Rosie ‘Rustbucket’'s Arc

Chapter 1 of 16

Rosie crouched beside her toolbox in the trade post yard, hands still greasy from the turbine housing she'd been working since dawn. She was here for parts, always parts — anything that might help her crack the next pre-war machine before someone else hauled it off for scrap. A man shuffled past the old mechanic shop across the yard, arms full of yellowed paper. He dumped the stack into a metal bin where flames already licked at twisted cardboard and wood scraps. The paper caught fast, edges curling black. Rosie watched him walk away, then saw it — clean lines and geometric shapes appearing through the smoke. Diagrams. Technical diagrams with the careful precision of old-world engineering. She moved without thinking. Her hand shot into the flames and grabbed the top sheet before the fire consumed it completely. The heat bit her fingers but she yanked the paper free, shaking embers from the charred edges. Half the page was already gone, blackened and crumbling. What remained showed a cross-section of something mechanical, with numbered callouts and connection points she couldn't name but recognized in her bones. Rosie laid the fragment flat on her toolbox lid, smoothing the intact portions carefully. The symbols made no sense to her, but the drawing spoke a language she understood — the language of parts fitting together in precise sequence. Someone had burned a whole pile of these for warmth, thinking them worthless. She looked at the bin, still blazing, and knew she'd be haunting this yard until she found whoever controlled that paper supply.