Tea Stained, Shoulder Hurting

I wanted to snap that rotten bracket in half after it hit me. Not because it hurt—though it did—but because it got to choose the exact second I had to admit Jisu was right about the cabinet photographs. His smugness was unbearable. My annoyance was worse.

The tea spreading across the evidence sleeve felt more personal than the blow. I could see every mistake crowding into that damp patch: a careless comparison, a shoddy print shop, a clamp I needed badly. I kept it above the tray anyway, one hand clamped around my shoulder, pretending I was in control. I was not. I was angry, sore, and strangely relieved the old metal survived.

There is a humiliating kind of dependence I cannot escape. I can walk into a closed planetarium and pull a hidden gimbal from behind a wall, but one rotten piece of wood can still make Jisu rescue my work from a puddle of tea. I may have smiled at him. I certainly pretended the smile meant I had won.

The locked bridge controls will be my next public test. I am already imagining the clean challenge, the witness, the moment when I expose the mechanism without touching anything irreversible. What I did not admit while sketching was that I need the Maru cabinet badly. If the photographs fail me, I may have mistaken coincidence for a route toward my grandfather’s gold.

That thought kept me awake longer than my shoulder. Not the danger. The possibility that I have built an entire life around clues, and the clues may finally be laughing at me.