Raven stood in the center of Grand Theft Autonomous, The maintenance bay had been stripped bare. All the tools, lifts, gas, and raw mechanical stock were hers now. But this was only half the haul.
The real prize was ahead.
She crossed the polished floor and approached the first row of display cars. Sleek, polished, and blindingly expensive. A Ferrari 812 Superfast, cherry red with custom chrome trim. Next to it, a black Lamborghini Aventador SVJ that looked like it had been dipped in liquid armor. Then came the Rolls-Royce Ghost, a Bugatti Chiron, a McLaren Senna, an Aston Martin Valkyrie.
Useless.
But not valueless.
Raven laid her hand on the Ferrari's hood. It vanished into her system space.
She followed with the others, absorbing them all, knowing full well she'd never drive one of them during the apocalypse. No durability. No real clearance. No capacity. But they'd make fine trade stock. Or if nothing else, parts. Strip them down, melt the alloys, forge something useful.
Speed is flashy. Weight is survival.
She turned and walked toward the real weapons of survival: trucks.
Rows of F-150s. F-250s. F-350s. Heavy-duty Dodge Rams. Chevy Silverados with reinforced bumpers. Toyota Tundras, lifted and plated. She absorbed them all. One by one, metal vanished into her domain.
In her last life, she remembered the idiots who'd bust into dealerships like this and went straight for the flashy sports cars. One flat tire. One pothole. One unpaved road and they were finished. Survivors abandoned luxury cars on every highway.
But the smart ones? They took trucks. Built weight into them. Reinforced the frames. Added steel plating, welded-on cages, makeshift battering rams. They didn't try to outrun zombies. They crushed them.
A four-ton vehicle at 40 miles an hour doesn't need finesse. It just needs mass.
Raven absorbed a fleet of garbage trucks, dump trucks, semis, box haulers. All of it. Anything with a reinforced axle or triple-ply tires. She didn't just want wheels. She wanted apocalypse tanks.
She reached the compact cars next—Toyota Corollas, Honda Civics, Subaru hatchbacks. Not exciting, but dependable. These she took for trade. Clean engines would become priceless when survivors started running out of parts. Mechanics could keep anything running, if they had the components.
Then came the electric cars.
Tesla Model S. Chevy Bolts. Nissan Leafs. A Rivian R1T parked in the far corner.
People laughed at electric vehicles in the apocalypse. No charging stations. No solar grid. Just dead weight. But to a Technomancer, they were gold. High-efficiency systems. Specialized batteries. Insulated cables and regulated conversion units.
Raven took them all.
It wasn't about plugging in.
It was about rewiring them to run on anything.
With enough power, she could make them run on garbage. On sunlight. On rot.
In her past life, when she reached Level 5 as a Technomancer, she'd scavenged old nuclear reactor ruins just to extract enriched uranium fuel rods not for bombs but for power cores. For her mechs. For her drones. For her life.
She remembered sending out a wave of spider-legged bots she'd forged from industrial scrap and drone guts. They swept entire ruins clean and turned them into temporary bases. Some she never even visited—just watched from satellite feeds she hacked into with her gear. Nobody dared enter a site guarded by her machines.
They saved her more than once.
Now she had the chance to build them again.
With a glance around the show floor, she finished absorbing the remaining delivery vans, utility vehicles, and dealership transport rigs. Then she stopped.
Something tugged at her memory.
In her first life, there had been rumors.
Teams had whispered about a basement level under this dealership—a substructure not listed on blueprints. They'd said scavengers had stumbled on it after the first few weeks, found crates of raw metal, industrial gear, even rumors of weapon components. Some claimed it had been set up by a terrorist cell planning an attack on pre-apocalypse New York. Others said it was just a black market storage site.
Raven didn't care.
All she knew was that basements like that often hid the best things—gear no civilian could get above ground. Tools. Forging materials. Compounds you couldn't replicate once the labs went dark.
She walked across the floor, eyes scanning the rooms of Grand Theft Autonomous.
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