Chapter 1 - Too Weak for Scrap
The transmission slipped because Mason had not eaten lunch.
That was the humiliating truth.
It weighed a little over a hundred pounds, which should have been manageable with the shop crane taking most of the load. But the chain snagged. Mason reached to steady the casing. His vision went white for half a second.
The transmission hit the concrete with a crash that made twenty heads turn.
Todd Kessler, owner of Kessler Auto Salvage, stared across the yard.
“Mason.”
Mason closed his eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me that wasn’t the Tremec out of the blue Mustang.”
Mason looked down at the cracked bell housing.
“I can tell you that.”
Todd’s face turned purple.
“Would it be true?”
“No.”
A man in a camel-colored coat laughed near the office. Logan Voss had arrived fifteen minutes earlier in a black Mercedes to inspect “investment-grade salvage,” a phrase Mason had previously believed was impossible to say with a straight face.
Logan looked Mason up and down.
“You employ him for lifting?”
Todd spread both hands.
“Not anymore.”
Mason’s stomach sank.
“Todd, come on. Dock the repair from my check.”
“Your check couldn’t buy the bolts.”
“I’ll work it off.”
“You’ve been working here fourteen months and you still look like a strong breeze could repossess you.”
A few yard guys looked away. One didn’t. Brent smirked openly.
Logan stepped closer and nudged the broken transmission with a polished shoe.
“Some men are built to own machines,” he said. “Some are built to sweep around them.”
Mason stared at him.
For one beautiful second, he imagined replying with something devastating.
His brain produced nothing.
Todd pointed at the gate.
“Get your stuff.”
Mason had seventeen dollars in checking, forty-eight thousand in combined debt, and a landlord who had stopped using question marks in his texts.
He got his coat.
He forgot his father’s toolbox.
That mattered because at 11:43 that night, sitting on the edge of his mattress in an apartment that smelled faintly of the laundromat downstairs, Mason remembered it.
The toolbox was the only thing he owned that his father had touched every day.
So he went back.
Kessler Salvage was surrounded by chain-link fence and cameras, but Mason knew Camera Four had been dead since February because Todd believed electrical maintenance was a personal insult.
He climbed in.
Snow dusted the stacks of wrecks.
His toolbox sat beside Bay Three.
Mason had almost reached it when metal screamed behind him.
A burned black coupe shifted on top of a three-car stack.
“Oh, no.”
The top car rolled.
Mason jumped sideways.
The coupe crashed nose-first onto the frozen dirt.
Its hood popped open.
Its dashboard—despite having no battery—lit red.
Mason stared through the broken windshield.
Words appeared in the air.
[ABANDONED OBJECT DETECTED]
[BLACKSTAR COUPE — CONDITION: 4%]
[RESIDUAL INTENT: EXTREME]
[AVAILABLE TRAITS: GRIP / HEAT TOLERANCE / ENGINE SENSE / UNFINISHED WILL]
Mason rubbed his eyes.
The words remained.
Then a second panel opened.
[RECLAIMER INTERFACE ONLINE]
[USER CONDITION: POOR]
[PHYSICAL FOUNDATION: EMBARRASSING]
Mason blinked.
“Did a hallucination just roast me?”
[YES.]
He stared.
The panel changed.
[YOU HAVE SPENT YOUR LIFE BEING DISCARDED.]
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN WHAT DISCARDED THINGS CAN BECOME?]
Two options appeared.
YES.
NO.
Mason looked around the frozen scrapyard.
Then he pressed YES.
Something inside the dead engine knocked once.
Like a heartbeat.
---
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