# Chapter 9: What the Wrenches Watch
The shop smelled like it always did now — motor oil, ozone, and the particular metallic hum of a thousand relays doing nothing in the dark. Michael had started to find it almost comfortable, in the specific way that things become comfortable right around the time you stop questioning why they used to terrify you.
Culvert had him running drills with the wrench itself today — not swinging it, just *holding* it, feeling for the moment its weight shifted from ordinary steel to something that pushed back against his grip like a compass needle fighting to point somewhere else.
"Again," Culvert said, from his oil drum, not looking up from whatever he was doing to the guts of a busted radio.
"I've done it eleven times."
"Do it a twelfth."
Michael did it a twelfth. William, sprawled on a stack of tires nearby with a bag of gas station donuts balanced on his knee, watched with the rapt, judgmental attention of a man scoring an Olympic event.
"Six out of ten," William announced. "You flinched on the pull."
"I did not flinch."
"You flinched. It was subtle. I respect the subtlety. Still a flinch."
Michael set the wrench down and rubbed the ache out of his palm. "Can I ask something?"
"You always can," Culvert said. "Whether you get an answer is a separate matter."
"How big is this? The Network. Is it just — Ripon? A few towns? Or is it—" He gestured vaguely at the ceiling, at the sky, at everything. "Bigger."
Culvert set the radio down. It was the first time Michael had seen him actually stop working mid-task, which meant, he was learning, that the question had landed somewhere real.
"Bigger," Culvert said. "There are seams on every continent. Some towns have three. Some have none, and the ones that have none consider themselves lucky, and they're right to. We have people — relay holders, like you, like your father — scattered wherever the seams are thin enough to need watching. A few hundred, worldwide, last count. Maybe fewer, now."
"A few *hundred*," William repeated, sitting up so fast a donut rolled off his knee and onto the shop floor, where it was immediately ignored by everyone including him. "For the entire *planet*? That's — Mike, that's fewer people than go to our high school."
"It is," Culvert agreed, without apparent concern. "Most seams don't need watching every day. Most days, nothing comes through worth mentioning. The Network isn't an army. It's more like—" He considered. "A very thin, very tired fence, strung across a very large yard, maintained by people who mostly just hope the dog next door stays on its own side."
"That's not reassuring," Michael said.
"It wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be true." Culvert picked the donut up off the floor, inspected it, and set it on the workbench with the mild disapproval of a man raised not to waste food, interdimensional crisis or not. "As for what's on the other side of those seams — I don't know. Nobody in the Network knows. Not really. We see what crawls through. We don't see where it comes from, or why, or whether it's one place or a hundred. Every relay holder who's ever tried to follow a seam back the way it came has come back with nothing to report, or hasn't come back at all."
The shop was quiet except for the low, patient hum of the shelves.
"So it's not — dimensions, plural, that we know about," Michael said slowly. "Just... somewhere else. One somewhere else, that we don't understand."
"That is the most honest way I have ever heard it put," Culvert said, and there was something almost like approval in it.
William, chewing thoughtfully on a fresh donut, raised a hand. "Okay, but genuinely — if the Network's been doing this for however long, watching seams all over the world, how has nobody ever noticed? No news story, no government cover-up, no *one weird viral video* — nothing?"
"Because most of what comes through is small enough to explain away as something else," Culvert said. "A large dog. A gas leak. A bear that wandered further into town than usual. People are remarkably good at not seeing things they've already decided aren't possible. It's the same reason your paramedic accepted 'coyote' without much of a fight."
"He absolutely did not accept it," William said. "He just had somewhere to be."
"Same result." Culvert wiped his hands on a rag that had clearly given up on being clean sometime in the last decade. "Which brings me to the thing I actually wanted to discuss tonight."
Something in his tone shifted — not sharper, exactly, but heavier, the way a room gets heavier right before someone says something they've been sitting on.
"Your System," he said, looking directly at Michael. "The stat screen. The levels. All of it."
Michael's stomach tightened, the same reflexive drop he'd been getting every time the conversation circled back to this. "What about it."
"Who have you told?"
"Nobody. Just Will."
"Keep it that way."
"I wasn't planning on taking out an ad."
"I'm serious, Michael." Culvert set the rag down, and for once there was no dry amusement anywhere in his face. "Not other relay holders. Not anyone else in the Network, if you ever meet them. Not a teacher, not a doctor, not a girl you like, not your aunt and uncle, not — " a pointed glance at William, who raised both hands in surrender, still holding a donut " — anyone else you might feel the urge to trust with it, no matter how good the reason feels in the moment."
"Why? I thought the Network was on my side."
"The Network is a few hundred tired people trying to keep a very large, very old fence from falling over. Most of them are decent. Some of them are not. And every single one of them, decent or otherwise, would want to know why a fifteen-year-old boy from a town with exactly one seam has something none of the rest of us have ever had." Culvert's eyes didn't leave his. "A relay bonds you to the Network. It doesn't level you up. It doesn't give you a stat sheet, or a quest log, or the ability to allocate points like a game character choosing how to spend an afternoon. What you have isn't a stronger version of what the rest of us carry, Michael. It's a *different thing entirely,* wearing the shape of something that looks familiar enough that you almost missed it."
Michael felt William go very still on the tire stack beside him.
"So what is it," Michael said quietly.
"I don't know. I told you that already, and it remains true." Culvert picked the radio back up, though his hands weren't moving on it anymore — just holding it, the way a man holds something to have somewhere to put his hands. "What I do know is that the moment word reaches the wrong ears that a boy in a small California town has a power the Network itself can't explain and can't replicate, you stop being a relay holder we're training. You become a *question* someone very far above my position is going to want answered, by whatever means gets the answer fastest. And I have found, in nineteen years of doing this, that the people asking those questions are rarely gentle about getting their answers."
The shop hummed. William had, for once in his life, run entirely out of things to say.
"Your father knew how to keep a secret," Culvert said, quieter now. "It's part of why he lasted as long as he did, doing this. I'd like you to learn the same skill before it's tested the way his was."
Michael looked down at the wrench in his hands — ordinary black steel, plain scratches, heavier now than it had been a week ago, in every sense that mattered.
"Okay," he said. "Nobody finds out. Just Will."
"Just Will," Culvert agreed, and there was the faintest ghost of that dry almost-smile again. "Though I'd have preferred just no one."
"Rude," William said, around a mouthful of donut. "I'm the tactical manager. I have clearance."
"You have a laundry basket with a crack in it and an opinion about everything," Culvert said. "That is not the same as clearance."
"It's *adjacent* to clearance."
Culvert let out that same short, dry exhale that passed for a laugh, and went back to the radio, and Michael sat with the wrench humming warm in his lap and the new, quiet weight of a secret that had just gotten a great deal heavier to carry alone.