Rosie ‘Rustbucket’'s Arc

Chapter 7 of 16

The old station sat three blocks south of the scrapyard, its loading platform stripped down to bare concrete. Rosie could hear the scrappers before she saw them — metal scraping against metal, voices shouting measurements, the sharp crack of a housing bracket breaking free. She found the side entrance through a service corridor, following the sound of sledgehammers until she spotted the room they hadn't reached yet. The door hung partway open, jammed against debris. Beyond it sat rows of equipment covered in decades of dust. A window in the adjacent wall had taken a sledgehammer blow — glass fractured outward in a spiderweb pattern from a central impact point, each crack radiating like spokes. Through the broken sections she could see two scrappers working. They'd already torn through the wall studs on their side. One more panel and they'd punch straight into this room. She had maybe twenty minutes. Rosie squeezed through the jammed door and swept her light across the shelves. A cooling unit sat on the nearest rack, its pale blue casing thick with dust but the manufacturer stamps still visible beneath. She recognized the bracket configuration from her diagrams — the same model she'd been trying to salvage for weeks. This one was complete. She pulled out her notebook and started sketching the connection points, working fast. The scrappers hit the wall again and plaster dust sifted through the fractured window. She traced the coolant lines, marked the stabilizer position, documented the housing bolt sequence. When the sledgehammer punched through the wall panel she was already crawling back out the door, notebook tucked inside her jacket. She had what she came for. Let them have the metal.