Nell Hollis can strip a dead-generation mech blindfolded in thirty-two seconds, and her family has never watched her do it. A scrap-yard mechanic's mind woke up in the heiress's body when a neural backup failed, and all she asks is a transfer to Kilgore: rated B, provisional, one field trial from being sent home. The trial puts three students in a dead mining basin with thirty-nine hunters behind them, no mech, no terminal, one brand to keep and seven days to walk out the far gate. The board opens her at nine to one. She kills what she cannot outrun by finding the soft seam under the plate, and she walks out with the other two, because the rule says all three or none. Then she sews herself a zebra head, registers a team called SCRAPYARD and takes it into the pits, where she cuts an S-rank shoulder off its hangers and burns out her own core doing it. She wakes nine days later, hears a vent two days late, and is graded A. Home for the holidays. Then a red box: confirm, all hands.
