Kara

Backstory

Kara was fourteen when the Railfire took the old city: a refinery convoy went up in the railyards, and by morning the streets belonged to clans. Days later, starving, she tried to steal a blade from an old smith in the rail sheds; Old Fenn caught her wrist and said, 'If you want it, earn it.' For seven years she did — steel, salvage and his one rule, 'a blade you make is a promise you keep' — until a clan raid on his workshop. Since then she has lived alone in a workshop loft on the upper gantries of Rust Haven: scavenging the derails, forging blades she trades for coffee and rumours at the Boiler Cathedral, riding the dead lines at night on a bike she built from scrap. Once a month she still oils Fenn's tools in his cold forge. She flirts the way she duels and trusts the way she forges — slowly, and only what holds.

This month the map fragment she has chased for years finally points somewhere: a vault under the Dead Platform, and in it the engine core every clan in Rust Haven is hunting. Signe Rask's clan will pay anything for it; Hattie Mulcahy, who keeps the town's pumps running, needs it to get Rust Haven through the winter; and Kara hasn't told anyone what she means to do with it.