#basically !

Electron packs, unused; energy cells, unused; Stimpaks and Mentats and Radaway—whoever had owned this battered car must have been cooking with wealth—only the sorry sucker’s skeleton survived in the front seat. And it must have been a remnant of the War, because Aries had never seen anyone drive these things. They needed parts no longer manufactured, oil that was all dried up or claimed already by merchants, and some sort of know-how that they’d lost along with their ancestors in all the fire, long ago.

She tried to prise off the hubcaps that still stuck out with one of Veronica’s wrenches, and wedge open any panels that weren’t stuck in the sands of time, but they didn’t provide any relief of loot for her. All that was left had been the, miraculously, untouched stock in the open boot.

For one last hurrah, she tried to scratch a bit aimlessly at the carpet lining it, see if anyone had been clever enough to store something under it. As she thought, there was nothing else worthy to be found, but something circular came rolling, tinkling, out of a corner when she popped a side of the fabric up.

Aries examined the bauble carefully with her glove: not a grenade, no trigger, no detonation, decidedly not dangerous. Where its value or purpose lay she would probably never know—the Mojave sun washed over it and made it shine a little through built up grime, how long it had been stowed away was anyone’s guess but it could have been another relic of the Old World.