Rosie ‘Rustbucket’'s Arc

Chapter 3 of 16

Rosie spread the four diagrams across her workbench that night, weighing down the corners with salvaged bolts. The cooling unit sequence showed everything she'd been getting wrong — the stabilizer third, not first, the housing bracket before the pressure release. She'd cracked three units learning what these papers spelled out in numbered steps. The diagrams proved she could do better, but they also proved someone else had done this work before her. Someone who'd written it all down and then let it burn. Barry mentioned the upper rooms when she traded him a working fuel pump for three nights of shelter. The rooms had been converted into living space, he said, but there was something nobody touched — a sealed unit built into the back wall before the war. Nobody knew how to open it safely, so they'd just built around it. Rosie climbed the stairs after Barry unlocked the door. The unit sat behind a makeshift partition, massive and rectangular, with panels that looked like they'd been designed to slide rather than bolt. No rust. No damage. Just smooth metal with a narrow seam running down the center. On the floor beside it lay half of a broken key, its inner gears exposed where it had snapped. Someone had tried and failed. Rosie knelt and picked up the piece, turning it over in her palm. The break was clean, which meant the other half was probably still jammed in the lock mechanism. She spent two hours tracing the seam with her fingers, testing pressure points, looking for the sequence. The diagrams had taught her that order mattered — that pulling the wrong piece first could crack everything that came after. The key fragment told her someone had already made that mistake. She found the lock slot hidden beneath a sliding cover panel, narrow and deep. The broken key piece was in there, wedged tight. She had no tools to extract it, no way to turn the mechanism with half a key missing. But she understood the problem now. The unit wasn't impossible to open — it was just waiting for someone patient enough to solve it in the right order. She pocketed the key fragment and headed back downstairs. Barry was wiping down glasses behind the bar. She told him she'd need three things: a needle probe, a gear puller, and access to those upper rooms for as long as it took. He nodded once and poured her a drink. The deal was made.