Chapter 16 : The First Day
The Wretched reached the upper levels before dawn.
They came in a flood—thousands of starving, irradiated people who had spent years begging at the Citadel's base suddenly finding the gates open and the guards confused. They poured through access tunnels I hadn't known existed, climbed ladders that War Boys had guarded for decades, filled corridors and chambers designed for a fraction of their numbers.
By noon, three separate fights had broken out. By mid-afternoon, a water pump that had served the Citadel for years gave up under the unprecedented demand.
I found it in the mid-levels—a mechanical station carved into the rock wall, its copper pipes sweating with condensation, its main valve jammed half-open by pressure it wasn't built to handle. Toast was already there.
She had tools spread across the floor—wrenches, pliers, a welding torch she'd clearly stolen from someone—and her hands were deep inside the pump's access panel, feeling for damage she couldn't see.
"You know how to fix this?" I asked.
"I know what it needs." She didn't look up. "Whether I can build it from what's here is the question."
I crouched beside her and studied the mechanism. Pre-war engineering, like everything in the Citadel—solid construction buried under decades of improvised repairs. The main problem was obvious once I knew where to look.
"Pressure valve's shot. The washer's corroded through."
Toast withdrew her hands and stared at me. "You can tell that by looking?"
"I can tell that by the sound it's making. And the way the flow stutters every six seconds." I held out my hand. "Give me the wrench. The three-quarter, not the half."
She handed it over without comment.
We worked in silence for the next hour. Toast had the intuition—she understood the Citadel's systems in a way I couldn't match, knew which repairs were holding and which were about to fail. What she lacked was formal training. The kind that came from three years of engineering school and two more in industrial design, knowledge I'd carried from a life that ended under a falling engine block.
I showed her how to fabricate a pressure washer from salvaged components. She showed me the hidden reservoir that fed this particular pump, the one the Wretched didn't know about and the War Boys had kept for themselves.
By the time the pump hummed back to life, my hands were cramped and my back ached from crouching in the narrow access space.
"Thank you," Toast said.
The words hit me harder than they should have. I searched my memory—eight days in this world, give or take—and realized no one had thanked me for anything since I'd arrived. I'd been fighting, surviving, manipulating, but gratitude hadn't been part of the equation.
"Don't thank me yet." I wiped grease from my fingers onto my already-ruined pants. "This fix will hold for maybe a week. After that, we need to rebuild the whole system."
"Then we rebuild it." Toast gathered her tools with the efficiency of someone who had survived by being useful. "You know enough to help?"
"I know enough to try."
She studied me for a long moment—the same careful cataloguing I'd seen since the Buzzard ambush, when a spike had flattened against my chest and revealed that I was something other than human.
"The bullet," she said. "From the canyon. I still have it."
"I know."
"I haven't shown anyone. Haven't told them what I saw."
I waited.
"I'm going to figure out what you are." Her voice was matter-of-fact, not threatening. "Whether you tell me or I figure it out myself, it's going to happen. The question is whether we work together while I'm doing it, or whether I treat you like a problem to be solved."
The pump hummed in the wall between us, water flowing through pipes that hadn't worked properly in years.
"I'd rather work together," I said. "I'm better at building than fighting."
Toast pocketed something—the flattened bullet, I realized, which she must have been carrying the whole time—and nodded once.
"Then we build. But this isn't over."
"I didn't think it was."
She left through the maintenance corridor, heading toward whatever crisis demanded her attention next. I stayed by the pump for another minute, listening to the rhythm of water flowing, feeling the Armor pulse against my skin with something that might have been satisfaction.
A pull through the Network—sharp, urgent, wrong.
Nux was panicking somewhere in the upper levels.
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