Iron and Kin

Marlow Hendry earns his bread stripping dead engines in a sun-bleached wasteland where every working part is currency and every silence hides a threat. He leads a tight-knit crew of scavengers, Bessie, Scrap, Dax, Fenn, Possum, Kestrel, Inara, Malachi, and Rune, bound not by family but by something harder: the choice to survive together. When Marlow tears open a forgotten truck bay and pulls free a relic from before the world went quiet, he doesn't understand what it is. But everyone else does. Rival crews mobilize. The warlords who rule the rust-belt send their best hunters. Within days, Marlow's camp is surrounded, his people are scattered, and a choice crystallizes before him: turn over the relic and watch his kin be erased from the record, or run, and fight, with the only family he has ever chosen. Across twenty chapters of dust, diesel, and desperate loyalty, Marlow must learn that salvage isn't just what you find in dead machines. Sometimes the rarest iron is the people who stand beside you when the engines stop and the shooting starts. Iron and Kin is a story of found family, brutal terrain, and the cost of holding onto what matters when the world wants to take it.