Rosie ‘Rustbucket’'s Arc

Chapter 9 of 16

Rosie left the station with her notebook jammed under her jacket and headed back toward the scrapyard. Her legs ached from crouching in the loading bay for twenty minutes, but the part numbers were logged. Sixty-three components she could rebuild from if she moved fast enough. She cut through the north alley and spotted him through a broken window — the man in the faded uniform sitting at a makeshift desk stacked with books. He had his back to her, tracing something on paper with careful strokes. She recognized the movement. He was writing in pre-war script. The realization stopped her cold. She'd walked past this building twice before and dismissed it as empty. The man turned a page in the thick book beside him, scanning lines she couldn't read, then copied another sequence onto his sheet. He was translating. Or teaching himself. Or both. Rosie pushed through the door before she could think better of it. The man looked up, startled, his hand moving to cover the page. She held up her notebook, flipped it open to show the part numbers she'd copied from the crates. "These mean anything to you?" The man studied the numbers, his expression shifting from wariness to recognition. He reached for one of the books on his desk and opened it to a diagram that matched her cooling unit sketch exactly. The labels were in pre-war script — the same script she'd been staring at blind for six years. He tapped the page. "You need me to read this." It wasn't a question. Rosie pulled out the two remaining stolen diagrams from her jacket and laid them on his desk. "I need you to teach me."