Every day, before Evelyn became Queen of the Junkyard, Hir Becken made her put on the heavy leather explorer's outfit. It consisted of a set of scratched goggles, a thick apron that had nearly buckled her knees the first time she'd tried it on, and oversized Kevlar gloves that were so big she had to tie them around her wrists with rubber bands.

Hir Becken said she was the best employee it had ever had. And at nine, Evelyn had never had a job that made her happier.

"Please, Pops," she asked, late at night when they were roasting weenies over an oildrum fire. "Can we stay here?"

"We'll see," he said, scratching his salt-and-peppered beard. That meant no. She knew that by now.

Evelyn had two duties: the first was fetching the smaller items out of the mazes of rusted metal. She'd follow the faint 'bleep' of her RFID-chip detector down long corridors of teetering
machinery and broken glass, until she finally uncovered a siphoning reblower half-buried underneath a pile of old storage drums.

...

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