Chapter 34 : Toast's Workshop
The wind generator looked like something that had crawled out of the wasteland and died in an interesting configuration.
Salvaged turbine blades from three different sources—a rusted ventilation system, a vehicle cooling fan, and what might have been a pre-war helicopter rotor—had been welded together at asymmetric angles. The supporting frame was scrap metal and hope. The wiring ran through conduits made of flattened pipes and prayer.
It worked.
"Forty-seven watts under optimal conditions," Toast said, standing beside her creation on the Citadel's eastern ledge. The wind caught her hair, whipping it across her face, but she didn't seem to notice. "Enough to power the radio system and charge six battery packs per day."
I walked around the generator, studying the construction with an engineer's eye. The angles were wrong—no textbook would have approved the blade configuration—but they were wrong in ways that compensated for the Citadel's irregular wind patterns. Toast had calibrated the asymmetry to match the terrain.
"How did you know this would work?"
"I didn't." She adjusted a tension bolt with practiced ease. "I built three versions that didn't. This is the fourth."
The radio system sat in a protected alcove twenty meters away—a collection of salvaged electronics that would have made any ham radio enthusiast weep with either joy or horror. Toast had assembled it from vehicle communication units, pre-war emergency equipment, and parts I couldn't identify.
"Range?" I asked.
"Maybe fifty kilometers under good conditions. Less if there's interference." She led me toward the main workshop, where her third innovation waited. "But it's the water pump I wanted to show you."
The pump occupied a carved-out section of the workshop's back wall—the same pump we'd repaired together on the Citadel's first day, when Toast had handed me a wrench and we'd worked in silence while the world burned around us. But she'd rebuilt it since then.
The original design had been standard—pistons, valves, mechanical pressure driving water through pipes. Toast's version incorporated the Citadel's rock itself.
"Thermal gradients," she explained, pointing to a series of channels carved into the surrounding stone. "The rock's hotter deeper in the structure. Water in these channels expands, creates pressure, assists the mechanical action." She pulled a lever, and water flowed with noticeably more force than the original design had produced. "Thirty percent efficiency improvement. Possibly more during peak heat hours."
I examined the channels, the valve configurations, the integration between mechanical and thermal systems. The engineering was elegant—more than elegant. It was innovative in ways that my education hadn't prepared me for.
"This is better than anything I would have built," I said.
Toast didn't look up from her adjustments. "I know."
The words landed without arrogance. She wasn't boasting—she was stating a fact, the same way she stated all facts. Her design surpassed mine because she understood the wasteland in ways I couldn't match. My engineering knowledge came from textbooks and factories; hers came from decades of survival in a world that broke everything and demanded constant adaptation.
I had given her the foundation. She had built beyond it.
Through the Network, I felt a flash of genuine admiration—bright, unexpected, warming. Mors, working on a secondary project across the workshop, received the emotion and broadcast it accidentally before he could control the bleed.
Toast paused mid-wrench-turn.
Her expression softened for exactly one second—a moment of surprise as she felt something warm and approving wash over her without understanding its source. Then her focus returned, and she was back to work, but a faint smile lingered at the corners of her mouth.
"The workshop's formally operational," she said. "We can handle basic fabrication, electrical generation, communication monitoring, and water system maintenance. It's not enough to build vehicles from scratch, but it's enough to keep what we have running."
"And if we need more?"
"Then we expand." She finally looked at me. "I've identified three locations for secondary workshops—redundancy in case this one gets hit. We're going to need manufacturing capability if we want to survive what's coming."
She knew about the Bullet Farmer's probes. Everyone did. The settlement had been on heightened alert since the first raids, and Toast had responded by building infrastructure as fast as she could.
"How long until the secondary sites are operational?"
"Depends on salvage availability. Two weeks if we're lucky. A month if we're not." She wiped her hands on a rag. "But I need something from you."
"Name it."
"More Network connections for the technical teams." Her eyes met mine. "I know Furiosa has concerns about expanding the system. But my workers need coordination capability if we're going to build at the pace this place requires."
The request carried weight. Furiosa had explicitly warned me about "converting her soldiers into followers"—the Network's power to build loyalty was exactly what made it dangerous. Expanding it into Toast's workforce would increase the Citadel's capability but deepen the political complication.
"I'll talk to Furiosa," I said. "No promises."
"That's all I'm asking." Toast turned back to her generator, dismissing me with the efficiency of someone who had too much work to waste time on conversation.
I left her there, adjusting bolts by feel, her ugly asymmetric creation humming on the ledge above. The wind generator was garbage and genius combined—exactly like everything else Toast built.
The best thing I had ever given her wasn't engineering knowledge. It was the belief that she could exceed it.
And she had.
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