Rosie ‘Rustbucket’'s Arc

Chapter 8 of 16

Rosie walked back toward the scrapyard with her notebook tucked inside her jacket, the cooling unit diagram still fresh in her mind. But halfway down the block she stopped. The scrappers had been working from west to east, tearing through the station floor by floor. She turned and headed back, circling to the station's north side where the loading docks used to be. A canvas tent sat erected over what had been open platform, and beneath it she could hear the grind of machinery moving earth. She crept close enough to see through the tent flap. A mechanical digger sat angled into a trench, its blade engraved with decorative metalwork that had no business on excavation equipment. Ravens stood around the hole watching the machine tear through concrete and packed dirt. One of them held a diagram, pointing at something below. Rosie recognized the paper stock — the same weight as her stolen schematics. They had blueprints. They knew exactly where they were digging. She pulled back and worked her way around to the east side of the building, counting windows until she found the loading bay door. It hung open, and inside sat rows of equipment under red tarps. She recognized the shape beneath the canvas — turbine housings, valve assemblies, pressure regulators. Pre-war parts, still crated, still organized. This was the cache her diagrams had been mapping. The Ravens were tunneling straight toward it from below. Rosie traced the excavation angle in her mind. They'd punch through the foundation in two days, maybe three. She couldn't stop them, couldn't move the cache alone, couldn't even warn anyone without explaining how she knew it existed. But she could map it. She pulled out her notebook and started sketching part numbers from the visible crate labels, working fast in the dim light. When she left twenty minutes later, she had documentation of sixty-three components — enough to rebuild her power system three times over if she could salvage even a fraction before the Ravens stripped it clean.