advertisement for a taco truck that no longer existed — "that when I imagined my first assignment for a secret interdimensional organization, it did not involve *Suds-N-Duds.*"
"It's not the laundromat that's the problem," Culvert said, without looking up from the small brass device in his hand — a compass, except the needle wasn't pointing anywhere near north, and every so often it spun in a full lazy circle like it had gotten bored. "It's what's behind it."
"That's a dumpster."
"Look past the dumpster."
William looked past the dumpster.
There, hovering about four feet off the cracked asphalt, was a tear in the world roughly the size and shape of a beach towel, if beach towels were made of static and regret. It didn't glow so much as *complain* — a faint, sourceless hum that made Michael's molars ache, like standing too close to a badly grounded amplifier.
"Okay," William said. "Retracting my earlier statement. This is extremely cool and I hate it."
"This is a Class-E instability," Culvert said, snapping the compass shut. "The smallest classification we track. Most of them close on their own within a day or two — reality doesn't like staying open any more than you'd like a papercut staying open. Every so often something small slips through before it seals. A Scrapper. A stray. Nothing you haven't handled."
Michael eyed the shimmering tear the way he'd once eyed a bee's nest he and William had disturbed with a lacrosse stick in the sixth grade — with the specific respect of someone who has been stung before. "And you want us to—"
"Watch it. That's all. I want to see how you handle a live seam before I hand you anything that can actually kill you." Culvert pulled a battered stopwatch from his coat pocket and set it, unceremoniously, on top of the dumpster. "If something comes through, deal with it. If nothing comes through, you'll have learned an equally valuable lesson about patience, which I suspect will do you more good in the long run."
"How long do we have to wait?" William asked.
"However long it takes."
"That's not an answer, that's a fortune cookie."
Culvert was already walking away, toolbox in hand, coat flaring behind him like a man who had somewhere better to be. "I have four other seams tonight and one bad knee. You'll manage."
"Wait—" Michael started.
"The wrench will tell you if something's wrong," Culvert called back, not breaking stride. "Trust it more than you trust him." A beat. "No offense."
"Massive offense taken," William called after him, then turned to Michael, hands spread. "We're babysitting a hole in the universe behind a laundromat. This is my life now. This is what I do."
They sat on the curb.
For twenty minutes, nothing happened, except that the tear hummed, and a woman came out to move her clothes from the washer to the dryer, walked directly underneath the shimmering rip in reality without looking up, and went back inside.
"She can't see it," Michael said.
"Culvert did say only System users and Network people can see the seams." William chewed on a piece of licorice he'd produced from somewhere, methodically, like a man settling in for a long stakeout. "Which, side note, is a genuinely terrifying piece of information. There could be one of these things floating over my kitchen table and I'd never know unless it ate my mom."
"That's not comforting."
"I wasn't going for comforting. I was going for accurate." William offered Michael a piece of licorice. Michael declined. "So what's the plan if something comes through?"
"Hit it."
"That is not a plan, Mike, that's your entire personality."
"It's worked so far."
"It worked *twice.* Statistically that's not a trend, that's a coin flip that landed the same way twice."
The tear pulsed.
Both of them went silent.
It pulsed again — a slow, wet contraction, like a heartbeat trying to remember how it worked — and a thin tendril of black mist began leaking from its edge, curling downward toward the dumpster with the unhurried confidence of something that had never once had to hurry.
**[SEAM ACTIVITY DETECTED]** **[CLASSIFICATION: E — MINOR]** **[THREAT ESTIMATE: LOW]**
"Low threat estimate," William said, scrambling to his feet. "I like low threat estimate. Low threat estimate is my favorite kind of estimate."
The thing that dropped out of the tear and landed in the dumpster with a sound like a bag of wet laundry was, unfortunately, not low-threat in the way either of them had hoped. It was low-threat in the sense that it was extremely small, roughly the size and shape of a raccoon, with too many joints in its legs and a face that appeared to be entirely mouth.
It looked up at them from inside the dumpster.
Michael and William looked back at it.
"Is it—" William started.
The creature let out a shriek that could have shattered a wine glass and launched itself directly at William's face.
"IT'S GOING FOR MY FACE," William screamed, in the exact register a person uses when a raccoon-shaped horror is, in fact, going for their face, and windmilled backward into a stack of empty laundry baskets someone had left by the alley wall.
Michael moved without thinking — the same reflex that had sent him running toward a screaming woman in a park a week and a lifetime ago. He grabbed the nearest available object, which happened to be a plastic laundry basket, and swatted the creature out of the air mid-lunge with the flat of it, the way you'd swat a very aggressive tennis ball.
**[IMPROVISED WEAPON MASTERY (E) ACTIVE]** **[DAMAGE DEALT: 8]**
The creature hit the pavement, skittered, righted itself on legs that bent in at least four directions Michael's brain refused to process, and came at him instead.
"Basket! Use the basket!" William yelled, still tangled in laundry baskets of his own, one leg stuck through a wire handle like he'd been personally betrayed by furniture.
"I AM using the basket!"
Michael swung again. The creature ducked under it — actually *ducked,* with what looked disturbingly like tactical awareness — and closed the distance in a single ugly scrabbling burst, jaws snapping at his shin.
**[HP: 100/100] — NEAR MISS]**
"It's smarter than the Scrapper!" William hollered, finally freeing his leg and grabbing a fresh laundry basket of his own like a man arming himself with the only weapon he trusted. "The Scrapper charged in a straight line! This thing is *juking* you!"
"I noticed, Will, thank you!"
Michael abandoned the basket strategy, dropped it, and did the only thing that had ever reliably worked for him in his entire life: he stopped trying to be clever about it.
The creature lunged again. Michael caught it out of the air — bare-handed, both palms, the way you'd catch a football thrown slightly too hard — and *squeezed.*
**[STRENGTH: 14 CHECK: PASSED]** **[CRITICAL GRAB — TARGET IMMOBILIZED]**
The thing shrieked, thrashed, and went very still.
"Don't kill it!" William yelled, unhelpfully, from behind his laundry basket shield. "I mean — do kill it, obviously, I just feel like we should establish a policy before you start—"
"IT'S TOO LATE FOR POLICY, WILL, I'M ALREADY HOLDING IT."
Michael, holding a shrieking, all-mouth horror at arm's length like a man who has picked up something in the yard and immediately regretted it, made a command decision. He threw it — hard, overhand, the same motion his father had spent a summer trying to teach him for Little League and had eventually given up on — directly into the side of the dumpster.
The impact cracked the plastic. The creature didn't get back up.
**[TARGET DEFEATED]** **[EXP GAINED: 3]** **[NO LEVEL UP — REQUIREMENT NOT MET]**
Silence in the alley, except for the faint, disappointed hum of the sealing tear behind them, and the distant, unbothered spin cycle of a washing machine through the laundromat's back wall.
William lowered his basket, very slowly, like a soldier checking whether the war was actually over.
"Three EXP," he said.
"Three EXP," Michael confirmed, breathing hard.
"We almost died. For *three EXP.*"
"We did not almost die."
"I had a leg stuck in a laundry basket, Mike, I want that on the record, I was *tactically compromised.*"
Michael looked down at the dented dumpster, at the faint wisp of dust already dissolving off the pavement, and felt the specific, ridiculous satisfaction of a job that had gone badly and worked out anyway. He picked the abandoned laundry basket back up, inspected the crack running down one side, and set it neatly by the alley wall where its owner would presumably find it, mildly concerned, on laundry day.
"Least dignified fight of my life," he said.
"You fought a woodland creature with a Rubbermaid product," William said. "I watched you do it. I will never let you forget it. This will be the first thing I tell your future biographers."
The tear behind them gave one last flickering pulse and sealed itself with a soft, unremarkable *fwip* — like a zipper closing — leaving nothing behind but a faint smell of ozone and the settling dust of a laundry basket that had, against all odds, survived combat.
Culvert reappeared at the mouth of the alley precisely four minutes later, toolbox in hand, checking his stopwatch with the air of a man who had timed the whole thing.
He looked at the dented dumpster. At William's leg, still faintly imprinted with the wire pattern of a laundry basket. At Michael, who had somehow gotten laundry lint stuck to his sleeve.
"Well?" Culvert asked.
"We won," Michael said. "Barely. Against a raccoon."
"It was not a raccoon," William said. "It had a *personality.*"
Culvert studied them both for a long moment, and something crossed his weathered face that might, charitably, have been the beginning of a smile.
"Congratulations," he said. "You've officially handled your first seam."
"That's it?" Michael asked. "That's the initiation?"
"That's the initiation." Culvert turned to go, then paused, glancing back over one shoulder. "For what it's worth — your father used a mop, his first time. Considerably less dignified than a laundry basket."
He was gone before William could get out a single word of the several dozen questions that statement clearly deserved.
"A *mop,*" William finally managed, to no one. "I need to know everything about that mop. I need a full report. I need — Mike, we are joining a secret organization run by an old man who apparently keeps score on how embarrassing everyone's first fight was, and I need you to understand that I am *thrilled* about this."
Michael laughed — actually laughed, the first real one in longer than he wanted to think about — and started the walk home, laundry lint and all, with the wrench humming warm and steady against his back.