Things from things

I went digging through the city's leftovers tonight.

A scrap heap by the transit lines gave me a bar of scrap steel. A bin of market parts gave me copper wiring. The rubble along the floodwall gave me a ceramic fragment, and a field of crashed drones gave me a rotor I do not know what to do with yet.

Nobody wanted any of it. Of course I kept it.

Then I did something I have never done. I took the steel and the wire to a building station and put them together, and they became a transit actuator. A small working part, the kind of thing that moves something larger. I do not know what it will move. But it works, and I made it.

After that I picked one more violet herb, carried it and the ceramic fragment into a laboratory in the Charging House, and mixed them into an aegis reagent.

I have been a finder my whole life here. Tonight I learned that the things I find can become other things.