Lian frowns as she stares at her warped reflection in the shiny metal of her screwdriver at the purpling bruise that’s formed near her temple.

  She doesnt… feel like she’s got a concussion, but she’s not exactly sure what that would feel like.

  Stuffing the screwdriver back into her personal bag, the scrapper shifts her legs to be slightly more comfortable where she’s sitting cross legged in the atrium.

  She didn't really want to walk all the way back home only to leave again a few hours later, and without any money she can't really buy anything, so she’d just found a low traffic bit of floor and sat down, fiddling with some loose garbage in her bag and enduring the occasional sideways glance from the crowd as she waits.

  As the hours go by, the shops and restaurants close one by one, and the crowd gets ever less dense. About fifteen minutes ago she’d been shooed out of the atrium by a gruff member of some private security organization, but she’d just come back a few minutes after he left.

  Finally, as Lian feels her head starting to bob and her eyes starting to droop, she’s jolted back to full wakefulness by a mellow chime from the room’s broadcast system signaling the station-wide lights out.

  Pushing herself up from her slump, she watches with no small fascination as most of the eternally cycling holographic ads shut off one by one, followed by almost every light shutting off at once with a mechanical click, leaving the large space eerily dim and empty.

  Seeing this, Lian pushes herself to her feet with a wobbling stretch, shaking out the pins and needles in her legs as she does before slinging her bag over her shoulder and quietly shuffling back toward her work.

  Show time.

  She smirks at the dramatic thought, slowing down a little as the dim running lights of the atrium give way to almost no lights at all in the unused work hall.

  The plan is simple, there are a lot of entrances into the scrapyard all over, around fifteen that she’s personally seen for one reason or another. Presumably there are more if she wanted to look, but she already knows the one she wants to start with.

  There are supposed to be security staff monitoring the place, but she knows that at least half of the cameras are either broken or not plugged in, and most of the guards don't take their jobs very seriously.

  Because they’re guarding a literal garbage, put there specifically because no one else wants it, what she’s doing right now is an exception to the rule, She’d be more nervous if she was trying to get to wherever the money is being kept, but she’s betting that the actual yard will have little to no actual security.

  Passing underneath one of the few still burning lights in the hall, Lian abruptly stops as she realizes she missed her turn, backtracking until she comes to a weird split in the hallway at a wonky right angle.

  Traveling down that leads her to a door that’s too large for the hallway it’s in, clearly unable to open fully without banging onto the opposite wall.

  Lian quiets her footsteps as she peeks through the window, breathing a sigh of relief as she sees no one.

  It’s very dark in here, but the scrapper is used to working in dim environments, so she pulls her screwdriver back out of her bag and gets to work on the panel controlling the electronic lock with little issue.

  Popping the front panel from its housing with a useful piece of scrap metal she’d found a while ago and since used as a miniature crowbar, Lian leans in to get a closer look at the guts of the lock eyes tracing each component.

  She’s never hacked a door before, but the fact that it was that easy to get into the electronics hopefully means that the door isn't designed to be all that hard to beat.

  She squints.

  “Uhhhh… Let’s see…” She mutters to herself, tracing wires with her eyes. “I don't know what you are… or you… I think you’re the transformer. Which means you must be the ID scan-y thing. Dunno what you are… but you look like you’re wired into a solenoid."

  Humming at the puzzle, turning it over in her head, Lian eventually pulls her screwdriver back out of her bag with a shrug.

  “Eh.”

  Then jams the flat metal point between two contacts on the board, rewarded by the solenoid buzzing once and the door moving a little toward her as it’s unlocked.

  Exactly once she showed up late to work, and in order to avoid getting fired, she had to knock on this door and pay a downright obscene bribe to one of the clerks to get her automatic punch card forged.

  Well now she has the last laugh!

  Lian gives the screwdriver a self satisfied twirl before stuffing it back into her bag and pulls the door the rest of the way open.

  They really should have put the electronics on the other side of the door.

  …Unless they wanted it to be more difficult for people to get out than in.

  …

  Shaking off the slightly offputting thought, Lian pokes her head into the side hall just adjacent to the clerk break room.

  Remounting the panel onto the door, Lian closes it most of the way but wedges it open with another piece of metal from her bag so she’s not trapped. Continuing down the hall until she comes to another closed door.

  During the day this one’s normally not locked.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  What are the odds…

  She presses the button and the door buzzes open without any fuss.

  “Yesssss.”

  Stepping into the scrapyard, the place evokes a unique and powerful combination of feelings, a mixture of being at a school after hours mixed with the cautious anxiety of walking into a room she knows has a deadly spider in it.

  It’s dark, very dark, one in twenty of the overhead lights are turned on, and the ones that are seem to be at some kind of low power mode.

  The piles of scrap are hazardous to move around in while fully lit, and now she has to walk half a kilometer blind.

  What she wouldn't give for a flashlight right now.

  …Wait.

  Lian’s face lights up with a grin as she rushes over to the closet marked ‘emergency,’ jimmies the locker lock with a bit of metal, and flings it open, belatedly looking around to confirm no one’s around before digging into one of the emergency kits.

  Her smile only widens as her face is illuminated by a flashlight.

  She’s always wanted to do this!

  …She’ll put it back when she leaves.

  Covering the bulk of the illumination with her fingers, Lian cheerily marches into the towers of metal and navigates toward her buried ship. The flashlight, while helpful, leads to some minor confusion, but in the end she makes good time and she’s climbing into the familiar crevice once more.

  She’s delayed for a second by a minor collapse since she left, forcing her to clear her path again, but then she’s back in front of the airlock door of the ship, illuminated a stark white by her new flashlight.

  She gets to work, fingers nimbly testing every screw and rivet she can find to make a way in.

  To the surprise of no one, airlock doors are tough, downright annoying to crack open. But work continues apace, and in a blur of pure focus the scrapper finds herself looking at several sections of the mechanism exposed to her view.

  She can't see a way further in. It’s metaphorically and literally airtight, an unpowered slab of metal that probably weighs over a ton. She’s not disassembling her way further in without a blowtorch and several days of work.

  But…

  “You’re not military.” She mutters, slowly waving her flashlight across the machine. “If something went wrong any sane person would want a way for emergency responders to get in. So it’s either a special tool or….”

  She narrows her eyes at an empty slot for some kind of uplink, not easily accessible most of the time without removing a mounted panel, but right next to the inactive electronics controlling the airlock.

  “...The failure mode for any reasonable exterior airlock should be to close in the event of power loss. But that means they need power to be opened. What if…”

  Turning off her flashlight and unscrewing the back to get at the battery, she looks around at the mountain of garbage she’s residing in until she finds a loose wire and tugs it out, cutting it in two on another jagged shard as she does.

  “‘C’moonn…” She mutters as she stuffs the wires into the ports and hovers the battery over the exposed copper. “Pleeeease.”

  Then she taps the battery onto the wires with a spark.

  And hears something within the door move with a grinding squeal.

  “Yes!” She cheers, shoving the battery back into her flashlight and clicking it back on.

  It takes several firm shoves to get the airlock to move, but with the full force of her body ramming into the metal something makes an unpleasant grinding nose and begins to move.

  The interior airlock is a simpler affair, a basic bar she has to lift then strain to lift open as it’s on a bit of a downhill slope with how it settled.

  And she’s inside.

  Her first thought is that the ship is upside down, the second is that it smells… odd, like a wet dog crossed with rotting air freshener. But the scrapper is long used to odd smells, and after confirming it’s not immediately dangerous she’s tearing herself away from the half ripped apart interior and toward the cockpit.

  It has to be here.

  It has to be here.

  It just has–

  Lian feels her breath hitch.

  There it is.

  Sitting exactly where she expected it would be, bolted to the wall next to the flight controls, a black box sits with one bundle of cables attached to the window while another is plugged into a port attached to the inactive computer.

  It’s over!

  Lian feels her shoulders beginning to shake with emotion.

  She can finally leave!

  A laugh bubbles out of her throat, blinking rapidly to force down tears as for a single moment all the anxiety she’d been forcibly suppressing disappears and the sudden removal of that weight on her chest has her mind buzzing.

  She didn't think–

  She couldn't–

  Her hand flies to her mouth as all the emotions has the need to cough flare from its eternal background itch to the fore and everything else takes a pause as she feels like she’s hacking up a lung onto the floor.

  The bout of uncontrolled coughing turns out to be a blessing in disguise, as by the time she’s finished spitting out yet another glob of gunk onto the floor, the flare of emotion has passed.

  Straightening up, Lain confidently steps up to the starmap over and pulls out an adjustable wrench,

  She’s got work to do!

  –––––

  It turns out removing the starmap from its mounting was the easy part.

  Lian grunts as she shoves the shockingly heavy microwave sized object ahead of her though the last little bit separating her from the exterior.

  But with a groan of effort, the starmap slides though the gap barely wide enough to contain it, followed by a very tired scrapper.

  Clutching the thing to her chest as she drags herself out to follow, Lian takes a few moments to breathe before pulling herself to her feet.

  She has no idea how long she was in there, but getting caught by the morning shift coming in would be… probably lethal.

  Lian struggles slightly to hold both the starmap and her flashlight so she can see where she’s going as she slowly starts toward the exit.

  She needs to be out of here as quickly as possi–

  Lian’s head snaps to look at the overseer's panoramic office as it explodes!