The rust had settled into the rocker panels like a second skin, flaking off in dry orange flakes each time the wind shifted off the interstate. Three years. Rosie counted them not in months but in seasons of neglect: the first winter when the cherry-red paint began to bubble and curl at the quarter panel, the second when the tires went soft and the oil wept a thin black line beneath the pan, and this third, the one where even the engine block had forgotten how to hold heat. She sat in the Trunk Yard with her fuel tank empty and her keys cold in the ignition, watching the other cars in the row shift and stretch between customers while she remained fixed, four hundred and twelve days of stillness etched into her chassis in a film of dust no one had bothered to wipe.
Gravel crunched under foreign treads at 0647 on a Tuesday in late October.
The sound came from the south end of the Yard, where the chain-link fence met the service road. A single vehicle, wide and low, rolling in with the kind of unhurried precision that made the gravel part rather than scatter. The 2022 Audi RS e-tron GT carried itself the way a verdict carries itself into a courtroom: inevitable, weighted, and entirely without apology. Its bodywork was matte graphite, unmarked, and the chrome rims caught the early sun in a line of white so sharp it split the grey sky behind them. The clicking was rhythmic, mechanical, each revolution of those rims striking the gravel in a measured pattern that sounded less like a car arriving and more like a clock being set.
Lila Voss stopped eight feet from Rosie's front bumper. The Audi sat perfectly level on her electric suspension, her quad-matrix headlights still dark, her charge indicator glowing a cold steady blue in the instrument cluster. She did not idle. She did not shift into a gear. She simply held position, and from her trunk, with the mechanical patience of a device that had been built to dispense and not to decorate, a steel plate slid forward on a pneumatic rail. The plate was letter-stamped, every character raised and cold to the touch, reading:
STERLING ASHWOOD PERFORMANCE. PULL FOR SIX-WEEK ASSIGNMENT. REPORT: 0600 HRS. CLEARENCE: IMMEDIATE.
Below the stamped text, a smaller line: AUTHORITY: V. LILA, FOREMAN. NON-NEGOTIABLE.
The plate settled onto the gravel with a flat metallic slap that echoed off the Yard's concrete wall.
Rosie's engine turned.
Not started. Turned. The old small-block coughed through two revolutions of the starter motor, the belts groaning on their dried-out pulleys, and the camshaft ground against a bearing that had not seen fresh oil in two and a half years. A thin plume of blue smoke escaped the tailpipe, sweet and acrid, and the whole chassis shuddered once, settling back into stillness. The ignition sputtered. The engine caught, died, caught again, and held for four seconds before the rotation slowed to a stop.
Four seconds. That was all she had.
"You heard the plate," Lila Voss said. Her voice carried the flat, clipped precision of a woman who had spent decades in garages where words were measured in millimetres and anything beyond specification was dismissed. The vowels sat slightly forward of standard Received Pronunciation, a faint Germanic coloring on the open a's, as though the German word for engine had worn the inside of her mouth over thirty years of tuning dynos outside Nürburg. "Six weeks. You limp to the garage. Four miles. Do not stop. Do not call for a tow. You will make the distance on what you have."
Rosie's steering rack whispered dryly as she turned it a quarter inch, testing. The rack had not moved in over a year. The grease had turned to a brittle grey paste, and the turning effort required a force that made her frame creak. The tires, long since flat, bit into the compacted Yard soil with a low groan, the rubber pressing against the stone in a friction that smelled of hot rubber and old oil.
"The tires are gone," Rosie said. Her voice came out warm, flat, the kind of Midwestern evenness that could flatten a complaint into a statement of fact. "I've been flat since February. The left front's got a slow leak through the bead seat and the others are just... soft. I can't run the speed you're implying."
"I am not implying a speed. I am stating a deadline." Lila Voss's indicator blinked once, a cold blue flash in the graphite panel. "You move at whatever pace your transmission allows. You arrive before 0600 hours tomorrow. The assignment is already scheduled. Sterling Ashwood has a bench reserved. You will not be the only vehicle in the queue, and I do not extend my own deadlines on your behalf."
The last line landed with a silence that pressed against the Yard's concrete walls. No engine note. No suspension adjust. Just the matte-grey Audi sitting eight feet away, holding the space between them like a held breath.
Rosie's starter motor ground again. The engine caught, held for two seconds, and the revs climbed to nothing more than a rough, uneven idle that shook her whole front end. The peeling paint on the fender flake shifted and dropped, a curl of cherry-red lacquer falling onto the gravel with a sound too small to register against the Audi's silent electric hum.
"I'll make it," Rosie said. Not a question. Not a plea. A flat, stubborn statement, the kind her father had made when the old man used to stand over a carburetor at three in the morning, saying it as though the words themselves could force the mixture to clear.
Lila Voss did not respond. The Audi's rear wheels rotated on the gravel with a soft, high-pitched whine of electric traction, and she backed forward into the Yard's access lane, her chrome rims clicking their measured rhythm against the stone. She did not look back. The matte bodywork turned the early sun into a long, cold reflection that slid across Rosie's hood and vanished.
The four miles began with a lurch.
Rosie's transmission engaged second gear with a clunk that vibrated up through her steering column and into the rack, and the flat tires rolled out of the Trunk Yard's compacted soil onto the service road with a soft, rubbery whisper. The road was wet from an overnight rain, the tarmac dark and glistening, and the tires hissed against the surface in a low, continuous murmur, like a person dragging a canvas sack across a garage floor. The steering was heavy, all of it, the rack working against itself with every correction, the dry grease clicking and popping under the wheel's rotation. She kept the speed to a crawl, barely above walking pace, the engine ticking and clattering with a rhythm that sounded more like a clock running out than a motor finding a pulse.
The first mile passed through an industrial corridor, warehouse loading bays with rusted roll-up doors and the smell of machine coolant and wet concrete hanging in the October air. Rosie's radiator had been dry for two years, and the engine's heat was uneven, the cylinder heads running cold on the left bank and warm on the right, a mismatch that made the whole chassis pulse in a slow, arrhythmic shudder. The paint on the driver's side had peeled back in long, peeling strips, revealing the bare grey metal underneath, and the wind that slipped through the window crack carried the taste of rust and old gasoline, a metallic sweetness that coated the back of the teeth.
By the second mile, the road climbed. The grade was shallow, barely three percent, but the engine's cranking power was so degraded that the climb forced a drop to first gear, and the transmission whined in a thin, high note that made Rosie's frame vibrate at a frequency just above hearing, felt more in the bones of the chassis than in the ears. The steering rack screamed on every turn, the dry bushings grinding in a sound like a slow, gritty creak, and she kept the wheel straight, refusing to correct, letting the car track slightly right of centre to spare the rack from another arc of rotation.
The third mile ran alongside a drainage canal, the concrete walls slick with algae and the smell of standing water thick and organic. A heron stood in the grey shallows, one leg lifted, watching the slow crawl of cherry-red and bare metal with the flat, unblinking patience of a creature that had seen everything and found nothing surprising. Rosie's engine misfired on every fourth revolution, the skip in the power band sending a jolt through the rear axle and up through the transmission housing, and the flat tires bit and slid on the wet tarmac with a soft, squelching whisper that echoed off the canal walls.
The fourth mile was the worst. The road ran downhill, a gentle grade that should have been easy, but the engine's idle was so low that the car coasted in a gear too high, the RPMs dropping toward the stall line with every inch of descent. Rosie feathered the accelerator, the throttle cable sticky and slow to respond, the butterfly valve grinding on its shaft with a rasping, dry sound. The tires, barely holding air, slid and corrected, slid and corrected, the whisper against the wet road a thin, continuous hiss that filled the silence where the engine should have been roaring.
Sterling Ashwood Performance sat at the bottom of the hill, a long, low building of poured concrete and glass, its signage backlit in a cold white that bled into the overcast sky. The loading bay doors were open, and the smell that drifted out was sharp, clean, nothing like rust or old oil. It smelled like new brake pads and solvent, and the floor inside was swept to a pale grey uniformity that made the sight of a flat, peeling, rust-flaked 1972 Camaro SS roll through the bay doors feel less like a vehicle arriving and more like a mistake being filed in the wrong cabinet.
Rosie's engine cut out forty feet from the bay. The last revolution was a hollow, rattling tick, the valves settling into a cold, silent rest. The car rolled the final distance on momentum, the flat tires a soft, defeated whisper on the concrete, and came to a stop in the centre of the bay with a final, shuddering creak of the frame.
The silence that followed was the kind that lived in a workshop after the last tool had been put down and the overhead lights had been killed. No engine. No ticking of cooling metal. Just the drip of old oil onto the swept floor, a thin, black bead falling in a slow, metronomic rhythm.
And through the glass doors at the far end of the bay, the blue glow of a charge indicator blinked in the dark. Lila Voss had been here three hours before Rosie. She had not moved. She had not called for assistance. She had simply parked, set the plate, and waited, her matte graphite bodywork reflecting the overhead lights in long, cold lines, the chrome rims still clicking faintly against a vibration no one else could feel. The six-week clock had already started. And on the far wall of the bay, in the cold white of the shop's signage, the words STERLING ASHWOOD PERFORMANCE held a steady, indifferent glow, watching the rust flake settle on the clean floor, one flake at a time.
The engine that cut through the bay's silence was not the rattling tick of a dying carbureted V8. It was a deep, baritone throat-clear, the idle of a twin-turbocharged inline-six settling from a long run, the exhaust note round and low and almost apologetic in the way a new car sounds when it has not yet learned the acoustics of the space it occupies. Lila Voss did not turn her head. She had not turned it in three hours. The charge indicator on the far wall pulsed its cold blue, and the silence it kept was the kind a surgeon's theater maintained before the first incision: expectant, sterile, absolute.
Through the glass doors, the carbon grey shape of a 2019 BMW M5 settled at the gate with the careful, deliberate grace of a cat choosing where to land. Not parked. Placed. The engine cut. A click of the electronic door release, then the hydraulic sigh of the front wing doors opening, the mechanism so smooth it sounded like a drawer being drawn from a cabinet that had been maintained on a strict oiling schedule.
He stepped out into the amber cone of the gate's security light.
Caden Ashwood. Sleeves of an immaculate charcoal tech shirt rolled to the elbow, the fabric still crisp at the crease, as though he had pressed it that morning and then driven four hundred miles without so much as a single line migrating. His hair was cut close at the temples, slightly longer on top, the kind of practical cut that did not require a barber and a conversation. He carried a tablet in his left hand the way a man holds a coffee cup he does not intend to drink. The screen glowed a flat, clinical white against the dark of the lot, and on it, a color-coded timeline marched in green, amber, and red bars, each segment a leg of a route that had been planned to the tenth of a mile and the half of an hour.
Lila watched him through the glass. She did not wave. She did not call out. The protocol for a garage of this caliber was not to acknowledge a late arrival with enthusiasm.
He raised the tablet. Tapped. Swiped. The color-coded bars shifted, and a small amber flag appeared next to the third segment, the one that corresponded to this exact location, this exact moment, this exact gate. He muttered something, a syllable too short to parse, and then looked up.
From the gate, his gaze crossed the forty yards of gravel and the length of the driveway to the 1972 Camaro SS still rolling its last, flat-tired feet into the property. From where Caden stood, the car had not yet cleared the second curve of the drive. The left fender was draped in a section of canvas tarp, the edges weighted with two bungee cords and a roll of shop rags that had gone grey with road grime. Under the tarp, if one knew where to look, the rust was not a surface blemish. It was a slow, patient architecture of oxidation, worked into the metal grain over forty-nine winters. The kind of damage that did not announce itself. The kind that whispered, and then, by the time the whisper became a shout, the structural member had lost more than half its cross-section.
Caden looked at the flat tires. He looked at the tarp. He looked back at the tablet, as though cross-referencing a rust stain with a Gantt chart, as though the oxidation on a Corvette's fender might alter the projected arrival time for the next segment by more than the two minutes the amber flag indicated.
"You're eleven minutes late."
His voice carried through the glass with the flat, unhurried cadence of a man who had spent his twenties reading telemetry data on drift circuits and his thirties learning to say the same things with less volume. The Texas in him was a faint underline under the vowels, a softening at the ends of words that the garage's cold air had not yet managed to scrub out. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. The sentence arrived at Lila's position with the weight of a verdict read in a courtroom where the defendant had already been found guilty and the jury had left to get coffee.
He did not blink.
The M5's charge indicator, visible through the windshield's glass, held its steady blue. The tablet's glow painted his jawline in a pale, antiseptic wash. On the screen, the amber bar for the next leg of their route pulsed with the patience of a thing that did not care whether a woman on a driveway was ready or not.
Rosie's Camaro crested the second curve. The flat tires hissed on the gravel, a dry, papery sound, like someone tearing the corner off a newspaper that had been left out in the rain. The engine was dead. She was coasting on the last fraction of momentum, the steering wheel locked at a slight angle, the car drifting its final twenty feet onto the apron with the careful, unglamorous shuffling of a thing that had run out of road and was not yet ready to admit it. The tarp flapped in the thin, dry wind that moved across the lot, the canvas whispering against the metal it was concealing, a small, soft sound that did not quite match the weight of what it was hiding.
Caden watched her approach. His thumb moved across the tablet screen, committing a timestamp. The color-coded timeline accepted the entry without drama. A small green box appeared in the lower left of the display, and the amber bar for the next segment advanced by one degree of rotation, a fraction of an arc, barely perceptible, but there.
Rosie killed the ignition. Or rather, the ignition had already killed itself forty feet from the bay. She sat in the driver's seat for a moment, both hands resting on the steering wheel at ten and two, the posture of a woman who had been driving for nine hours and was negotiating with her own body about whether to get out or stay in the car for another minute. The metal of the dashboard was cool under her palms. The air inside the cabin had gone still, thick with the smell of old rubber and the faint, sweet ghost of the carburetor's last exhalation.
She saw Caden at the gate. He saw her see him. Neither of them moved. The gravel between them held a thin, dry silence, the kind that lived in the space between two people who had not yet decided what they were to one another.
Then she straightened in the seat, unlocked the door, and stepped down. The gravel crunched under her boots, a short, dry crackle that spoke of two days on a road that had not been driven on a second time in a long while. She walked toward the bay with the measured, unhurried gait of a woman who had a commission to fulfill that her late father's shop had not finished and who had not yet decided whether the word "late" was a description of a clock or a judgment of a character. Her shoulders were squared. Her jaw was set at an angle that suggested she had been chewing on the same thought for a long time and was not done with it.
The two vehicles entered the bay in parallel, a slow, creaking procession that shook the hanging chain hoist overhead and sent a fine spray of dust cascading off the corrugated steel panels. Caden's flatbed trailer ground to a halt first, its hydraulic bed still low, the 1953 Corvette cradled in two padded cradles on top of it. The Corvette's paint had taken on a bruised, matte quality from the two days of travel, and the headlights sat dark and glassy, like eyes that had stopped blinking. Behind Caden, Rosie walked between the trailer and the open bay door, her hands still slick with transmission fluid, the smell of hot gear oil clinging to her forearms in a thin, acrid ribbon.
The garage swallowed them both.
It was a long, narrow structure, pre-war German industrial stock, the kind of building that had once housed a textile mill before the war turned it into something else and the war ended and no one bothered to give it a new name. The concrete floor was cracked in long, branching lines that ran from one end to the other, and the smell was a layered thing: diesel exhaust trapped under the door seals, the chalky dust of old paint chips, and underneath all of it, the deep, mineral tang of iron that had been oxidizing for decades in the walls.
The split was clean, almost surgical. Caden's half, the eastern portion where the trailer had parked, was a study in obsessive order. Torque charts laminated in clear plastic were affixed to the wall in a grid, each one a different engine family, the numbers on them color-coded in red, blue, and a pale yellow that had begun to brown at the edges. Tool trays sat on the workbench in aligned columns, every socket and spanner in its exact slot, the metal surfaces catching the overhead fluorescents in small, sharp glints. A magnetic parts grid held fasteners in descending order of diameter. The whole arrangement suggested a man who had internalized the belief that a loose bolt on a shelf was a loose bolt on an engine, and that the two could not be separated.
Lila Voss's half was the west side, and it was a different continent.
The concrete slab was bare, unmarked, nothing painted or affixed to it. A forklift sat parked in the middle of the space, its forks lowered, the diesel engine cold and ticking in the silence. Beside it, a single jack stand, the kind you would find in a municipal depot, its red paint flaked to a rust-bleached pink, stood on a cinder-block plinth as though it were a display piece. No tools. No charts. No workbench. Just the slab, the forklift, the stand, and the long shadow the fluorescent tubes threw across the floor.
And Lila Voss herself, standing at the far end of her half with her arms folded, watching the trailer bed lower in slow, deliberate segments. She was smaller than Rosie expected, compact, dressed in a charcoal coverall that was clean in a way that no working mechanic's clothes ever were. Her hair was pulled back tight, not a strand escaping. She did not step forward. She did not offer a greeting. She simply watched, her expression arranged in the careful neutrality of a woman who had decided, long before anyone arrived, exactly how much of herself she would permit to be visible.
"Right then," Caden said from the driver's seat of his truck, one elbow on the door frame, his voice carrying that flat, lazy Texas cadence that made even a simple sentence sound like a suggestion wrapped in a shrug. "We're here. Commission from the dead man's shop. Whatever that means in Nürburg-speak." He said it lightly, the way he said everything, as though the words were gravel he was flicking off a boot.
Lila Voss did not answer him. Her eyes moved past him, past the trailer, to the Corvette sitting on its padded cradles, the tarp draped over the body from windshield to trunk. She studied the vehicle the way one might study a radiograph, slowly, her gaze tracing the silhouette beneath the canvas.
"She's a '53," Lila said. The words were clipped, each syllable measured, the vowels rounded with that faint Germanic coloring that sat under her British diction like a watermark. "C2. Split window?"
"Split window," Rosie confirmed, stepping forward. She wiped her hands on a rag she kept in her back pocket, the cloth going dark with a smear of black fluid. "Chromax. Original 283, though the block was cracked, so my dad pulled it for the rebuild. That's the commission. The engine's at the shop, it just needs to be finished and mated back to the car. He never got to it." She said this quickly, the way she said everything now, as though if she slowed down the shape of the thing would become larger and harder to set down on the floor of the conversation.
Lila Voss nodded once. A single, mechanical dip of the chin.
Outside, through the open bay door, the afternoon light fell in a long, slanting wedge across the cracked concrete. The fuel station had set up a small canopy of old pumps and a kerosene heater for the winter, and beneath that canopy, a 1987 Nissan 240SX sat idling, its little engine a thin, eager purr. The car was silver, or had been once, and it was now the color of weak tea. Its windows were cracked down, and one of its indicator stalks was extended, the amber lens pulsing in slow, rhythmic beats.
The 240SX's indicator flashed three times, a little wave. Then, from beneath the canopy, a voice came up, thin and reedy, like a speaker that had been submerged and dried and submerged again.
"About time someone dragged her out of the mud."
The 240SX's voice was not unkind. It was the tone of a neighbor who had been waiting by the window for a specific amount of years and was finally, grudgingly, satisfied that the correct day had arrived. The kerosene heater ticked and exhaled a plume of soot into the pale sky.
Caden glanced at the car, then back at Lila. "Your regulars are talking again."
"They are not regulars," Lila Voss corrected, and the word regulars was delivered with the precise, flat contempt one might reserve for a spelling error. "They are a vehicle and a rumor."
"Fair enough," Caden said, and turned back to the trailer. He began unhooking the safety chains from the Corvette's front axle, the steel links clinking together in a short, bright roll of sound.
Rosie had been watching the tarp the whole time. She had been watching it since they crossed the threshold, since the fluorescents had flicked on and the shadow of the canvas had stretched long and thin across Lila's bare slab. Now, as Caden worked the chains, a draft from the open bay door caught the edge of the tarp and lifted it, just slightly, just enough. The canvas peeled back from the Corvette's rear quarter panel, and the light that had been hidden underneath came out into the garage.
Rust.
Not the thin, surface freckling of a car that had been parked in a damp she'd for a decade. This was structural, deep, the kind that worked its way into the metal grain and turned the steel into something porous and tired. The rear quarter, the arch, the seam where the panel met the trunk lid, all of it bloomed in a dark, orange-brown map that spread in irregular fingers. The paint beneath it had cracked and lifted in small, dry islands. The metal itself had thinned in places, the corrosion visible as a pale, chalky discoloration where the rust had eaten through to the substrate.
The tarp settled back down. Not all the way. Just enough.
Caden had not looked up from his chains. But his hands had stopped moving. The links hung still between his fingers, and he looked at the rust with the flat, appraising gaze of a man who had spent four years reading the bodywork of cars that slid sideways at two hundred and forty miles an hour, who knew the language of stress fractures and fatigue, who could tell a tired mount from a fresh one by the color of the bolt threads. He looked at the rust on the Corvette and he understood, in the way that only a mechanic's eye understands, that this was not a weekend project. That the metal was tired in a way that went past surface dressing. That the car had been sitting in the mud, in the cold, for a long time, and the cold had done its work.
He said nothing. His jaw, visible in the profile as he leaned over the axle, tightened. The muscles at the hinge of it pulled taut, a small, hard knot of it. He unhooked the last chain, let it drop into the trailer's wheel well with a flat, damped thud, and did not look at Rosie.
Rosie saw him see it. She knew the look. She had worn that look herself, the day she had pulled the tarp off for the first time at her father's shop and seen the undercarriage of the '53 and understood that the commission would not be as clean as the paperwork suggested. She set down her rag. She walked over to the Corvette, her boots finding the small rhythm of the cracked concrete, and she lifted the tarp properly this time, folding it back over the windshield, exposing the full length of the car to the fluorescent light.
The rust was worse than the glimpse had suggested. It ran along the rocker panels, both sides, a continuous streak of dark oxidation that spoke of months, possibly years, of standing in wet soil. The wheel arches were weeping. The trunk lid had a slow, spreading stain near the latch, the kind that meant the metal was ready to be poked through with a finger.
"Okay," Rosie said. It was not a question. It was the word she used when she needed to buy a breath and a half-second to recalculate. "Okay. So it's more than the engine swap. The shell needs work. I can do the panel, I've done quarter replacements before, but the underbody, the sills, that's" She stopped. Swallowed. "That's more than a junior apprentice."
She looked at Lila Voss.
Lila Voss had not moved from her position at the far end of her half. The single jack stand behind her caught the light and threw a small, red shadow on the slab. She was watching the Corvette with the same expression she had applied to everything in this garage: a controlled, patient stillness, as though she were waiting for the object to reveal its full complexity before she would permit herself to form a judgment.
"You are aware," Lila Voss said, and her voice filled the space between the two halves of the building with a quiet, precise authority, "that this commission is not one I was asked to accept. I was not asked by your father. I was not asked by anyone." She paused. The kerosene heater outside ticked. "I was told, by a man whose name I will not repeat, that a Corvette with a cracked 283 block and a rusted chassis would be rolling up the Nürburg road within the week. I was told to be ready." She let the silence hold. "I was told to be ready, and so I am. Whether I choose to work on this is a separate matter."
Rex Calloway's name, unspoken, hung in the air for half a second before Lila Voss let it dissolve.
Caden pushed the Corvette off the trailer with a long, rolling nudge of his shoulder against the rear bumper. The car groaned, the suspension compressing, the old rubber bushings sighing a sound that was almost vocal. They rolled the Corvette across the split line of the floor, from the laminated charts and aligned trays of Caden's half, across into the bare, empty slab of Lila's. The wheels found the cracks in the concrete and rattled over them, a short, dry percussion.
They parked it beside the forklift. The single jack stand stood in its cinder-block plinth, and the Corvette's shadow fell across it, and for a moment the small red object looked like a child's toy set down at the feet of something very old and very tired.
Lila Voss walked forward. She stopped three feet from the car, close enough that her breath was visible in the cold air that had seeped in under the bay door. She looked up at the rust, at the weeping arches, at the chalky sills, and her face did not change. It never changed. But her eyes moved slowly, methodically, the way a surgeon's eyes move over an X-ray, cataloguing, measuring, deciding.
"The engine," she said. "The rebuilt 283. Where is it?"
"At the shop," Rosie said. "In a crate. I'll have it here by the end of the week."
"Then you will bring it by the end of the week." Lila Voss turned, walked back to her slab, and picked up a thin, leather-bound notebook from the cinder-block plinth. She opened it. The pages inside were dense with handwriting, small and sharp, a different script from anything on Caden's torque charts. "I will be inspecting the underbody on Thursday. Bring the car in clean. I do not work on filth." She closed the notebook. She looked at Rosie. "You have four days."
"Three," Rosie said.
Lila Voss held the gaze for a moment. Then she set the notebook down, its spine thudding soft on the concrete. "Three," she repeated, and the word was final, a door closing with the particular, dry sound of a European cabinet latch. "Three days. The forklift is operational. The stand is calibrated. You will not need to do the lifting yourself."
Caden let out a short breath through his nose, almost a laugh, and shook his head. "Three days. You just gave her a Tuesday."
"I gave her a Tuesday," Lila Voss confirmed, without turning around. She was already walking back to the far end of her half, her coverall catching the fluorescent light in small, sharp creases. "The rest is her problem."
The 240SX outside flicked its indicator one more time, a slow, satisfied pulse, and its engine settled into a lower idle. The kerosene heater ticked. The rust on the Corvette's quarter panel caught the light and held it, a small, dark bloom that would not, for a few more days, be the thing that mattered most.
Rosie knelt on the cracked concrete, pressed her palm flat against the bare slab, and felt the cold of it seep through her work glove. Three days. She had a cracked engine, a rusted shell, a forklift she did not trust, and a woman who spoke to metal with the same tone she used to deny a man a pint.
She straightened up. The rust glinted, just once, in the fluorescent hum.