Vince Calloway's Arc

Chapter 4 of 3

Sable's sedan rolled through the salvage yard's gate and stopped. She killed the engine but did not move. "This is the yard," she said. "I don't wait." Yet her hands stayed on the wheel. Vince climbed out with the cracked part in his fist. Rusted robot frames rose in walls on every side. Dead machines stacked ten high, arms hanging, faces dark. Somewhere inside all that scrap sat parts worth a road across the border. A thin shape scuttled down a heap of gears. It was a centipede the size of a man, spectacles on his face, spindly legs clicking over metal. He held a dented can of coffee in two front limbs. This was the keeper Sable had named. Otto ran the yard, and the yard was his kingdom. "Need a part," Vince said. He held it up. "Thirty years old. You've got dead robots. You've got the match." Otto's antennae twitched. He did not look at the part. He looked past it. "Type nine coupling, cast iron core, obsolete run," he said fast. "Seventeen indexes. Density fits. I had one. Sold it. Client came at dusk, paid cash, took the last." He sipped his coffee and scuttled sideways. "Left rear joint keeps failing. Same tolerance. Interesting." "Where's the match now?" Vince pressed. "Sold," Otto repeated. He wasn't ignoring them. He was somewhere else. "Nineteen ninety-four. Man in a gray coat. Said it was for waking Her." He stopped scuttling. His spectacles caught the light. "Said the part completes Her. Said She sleeps in the tomb until the last piece comes home." Vince went cold. "Waking who?" Faye stepped forward. She had stayed quiet, cop's eyes reading the piles. "A client, thirty years ago," she said, flat. "Not helpful. We need the part, not a ghost story." But Z.E.R.O. moved. Oil tapped the dirt. Its green eyes fixed on Otto. "Say the name," it said. "The tomb. Where." Otto rattled off a location on the county's far edge. A guarded tomb. A man who let no one pass. He said it all in one breath, then turned back to his failing joint, done with them. Vince got what he came for and hated it. There was no spare part in this yard. The only match sat inside something buried in a tomb thirty years ago. His clean sale, his easy money, gone. To get the part he'd have to dig into whatever "Her" was. Sable heard the word tomb and started her engine. "That's my exit," she said. "Two rules broken already. I'm not driving to a grave." "Sable," Vince said. "No." But she didn't pull out. She looked at the shotgun in Z.E.R.O.'s grip, then at the gate, and her jaw worked. Vince closed his fist on the useless part. The yard held no answer. The answer waited in a tomb, behind a guard, wrapped around something that was meant to wake.