Rosie ‘Rustbucket’'s Arc

Chapter 6 of 16

Rosie got back to Gary's scrapyard just after dawn and found the gate standing open. The generator sat where she'd left it, but the shelves along the back wall had been stripped clean. Someone had taken every cooling unit she'd been working on — six housings, three turbines, all the parts she'd carefully sorted over the past week. Gary stood by his trailer, watching a rust-colored pickup truck disappear down the road toward the old station. He told her the scrappers had come through an hour ago, loading parts into their truck bed. They'd offered him trade value for the cooling units, but he'd said no. They'd taken them anyway, along with anything else that looked salvageable. He pointed toward the station. Said they were gutting the place for metal, pulling compressors and housings faster than anyone could catalog what was being lost. The warehouse there had turbines that matched the diagrams Rosie had traded away — turbines she could have studied intact if she got there before they cracked them open for scrap. Rosie grabbed her toolkit and started walking. She still had two diagrams left and the knowledge she'd gained from fixing the generator. The scrappers would be at the station for hours, maybe days, ripping out machinery they didn't understand. She could either sit here protecting what was already gone, or she could get inside that warehouse and map the assembly sequence of at least one turbine before they reduced it to metal chunks. The diagrams had taught her how things fit together. Now she needed to see a complete system before it got torn apart. She picked up her pace. Every hour she waited meant another working turbine became worthless scrap.