CHAPTER 5 – SCAVENGER'S EYE
The heater hums different in the morning.
Last night it wheezed and coughed its way through the dark, every cycle a question mark. Now the sound is smoother, a long steady exhale running through the bones of the building. The air in the dorm isn't warm‑warm, but it's not cutting anymore. My fingers don't ache when I flex them. My nose isn't frozen.
Good. That means I didn't screw up.
I lie there for a minute on the top bunk with my eyes open, watching the faint orange glow from the exit sign smear over the ceiling. People are still half asleep—soft snores, a cough, someone mumbling into their pillow. The vents breathe out another wash of air. No rattle. No bang. No panic pause.
I did that, a small, quiet voice says in the back of my head.
I shut it up before it grows into anything like pride. Pride's useless. What matters is that people aren't freezing. That they can actually sleep instead of clenching around the cold.
The room starts to wake in layers. Someone swings their legs out of bed with a thump. A kid whines. Mattresses squeak. My stomach reminds me I didn't eat enough last night.
I slide out of the bunk, land soft, and grab my backpack. It's lighter than it should be; there's not much in it. Just enough that if I had to walk away from Gotham today, I'd still have something that was mine.
The hallway outside the dorm smells like bleach and cheap soap. The floor is cold under my shoes, chill seeping up through rubber that's already thinning. The heater's hum follows me down the corridor toward the common room.
Breakfast line curls around the edge of the space: people in coats and blankets, shoulders hunched, hands wrapped around empty cups waiting for coffee. Nia and a volunteer are working behind a folding table, scooping oatmeal into bowls and handing out slices of bread that try very hard to be toast and don't quite make it.
I take my place at the back of the line. From here, I can see a corner of the room that doesn't belong to anybody in particular: a busted table propped on one short leg, a cheap toolkit open next to it. Hammer, real screwdriver, needle‑nose pliers, roll of tape. Gold, in its way.
The volunteer using them—Tom, I think, the same one who showed me the dorm—is down on one knee, wrestling with the table leg. He's got the screwdriver jammed under the edge of a metal bracket, trying to lever it up.
It's the wrong tool for what he's doing. He needs a wrench or at least pliers on a nut. He's using what he has. The way the metal flexes makes my teeth itch.
"Careful," Nia warns, not looking up from her ladle. "If you break that, I am not replacing it."
Tom grunts. "Just trying to get it to stop wobbling."
I watch him for a few seconds, biting down on the urge to walk over there and ask if I can try. Instead I keep my hands around my empty cup where they belong.
When it's my turn at the table, Nia glances up. Dark circles under her eyes, hair pulled back messily, smile stubborn.
"Morning, Xavier," she says. "You sleep okay?"
"Yeah." I look down into the oatmeal she spoons into my bowl. "Room was warmer."
"Guess the city finally sent somebody," Tom says from the floor, voice echoing under the table. "Boiler's not coughing up blood anymore."
"Miracles happen," Nia says.
"Sure," I say, before my mouth can stay out of it. "Miracles with a bleeder valve."
Nia's eyebrows twitch up. Tom pauses, peeks around the table leg at me.
"You know boilers?" he asks.
I shrug. "Know when they're dying. It was mostly air in the lines." The words are out before I've decided to share them. I hate that.
Tom blinks. "Huh. Well. Whatever it was, I'll take it."
Nia's watching me more closely now. Not suspicious, exactly. Just… connecting dots. Heater broken. New kid shows up. Heater suddenly better. She opens her mouth like she might say something about it.
I break eye contact first. "Thanks," I say, and step out of the line before she can pin me down with questions I don't want to answer.
I eat at my usual corner table, back to the wall, keeping the toolkit in sight. Between bites of oatmeal, I watch people cycle through it. Somebody borrows the hammer to straighten a bent chair leg. Another guy asks for the tape to patch a rip in his coat. The kit sits there on the table, public property. Useful. Accessible.
I could walk over, ask if I can use the screwdriver when they're done. No one would say no. But that's not the point.
The point is: when the heater failed, I had to hope there was a wrench on a forgotten shelf in a basement. If there hadn't been, I'd have been using my hands on hot metal, and the line between "fix" and "trip to the ER" is thin when you're improvising like that.
Borrowed tools worked once. I don't want to depend on luck again.
"Staring at that thing like it owes you money," a voice says across from me.
I look up. Harris has taken the chair opposite mine, moving quieter than a man his age should be able to. Army jacket, gray beard, the same careful way of looking at people without letting them know they're being weighed.
"It does owe me money," I say. "In the form of not existing."
He snorts. "That so?"
"Yeah. If I'd had my own tools last night, I wouldn't have spent half an hour praying somebody forgot their wrench downstairs."
His gaze flicks from my face to the community toolkit, then back. Something clicks behind his eyes. He doesn't smile, exactly, but the corners of his mouth do something close.
"So you're the reason my toes aren't blue right now," he says, voice low enough not to carry.
I don't answer.
"Relax," he adds. "I ain't telling Nia. Woman's got enough to worry about without knowing who's breaking into the boiler room."
"I didn't break anything," I say.
"Yeah," he says. "That's why I like you already." He nods at the toolkit again. "If you're planning on making a habit of that, you might want your own set."
"That's the problem." I scrape my spoon through the last of the oatmeal. "I don't have the money for a 'set.'"
"Good thing this city throws away enough to build three more," he says. "You got eyes, kid. Use 'em."
He gets up without waiting for an answer, limping just slightly as he heads for the coffee urn.
I stare at the toolkit a little longer.
Use your eyes.
The city throws things away.
He's right. Back home—before Gotham, before teleporting into a universe that isn't supposed to be real—I'd built half my fixes out of things other people left broken in corners. Door hinges, electronics, cheap furniture. There's no reason Gotham would be any different.
I rinse my bowl, stack it with the others, and drift down the hall like I'm just wandering. Nobody stops me; kids are running around, people are shuffling to and from the showers, staff are triaging an endless list of small crises. I'm good at being invisible when I want to be.
The storage closet is where it was yesterday—off a side hall, door propped open with a plastic bin. No sign that anyone's watching it.
I step through.
The room's smaller than I hoped and bigger than I feared. Metal shelves line the walls, stacked with donations and overflow: blankets, boxes of clothing, plastic tubs labeled TOYS, SHOES, MISC. A laundry bag slumps in one corner under its own weight. The air smells like dust, fabric softener, and that dry cardboard scent everything gets when it's sat for too long.
This is where they put things waiting for new lives. Or no life at all, if nobody ever comes asking.
I glance once over my shoulder. No one in the hall. Voices are distant. Good.
I pull the door mostly shut and move to the shelves.
Lost and found first. There's a box for it—a cracked plastic crate with LOST written in marker and a date that's at least a month old. Half a scarf, two gloves that don't match, a cracked watch, a key ring with no keys, a pair of sunglasses with one arm bent. I turn each thing over in my hands, weighing usefulness.
The watch doesn't tick. The face is cracked. I pop the back off with a thumbnail. Inside, the battery has that powdery crust on it that says "do not lick under any circumstances." Useless as a timekeeper, but the tiny screws holding it together are fine. I palm the watch, turn half‑away, and use my thumbnail again to coax two of the screws into my other hand. They wink in my palm like tiny silver punctuation. Those go into my pocket. The dead watch goes back in the box. No one's getting any use out of it either way.
The sunglasses are cheap plastic, but the hinge pins could be extracted if I'm careful later. I slide them aside mentally: maybe.
Next shelf down: a cardboard box full of old tools and metal junk somebody clearly meant to "deal with later." This is the motherlode.
There's a screwdriver with a cracked plastic handle and a shaft that's a little bent. I press the tip into my thumb. The cross‑head's chewed up but not destroyed.
"Handle's trash," I murmur, turning it over. "Shaft still bites."
If I cut the handle off and wrap the metal, I can have a short driver that fits in a pocket. I slide the screwdriver under my arm for now.
Next: pliers. Real ones. Rust freckles the hinge, but when I work them open and closed, the jaws still meet. A little tight, but that's better than sloppy. The grips are torn, the rubber peeling. That can be fixed.
"Definitely not leaving you here," I tell them, too quietly for even the walls to hear.
Under that is a pair of scissors. One blade is snapped off near the screw. The other is intact, long and sharp, its tip still aligned with the pivot point.
I unscrew the blades with my fingers—it's loose enough that it almost comes apart by itself. The broken half goes back into the box. The good blade, the one with the intact cutting edge, I hold by the handle, feeling the balance.
"You," I say, "are a problem and a solution."
As a full pair of scissors, it would've been obvious. As one wrapped blade, it's a cutting tool, not a weapon. That's an important difference. I don't want to be the guy carrying knives around a shelter. I don't want to be the guy who solves problems by stabbing them either. Tools, not weapons.
I tuck the blade carefully into the side pocket of my hoodie for now.
There's more. A coil of old lamp wire, insulation still mostly intact. A metal bracket with three holes that could be part of a clamp later. A handful of screws and nails.
Everything I touch, I ask three questions:
Can this help me fix something?
Can I carry it without someone noticing?
If somebody sees it, can I explain it without lying?
If I can't say yes to at least two out of three, it stays.
Footsteps pass in the hall. I freeze, hand on the box, listening. The handle on the door rattles faintly, then stops. Someone laughs and moves away. I let my shoulders drop an inch.
I'm not stealing from anyone who still has a claim. These are things nobody is using. Things that will sit here until they vanish into trash bags. If I take them and turn them into something useful, that's not theft. That's… delayed maintenance.
That sounds like rationalizing, even in my own head. I go slower after that, more selective.
A plastic bag near the floor holds sewing supplies: tangled thread, a few needles pinned into a battered tomato‑shaped cushion, buttons in a medicine bottle. I remember seeing a sign about "mending hour" on the bulletin board; staff use this to repair clothes. I won't strip it bare. But one needle and a bit of thread, tucked into my pocket, won't ruin their chances.
"I'll bring you more later," I tell the cushion quietly, and slide just one thin needle free.
By the time I'm done, my pockets have a small, dense weight to them. Screwdriver shaft. Pliers. One scissor blade. A twist of wire. Two watch screws. Needle and thread.
It feels like contraband. And in some ways, it is. If someone searches me, it'll look odd. I can explain some of it—"found it," "wanted to fix my own shoes"—but my heart's still beating a little fast as I crack the storage room door and slip back into the hall.
No one stops me.
Back in the common room, Harris is at his corner seat, watching the news with the sound off. I cross his line of sight; his gaze dips for half a second to the way my hoodie sits, pocket slightly heavier on one side now. He doesn't call me out.
He doesn't need to. The tiny tilt of his head says, See? Told you.
I take a slow breath. This is a start. Not enough. I need more—more options, more parts, more redundancy. But I can't strip this place for parts. It's already barely holding together. I need to look somewhere the city actually throws things away.
Outside.
The Marrow looks different when you're hunting for trash.
Up until now, I've been mapping it by threat levels: which alleys belong to which gangs, where cops cruise, which corners collect drunk aggression after dark. Today, I map something else.
Trash routes.
There's a rhythm to it. You can see it in the overflow: which dumpsters are full on what days, which blocks have torn trash bags spilling guts because the lid never closes, which storefronts leave broken displays and busted hardware out by the curb because nobody wants to pay for proper disposal.
I walk with my hands in my pockets, hood up, like any other kid killing time. I stop when it makes sense to stop—in front of store windows, at crosswalks, beside the shelter's brick wall to adjust my backpack strap. Always one eye on reflections. Always aware of who's watching.
Behind a narrow grocery, the alley is a canyon of bricks and back doors. The dumpster here is overflowing, lid propped open with a broken mop handle. I glance once at the street—no one looking—and slip into the alley's shadow.
On top of the pile: food trash. Broken pallets. Cardboard. But along the side, where someone has stacked "not trash, not worth fixing," there's treasure.
A metal utensil tray with one bent spoon still in it. The spoon's handle is twisted, but the bowl is intact. With some grinding or a hammer and patience, it could be reshaped into a small scraper or pry tool. I slide it under my hoodie, along the waistband of my pants, where it rests flat against my side.
Next to it: a desk fan with a snapped cage and a dead motor. I don't need the whole thing. I pry the front cover off, wincing at the squeal of old plastic. The screws holding it together are bigger than the ones in the watch and still sharp. I pocket two and leave the rest. Someone yells inside the grocery; I flatten against the wall until the sound fades into ordinary argument.
"Hey!" a voice barks from the back door. "You got business back here?"
The door creaks open. A man steps out, apron dusted with flour, cigarette already in his mouth. His eyes cut straight to me.
My heart jumps, but my face doesn't change. I pull my hood back a little so he can see more of it—kid, tired, nothing special.
"Just cutting through," I say, nodding toward the other end of the alley. "Didn't want to walk in the street."
He grunts. Suspicious, but not invested. "Street's the front. Back's for deliveries. Move along."
"Yes, sir." I mean it. I walk, not too fast, skirt the leaking dumpster, and slip out the other end. Only when I'm around the corner do I let my shoulders drop.
Note to self: don't linger. Don't look like you're digging. Keep it moving.
Block by block, I build a mental overlay of the Marrow's waste.
Behind a small appliance repair shop, there's a pile of dead toasters and coffee machines. Their cords dangle like vines. Most are too bulky to do anything with now, but I commit the location to memory. If I ever need heating elements or metal shells, that's a source.
An office building's side entrance has a recycling cage full of e‑waste: old keyboards, cracked monitors, a printer the size of a coffin. Too visible to raid in daylight. But a few feet away, half wedged between the cage and the wall, there's a torn mesh pencil case someone dropped and no one bothered to pick up. The zipper still works. The fabric is stained but intact.
I step close like I'm tying my shoe and scoop it up in one motion, dusting it off with my fingers. It's big enough to hold a handful of tools. Small enough to disappear in a hoodie pocket.
Perfect.
On another street, I cut past a church I don't know yet and spot a clothes donation bin chained near the curb. Socks and shirts poke out from around the lid; somebody couldn't be bothered to shove them down. I'm not here to steal clothes from people who need them. But near the base, there's a torn shoe with the sole half off. Useless as footwear. Interesting as material.
I crouch, pretend to tie my laces again, and peel a strip of rubber away from the ruined sole. It comes off in one long, satisfying pull. That goes into my pocket, too.
The more I walk, the more the city shifts in my head.
It's still dangerous. Still full of people who would hurt me for looking at them wrong, or because they're bored, or because I remind them of someone else. But overlaid on that threat map is another one: points of salvage, potential parts, abandoned potential.
There's a busted traffic sign leaning against a fence, its metal bent. There's a rusting grate with two screws missing, the remaining ones barely holding on. There's a stack of broken plastic crates behind a bodega.
Every one of those is a problem for somebody and a solution waiting for me.
At one corner, I see a shopping cart half‑full of scavenged metal and blankets, parked in the relative shelter of a recessed doorway. Hand‑lettered cardboard sign: THIS IS MY STUFF. DON'T TOUCH. That's a line I don't cross. Whoever left that cart needs it more than I do. I move on without slowing.
By the time the light starts going gray again, my pockets are heavier than they've been since I landed in this universe. Each step makes the weight shift slightly against my legs and sides—not enough to clink, but enough to remind me that I'm carrying something worth having.
The air is colder. The wind coming off the river cuts down the side streets, tugging at my hoodie. I tuck my hands into the front pocket, fingers brushing over the zipper of the pencil case, the steel bones of pliers, the wrapped scissor blade handle.
I'm not armed. Not really. I'm equipped.
That feels… new.
There's a stairwell in St. Mary's that no one uses unless they have to.
It runs between the main floor and a half‑basement that's mostly storage and an unused classroom space. The elevator is closer and easier, so people take that. The stairs are for fire drills and kids playing tag until Nia yells at them.
Which means, at the dead point between afternoon and dinner, it's empty.
I sit on the landing halfway down, back to the wall, feet on the step below. The light overhead flickers once, then stabilizes into its usual hum. Concrete under me is cold, but not freezing. Down here, the heater's work is more obvious; the building holds warmth better when you're closer to its core.
One by one, I empty my pockets.
Screwdriver shaft. Pliers. Scissor blade. Spoon. Coiled wire. Little screws. Needle. Thread. Rubber strip. Pencil case, zipper scarred but functional. I line them up on the step opposite me like exhibits in a court case.
"This is ridiculous," I tell myself.
It is, a little. This is a handful of trash. None of it is shiny. None of it is expensive. If you showed it to anyone, they'd see junk.
But I see what they can be.
The screwdriver shaft, if I cut away the cracked handle and wrap the bare metal with tape or cloth, becomes a stubby driver I can use in tight spaces. The pliers, once I scrub rust off the pivot and rewrap the grips, will give me leverage I didn't have last night in the boiler room. The scissor blade is a cutting edge. The spoon can become a scraper. The pencil case is a container. The rubber strip can quiet metal or keep tools from printing through fabric. The screws are anchors. The needle and thread are precision joins and small repairs.
"Not a set," I murmur. "But a start."
I pick up the pliers first. They're heavier than they look. The hinge is stiff but moves when I work it, making a small grinding noise as rust flakes off. My thumb and forefinger trace the teeth on the jaws: still sharp enough to bite into metal.
"You'll do," I tell them. "You just need work."
The scissor blade's edge catches the light. I nick each fingerpad lightly, testing sharpness. It's not razor, but it's enough. Wrapped properly, it can be a cutter without being a knife. That distinction matters to me in a way I don't want to examine too closely.
I test the zipper on the pencil case. It snags halfway, but a little tugging and straightening gets it moving along the track. Inside, the lining is dirty but not falling apart. I wipe it out with the edge of my sleeve.
I could just throw everything in there and call it done.
Loose metal, though, will clink and shift and poke its way through the fabric. That's a good way to get noticed and stabbed in the same day.
I pull the rubber strip out and run it between my hands, stretching it a little. It's tough but flexible. Wrapped around the scissor handle, it'll make a grip and a buffer. The thread can be used to tie things down. The spoon handle can be bent to match the curve of my palm.
I feel my brain doing the thing it does when I'm faced with a system: breaking it down, recombining it, running possibilities. Pipes, wiring, tools, people, doesn't matter. Problems and parts.
The rig isn't real yet, but the idea is. A small, quiet kit that lives on me, not on somebody else's shelf. Something that means the next time a heater dies, or a pipe leaks, or a door sticks in the wrong way, I don't have to go begging the building for help.
A pocket of options.
I tuck everything back into the pencil case for now, arranging them so the heaviest pieces lie flat at the bottom, the sharp edges toward the center, cushioned by rubber and cloth. The case bulges a little, but not as much as I worried it would. When I zip it, the sound is loud in the stairwell, but the pouch itself is silent when I shake it.
That's important. Silence keeps you alive long enough to fix things.
I slip the case into the front pocket of my hoodie. The weight sits against my stomach, noticeable but not uncomfortable. I stand and walk up and down the stairs twice, testing bounce and swing.
The pouch settles into a sweet spot, resting near my center of gravity. It doesn't slap against my side when I move. It doesn't jab my ribs when I bend.
I can feel it, though. A small, solid presence.
I press my hand over it once, just to confirm it's there. It's stupid to feel calmer because I'm carrying a handful of scrap metal and wire. It's just physics. Just mass.
It still feels like breathing a little easier.
Footsteps echo above. Voices filter down. I lean against the wall, casual, hand out of my pocket, until whoever it is passes by the open door without looking in.
When the stairwell's empty again, I let my eyes close for half a second.
The city is still hostile. Still broken. Still dangerous in ways I haven't even seen yet. It's still Gotham. The wrong universe. The wrong timeline. The wrong everything.
But in one small, stupid way, I'm not walking into it empty‑handed anymore.
I tap the pouch through the fabric—light, barely a touch.
"Tomorrow," I tell the tools. "We make you into something better."
For now, I go back up the stairs, toward the smell of soup and the murmur of people and the steady, healthy hum of the heater I fixed with someone else's wrench. The pencil case rides with me, quiet and invisible.
The Marrow will keep throwing things away.
I'll keep picking them up.