The bolt groaned, a final complaint against the torque of her wrench. Grit and rust dusted the back of Signe’s gloves. She gave the tool another hard twist, her muscles coiling tight across her shoulders. The bolt gave way with a sharp snap, the sound carrying through the thin, dry air.Another few kilograms of high-grade alloy for the pile. Profit.
She braced a boot against the skeletal frame of the derelict transport and leaned back, surveying her work. Below her, the Scraplands stretched out, a graveyard of highways stacked three deep. Wind moaned through the gaps in the asphalt, a constant, lonely sound that had long ago replaced silence. This high up, on the spine of a collapsed overpass, the wind had teeth. It ripped at the patched sleeves of her jacket and tried to steal the heat from her skin.
Survival was a simple equation of energy expended versus energy gained. The climb up here had cost calories, but this pre-Purge transport was a rare find. Its chassis was mostly intact, which meant its guts hadn’t been picked clean by every scavenger with a pry bar. The alloy bolts alone would fetch enough credit for a week’s worth of water rations and nutrient paste. Anything else was a bonus.
She slid deeper into the vehicle’s exposed rib cage, her boots crunching on shattered safety glass. The smell of decay was thick, a familiar perfume. Her fingers, nimble and sure, traced the lines of a power conduit, searching for the copper wiring within. Most of it was already gone, snipped and pulled by someone who’d gotten here first. Of course. The easy veins were always tapped.
Signe pulled a smaller pry bar from her belt loop, the tool’s handle worn smooth from years of use. She jammed the tip into a fused control panel, leveraging her weight against it. The panel popped open with a spray of corroded dust. A nest of desiccated wires greeted her, worthless. She cursed under her breath, the sound swallowed by the wind. A waste of energy.
She was about to move on, to crawl toward the engine block where the real prizes might hide, when she saw it. Not a gleam of metal or the tell-tale green of copper oxide. It was a line. A perfectly straight, clean line in a world of jagged edges and slow decay.
Wedged deep within the vehicle’s mangled subframe, beneath a tangle of coolant hoses and fused plastic, was a compact case. It was matte black, made of some polymer she didn’t recognize, and showed none of the sand-blasting or sun-bleaching that marked everything in the wastes. It looked new. Which was impossible.
Her first thought was: trap. Some junkers booby-trapped worthless claims to maim the competition. But the placement was wrong. It wasn’t meant to be found. It was meant to be hidden.
Her second thought was: value. Anything that survived the Purge and a hundred years of Shatterstorms in that condition was made of something special.
She lay on her stomach, the sharp edges of the transport’s frame digging into her ribs, and reached into the narrow space. Her fingertips brushed the case’s surface. It was cool and unnervingly smooth. She snagged a loose hose and pulled it aside, clearing just enough room to get a grip on the case’s edge. It was heavier than it looked. She grunted, pulling it free from its nest.
It was about the size of a ration brick, sealed with two clean, efficient latches. No logos, no writing. Just a sterile, functional object that had no business being here. She shook it. Nothing rattled.
The case itself was valuable. The polymer could be shaved down and traded. The latches were precision-molded, worth something to a tinker. She should strip it for parts and move on.
Instead, she tucked the case into the deep inner pocket of her jacket, the cold, hard rectangle a foreign weight against her side. The rest of the transport yielded little else: a handful of bolts, a short length of untarnished wire. Not the score she’d hoped for, but with the case, maybe it was more.
The descent was faster than the climb. She moved with an economy of motion that was second nature, her boots finding sure holds in the crumbling concrete, her hands gripping exposed rebar like the rungs of a ladder. She didn’t look down. Down was a fifty-meter drop to a lower level of smashed roadway.
Her camp was a hundred-meter crawl from the base of the overpass, tucked into the hollowed-out shell of an ancient cargo container. It was defensible, with a single point of entry and clear sightlines across the rust-dusted flats. The entrance was shielded by a heavy sheet of corrugated metal she could drag into place, reinforced with scavenged struts. Home was a heap of scrap that kept the wind out and the worst of the dust from settling on your teeth while you slept.
Inside, the air was still and smelled of her: grime, sweat, and recycled water. A sleeping pallet lay in one corner, a small, hand-crank generator in another. Her tools were arranged neatly on a magnetic strip she’d pulled from a wrecked maintenance drone. Everything had its place.
She bolted the door shut. Only then did she allow herself to retrieve the case. She set it on her small worktable, the black rectangle stark against the scarred metal surface. For a long moment, she just looked at it. It was an anomaly, a disruption to the known physics of her world. Things fell apart. Metal rusted. Plastic grew brittle. But this had endured.
Her heart beat a little faster, a nervous, unfamiliar rhythm. This was how people got themselves noticed by the Scribes. By finding things that shouldn’t exist. Any artifact that carried the unfiltered stink of the past was a cancer, and the Republic’s Inquisitors were the surgeons. The public executions in the Hubs were proof enough of that.
But what if no one knew? A quick trade, some questions asked sideways in a black-market outpost. Something this well-preserved could be worth a fortune. Enough to buy passage to a different sector, maybe even bribe her way into one of the Hubs. A life without the grit of the wastes between her teeth.
She ran a gloved finger over one of the latches. It felt warm now, having absorbed the heat of her body. With a decisive click, she flipped it open. Then the second. Her breath hitched. She was being a fool. A reckless, stupid fool. She should throw it down a storm drain and forget she ever saw it.
She lifted the lid.
Inside, nestled in custom-molded, velvet-like foam, was a book.
Not a new-press pamphlet from the Republic, printed on cheap, gray pulp with the Architects’ seal on the cover. This was an object of impossible craftsmanship. The cover was deep brown leather, worn but not cracked, and bound with thick, even stitches. There was no title on the front, no text at all, just a simple, embossed design of a branching tree.
She hesitated, then slowly, reverently, lifted it from its case. The weight of it surprised her. It felt solid, permanent. The air filled with a faint, dry scent—dust and leather and something else, something organic and ancient. Paper. She’d seen scraps of it before, brittle, yellowed fragments that crumbled to dust if you looked at them wrong. But this… this was different.
The pages were thick and creamy, their edges gilded with a faint shimmer of gold. She let her thumb brush the gilt, the texture impossibly fine. In her world, things were jagged, patched, welded, or broken. This book was seamless. It was perfect. And that perfection was the most dangerous thing about it.
For a long time, she just held it, turning it over in her hands. Her mind, usually so quick to calculate value and risk, was silent. The pragmatist in her was at war with something else, a deep, resonant curiosity she hadn’t felt since she was a child. What was it? A story? A history? A collection of the lies the Scribes claimed had torn the old world apart?
Her gaze fell on the foam cutout where the book had rested. Tucked into a small recess was a single, hardened data chip. Standard pre-Purge tech, probably corrupted beyond use, but still valuable for the rare earth metals in its contacts. She plucked it out and slipped it into a pouch on her belt. A small, practical score to ground herself.
But her attention was drawn back to the book. The real prize. The real danger.
To question the Republic’s official history was treason. To seek an alternative was a death sentence. To own a physical piece of that alternative… that was an act against the foundations of the world.
She should close it, put it back in its case, and bury it a hundred meters down a sewage pipe. She should walk away and forget this day ever happened. It was the only sane choice. The only way to survive.
Her fingers trembled slightly as they found the edge of the cover. Survival was one thing. But just once, she wanted to know what she was surviving for. Was it just for the next ration bar, the next rusted bolt, the next sunrise over a dead world?
With a soft whisper of leather against leather, she opened the book.
The first page was blank, save for a small, handwritten inscription in the corner. The script was an elegant, looping cursive that was difficult to decipher. She traced the letters with her finger, sounding out the words in a half-forgotten whisper learned from a scavenger who’d once owned a pre-Purge technical manual.
Property of A. Shepherd.
Shepherd. The name meant nothing. The pages that followed were filled with dense blocks of printed text, black and sharp against the cream paper. The language was modern, but the sentence structures were complex, formal. It was a history of some kind, she guessed. Or a philosophy. It didn’t matter. The words were poison.
She was about to snap it shut, the thrill of discovery finally giving way to the cold grip of fear, when she noticed the inside of the front cover. It wasn’t blank. Taped to the smooth leather was a folded sheet of paper, thinner and more brittle than the pages of the book. It was yellowed with age, creased from a hundred foldings. She carefully worked a fingernail under the tape and peeled it back. The paper crackled in protest.
She unfolded it.
It wasn’t more text. It was a map. Hand-drawn, in faded black ink, it depicted a stretch of the Scraplands she vaguely recognized—a network of broken highways and dried-out riverbeds. But it also showed routes and symbols she didn’t know. A series of lines converged on a single point far to the east, marked with a simple, hand-drawn icon: an anvil and a hammer. Beside it, two words were scrawled in the same careful script as the inscription.
Shepherd’s Forge.
Another location was circled far to the north, in what the old maps called the frost-belts. It was marked with a single, ominous word.
Archive.
Signe’s thumb brushed over the faded ink, tracing the lines leading east, then north. The book’s pages fluttered in the dry breath of wind sneaking through the cargo container’s seams. Someone had thought it important enough to disguise and preserve the map. Someone was bound to come looking for it, but she would be long gone by then.