Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Standard disclaimer: None of the characters, places, etc. in this story are mine, but are instead the property of Bethesda Game Studios.  No copyright infringement is intended by their use in this story.

Author’s note:  Okay, I’m trying something a little different with this story. Normally, even when I write multi-chapter fics, I never upload anything until it is all finished.  In this case, the entire story is finished, but my beta hasn’t gotten all the way through it yet.  I really want to get this up, so instead I’ll be posting each chapter as my beta reviews it.

This story is firmly intended as a character piece exploring Arcade, Samara (my Courier) and the dynamic between them instead of something more along the lines of a walkthrough or “let’s play.”  Because of this some liberties have been taken with the Lonesome Road DLC.  It also will include a couple of chunks of headcanon for Arcade at some point.  If that’s a problem, don’t say I didn’t warn you.  There will be two more short New Vegas stories after this, then a really long New Vegas / Fallout 3 crossover coming at some point in the future (assuming I ever get it finished), and then maybe another short New Vegas fic, but again, that’s a long way off yet.

 

“The other night I dreamt of knives
Continental drift divide
Mountains sit in a line….
It’s the end of the world as we know it
And I feel fine.”

-“The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” R.E.M.

“This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end....
I’ll never look into your eyes
Again....”

--“The End,” Doors

What makes a hero?

Arcade chewed over the question as he and Samara stood on the lip of the Great Divide, looking out over the edge of the cliff, over the vast expanse of ruined and shattered land below.  Far off in the distance, red lights blinked against the Divide’s opposite wall, whose brown bulk reared up against the murky sky.  Dust skirled endlessly through the crevices and canyons beneath them; lashed, stinging against Arcade’s face, carried by the wind that whined in his ears.  Strands of Samara’s short brown hair stirred in the breeze; she had taken her helmet off and it hung at her hip.  She raised one hand to shield herself from the blowing dust; her pale eyes squinted a bit, but otherwise she was as still as a statue, unblinking.  Arcade’s eyes flicked from the vista in front of them to Samara, studying her.  The question he had asked Dala in Big Mountain, seemingly a lifetime ago, was foremost in his mind.

What makes a hero?

The cold distance in Samara’s ice-blue eyes was unsettling; Arcade shifted a bit.  “What are you thinking?” he asked her.

“That Ulysses is out there.  Waiting for me.  I can feel him.”  She didn’t spare Arcade so much as a glance.  “I’m coming for you!” she shouted, so suddenly that Arcade flinched.  The words rang out, echoing across the wasteland below.  She stood there a moment longer, looking out over the edge as the wind howled, then glanced at Arcade.

“Come on.”  She jerked her head in the direction of the narrow trail along the cliff face.  “Let’s go.”

[*]

The path led along the side of the cliff, too narrow for both of them to walk side-by-side; Arcade let Samara go first, bringing up the rear, his Plasma Defender drawn.  The path ended in a metal door, set flush with the side of the mountain.  It was tightly closed.  A green sign was bolted to the right of the door, proclaiming:

HOPEVILLE BALLISTIC DEFENSE STATION
Authorized Military Personnel Only

To the left was a fallen billboard, which had probably tumbled from the cliff above.  Building the American Dream … On Solid Ground! it announced, in bold, cheery letters.  The words were flanked by two missiles and set on a brown background; across the top of the sign was a blue band with cartoon images of trees, a house and a building that might have been a school.  It took him a moment to figure out that it was a stylized depiction of the missile base itself, with rockets sunken into the earth, underlying the surrounding residential community.  The once-bright colors were faded to a pastel wash, and the billboard itself was tattered and torn.  Arcade looked away.

“What’s that, do you think?” he asked, pointing to a symbol that had been painted in white over the green sign: a central star surrounded by a circle of thirteen other stars, with five white stripes depending from it. Arcade recognized it as a crude representation of the flag of the prewar United States.   There seemed something almost purposeful about its placement.  

“It’s Ulysses’s symbol,” Samara answered instantly.  Her pale eyes were cold.  “He left it for me--to show me the way.  He wants me to follow him.”

“Oh.”  Arcade shifted from foot to foot.  “How do you know?  It could be--“

“I know.”  Without another word, she stepped forward and fiddled with the door controls for a moment; the door folded its sections away with a grinding, rusty squeeeal. A drift of air wafted out from the dark passageway that revealed itself within, as stale and dank as air from a tomb, redolent with dust and decay.  “Come on.”

 Arcade drew a breath.  The dark mouth of the passage gaped, hungry and inviting; something about it gave him the chills.  Suddenly he realized he did not particularly want to follow Samara into that darkness; a superstitious dread gripped him that if they descended that way into the dim interior of the base, one or both of them would not return.   “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,” he muttered under his breath.

“What?”

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.  Arcade sighed.  Too late to back out now, he reminded himself.  “Nothing.  Lead the way.”

Samara stepped over the threshold and shadows closed around her.  After a moment’s hesitation, Arcade followed.

[*]

 Should you journey to the Great Divide, you will find…. Death.  Fire.  Loss.  The end of everything that has gone forward.

The prophecy he had received from the Think Tanks in Big Mountain dogged his heels as he entered the base, following Samara’s uncompromising back.  It was nonsense, Arcade firmly reminded himself as they descended; vague, meaningless nonse, most likely produced by some sort of random word generator. Yet somehow he could not put it from his mind.

They halted for a moment as the door closed behind them, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the dimness of the interior.  When Arcade’s eyes cleared, he found he was standing in a low, sloping passage with brownish-stained concrete walls.  A bundle of cables ran along the ceiling, broken and sparking at the midpoint of the tunnel; the sparks provided just enough light to see a metal door at the far end. The sparks leapt and flickered off something shiny that was spread on the wall; Arcade squinted but could not see it clearly.

“Can you make that out?” he asked Samara, who was peering through the gloom.

Samara frowned, striding forward.  She activated her Pip-Boy light.  “Dunno.  I think it’s--“

Then she stopped, going absolutely still.

“What is it?” Arcade asked.

Samara made no response; she just stood there staring at the wall.  She didn’t even seem to have heard him.

“Samara?”  He hurried to her side.  “Samara, are you all ri--“  Then his voice died in his throat as he caught sight of what she was staring at.

Splashed against the wall in foot-high letters, glistening a shocking, vehement red in the erratic light from the sparking wires, were the words:

You cAN Go HoME
COURIER

Paint, Arcade told himself.  It’s paint.  Blood would have dried to brown by now.  But the violence--the viciousness--behind the sneering message belied his rationalization.  It chilled his bowels and turned his blood to ice with fear.  Not for himself…but for Samara.

He knew she was coming.

Arcade swallowed, hearing a dry, clicking sound in his throat.  He glanced over at his companion.  Samara hadn’t moved; her pale eyes were frozen.  As he saw her standing there in her hulking Powered Armor, Arcade was swept with an overwhelming sense of her vulnerability.  She seemed somehow tremendously small and frail compared to the forces arrayed against her.  He reached out only half-consciously to touch her shoulder-- then drew back when it came to him what he was doing.  She wouldn’t even be able to feel it through all that metal anyway.  Instead, he racked his brain, trying to think of something witty to say, but nothing came to mind.  As he had at Big Mountain, he felt an almost irresistible impulse to just snatch her up in his arms and whisk her away from whatever this threat was that was aimed at her, that called her by name.

Not that that would do any good.  He swallowed again.  “Samara, are you okay?”

Samara’s throat worked.  She opened and closed her fingers on the stock of her weapon, and those icy eyes hardened.  “Yeah.”  The word was rough, forced.  “Let’s go.”

Almost violently, she wrenched herself away from the message and continued down the passage, toward the metal door at the far end.   Arcade followed, his stomach churning.

More graffiti awaited them at the far end of the tunnel, by the interlocking metal door; two words were scrawled in that same, vicious bright red:

LoNESoME ROAD

A muscle in Samara’s jaw jumped when she saw it.  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered in a savage undertone, and turned her attention to the door.

Arcade wet his lips; his mouth felt dry as a desert.  “Our friend believes himself quite the artist, it seems.”

It wasn’t the best thing he’d ever come up with--hell, it wasn’t even funny, really--but it was apparently enough; Samara burst into startled, relieved laughter and threw him a look of gratitude.  Arcade managed an uneven smile in return, and somehow it was almost all right.  The frozen distance around Samara thawed a bit as she bent to the opening mechanism, and the door split apart with a screech.

[*]

Beyond was a large, open, empty room with two more doors, one on either side.  Across from the entrance stood a large computer console, in front of the room’s dominant feature: a curved floor-to-ceiling window of scratched, dirty glass or plastic.  Objects were visible beyond the window, but Arcade’s eyes couldn’t at first resolve the shapes.  “Samara--?”

Samara was checking her PIP-Boy 3000.  “Looks like we need to go that way.” She moved to the left-hand door, marked REACTOR, and fiddled with it for a moment.  “Damn.  It’s sealed somehow.  Arcade, check that console--see if there’s a switch.”

Arcade moved to the bank of computer equipment, examining it.  “Doesn’t look like it, at least, not that I can see.  Maybe if you--“ Then he raised his eyes to the window again.  He fell silent.

“What is it?”

“Samara,” he said quietly, “look.  Look where we are.”

Samara moved away from the door and came to stand next to him.  When she caught sight of what was beyond the window, he heard her give a low, long whistle. 

“Wow.”

The curved window opened upon a huge, round, vertical open shaft.  Arcade was terrible at gauging distances, but he would have guessed it was at least thirty feet across, possibly more than that.  It was so tall that even by craning his neck he could not make out the top of it.  The sides of the shaft were ringed with metal stairs and landing platforms; squinting upwards as far as he could see, he could make out other windows in the walls to the left, right and above.

The center of the shaft was dominated by a massive column of metal, at least ten feet in diameter, stretching up out of sight and mounted on two flaring cones.  The cones were black, but the column itself was a rusty white and gray, as were the smaller cylinders subsidiary to it.  Arcade saw the red, white and blue flag stenciled on the side, under the capitalized, vertical words UNITED STATES, and a chill surrounded him.  He felt the hair on the back of his neck stiffen in mingled awe and fear.  Save for a few inches of glass, he was standing before one of the giants that had shaken the Old World to its knees.

“We’re actually in the goddamned missile silo,” he breathed.

The two of them stood there for a long moment, side by side, gazing up at the monster that had shaped their world. Gooseflesh prickled on Arcade’s arms where the armor left them bare, and he rubbed himself briskly.  He stole a glance at Samara; her face was unreadable, but there was a curious immobility about her that hinted at the presence of some deep emotion.

Samara broke the moment first.  “Come on.  We need to find a way through here.”  She turned away, and Arcade, after a last, lingering look, followed her.

[*]

The door on the right-hand side of the room was marked UTILITY.  It too was locked, but after a moment or two of fiddling with the computer terminal on the wall nearby, Samara was able to open this one; Arcade, whose skills were strictly medical and who, despite his background, had never really “gotten” machines, stood and watched uselessly.  Beyond the door was another curving passage, with pipes running along the walls, its end out of sight.

“Are you sure this is the right way?” Arcade asked her as they followed the corridor.

“It’s not,” Samara said briefly, indicating her PIP-Boy 3000. “We need to go to the reactor. But maybe going this way we can find something to help us open the other door.”

At the end of the passage was a large room with another bank of windows on the left-hand side, so scratched and cloudy with dirt and age that they were almost completely opaque.  Arcade was glad; the vast, brooding presence of that missile just beyond the glass in the other room had given him the creeps.  There was nothing here except for a couple desks and banks of computer equipment on the left side under the window, and a long, low catwalk on the right, ending in something that he recognized as a Bot Maintenance Pod.

“Think any of those computers still work?” Arcade asked.

“Check them and find out.”  Samara was intently studying her PIP-Boy; then she looked from there up to the cylindrical maintenance tubes.  “These Bot Pods might have something….”  She trailed off.  She mounted the catwalk, her armored tread ringing on the metal, and approached the pod at the end.

“See something?”  The glass of the pod was too clouded for Arcade to make out anything from where he stood.

“I’m not sure.  It looks like….”  She turned to address the pod maintenance terminal.  After a few moments of tapping, there was a hissing sound.  The pod door slid open to reveal—

Arcade frowned.  What the hell?

“ED-E!”

Arcade looked sharply over at Samara’s delighted cry.  From the maintenance pod there floated a round eyebot, bristling with antennae, the exact twin of ED-E back in the Mojave Wastes.  The eyebot hovered forward a few paces, then turned and faced Samara.  It chirped inquiringly.

“ED-E, am I glad to see you!”  Samara looked thrilled.  Her entire face lit up at the sight of the little eyebot; she was actually smiling, not one of the small, fleeting smiles Arcade had seen from her in the past but a bright grin of sheer pleasure.  Arcade had never seen her look so happy since he had known her.  His brows drew together; he felt slightly miffed, though he couldn’t say why.  He approached the two of them, climbing up the steps to the catwalk.

“Samara, that’s not ED-E,” he corrected her, somewhat irked.  “That’s just another eyebot.  We—the En—they made thousands of those things.  What one of them’s doing here, I don’t know, but in any case, it’s not ED-E.”

Samara and the eyebot both swiveled to face him; Samara glared at him and the eyebot chirped and spat a harsh crackle of static.  “No.  It’s ED-E.  Isn’t that right?” she asked the bot, which gave a happy beep.  She turned that bright smile back on the little eyebot.  “See?”

“Well, that response certainly proves it, all right.” Arcade folded his arms across his chest.  “I hate to break it to you, Samara, but those bots are programmed to respond to any question by beeping like that.  It doesn’t actually mean anything.”

Samara glared at him again.  “ED-E, if you really are ED-E, beep twice.  Okay?”  The eyebot obligingly gave two chirps.  “What did I tell you?”

“Yes, because you just gave it the answer you wanted to hear.  That bot probably didn’t understand anything beyond ‘beep twice.’  Have you ever heard of Clever Hans?”

She faced him now.  “What’s your problem, Arcade?”

“My problem is, we don’t need an eyebot with us,” he said, his voice rising in irritation.  “They’re hard to control, have notoriously buggy target-identification systems, and have a nasty tendency to overload at the worst times.  The things I—“  He caught himself and broke off, not wanting Samara to wonder how he knew all this.  Lamely, he finished, “We’d be better off leaving it here.”

“ED-E isn’t like that,” Samara said.   Those pale eyes glimmered.  “ED-E’s my friend, and he’s never been anything but useful for as long as I’ve had him.”

“But that isn’t ED-E.” Arcade sighed heavily.  “Why should we take it with us?  What can it do for us?”

She turned back to look at the floating eyebot.  Her face softened, filling with a warmth he had never seen her show toward any human being.  Veronica would probably have died happy if Samara ever looked at her like that.   “He can hack the door,” she replied. 

“Hack the—Samara, that’s a weapons support platform.”

“ED-E can do it,” was her only response.  “I know he can.  Come on.”

[*]

Samara turned out to be right, not that Arcade was pleased to admit it; after a few moments of working silently at the computer console in the main room, ED-E gave a happy beeping and the door unlocked.  Samara glanced over at Arcade.  “You see?”

“I concede the point,” he replied, less than graciously.

They walked down another passageway, past what turned out to be  an empty utility closet, and stepped through a door on their left, out onto a metal landing jutting into the cavernous space of the missile silo itself.

For a long moment, the two of them simply stood there side by side for a long moment, staring up at the massive weapon.  

“Wow.”  Arcade’s voice echoed in that vast emptiness; the echoes bounced his words back to him, sounding strangely, unintentionally reverential.  “So there it is, in the flesh.  Or, I guess, metal.”

Samara said nothing.  Her ice-blue eyes were shadowed as she gazed up—and up—and up—at the huge missile before them.  It loomed over the two of them, resting quiescent in its enormous, circular cathedral.  As his eyes traced the height of the thing, Arcade suddenly understood the tall tales he’d occasionally heard from drifters who had come from the East: bizarre tales of something called the Church of the Atom, a strange religious sect that worshipped an atomic bomb.  The tower before them was awe-inspiring.  Just being in the huge metal thing’s presence sent chills down Arcade’s spine.   Cold metal now, he thought, but with heat enough to set the world on fire….

“That’s it, then.”  He hadn’t realized he was speaking aloud until Samara looked over at him in confusion.  “That’s it.  The pinnacle, the—the magnum opus of everything the Old World ever produced.  Right there.  Their greatest work, the absolute best they could do was that—that instrument of mass destruction.”

Samara’s brows drew together.  “Arcade, are you all right?”

Arcade pulled off his glasses and rubbed at his closed eyes.  A dull, frustrated anger was burning inside him.  All their resources, their knowledge, their learning, their skills—compared to those Old World giants, we’re nothing more than children.  And this—this is what they chose to do with it all.  He thought of the Think Tanks in Big Mountain, those arrogant, murderous, solipsistic geniuses, living embodiments of everything that had been wrong with the Old World, and his anger sharpened.  Oh, they could do wonders, all right, and this technological terror was the greatest of them all.  All that potential, used for nothing more than creating death.  The thought occurred to him that he was being unfair, but Arcade harshly dismissed it.  And we’re still doing it, right now, back in the Mojave—drawing on the refuse of a dead world, and turning those fragments into weapons.  War.  War never changes. Haven’t we learned a goddamned thing?

Apparently not, Arcade mused.  It struck him—and left him vaguely uneasy—that the Followers of the Apocalypse were playing essentially the same game as the Legion and the NCR: sifting through the wreckage of the Old World for any scraps they could use in the present.  Of course it wasn’t the same at all, he hastily corrected himself; the Followers were trying to help people, while the Legion and the NCR were searching for weapons—but the thought was still more than a little uncomfortable.

Samara was still staring at him; Arcade realized he hadn’t answered her question. “No, I’m not all right,” he said shortly, “but that doesn’t matter.  Let’s go on.  This thing—“ he nodded toward the missile “—is giving me the creeps.”

They went up a set of spiral stairs, with ED-E bobbing along behind them, to come upon another metal landing.  After some fiddling with a wall-mounted computer, Samara was able to open a door marked OPERATIONS.  The room inside, roughly L-shaped, was filled with overturned tables and banks of computer equipment surrounding what looked like a central workstation.  Pinned to one wall was a bulletin board with schematics for some kind of weapon.  As mechanically illiterate as Arcade was, he could tell that it was a rocket launcher. 

“Red Glare?” he murmured to himself, studying the plans. 

Samara glanced over her shoulder.  “Come on, Arcade.  We need to move.”  The eyebot chirped agreement.

“Fine, whatever,” he said, sighing, and followed her through the exit.

The next set of stairs rose to a small corner landing, then turned at a right angle and continued to rise.  Samara’s heavy tread and the whining of her armor echoed loudly in the small passageway, as did the humming of the new eyebot’s thrusters (it’s notED-E, Arcade thought somewhat pettishly).  They continued to climb until they reached another closed door; the sign over this one said STORAGE.

“Who laid this silo out?” Arcade demanded. “This makes no sense.  Why is the storage area connected directly to Main Operations? Shouldn’t there be a main office up here somewhere?  A break room? Living quarters?  I’m beginning to think those ancients didn’t know as much as we thought.”

Samara paid him no attention, stepping forward and touching the control panel.  The door folded itself away again. Looking over Samara’s shoulder, Arcade saw another twisted jumble of ruined shelves.  “I hope they had more storage space than this for the entire silo, because if—“

Then he looked past her and his voice died in his throat.

Pinned to the wall across from them was a limp human figure.   This by itself neither distressed nor particularly surprised Arcade; like all who lived in the wastes, he had done enough and seen enough to become fairly inured to the sight of death.  However, even from across the room, with the figure in profile and heavily backlit by the room’s single still-functioning bank of fluorescent lights, he could see enough to tell—

“There’s something wrong with it,” Samara said, uttering his thoughts.

“Yeah, there is.”  He shouldered past her and crossed the room to examine the figure, hearing Samara’s lumbering tread as she followed him.  Together they regarded the unfortunate soul pinned to the wall.

The strange apparition appeared to be the body of a male; heavily built and muscular, wearing damaged, battered brown combat armor. Gender was hard to tell, though, partly because the armor obscured the shape of the body within but also because there was no skin left on the creature anywhere.  Arms, legs, face—all had been completely denuded.  The red cords of muscle were obscenely vivid in the harsh lighting.

The two of them stood side by side, studying the poor creature.  “What happened to him?” Samara asked at last.  Her eyes narrowed.  “Was he tortured?  Is that why—“  She gestured wordlessly to the thing before them.

Arcade frowned.  “No smell—this was recent.  And no—I don’t think this was done to torture him.  Where’s the blood?  Look—the floor is clean.  Even if they did this to him somewhere else and then dragged him here, he would have been bleeding all over the place and it would have gotten everywhere.”  He laid his fingertips against the exposed muscle of the creature’s arm.  It was dry and hard to the touch—like ghoul flesh, his mind supplied.  “Some kind of ghoul, maybe?”

Samara shrugged.  “Maybe.  He’s wearing armor….”

“Yes, and the armor’s been patched, but badly,” Arcade murmured.  The brown shell of the armor was pitted and dented, and it had been bizarrely patched with a litter of random street signs, pieces of sheet metal, and old license plates. “That would suggest sentience, of a sort.  But it also suggests that either he’s not smart enough to know how to really fix his armor, or else that he doesn’t have the equipment to do so.  Incidentally, the fact that he’s still wearing armor suggests against torture as well—if this was done deliberately, why would his torturers allow him to keep his armor?”  He was silent a moment, trying to make sense of the spectacle before him.  “These patches—I can’t help but think they’re mostly for looks.”

“I think you’re right,” Samara agreed.  “I mean, look at this—“  She pointed to a chunk of a stop-sign.  “Thin metal. This wouldn’t stop a bullet, wouldn’t even slow one down.   The armor….”  She looked at him with solemn eyes.  “It almost looks like NCR Trooper Armor.”

Arcade suddenly realized she was right. “Do you suppose we’ve found one of the NCR’s missing soldiers?”

“Don’t know.  Maybe.”  Samara seemed troubled.  She was silent for a moment, gazing at the human figure.  At last, she brought out:  “Somehow this feels like it was meant for me.”

A cold shiver passed down Arcade’s spine.  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he scolded Samara.  “That’s nonsense.”

Except it didn’t feel like nonsense, especially not when coupled with the graffiti they’d seen earlier.  The display of this body—the first evidence of any living thing they’d seen so far—felt like a personal threat, aimed directly at her.  Arcade shifted from foot to foot, his skin crawling with a vague, nebulous sense of danger; again that sensation of Samara as small, frail, and horribly vulnerable came over him. She said nothing further, just stared at the figure, biting her lip.    At last, he asked her in a low voice, “What do you want to do?”

She shook her head slowly.  “Only one thing to do.  Keep on moving; find out what happens.” Samara glanced at him, another one of those sideways glances.  “Arcade…..”

“Yes?”

She started to say something, then stopped.  She reached out instead, hesitated, then gripped him by the shoulder, giving him a rough, awkward squeeze.  “Let’s go,” was all she said.  She started for the room’s exit, and he followed her.  The eyebot bobbed after them.

[*]

The exit took them back out to the shadowed, cavernous missile bay, onto another semi-circular metal landing.  This one had two doors, one on the left-hand wall marked MAIN ENTRANCE and the other in the wall all the way across from them, marked SECURITY.

“That’s where we want to go,” Samara said, nodding to MAIN ENTRANCE.  When she touched the door control panel, it folded itself away to reveal a square room divided longitudinally into two separate bays.  The bay down which they were staring had a desk with an overturned chair in the middle and led to a separate door, also marked MAIN ENTRANCE.  Samara fiddled with that one for a moment, then shook her head. 

“Locked again,” she pronounced.  “ED-E?”

The eyebot drifted over to examine the door, then floated into the other bay, to the right.  This bay was lined with banks and banks of computer equipment.  The bot focused on a terminal station, then chirped. 

“Can’t get through,” Samara diagnosed.  “He says he needs some specialized codes.”

Arcade exhaled slowly.  “Great.  And where are we supposed to find those?”

“Dunno.”  Samara shrugged.  “Let’s try Security.”

They filed back through the landing to the door to the security office.  Samara messed with this one for a bit, and then it slid open too.

When this door folded itself aside, they were looking into a large, roughly square room. Almost directly across from them, in an alcove, was a round wooden desk backed by a bank of computer equipment and holding a small terminal.  A dimly seen form sprawled in the chair at the desk; by the angle of the shoulders, the tilt to the head, it was clear the figure at the desk was dead.

“Who do you think that is?” Samara asked, her voice hushed.  “Another—like the one downstairs?”

Arcade shook his head.  “Doesn’t look like it from here.”

They entered the room.  Samara stopped, looking down.  “There’s something on the floor.”

A large, tiled square bearing a circular design of some sort was inset onto the floor before the desk.  It was covered with dust and refuse.  The two of them scraped at it with their boots, clearing some of the trash off the design.  Arcade frowned.

“It looks like a seal of some kind.”

“Yeah.”  Samara scraped at some more dust, revealing a circle bearing the design of a large shield, on which was superimposed a sword and buckler, blue with thirteen stars, wreathed with olive branches.  “Look, there are words—“  She traced the outer rim of the circle.  “Ballistic Defense Division, Commonwealth Defense Administration,” she read. “And there’s a banner under it—“  She squinted at the tiled gold ribbon under the shield.  “It’s not English--it looks like that Latin stuff you and the Legion use all the time.  Exitus….acta….” she read haltingly, “acta … “  She cleared some more trash out of the way.  “I can’t make out the last word—“

“Probat,” Arcade supplied dryly.  “Exitus acta probat.”

“Oh.”  She looked over at him.  “What’s it mean?”

The corner of his mouth twitched.  “’The end justifies the means.’”

“Really?”

“Close enough.”  He sighed, rubbing at his eyes again.  “Come on.  The faster we find these codes, the faster we can get out of here.”

Upon investigation, the computer terminal on the desk across the room appeared to be still working, though its dim green screen flickered and was choppy with static.  While Samara worked on hacking the terminal, Arcade turned his attention to the figure sprawled in the chair, stiff and cold.

It’s a ghoul, he realized.  He bent closer.  The man wore a uniform of a type Arcade had seen in prewar holotapes: a U.S army uniform.  Arcade knew enough to tell that the four stars on the man’s epaulets indicated that he had been a general, a speculation further confirmed by the name badge: Gen. Martin Retslaf.

“Move him out of the way,” Samara ordered peremptorily.  “I need more room; I can’t even see what I’m doing.”  Her bulky Powered Armor was an awkward fit in the tight wooden horseshoe of the desk.  Arcade shoved at the man’s chair, and it rolled backward; as it did, General Retslaf’s position shifted, and his head slumped.  The entire back of his skull was gone, Arcade realized: a ruin of shattered bone fragments and dried blood and pieces of brain that coated the back of the chair.  More spots of blood stippled the computer bank behind him.  Arcade glanced to the side and saw that there was a 10mm pistol lying on the surface of the desk, right where it would have fallen out of the man’s hand.  He wrapped his arms around himself, resting his eyes on the man while Samara worked away, heedless, at the computer terminal behind him; the clicking of keys filled the tomblike silence in the bunker as she typed.

How did it end for you, I wonder? Arcade mused. The man was a ghoul, which suggested that he’d lived for some time after the bombs had dropped; and he was a general, which meant that he was almost certainly the base’s commander and the one who would have been responsible for the orders to launch when the balloon went up, so long ago.  Arcade’s imagination painted a bleak picture for him: General Retslaf, the base’s commander and sole survivor, wandering the still, corpse-filled corridors of the dead missile silo, his mind and body slowly disintegrating under the burden of guilt and radiation.  Until finally, with the last vestige of sanity remaining to him, acting on the remaining traces of memory of what he was and what he did, he dons his uniform, takes his service pistol, retreats to the desk from which he gave the final order, and shoots himself in the head. Was that how it was?  No way to tell, of course, Arcade knew…but somehow, this felt right.  The thought filled him with a profound, almost overwhelming sense of horror and pity.

“There, got it,” Samara announced, straightening.  “ED-E?”  The little eye-bot chirped an affirmation.   “Okay, that’s it.  Arcade,” she said, glaring at him.  “Quit fooling around with that dead guy.  We need to move.”

Arcade’s jaw tightened.  “Should we…do anything for him?”

“Why?” she asked, staring at him blankly.  “We didn’t for the other dead guy back there.”

“I just…ah, never mind,” he said, sighing. “Forget it.”

“Right.”  She put out her hand and scooped up the 10-mm, tucking it away inside her armor, then jerked her head toward the door.  “Come on.”

[*].

 Back in the horseshoe-shaped room, the eyebot flitted immediately over to the computer mainframe and communed with it for a moment, then gave a happy chirp.  Samara nodded.  “That’s it.”

She approached the door to the outside, Arcade following behind her.  He waited as she touched the controls to open the door; the door folded back and an alarm indicator started to blare—

“Holy shit!”

The words burst from his lips.  Everything seemed to skid to a halt.  An icy wave crashed over Arcade; his chest locked up and his heart lurched.  On the other side of the door, almost right in the doorframe, were three massive sentry bots.  The huge, glistening gray metallic monsters were each as tall as a man; resting on wheeled tripod-legs, their two gun arms—one a laser cannon, the other a modified missile launcher—were aimed right at himself and Samara. Their small, dome-shaped heads swiveled, and their optic sensors flared as one, two, three, they all locked onto their targets. Arcade was frozen, his heart ice; he couldn’t move, could do nothing but stare at the three hulking forms. His mind plunged out of control, recalling the sentry bots’ armaments, calculating coldly and precisely the effect such weapons would have on the human body when fired at point-blank range.  Lovingly rendered, extremely graphic images in all their gruesome, medically accurate detail flashed before his mind’s eye—

--when Samara’s gauntleted hand planted itself right in the middle of his chest.  He got a flash of her pale eyes, blazing almost white, before a tremendous shove sent him staggering backwards with such force that he almost tripped over the desk in the middle of the room.  Samara snatched her helmet from her hip and jammed it on her head, calling out, “ED-E!  Back!” The little eyebot chirped as Samara lunged for the door—

Lunged through the door—

And the sound of rumbling metal filled the air as the door slid shut behind her.  Arcade caught himself on the desk and straightened, staring blankly after her.

The door was closed.  Samara was on the other side.

With a cry of desperation, he flung himself at it, groping at the entry mechanism, but it was frozen solid.  Locked, goddamnit, locked--  He could hear muffled explosions, the rapid chatter of laser cannon fire, and then a heavier explosion—a missile?  Dear God— Nightmare images filled his mind.  He pounded frantically on the steel door, hard enough to cut his knuckles.  Drops of red stained the dull metal.  He backed up and kicked at it wildly; the door rang under his blows, but did not give way.  He heard the zing of Samara’s pulse gun, and her shouts of rage and terror, crackling and distorted with electronic feedback.

With a wrench, Arcade rounded on the eyebot.  “Open the door!” he shouted at it.  It beeped in confusion.  “She’s dying out there!  Open—ED-E, open the goddamned door!”

ED-E whistled assent and spun back to the computer banks.  Arcade snatched out his weapon and pressed himself against the wall beside the entrance.  His Plasma Defender was shaking in his hands; he hurled epithets against himself, for letting Samara leave him like that, at Samara for rushing ahead and putting herself in that position, hell, even at the damned eye-bot for letting the door lock behind her.  The metal strips of the door folded themselves away, showing the gray concrete tunnel beyond….

The first thing Arcade saw was a laser turret on a large concrete block dais, protected by a waist-high ring of sandbags.  Tucked into the bend of the tunnel beyond the door, it had been concealed by the three sentry bots before; now, however, it was visible and firing at something—someone—just outside his visual field.  Its seeking sensor moved, scanning, and it began to swivel toward him. Arcade raised his weapon and fired at it, and it burst in a brilliant shower of green sparks.  He darted through the open door in a flash, heading for the now-destroyed turret; he had no idea what, if anything, was aiming at it that he couldn’t see, but he knew he couldn’t stay where he was.  His heart was pounding in his chest, and adrenaline sparkled along his veins like whiskey.  He vaulted the ring of sandbags in one bound, and flung himself down between the wall and the concrete dais.  Panting great gasps of air, he raised himself on one knee and lifted his weapon, scanning in haste for Samara.  A laser cannon chattered to his right, and a blast of laser fire almost took his head off; he flung himself down again, breathing hard, inhaling the reek of damp concrete and old rot.  Shit!  Shit!  Shit!—

There was a chirping sound as the eyebot sailed over his head, and a shattering detonation echoed from the same direction the laser fire had come from.  Gambling that the little bot had taken out whatever menace lurked over that way, Arcade forced himself to look out over the sandbag parapet again.  A shock of ice water jolted in his veins as he realized he was staring directly at another turret across the tunnel, aimed right at him; then he registered the scorch marks and realized that it too was inactive.  The middle of the tunnel was dominated by two of the sentry bots, tipped over, their wheels spinning; and pressed against the wall, right where the corridor opened out into two bays, was the bulky form of—

“Samara!”

On her feet, thank God, she’s standing at least--  Her helmeted head turned toward him. She held up one finger and jerked her head left.  He had no time to interpret what she was trying to tell him before she lunged away from the wall.

A shower of red light lanced out.  Samara was moving on a diagonal; she pivoted and fired three shots of her pulse gun to no discernable effect.  Arcade could hear the deep electronic chatter and mechanical grinding of the third sentry bot, out of sight around the wall of the tunnel.  Samara bounded backward two more steps, raised her weapon to fire again, when another bolt of sizzling red energy struck her armored form full in the chest.  She dropped like a discarded marionette.

“No!” Arcade heard himself cry.  Wild panic leaped up in him, burning his brain and filling him with a terrible, agonized fury.  The groaning and whining of the third sentry bot grew louder; and a moment later, it rolled into view.  With all that frightened rage, Arcade lined up his shot and squeezed the trigger of the Plasma Defender again and again, sending bolt after bolt of green light smashing into the sentry bot.  The bot shuddered, ground to a halt; then a miniature detonation blew off its front panel.  It tipped over and fell onto its side, only narrowly missing Samara’s prostrate form. 

Except for the muted, distant blaring of the alarm, which had continued throughout the battle, all was quiet in the tunnel.

Samara….

Arcade scrambled out from behind the sandbag ring and across the tunnel to Samara’s still form. His hands were still shaking with reaction; his armor seemed to weigh a ton as he fell heavily to his knees at her side.  Damn it, Samara, damn it, damn it--  His thoughts were a mess; for a moment he couldn’t think where to start.  Over his head, he heard the little eyebot beeping, but it seemed like something in a different world.

Okay.  Calm down, he told himself.  Just like in emergency training: start by assessing her condition. 

Assess her condition.  Easier said than done.  Hell, he couldn’t even tell if she was bleeding or not; Powered Armor was a completely enclosed environment with the seals engaged.  She could be bleeding to death in there and he wouldn’t even know it.  The armor seemed completely unfamiliar and his eyes could not make sense of it. Damn it, focus!  Think.  What do you have to work with?

He stared down at her.  Enclave Powered Armor, he remembered, was designed with an accessible panel that gave a readout of its occupant’s vital signs; it was intended to help army medics in combat make rapid diagnoses. Enclave Armor had been derived from the U.S. Army’s original Powered Armor designs, which was essentially what the Brotherhood of Steel used.  So Samara’s Brotherhood Armor should have something like that.  Enclave armor had the readout panel on the soldier’s vambrace, so maybe—

He pawed at Samara’s right arm, the one without her PIP-Boy gauntlet, searching for a catch or a button. A bright flare of elation passed through him as her vambrace opened up to reveal a glowing screen underneath, to be followed by wild despair: the screen contained nothing but flickering nonsense characters. System overloaded from the blast, goddamnit--  He fumbled with the screen for a moment more, searching for a hard reset catch to reboot the system, but nothing he saw looked familiar.  Goddamn Brotherhood, why the hell can’t their armor make sense like the Enclave’s? With a frustrated cry, he let her arm fall back down to her side. He ripped off his helmet, flinging it aside, and ran his hands through his hair, trying to think.

All right.  What next. Onboard diagnostics are down, so you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. Quickly.  Move! He actually flinched, hearing the words in the harsh, impatient voice of his first instructor.

He groped at the area where Samara’s helmet joined to her cuirass; the seals were unfamiliar and it took him much longer than it should have to figure them out.  At last he was able to break the seal and he pulled her helmet off, cursing the Brotherhood and their confusing armor to all the hells and back.  Samara’s head rolled limply to the side, strands of her short-cut, reddish-brown hair sticking to her cheek.  Her face was deathly pale, almost white, and when Arcade lifted her eyelids to check, he saw that her eyes had rolled back in her head. 

“Samara.  Samara!” he called her.  No effect.  He slapped her cheek lightly and nothing.  Damn it-- Taking her head in his hands, he gently tilted it back, lifting her chin to clear her airway, then leaned close, listening for her breathing.  He did not like what he heard: her breath was rapid and shallow.  He laid his fingers against her throat, checking her carotid artery, and liked that even less: her pulse was a light, quick fluttering against his fingertips. She’s going into shock--Shit--Shit--! Then he gave himself a rough mental shake.

Come on, Gannon, you know this. When in doubt--  He reached down to the right lower compartment on his armor where he stored his stimpaks and seized one.  He paused for a moment, choosing the best place, then jabbed it right into her body where her shoulder met her neck.

His attention was riveted to her face. Come on, Samara, come on, come on—

Slowly, her breathing began to improve; it strengthened, steadied, but only somewhat.  When he checked her pulse again it was stronger…but not enough.  Her face remained that deathly, waxen color, and her skin was still clammy under his fingertips.  And she still did not waken.  A terrible dread gripped Arcade—that he had failed her, that he had let her down—and with cold, desperate fingers, he took another stimpak and jammed it into her throat.

It felt like hours; he sat there, watching her, his fists clenched, willing her to come back to him--watching as inch by inch, Samara fought her way back to life.  Slowly, achingly slowly, the color crept back into her complexion. Her breathing steadied, became deeper, stronger.  Finally, her eyelids fluttered.  She opened her eyes.

“Ar—Arcade?” Her voice was thick, slurred.

Thank God.  “Do you remember where you are?”

Her armor whined and ground as she sat up, rubbing at her head. The bulkiness of the armor strangely seemed to accentuate the unsteadiness of her movements. “Yeah…in the Great Divide. We’re goin after Ulysses.  Arcade, what th’ hell happened?”

“You took a laser blast directly to the chest.  You’re lucky to be alive,” he said waspishly.  Suddenly, all the fright and stress of the past few moments crashed down on him and exploded into bright anger. “What the hell did you think you were doing, running off like that?”

Her brows contracted in confusion.  “Running off like…you mean, with the sentry bots?”

“Yes, with the sentry bots!  You could have been killed!  Jesus, haven’t you—haven’t you been through enough already?” The horrific images he had conjured of the damage the sentry bot could have done to her still lurked in the back of his mind--and behind those were the memories of the canopic jars in Big Mountain, holding pieces of her body. They combined with the image of her pale, ashen face to fan his anger; he wanted to grab her by the shoulders and just shake sense into her. “Damn it, you know better than that!  Why would you do such a thing?!”

Samara shifted uneasily, drawing away from him a bit. She averted her eyes, looking almost sheepish. “I dunno.  I’m sorry,” she offered. “Sorry, Arcade.  I didn’t mean to make you upset….  I guess—when I saw the three sentry bots, I just….You were only in Combat Armor.  I had Powered Armor, and….I thought that I—“

“Powered Armor?  Goddamn it, Samara!” He couldn’t remember ever being so furious. “Wearing Powered Armor doesn’t make you invincible!  My instructors drilled that into my head, what the hell did yours teach you? It’d be just like the damned arrogant Brotherhood to think they can take on Deathclaws barehanded because they have Powered Armor!  Christ above!  If ED-E hadn’t hacked the door, I—You could have—“  He broke off, turning away, clenching his fists and struggling to control himself.

Samara’s brows were furrowed.  “I’m sorry, Arcade,” she offered him once more.  “I just didn’t want you to get hurt.  I won’t do it again.”

He nodded curtly, still too angry with her to speak.   There was silence for a moment, and then he became aware that Samara was staring at him.

“What?”

“You have Powered Armor training.”

Shit.  His blood chilled.  He couldn’t even deny it; he’d just told her that in so many words.  God damn it, Gannon, how could you let that slip?

 “Yes,” he said ungraciously.

Her pale eyes narrowed. “Why did you never mention this before?”

“Would you accept ‘You never asked?’”

Doesn’t look like it.  The stony hardness in her face did not abate.  Arcade held his tongue, waiting.  After a time, she asked, “Where’d you get it?”

“Oh, you know,” he said with attempted lightness.  “Just picked it up, here and there.”

“No one ‘just picks up’ Powered Armor training.” Those eyes narrowed further. “Where’d you get it?”

He exhaled slowly.  “Samara, do you remember what I said before?”

“What would that be?”

“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.” Her gaze would have left scorch marks on steel; Arcade met it head on, refusing to back down.  You’re not getting any more out of me, he told her silently.

At last, she looked away, considering.  Arcade internally breathed a sigh of relief; he would have moved to wipe the sweat off his forehead except that he knew she would pick up on it.  When she looked at him again, her pale eyes were ice.

“Arcade, have you ever lied to me?”

“Lied? No.”  He crossed his arms over his chest.

“Will you ever lie to me?”

That caught him off-guard; he hesitated a long time, trying to figure out how to honestly answer.  At last he sighed.  “I’ll do my best to avoid it.” 

Samara stared at him again.  Arcade was silent.  He could have said more—made protestations of loyalty, perhaps, or pointed to the aid he’d just rendered her—but he sensed any such protestations would fall flat.  It’s on the table; either she trusts me or she doesn’t.  He waited with folded arms.   At last, after a long period of scrutiny, she nodded.

“Well, I guess that’ll have to be good enough then, won’t it?”  She stood up decisively, with an air of slamming the door on the subject.  Arcade felt tension lift from his shoulders like weight.  He gathered his helmet as Samara reset her armor, and the two of them continued up the passage in silence. Behind them, the eyebot followed.

[*]

“More graffiti,” Samara muttered as she prodded the controls for the base’s main exit.  Her shoulders were tense under the heavy armor, and she avoided looking at the bright red letters.  Arcade gritted his teeth.

“He’s trying to rattle you.”

“Really, you think?” Samara stepped back and let the door fold itself away with a rusty metal screeching.  Arcade felt a rush of wind past his face as the stale atmosphere of the tunnel—an atmosphere that had been undisturbed for who knew how many decades—was displaced by the air from the outside. 

The two of them stood for a moment, peering out through the metal archway into the world beyond.  The sky filling the arch was the same gooey orange it had been up top: a thick, heavy overcast through which the sun shone only feebly.  To either side of the doorway were thick walls of rock stretching up into an arch above them; the door had been set into the side of the mountain.  In front of them, the ground sloped down a long and gentle grade to a chain-link fence, on the other side of which was a scattered collection of army barracks.  Beyond the barracks, dimly glimpsed in the filtered light from the sullen sky, were the ruins of crumbling concrete structures that might once have been the outskirts of a town or city. 

Hopeville, Arcade thought.  They built the town right on top of the damned missile base.  Christ.

Samara had her head down and was gazing intently at her PIP-Boy; Arcade frowned.  “Do you see anything?” he asked her.

She held up one hand for silence, studying her screen.  “There’s something moving down there,” she said after a moment, “but I don’t see—“

A screeching feedback whine from the eyebot cut her off.  Arcade jumped, almost leaping out of his skin.  Samara jolted as well, straightening from her PIP-Boy with a jerk, turning to face her metal satellite.  The bot rotated toward them, whining still, and its speakers crackled to life.

“So you came, Courier, following the trail I left for you, messages like pebbles dropped in the Waste, signposts carved on the barren land.  You came…but not alone.  Brought a shadow with you, dogging your steps, trailing at your heels like a cloak.  Wonder—did you fear to face me, Courier, without your little follower at your side?  Not the way this was to go.  Not the way history would have it—it was to be Courier versus Courier, West versus East—if, that is, the Divide doesn’t get you first. The Mojave didn’t do it. The Chip didn’t do it.  Yet the Divide may end all.”

The voice was a deep baritone, rasping with something that might have been static feedback, where it issued from the eyebot’s speakers; the static gave it a grinding, alien quality.  Arcade had never heard anything like it before.

 “Ulysses.”

The word was spoken in a kind of rolling growl that originated from the back of Samara’s throat.  At the sound, the hairs on the nape of Arcade’s neck stiffened, and a chill ran down the outside of his body.  Samara’s pale eyes were shining with an awful, terrifying light.  He took a step back from her, almost without realizing it.

“Not my birth name.  One I chose for my own.  Name of a man before the War, a man who had to make two flags into one, to forge a single nation out of a squabbling and divided people.  He did it, and it killed him. There was no place for him in the world he made--the world of peace.  Lesson there, for those who wish to learn it.  Those like you, and I.  Courier.”  The word was shadowed with contempt.  The voice from the eyebot rebounded from the mountain cliffs above, sending echoes bouncing out and back to them from across the barren landscape below.   Arcade glanced at Samara, then stepped forward.  He wet his lips.

“All right,” he called to the eyebot.  “You brought us here. What do you want?”

“I don’t care what you want!” Samara shouted.  She whipped a furious glare at Arcade, her eyes burning so hotly he recoiled, before turning back to the little eyebot.  “Come on out, and we’ll settle this now!”

“Searched for you down the roads and years--followed a shadow, a trail, footsteps in the dust.  Found only empty air…a name, a rumor, a ghost.  Tired of chasing you.  Your turn.  You come to me, Courier. Through the Divide.  Walk it.  See it.  You must see it.  It is your history.”

Arcade heard Samara draw in her breath in shock.  She had gone completely still, her hands clenched at her sides.  Her face had frozen; only those ice-blue eyes blazed.

“What do you mean, my history?”

“History.  Home.  All men and women have one, and this was yours.  Not the place you were born, perhaps; but the place you returned to, the place you built.  Step upon step, brick upon brick, rising like hope out of the ash of the Divide.  The NCR, that dying husk into which you’ve been attempting to breathe new life--it was never yours.  This place was yours, this broken land where you rooted, where you grew…until the day you brought it all down.”

“What the hell are you talking about!?’  The words were almost a scream.

“Talking about the past, Courier. Yours and mine.  Ties that bind us, shape us.  You may have it, if you want, but not free for the asking.  Nothing is free in this world, and why should this be different?  No, if history matters to you--you’ll need to earn it.”

“Earn it?  Earn it?  How about if I beat it out of you, you son of a bitch!!”  Samara’s entire body was taut with fury, and the servos in her armor whined.  “Come on out and face me, or are you afraid!?”

And Ulysses began to laugh.  It was a terrible, grating sound, his harsh voice rasping through the eyebot’s speakers, a rough, mocking chuckle that went on and on.  Samara gave an inarticulate cry, something between a sob and a howl; she was actually trembling inside her armor.  Arcade had never seen her so distraught, and it tore at his heart.

“You’re baiting her!” he shouted at the eye-bot.  “By God, can’t you leave her alone?!”

The eyebot swiveled toward him, and that laugh deepened.

“You.  I know you. Child of the last of the government that was, a sad, pale thing trying to keep alive a glory long since dead.  Surprised she brought you with her, at her side. Perhaps she didn’t know what it was she was bringing. Get of the Enclave, follower of the Followers--three times a follower, in truth.  What’s between us doesn’t concern you.  This is a matter for Couriers.”

The breath rushed from Arcade’s lungs as if he had been punched in the gut.  The sound seemed to drain from the world; he could hear nothing besides Ulysses’s rasping voice.  As if from a vast distance he saw Samara’s head turn toward him, saw those ice-pale eyes staring at him; her lips moved, but he could hear no words.  The secret he had kept for so long, hidden from everyone, had been stripped from him suddenly and ruthlessly; he felt horribly exposed and vulnerable, more naked than naked. His first, almost overpowering impulse was to flee, to hide from Samara’s penetrating eyes, but he couldn’t move; his feet felt as if they were affixed the ground.

Ulysses was still going on, that overpowering, rasping voice rattling through the speakers of the eyebot, but it took a moment for the words to make sense to Arcade; they sounded like something in a foreign language that he could barely decipher.  “...know you’re as tired of this as I am, Courier.  Want an end to it, both of us, you and I, this long road we’ve walked together.”

“Then why not kill me now!?”  Samara shouted at the eyebot.

“Not the way of it.  What kind of world would this be, if Courier killed Courier?  No, I can’t kill you...not yet at least.   And I’m thinking--you can’t kill me either.“

That low, rumbling growl rolled out of Samara’s throat again.  “Oh, I promise you, you are so wrong.”

Again that low, harsh laugh.  Samara snarled in fury, but controlled herself this time.  “Perhaps.  Perhaps you can...but you won’t.  At least, not until you’ve walked this road to the end.  Seen the damage you’ve done.  Till we’ve stood face to face, looked into each other’s eyes, taken each other’s measure.”  Ulysses paused.  “You’re tough, like the roads you travel.  Thought the Chip would do you in, the Mojave would drag you down, down into the dust.  Yet you survived it. Rose above.  Superabatis--there’s a word for you, Follower, if you like it. Yes, you’re tough--but the Divide may be tougher. Suppose we’ll see.”

“Where are you?” Samara ground out.

“Walk the Divide.  Walk the wreckage.  America lies sleeping ahead of you--what it was, what it has become, all wrapped in dreams or nightmares.  You’ll find the path I left for you--the markings, the colors, to show you the road ahead.  I know it.  I have faith in you, Courier.”  Even in his paralysis, Arcade sensed that shadowed contempt--and something else, something he could not quite identify.  “You’ll find them, find the blockages along the road.  Not my doing, but there, nonetheless. There’s a way.  America’s spears sleep in the Divide, in the wreckage they created, some beneath the soil; some above.  Find the key--the detonator.  It will bring you to me.”

Samara’s teeth bared in a snarl.  “Fine.  I’ll find this detonator, then I’ll find you.  But you better hope you have enough ammo when I kick down your door!”

“Road gets rougher from here on out.  I’ll meet you at the end of the trail--if you survive.”  And with that ED-E chirped, and the low hissing crackle of the open intercom cut off.  The silence that followed--broken only by the sound of the wind--seemed very loud indeed.

Arcade could not move.  He was almost immobilized with fear.  His eyes clung to Samara’s face, awaiting her response, but her face was granite; he could read nothing there.  The thought surfaced that he’d fought Deathclaws and been less afraid. Silence hung suspended between them, like a fragile object on the verge of shattering.

At long last, she moved, and Arcade flinched back, thinking she was going to raise her weapon; but she just jerked her head down toward the village below.  “Are you coming, or just gonna stand there all day?”

Arcade wet his lips.  “Samara, um--“  His hands were cold and clammy, and there was a sick tightness in his chest.  He could barely form the words; speaking felt like he was heaving boulders.   He swallowed, hard. “Ah...wh-what he said...About, ah, about--m-me and the Enclave--“

“Stop,” Samara ground out.

Arcade cut himself off at once. 

“Look at me.  Look me in the eye.”

His fists clenched and unclenched.  He steeled his spine. Her gaze seared into him. 

“Answer me,” she ordered him.  “Are you planning to stab me in the back?”

“No,” he said immediately.  “No, of course not.”

“Then don’t say anything else.”  He should have been comforted, but there was nothing comforting in that iron-hard voice.  “I can’t deal with it right now.  I can’t--I can’t afford to be distracted.  Later, when we get back to the Mojave, I might have some questions for you.  But not now.”

Arcade bit his lip, exhaled slowly.  “Fair enough.”  He tried not to think about their return to the Mojave.

She studied him a moment more.  “So that’s your secret,” she said.

Arcade was silent. 

Samara snorted in disgust.  “Come on.  We need to go find that detonator thing.” She turned away and started down the long grade to the slope below.  After a moment to collect himself, Arcade followed at her heels.

 

Chapter Text

He trailed after Samara as she descended the long slope to the decaying barracks below. There was still a queasy tightness in his gut--an aftereffect of having his shroud of secrecy ripped from him--but at the same time, a strange sense of lightness, almost giddiness, pervaded him; it was a while before he could recognize it as relief. His secret was out...and Samara hadn’t turned on him, hadn’t repudiated him, hadn’t attempted to attack him.  She knows, and she doesn’t care.  He’d been hiding the secret for so long, and in the end, it turned out to be nothing.

The two of them made their way down the sloping hillside, past an overturned army truck and across a broken roadway until they found themselves in among a set of ruined wooden barracks.  A billboard stood near the road, heavily weathered and canted at a crazy angle; it was so faded and battered that it was almost illegible, but he could make out what seemed to be the image of a flag.  Over this were superimposed the words: America’s Bright Future in YOUR Hands!  Arcade winced at the sight.

Samara passed right by it without a glance.  She surveyed the wreckage around them.  Huge piles of rubble lay everywhere, in and among the ruined barracks; several buildings were half-buried, and far in the distance, faded to pastel by the constantly blowing wind and sand in the air, there were the jagged stumps of skyscrapers and overpasses. 

“This is bad,” she said.

“This damage--this is more than just decay.”  He frowned.  “Was all this done in the war, do you think?”

Samara shook her head.  “Most of this looks more recent.  See all the rubble?  The collapsed buildings?” she asked, taking in the entire vista of wreckage with a sweep of her arm.   “Whatever wrecked this place came from underground.”

“Underground.  God damn.”  He thought of the sign they’d seen back at the missile base entrance--Building the American Dream ... On Solid Ground!-- and rubbed at his eyes with the back of one hand.  They watered slightly; grit from the ever-blowing wind had gotten in them.  “Maybe that’s what he meant by ‘America’s spears’ and the ‘wreckage they created.’”

“Maybe,” was Samara’s only response. 

“Our little friend just enjoys being cryptic, doesn’t he?” Arcade mused. He started to catch himself, concerned that he was talking too much--but then realized that it didn’t matter what he said.  Samara already knew everything; there was nothing to hide from her anymore.   He didn’t need to avoid calling attention to himself, or carefully monitor everything he said to make sure it didn’t lead to questions he didn’t want to answer.  The sensation was heady, almost intoxicating.  “I’m almost afraid to speculate what that ‘detonator’ is and why he wants you to find it.”

Samara surveyed the devastation slowly. After a moment, she pointed.  “I think I know.”

Smashed up against the door of one of the barracks, buried in a pile of rubble, lay what was unmistakably an undetonated atomic warhead.

“Jesus Christ.”  Arcade stepped backward involuntarily.  A primal, atavistic fear swept over him, as if he had just spotted a venomous serpent.  He realized that he was shivering; gooseflesh had risen on his arms where they were left bare by his armor.  “He can’t--“  He glanced at Samara, then quickly back to the weapon; his eyes were drawn to it as if by magnetic attraction.  “You don’t mean he wants us to--”

Samara’s eyes narrowed.  “I’m guessing there’s a warhead up ahead blocking the path somewhere and that’s the one we’ve got to detonate to get through.”

“Samara--“  Arcade turned toward her in alarm.  “You’re not actually going to do this, Samara, are you?”

“All I care about is finding Ulysses.”  Her jaw set.

“But Samara, you--“ 

She turned to look at him, and he fell silent. 

“Come on.”  She started off, ED-E following.  After a moment, Arcade went after her, his insides churning.

They wound their way among the barracks until they came to another broken road that passed through a gap in a bent and buckled chainlink fence.  The wind lashed their faces with sand and grit; Arcade had to blink it out of his eyes and rub them heavily with the backs of his hands to see clearly.  The gap in the fence through which the road passed was flanked by two more wrecked army trucks; and on a fragment of concrete was stenciled the same symbol they had seen at the top of the mountains--the stylized flag with the stars and stripes, only a different color this time.

“Why is this one red?” he wondered aloud.

“Danger,” Samara said succinctly.  She put her hand on the stock of her LAER rifle, and her face tightened.  “Be cautious.”

On the other side of the chainlink fence, the road ran past a blocky, concrete building off to the left and then on through a line of steel Quonset huts.  Some distance beyond were the remains of what must have been the shopping district for the base town: ruined brick storefronts with boarded-up or vacant doors and gaping windows; crumbling, formerly majestic concrete structures that perhaps had once been banks, town halls, or government buildings.   Wrecked vehicles, both civilian and military, were everywhere: crashed cars, overturned trucks; even a couple of long, jackknifed semis spilling barrels and crates out onto the ruined asphalt.  The overcast sky threw lurid, gloomy shadows over it all; the wind blew without respite.  It was one of the most desolate places Arcade had ever seen.

The only sounds were their footsteps and the moaning of the wind.  From time to time they came upon bodies of the same red, flayed look as the one in the missile silo; these were not posed, but simply lay where they had fallen.  A few of the walls had graffiti scrawled on them: mostly meaningless doodles, a few oddly disconnected, plangent phrases that were somehow disturbing in their strange emptiness, like stones dropped into a hollow well.

Where is everyone? one scrawl read, looping unevenly over the bricks of a shattered storefront.

A block or so later, as if in answer to the first phrase, they came across D-E-A-D, spelled out in vertical capital letters on the side of what might have once been a bank.

“’I feel fine’?” Arcade murmured, tracing words along the roof of an overturned semi.  Something about the words gave him a chill.  He wrapped his arms around himself, then turned to glance at Samara.  “These are relatively fresh.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Feel the wind?  All the sand blowing around?  If they’d been done too long ago, they’d have weathered away.”  He rubbed at his eyes again, trying to blink the grit out of them.

“How old do you think they are?” Samara asked.

Arcade shrugged. “Dunno.  But at the very least, these weren’t done in the immediate postwar period. The last few months or so, maybe even the last few weeks.”

He watched Samara’s face tighten as she absorbed that.  “Come on,” she said.  “We need to keep moving.”  She motioned him onward, and did not ask the obvious question: Who did them?

Aside from the graffiti and the occasional bodies, there were no other signs of recent human presence. All the same, Arcade felt the skin on the back of his neck crawling.  He could not shake the feeling that they were being watched.

“We are,” Samara said when he mentioned it.  She nodded to her PIP-Boy 3000.  “Life signs, not too far off.  Why they’re not coming out to play, I have no idea.”

Arcade digested that with an inward chill.  “Maybe they don’t know we’re here.”

Samara gave an awkward, jerky shrug. “If they don’t know we’re here after Ulysses, they’ve got to be deaf.  The whole Divide could probably hear that.”  She glanced at her PIP-Boy again.  “Doesn’t matter.  If they don’t show up, fine; if they do, we’ll take ‘em out then.”

Samara forged ahead through the ruined downtown area with solid, purposeful strides, as if she knew exactly where she was going.  From time to time, she would stop and check her PIP-Boy 3000, though Arcade had no idea what she was looking for, and then set off in a new direction.  He followed at her heels, his skin prickling, senses hyperalert.  The eyebot bobbed along, usually behind Samara, though it sometimes darted ahead, the humming of its motor loud in the silence. Along the way, they came across more of those stylized flag markings, in white, blue or red, marking out the path to follow; Samara greeted each one with a stony nod. 

“Bastard’s marking the path for us.  Good. That’ll only make things easier.”

As they wound their way deeper into the ruins, they began to come across what could only be described as campsites.  Areas where fire circles had been made out of broken bricks, with battered, splintery chairs and foot lockers drawn up around them.  Arcade glanced at one of the circles and saw that in addition to the usual chunks of wood culled from the wreckage, there were charred, blackened books, that had clearly been used for kindling.  His jaw tightened.  In absentia luci, tenebrae vincunt, he thought grimly.

Scattered beyond the campsites were several beehive-shaped piles of blocks that Arcade at first took for more heaps of rubble; it was not until they passed by one more closely that he saw the opening on one side.  Huts, he realized.  These are stone huts.

“Samara--look, there are--“

She gestured sharply without turning.  “Not now.  We’re close.”  Her head was down and she was gazing at her PIP-Boy 3000 screen.  With a sigh, Arcade followed her.

She strode down the street another block or so, past a few more abandoned cars and twisted lamp posts, until she came to what appeared to have once been a ruined two-story brick apartment building.  After consulting her PIP-Boy 3000, Samara jerked her head toward the building.  “In there.”

The doors and windows to the building were empty gaping frames like hollow eye sockets, and a whole section of the wall had crumbled inward; Samara stepped over the threshold into the interior, and then climbed the concrete stairs to the second floor.  A fallen slab of concrete provided a ramp to the roof.  Most of the roof had fallen in long ago, but in one corner a segment was preserved.  The section had been turned into a small aerie: a mattress lay on the roof with a chair and footlocker nearby and several boxes of ammo.  Samara went straight to the footlocker and threw it open; inside, resting on a litter of ammo and MREs and bottles of water and other trinkets, was a square, dull-green rectangular weapon with a truncated barrel.

“This is it,” she said, holding it aloft.

Something about the dull green metal gave Arcade a chill: it looked almost hostile in the lurid, overhead light.  “Samara, are you really--“

She waved him to silence, checking her PIP-Boy 3000 and then looking over the edge of the roof.  She traced a line on her PIP-Boy, muttering briefly to herself, then looked up.  “South.  We need to go south.  Come on.”

Without so much as a word, she began climbing down from the roof.   Her eyebot darted after her almost eagerly.   Arcade wondered if she’d even notice if he didn’t follow.

As he picked his way down the heap of debris after her, he caught sight of another billboard off in the distance, canted at a crazy angle and skewered by a jagged, rusty girder.  Our Hope For Our Children, this one said.  Arcade grimaced and looked away.  The billboards weren’t funny anymore, even as black humor.

[*]

 They made their way south through the silent, eerie streets, following the remains of a road through the wreckage of downtown and past the chain-link fence that defined the outer limits of the old base.  The eyebot bobbed behind them, a silent witness.  The road led back past the rusting Quonset huts to a high concrete wall with a gap in it for the road to pass through.  The gap was with a mountainous jumble of building fragments, old cars, metal girders, concrete and boulders.  In the middle of it all was a large warhead, sitting smugly like an egg in a nest. Next to it was another one of those damned flag symbols--in red. 

Samara’s mouth tightened in a grim half-smile.  She looked down at her PIP-Boy 3000.

“Get ready,” she said without sparing Arcade a glance.  “They’re all beyond there--swarming like ants.  When I blow this thing, it’s going to get crazy.”

Arcade started to say something, then pressed his lips together.  He sighed instead.  “Fine.”

The three of them--Arcade on the left, the eyebot on the right, and Samara herself in the center--took up a position behind a huge pile-up of ruined cars close to the entrance. From within her armor, she pulled a small bottle of Rad-X, and dispensed a couple pills for herself and for Arcade.  They tasted bitter, and Arcade’s throat was so tight he had a hard time swallowing them, knowing what was to come.  Once they all were ready, Samara caught his eye meaningfully and then donned her helmet.  There was a hiss and a clicking noise as it sealed home.

Here we go.  Again.

Cursing Samara in his heart, Arcade drew his Plasma Defender as she produced the laser detonator.  She aimed it at the warhead, and pulled the trigger.  A beam of sizzling, red laser light lanced out, blazing green afterimages across his vision, and Arcade had just enough time to drop to one knee behind the rusting car heap and turn his face away from the blast.

There was a flash of white light and then a thunderous, deafening roar that shook the ground beneath him. Arcade saw chunks of shrapnel; then the whole, huge carcass of a car hurtled over his head and crashed into a storefront, which collapsed in a shower of dust.  He could hear the Geiger counter built into Samara’s PIP-Boy 3000 clicking like mad.  

“Here they come!” Samara’s electronic, synthesized voice rang out, and the eye-bot broke into the short phrase of music that signified the presence of enemies.  Gripping his Plasma Defender, Arcade swung back to the front to deal with the threat.

The barrier was gone.  Where it had been was now a blackened crater, a huge breach blasted into the cement walls.   Smoke and dust filled the air, great billowing clouds, obscuring whatever lay beyond.  And out of that dust, indistinct shapes were appearing--a score at least, possibly even more--howling and snarling as they came.

Even before they were fully visible, Samara was coolly lining up her shots. Bright blue beams of laser light lanced out from her LAER, as she fired with almost mechanical speed and precision at the shrouded forms, picking them off one by one as they swarmed through the smoke.  Arcade scrambled to do the same, aiming the barrel of his Plasma Defender into the dust, shooting as fast as he could pull the trigger, and above them both, the eyebot sent its lightning bolts leaping among the attackers.  As the dust began to settle and the wave of enemies surging toward them drew nearer, Arcade saw they the same flayed creatures as the bodies they’d been finding all over the site--only these were alive.  They wore shabby, patched armor, carrying weapons that looked as if they were going to fall apart in a stiff breeze.  Bullets snapped and zinged all around, but without any great accuracy; Arcade guessed by the condition of their weapons that the only way they’d be able to hit either him or Samara was by accident.

“Arcade! ED-E!  Close up around me!”  Samara’s voice rang out as the first few flayed opponents began to get to melee distance.  Arcade swore viciously, holstering his Plasma Defender and snatching his Ripper chainblade from his waist.  The weapon gave a snarl as he powered it up, and the vibrations shook his hands.  His gut was twisted in sick knots.  Samara had taken out the strange axe with the glowing, dark blue blade that she had carried with her ever since she had come back from one of her jaunts--she called it the protonic inversal axe, he remembered distantly.  Electricity crackled up and down the weapon’s blade.  There was no sign visible in her armored form of the dread Arcade felt; instead, something about her stance suggested readiness, even eagerness.  Then Arcade had no more time to look at her, because the first of the enemies were upon them.

The next few moments were a confused whirl of stabbing and slashing with his chainblade, ducking and frantically trying to avoid blows, hearing the snarling, raging cries of those they fought, and Samara’s own high shrieks of fury.  His chainblade roared in his ears, and the vibrations shook his hands all the way into the bones.  The eye-bot stabbed arcs of lightning into the swirling battle below; more lightning danced among the fray from Samara’s inversal axe, as its glowing blue blade severed skulls and cleaved limbs from bodies.  Arcade had all he could do to stay alive, let alone pay attention to his companions; it wasn’t until he yanked his Ripper blade out from the torso of a doomed opponent and drew a breath, wiping a smear of blood off his forehead with one arm, that he realized all the others around them were down.

Thank God. Suddenly his legs were trembling with weakness.  He dropped to one knee, breathing hard his gaze wandering uncomprehendingly over the bodies strewn before him.  How many--  He remembered, not opponents but weapons: there had been one with a huge sword, almost as tall as its bearer; another wielding a Super Sledge, a third with a combat knife--  More  than that.  There had to be more than that. Perhaps there were, but he could not remember them. 

His chainblade was still sputtering in his hands; he flicked the switch off, and saw that blood stained the housing.  His hands still trembled; they were red and sticky, all the way up his wrist guards.  More blood spattered across his battered armor, and checking with his eyes, he saw nicks and gouges that had not been there before.   Quickly, almost automatically, he patted himself all over, making sure that he was unwounded.  His stomach was still churning at the sight of so much violence--at the thought that he had taken part in it--and unbidden, it came to him that he had never participated in such things before he had begun following Samara.

Samara--  A sudden jolt went through him and he heaved himself unsteadily to his feet, scanning for her frantically through the smoke and dust.

“Samara--?” he called.  “Are you all right?”

His eyes found her: Samara was standing in the middle of the carnage, her Power Armor dripping. Blood sizzled along the blade of her inversal axe as she gazed beyond the smoking crater and down the road ahead.  For a long moment, she did not answer, and Arcade wondered if she had even heard him; but then she seemed to come back to reality.  She reached up and removed her helmet, and her eyes met his.

“Arcade,” she said slowly.  “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. You?”

Those pale eyes turned inward.  “I’m okay.  Check the bodies,” she ordered peremptorily, gesturing toward the bodies of the dead that lay around them.  “See if they have anything good.” 

Without further ado, she promptly suited action to word, going down on one armored knee beside a fallen enemy and beginning to roughly check it over.  Muttering under his breath, Arcade followed suit.

The body before him was tall, probably as tall as he was, but much more robust: broader of shoulder with heavy, cable-like muscles visible where the armor left limbs bare.  A deep gash from Arcade’s blade cleft his chest.  Like the man they had seen pinned to the wall in the missile silo, like the other bodies they had come upon scattered in the streets, this individual had the appearance of one who had been flayed alive: the red ropes of sinew and tendon were visible, but dry and hard to the touch.  Like a ghoul, the man had no nose or ears, and his open eyes were milky, cataract-white.  As Arcade leaned over him, there was the faintest twitch of the man’s exposed facial musculature.

“This one’s still alive.”

Samara straightened from the man she had been checking over.  “What?”

“He’s breathing.”  Arcade held his metal-and-ceramic wrist guard over the hole in the downed man’s face where his nose had been, and watched it fog up.  “See?”

“Not for long.”  Samara’s jaw tightened and her pale eyes hardened again.  She began to advance on the fallen man, reaching into her armor and pulling out the 10mm pistol she had taken from General Retslaf.  She clicked the safety off.  “Clear the shot.”

Another chill ran down Arcade’s spine.  “Put that away, Samara,” he snapped at her.  On the spur of the moment, he reached into his armor and took out a stimpak.  “I’m going to try and bring him around.”

He turned to the man lying beside him, hearing the click as Samara put the safety back on.  “What?” she asked in confusion.  “Why?”

“Why not?  We can try and talk to him, at least.”

He heard her armor servos whine as she shifted restlessly, and the eyebot beeped above her.  When she spoke, it was with a strange diffidence.  “Arcade....why bother?” He glanced up at her and saw her brows were furrowed again, as if confronting a puzzle.  “I mean, I--I’m pretty sure these guys are some kind of feral ghouls.  I don’t think they’re sentient--“

“They’re not like ferals,” Arcade snapped.  “Look, have you ever seen a feral ghoul wear armor?”

“No, but--“ Samara began.

“Use weapons?” 

“Well--no, but I don’t--“

“Build huts, for Christ’s sake?”

“They build huts?” she asked, baffled.

“Weren’t you listening to me back there?” Arcade demanded.   “Yes, they build stone huts.  Now I ask you--do you think a feral could do that?”

“No,” Samara acknowledged, still frowning.

“Exactly.  Thank you.”  Arcade examined the downed form before him, searching for the best place to apply the stimpak.  “There’s something--some one--in there, Samara.  If we can just bring him around--“

That furrow between Samara’s brows deepened.  “Fiends are sentient too, but whenever we fought them you never tried to bring one of them around.”

“If we wake this guy up and he understands us, we can talk to him--ask him questions about what we’re up against, at least.  Don’t you think that would be useful?” he challenged her.

“And if he can’t or won’t talk to us?”

“Then we’re no worse off than we are now. Look, we can at least try, can’t we?” He selected a spot on the red, flayed man’s neck.  “Here goes.”

“Wait.”  Samara’s metal-gauntleted fingers closed on Arcade’s shoulder.  She was still holding the pistol on the man.  “Move aside.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“If you want to bring him around, fine, but I’m not going to risk your life for this.  If he wakes up and starts threatening you--“  Her eyes hardened.  “I’m going to shoot.”

Arcade gauged the usefulness of arguing with her against those stony features and sighed.  “Fine.  Just don’t interfere.”  And he placed the stimpak against the fallen man’s neck.  The needle jabbed straight into the muscle and the plunger depressed.  Arcade sat back on his heels, watching. 

Slowly, the main’s breathing strengthened and tone returned to his muscles.  The gash in his chest began to close, bit by bit, fading to a raw, angry-looking weal.  Arcade guessed the radiation in the area probably helped as well; he could still hear the Geiger counter built into Samara’s PIP-Boy 3000 clicking away in the background, and tried distantly not to think about how many rads he was taking, even with the protective effect of the Rad-X.  At length, the man opened his eyes.  When he saw Arcade bending over him, he tensed.  His hand started to creep down by his side, when Samara cocked her pistol.   She took a step forward, her heavy tread ringing on the pavement, and the man’s eyes went to her.

“Don’t move.”  She was glowering at him.  “Do you understand me?  Don’t.  Move.”  She repeated the words, clear and distinct, shoving the gun at him, making sure he could see it.  The man let out a long, slow hiss.

“Under...stand,” he said slowly, as if having to dredge the word up from a long disused portion of his brain.  His voice was raspy, grating.  “No....move.”

Samara snorted in disgust, though she didn’t take her eyes off the man for an instant.  “He’s all yours, Arcade.”

Great.  Arcade sighed.   He drew a breath, considering how to proceed.  Samara said nothing more, clearly seeing the whole thing as his affair; she simply continued to watch the man, holding her weapon steady.

And the man is watching her, Arcade realized suddenly.  The flayed man had glanced at Arcade briefly when he’d first come around, but when he’d caught sight of Samara, she had suddenly become the focus of his whole attention.   Even now, he was studying her closely, as if trying to figure something out.  It could be just because she’s holding a weapon on him, Arcade mused...but somehow, there seemed to be more to it than that.

Memories of time spent working with some of the more isolated tribes came to mind--in the real backwoods places, the version of English the inhabitants spoke had undergone so much change that it was almost a different language and communication was exceedingly difficult.  He leaned forward, catching the man’s eye. 

“Arcade,” he said, tapping his chest, then gestured toward Samara.  “Samara.”  He indicated the man. “You?”

The man again glanced at him briefly and then returned his gaze to Samara.  His ruined face twitched in a grimace that might have meant anything.  “Sa...ma...ra?”

Arcade sighed.  “Yes.  She’s Samara.  You?” he asked again, and once more indicated the man.

The man’s grimace deepened.  “No.  Not...Samara.  Wal...ker.”

What?  “Walker?”

“She...Walker.  She...bringer.  No....”  He shook his head.  “Not...bringer.  She....He say....”  His jaw twisted, and some gurgled sounds came from that ruined throat, sounds that perhaps approximated “Courier.”

Arcade glanced at Samara quickly, but she showed no reaction, simply holding her weapon on the man.  He sighed again.  “Yes.  Some people call her the Courier.  Who are you?”  he asked again.

The man gave a rough, choking noise that Arcade almost recognized as a laugh.  “Blis...ter.”

“Blister? Your name is Blister?”  At the man’s nod, Arcade frowned.  “I’m guessing that’s not the name you were born with.”

Blister gave that choking, gurgled laugh again.  “Born.  Yes.  Born....here.  Blis...ter.”

“You were born here?”

“Born...two times.”  He held up two fingers to demonstrate.  “Second....here.”

Second here?  Arcade glanced at Samara, who shrugged slightly.  Blister was still watching her with that fixed gaze.  “What do you mean, you were born two times?”

Blister ignored him.  “You.  Walker,” he said to Samara instead.  His voice was awful, a horrible, wet, rasping gurgle; each word, each syllable sounded as if it were physically painful.   If he had been Arcade’s patient back at the Old Mormon Fort, Arcade would have diagnosed him with double pneumonia based on the sound of his voice alone.  “We.  Know ... you.  Before ones...know...you.”

Samara’s eyes narrowed.  “What do you mean?” she asked suspiciously.  Blister just laughed again, the watery sound of a diver with a bad rebreather.

“Hey,” Arcade interposed, leaning into Blister’s field of vision.  “You said you were born twice.  What do you mean?  Where were you born the first time?”

Blister didn’t take his eyes from Samara’s face.  “You....me....answer .... him?”

Samara’s face twisted in confusion.  “Why are you asking me?  Yes.  Answer him.  He’s my friend.”

Blister hissed in something like disgust, but turned his attention to Arcade again.  “You.  Walker.  Of...Bear.”

The NCR.  Of course.  “No, not exactly--“

“Me...Bull.”  And he gestured to indicate horns.  “Born...of Bull.  East.  To....East.  First time.”

“Legionary.”  Arcade couldn’t repress a shudder at the sheer level of loathing in Samara’s voice.  She said the word as if it were an obscenity.  Her face hardened as she steadied her weapon.

“Put the damned thing down, Samara,” he snapped.  “You said he was all mine, well, let me handle this.”  As she hesitated, uncertain, he needled her, “Besides, I thought you said the Legion wasn’t your fight anymore.”

Her glower made him wish he’d kept his mouth shut, but she relaxed a fraction; still, he could see the stone in her eyes.  He turned back to the man.

“You were with the Legion?”

“Le...gion.  Yes,” Blister gurgled.  “Le...gion.  En...See...Arr.  These words...long ago.  Bear...Bull....  No more.  Now....Marked Men.”

“Marked Men,” Arcade repeated, frowning.  “That’s what you call yourself?”

“All....Marked Men.”  Blister stretched out one red arm to encompass the whole Divide.  “Once Bear.   Once Bull.  Gone.  Only....Marked Men....Now.”

Arcade turned and looked back at Samara, who shifted her eyes fractionally to him.  “The armies that met in the Divide,” he said.  “No one ever knew what became of them.”

Samara nodded.  “These...Marked Men...must be the survivors.”

Blister gave a wet, painful-sounding laugh.  “She...knows.  Wal...ker.  Sa...ma...ra.  She...there.”

Samara froze.  “What.  Do.  You.  Mean.” 

Arcade waved her to silence.  “What happened here?”

The  Marked Man hissed.  “Fire.....” he breathed out.  “Great...fire.”

“Explain.”

 Blister was silent for a long moment, casting his milky eyes down.  Crude spasms crossed his rudely disfigured face.   It seemed as if the Marked Man were excavating his memory, searching through rusting, disused scraps of his brain to produce an answer to Arcade’s question--as if there were such a vast gulf between what he had been and what he now was that his prior experiences were almost inaccessible.  At last, slowly, he raised his eyes to Arcade.

“We came.  Here. We came....Legion....En See Arr....Together.  To...this place.  Divide.  We came....to....”  He cast his eyes down again. “Fight,” he said at last, as if just now remembering.

Arcade glanced at Samara.  “Makes sense--the NCR wanted this Divide for their supply lines, and Caesar’s Legion wanted to cut them off.”

“Supply lines.  Yessss...” Blister hissed, and laughed again.  “We came....To fight.  Here....people.  Town.  A town....”  He nodded again toward Samara.  “Sheee....made.  Wal....ker.  Sa...ma...ra.   She....made....town.”

Arcade turned back to stare at his companion.  “You? You...made a town?”

“I don’t remember any of this!” Samara shouldered forward, holding her pistol on the Marked Man.  “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Town....You made....”  Blister’s eyes moved past Arcade as if he no longer existed.  “You made.   Made .... path.  People...come.  Live.  You....keep.  Keep tied...desert.  Keep....alive.  You.  You....Courier.”

“That’s bullshit,” Samara snarled, furious.

“You.  Town.  Town....love you.  Honor...you.  We come.”

Samara looked about ready to interject some more questions; Arcade interrupted in an effort to keep things moving.  “Okay.  So there was apparently a town here that had some connection with Samara--“  the black expression on Samara’s face deepened “--and the Legion and the NCR came here to fight over it.”  He could not repress a snort.  “Sounds like them.”

“Which?” Samara asked.

“Both,” he replied rather tartly.   He looked back at Blister.  “What happened to the town?  And what about Ulysses?  Where does he come in?”

“Ul...yss..eeesss....”  Something akin to reverence seemed to cross the Marked Man’s face.  “Wan...der...er.”

“Yes, where does he fit in?”

Blister’s flayed face seemed to twist.  “Not...speak.  Wanderer’s....name.  Bad....bad luck.  Not speak.  Wan...der...er.  He hear...he know.”

“He can’t hear you now, I assure you,” Arcade said.  “How does he fit in?  Can you tell me?”

That strange expression crossed over Blister’s face, like the shadow of fear.  “Close....” he breathed.  “Close...in.  No one ... hear.  Sheeee...”  He glanced at Samara.  “Sheee...not hear.”

“Anything you can say to me, you can say to her,” Arcade argued, seeing Samara’s displeased expression, but Blister shook his head.

“You.  Lean in.  Close.  She... not hear.”

Samara nodded, and Arcade leaned in.

“Closer....” breathed Blister.  “Closer.....”

He leaned in closer.  “Say it?”

The Marked Man’s ruined features twitched, twisted.  He put his left hand on Arcade’s shoulder--

And two pistol shots cracked out.  The top of the Marked Man’s head exploded in a rain of flesh, blood, bone and brain matter; his long, lean body jerked and then fell away, his fingers releasing Arcade’s shoulder.

“What the hell!?”  Arcade leapt to his feet, spinning on Samara, his hand going automatically to the stock of his gun. He was shaking; the pistol shots so close to him, so close to his ear, had dumped a shitload of adrenaline into his system. A bright flash of rage and fear filled him.  He could feel Blister’s blood stippling his cheek.  “Samara, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?!  What the hell--He was talking, he wasn’t--“

Samara was standing there, looking at him and holding General Retslaf’s 10mm in her hand, the barrel still smoking.  She nodded toward Blister.  “He had a knife.  You didn’t see it.”

Still shaking, Arcade turned to look down at Blister’s corpse.  True to what Samara had said, a combat knife lay by Blister’s outstretched right hand; he had clearly just pulled it from within his armor.  When he told me to get closer--  The knife’s blade gleamed dully in the dim light from the overcast sky. Again, Samara glanced downward, shifting awkwardly.

“I told you I wasn’t going to risk your life,” she offered, sounding almost like she expected to be scolded again.

Arcade swallowed hard; his stomach was roiling.  Everything seemed nonsensical.  He started, automatically, to wipe at the blood he could feel trickling down his face, but when he saw the red still staining his hands from the melee, he abruptly jerked them down.  He wanted to be sick.

“Are you all right?” he heard Samara ask.  “Did he get you?”

“Give me a minute.”  He waved at her, and she fell silent as he tried to collect himself.  What the hell is wrong with me? he found himself wondering.  I’ve been close to death before...but now...?

But he’d just been talking with Blister not half a second before Samara shot him.  They’d literally been in the middle of a conversation....he’d been close enough that the man’s brains had splashed him.

Goddamn you, Samara, he thought with real venom, as again it occurred to him that he had never been in these kinds of situations before he’d known her.He turned on her, wanting to take a piece out of her; but when he saw her standing there, looking at him so awkwardly, something about her diffidence disarmed him.  His own eyes dropped to the knife, still gleaming, and he muttered a curse.  She had saved his life, after all.

“Thank you,” he said in a low voice.

 Samara nodded.  “Come on,” she said, nodding toward the shattered, gaping hole in the concrete wall.  “We have to get moving.”

[*] 

Beyond the wall was a nightmare jumble of huge, shattered blocks. Chunks of concrete taller than a man lay piled on each other at jagged angles, creating a nearly impassable wasteland.  Arcade thought that he was looking at the remains of a highway overpass, but that was no more than a guess.  The wreckage was colossal; he felt like a child facing the ruins of some giant’s castle.  He turned to ask Samara how they were to get through that, but his companion simply forged ahead, her eyebot following her.

They climbed down over a sharply-angled concrete slab with faded highway markings--Arcade missed his grip and skidded the last few feet, scraping his hands--and then picked their way slowly  through the rubble to where a car fallen at a slanted angle provided a bridge to a lip of undamaged roadway jutting out over their heads, stark black against the sky.  The car shifted uneasily as they stepped off it onto the concrete, and they found themselves staring at an overpass arch that seemed to open onto a shadowed cave or tunnel.  A jagged slab of concrete was propped up against the wall of the arch, with Ulysses’ white symbol painted on it; next to it was another slab with the words, also in white: KEEP OUT.

“Through there,” Samara said.  That stony distance was creeping back into her eyes.

Arcade nodded to the two slabs of concrete. “Our friend appears to have a serious case of mixed signals.”

“It doesn’t matter.  Or rather, it won’t when I find him,” she said, and plunged under the archway.

[*]

The tunnel beneath the overpass was a cave of gloom and shadows.  The scent of dust and decay was everywhere.  The sky above was completely blocked by huge chunks of pavement; only a few glimmering shafts of light filtered down to them through the cracks in their concrete roof.  Their surroundings were just as chaotic as they had been outside: great mounds of rubble bulking darkly in the twilight, overturned and smashed cars and trucks protruding at different angles.  A whole brick building that had probably once been some sort of store was almost completely buried.  It was staggering to consider the forces that had wrought such destruction.

There was something spooky about the dull murkiness surrounding them.  The darkness felt almost alive, as if it were breathing.  Watching us.  Something’s out there.  Arcade could sense it...he held his breath instinctively, not wanting to make the slightest noise--

“Ulysses!  Ulysses, can you hear me!?  Come on out and fight!!”  Samara’s shout rang throughout the tunnel, bouncing echoes back from the distant reaches of the darkness.

“Samara, Jesus, quiet!!!” Arcade hissed.  She was standing taut, staring into the gloom as if she could pierce the space between her and her quarry with her eyes alone.  “No, Ulysses can’t hear you, of course he can’t, but whatever else is in here can hear you just fine!”

“Let them come.  I’m not afraid of them.  All I care about is Ulysses.”  Her face was set, and she fingered her weapon; Arcade suddenly had a visual of her charging a stone wall at full speed.  And to be honest, I’d only give even odds to the wall.  He drew a breath.

“I know that, Samara, but can’t you at least see the need for stealth?  There could be things here--“

A low growl rolled out of the dark.

Samara raised her LAER rifle and Arcade aimed his plasma defender, cursing Samara under his breath. Like that, see, like that, he wanted to say, but held his tongue. The two of them backed toward each other.  Another growl came, from somewhere up ahead; but the echoes bounced and reverberated so greatly that it was impossible to tell exactly where it originated from or how far away it was.  Arcade risked a quick glance over at Samara, and saw that she was studying her PIP-Boy 3000.

Taking a tight grip on his urge to throttle her, he asked, “Do you see anything?”

“Nothing.  ED-E hasn’t detected anything either,” she said, nodding toward the eyebot.  She straightened her shoulders.  “We head on.  Further in.”

“Samara, do you hear the growling?”  The echoes were still chasing each other in the corners of the tunnel.  “Do you hear that?  I know your PIP-Boy doesn’t detect everything--if it’s something like night-stalkers, then--“

“Then we’ll kill it when it shows itself,” she said, her eyes hardening.  “Come on.”

“Samara, think for a moment.  Anything could be out there, we don’t know what it can do--“

She turned and looked at him, and he broke off.  “Fine,” he said with a sigh.  “After you.”

As they threaded their way through the piles of wreckage, Arcade was tense and jumpy, expecting them to be attacked at any moment; but nothing happened.  Low growls drifted out of the dark now and then, and from time to time, something clattered far off in the shadows, but whatever was there seemed content to do nothing more than watch.

For now, anyway, he thought grimly.

There was no order to the overpass tunnel; they had to pick their way among the debris, and were forced to back up a number of times and seek an alternate route.  As they rounded the edge of an overturned semi truck, Samara touched his arm. 

“Look,” she said.

Arcade turned, raising his weapon by instinct, and then stopped.  By the light of her PIP-Boy 3000, he could see a body sprawled in the back of the trailer, arms flung wide, head turned to the side.  The body was clad in damaged NCR Trooper armor; however, the armor was not patched, as on the corpses they’d seen earlier, and though there wasn’t much of the face left, there was enough to tell that this was not a Marked Man.

“A Trooper,” he said.  Her face had been clawed to unrecognizability, and jagged swipes extended down her throat, so deep that Arcade could see the white glint of her spinal column.  A chill ran through him and he rested his hand again on the stock of his pistol.  Whatever killed her, it’s still in here.

“Yes.  ED-E, guard.”  Samara glanced up at the eyebot, which whistled acknowledgement, then knelt by the body.  As she went through the soldier’s pockets and then checked the armor, Arcade studied the trooper. She was stocky and solidly built with olive skin and short-cut brown hair.  Arcade guessed that she probably had been young, maybe on her first deployment.  He wondered at the life course that had brought her here, so far from California.

Samara rose to her feet, holding up a small gray firearm with a short barrel.  “Looks like she had a flare gun.  And here--”  She handed him a couple of canisters.  “Flashbangs.  And I think here--“  She pulled a sheet of yellow military flimsy from the soldier’s armor.  “It’s orders of some kind.” Arcade leaned over her shoulder as Samara unfolded the paper and held it under her PIP-Boy light.

“At 0600 hours,” Samara read aloud, “Bravo Team will conduct sweep-and-clear operations in advance of the main force.  Early intelligence suggests the tunnels are only sparsely populated by small subterranean semi-humanoids, which are easily cowed by bright light and loud noises.  Bravo team has been issued flashbang grenades for this purpose and is expected to meet minimal resistance.”

Minimal resistance.  Arcade looked down at the dead trooper, her face clawed to ribbons, then at the canisters Samara had handed him.  Flashbangs.    “God damn.”

He hadn’t meant to speakaloud, didn’t realize he had until he saw Samara looking up at him, her brow furrowed.  “Arcade...?” she asked.

 He rubbed at his eyes again, surprised and rather disturbed by the depth of his bitterness. Samara was still watching him and he shook his head slightly. “Just....arrogance.  Damned arrogance.  The NCR think they know everything--“

“Well, we’re not the NCR,” Samara interrupted.  “And we’ve got stuff with us a lot more deadly than flashbangs.”  She turned away from the downed woman without so much as a backward glance.  “Come on, let’s go.”

A fairly decent migraine was starting in his right temple; Arcade gritted his teeth. “Of course. I didn’t mean to interrupt your little quest for vengeance.  By all means, lead the way.”

She gave him a hard look, and for a brief moment, Arcade wondered if he’d gone too far; but then she turned away, striding forward into the dark.  Arcade trailed after her, massaging the side of his head.  It didn’t seem to help much.

They continued on, deeper into the shadows of the concrete jungle.  More growls and scuttlings followed their progress; Arcade found himself jumping at shadows.  Samara didn’t seem to be worried, he observed sourly, though she did stop and change out her microfusion cells for overcharged ones.  Arcade silently followed her example; whatever was lurking out there, he wanted to be prepared.

Near a jackknifed, half-crushed semi truck, they came upon a few more bodies: two more troopers and a solid, broad-shouldered man in Ranger armor.  Each of them had the same swiping claw marks raking them as the trooper had.  Samara retrieved a few more flashbangs from their belts.

“See in there?” she asked, nodding to the back of the truck.

Arcade looked, and saw the tangled limbs and dun-colored hide of a Deathclaw.  He felt himself shiver.  “Could this be it?” he asked Samara.  “What killed those troopers?”

Samara shook her head, biting her lip again.  Above them, the eyebot whistled.  “Look,” she said, indicating the body.

Arcade followed the line of sight with his eyes.  As he examined the Deathclaw’s corpse more closely, he saw that it had been disemboweled.  Its guts spilled out in a dark pile on the floor of the dented metal truck.  He swallowed.

“NCR troopers didn’t do that,” he murmured.

“No.  Nor Legionaries, either.”  Samara glanced over at him.  “Stay close.”

“You don’t need to tell me twice.”  He followed after her with his hand on his weapon. Above them both, the eyebot hovered.

Near the exit, Samara tossed a truck door out of their way with her powered armor and pointed.  “There.” 

Arcade peered through the gloom.  The path before them slanted upward, to a jagged edge of broken concrete that was clearly part of a fallen highway overpass.  A collapsed sign reading HIGHWAY ½ MILE canted at an angle that formed a sort of archway. Above them, more sharp edges of concrete sliced the night sky into jagged shapes.

“I see the symbol,” he acknowledged.  Ulysses’s white symbol was stenciled on a slab of cement to the right.  On the left was another splash of violent red graffiti, but neither of them acknowledged that....though he did see Samara’s jaw tighten as her eyes fell on it.  Then she frowned.

“Hey, what’s that?”

Lurking beyond the splash of red graffiti was a strange mound of some sort.  As they moved closer, Arcade saw that it seemed to be formed out of chunks of broken concrete that had been cemented together as if by some sort of glue.  The mound was fairly sizeable--as high as Arcade’s chest and probably the span of his arms across--and in the center of it was a perfectly round, human-sized hole.  Samara strode toward it and Arcade followed more cautiously, raising his weapon.

“It looks like a burrow of some kind,” he said. 

“But what made it?” Samara asked.  Steam was rising from the mouth of the burrow, a sickly greenish color; it smelled of sulfur and radiation.  Arcade frowned, feeling his skin prickle. 

“Whatever it was, it was big. Look at that hole.  A person could pass through that easily.”

“Yes.  Or several people.”  She turned and looked at Arcade soberly.  “Do you think we--“

The blast of music from the eyebot behind them made them both jump.  The little bot blared its threat cue, only to have it cut off halfway through by a loud metal banging sound.  Samara whirled--Arcade would never have thought that he could have seen anyone in armor move that fast--and cried out, “ED-E!  ED-E, are you--“

And then the threat was upon them.

The two of them were instantly engulfed in melee.  Arcade’s Ripper was in his hands somehow, though he had no memory of drawing it.  The chainblade coughed and roared as it sliced into dark, shadowed forms with broad shining eyes that seemed to glow as brightly as the moon.  They just kept coming, more and more of them pouring over and around the mounds of concrete rubble in an endless river.   His mind was still reeling from shock; Arcade hacked and slashed desperately, his knees shaky and his limbs weak as water.  The vibrations from the Ripper made it feel like it was slipping out of his hands; his timing felt off, as if he were half a second behind the attackers and had to hurry to catch up.  He could hear Samara screaming, yelling the foulest language he’d ever heard, shouting furious threats and raging about ED-E, but he couldn’t dare to look at her; he was scrambling to keep up with the waves of enemies surrounding them.

He couldn’t have counted how many there were.  He felt their hot blood on his hands, their foul breath on his face, as he strove to stay alive just one second more.  Claws raked across the back of his armor, knocking him off-balance; he barely managed to keep his footing as he wrestled his Ripper around to deal with the threat, only to run into a massive blow against his helmet that jarred him so badly he saw stars.  He lashed out blindly in the direction of the attack, driven by the sharp, bright edge of fear even as he felt the blade make contact and heard the wet sound of his Ripper tearing into flesh: knowing that he couldn’t keep this up much longer, any minute now would be the blow he didn’t see--

Then he heard the sizzle of Samara’s LAER weapon and a flare of blue-white fire blazed across his sight.  When the after-images died away, he realized that he was standing in the middle of a pile of ashes, all that Samara’s weapon left behind.  All was quiet.

He drew a few shaking breaths, trying to steady himself.  The ground was covered with dismembered, vaguely humanoid corpses, mixed with small mounds of ashes; at some point, he realized, Samara had gotten her rifle out.  His hands and the housing of his Ripper chainblade were covered with fresh blood, greenish-black against the red stains from the Marked Men earlier. He saw her hulking form in the darkness.  “Samara--“

She cut him off with a wave of one hand.  “ED-E!” It was a plaintive wail.  She bounded across the shattered concrete subsurface to fall on her knees at the side of the eyebot.   Within moments she had pried off the machine’s access panel and was prodding frantically at its innards, sparing Arcade not so much as a glance.  “ED-E, oh my God, ED-E--ED-E, be okay, please--“

A flare of irritation so strong it rose to anger spiked in Arcade’s chest as he watched her working desperately away at the circuit boards and wiring of the machine’s interior.  What about me, Samara? he wanted to shout at her. Do you even care? He bit down on the response.  Instead, he said sharply, “Samara, we can’t stay here long.  Let the eyebot go.   More of those--those tunnelers might be along at any--“

“I’m not leaving ED-E!”  The words were a shout; Arcade stepped back.   Clenching his fists, he turned away, staring out into the darkness around them.  He still felt shaky and unbalanced, and the bright flare of anger had not subsided.  He concentrated on breathing until he felt more in control of himself, as Samara worked away at the eyebot behind him.

To distract himself he turned his attention to the bodies of their attackers.  The creatures that lay sprawled on the ground around them were roughly humanoid, but with dark green, scaly skin and hands much larger than human hands, tipped with sharp, long curving claws, like those of a mole-rat.  Guess now we know who that burrow back there belonged to.  He glanced up at it again, the hole in the pile of rubble with greenish smoke rising from its mouth; it matched the size of the creatures before him exactly.  Their heads and shoulders bore short spikes--perhaps for sensing in the darkness?--and their eyes were enormous and a glowing white. They looked to be adapted for crouching and traveling on all fours, with their hind legs appearing permanently bent--the possible beginnings of an evolutionary transition back to digitigrade locomotion?

“Samara, have you seen--“

“Not now!”

“Geez, fine, whatever,” he muttered sullenly.  He wandered to the edge of the circle of light cast by Samara’s PIP-Boy 3000 and knelt by a small pool of murky, foul-looking water that reeked of sulfur.  A quick taste revealed that it was brackish and unsuitable for drinking; almost certainly radioactive too, Arcade thought sourly.  That was all right, though; he had no intention of drinking it.  Instead, while Samara worked frantically away at the eyebot, Arcade tried his best to wash the blood and grime from his filthy hands and chainblade.  It was no easy task; the blood of the Marked Men and the--the Tunnelers, Arcade supposed--had combined into a substance somewhere between shellac and glue, and he had to scrape at the stuff with his fingernails and even handfuls of concrete dust to get it to release its grip.  Traces still remained in the creases of his skin and deep under his nails by the time he heard the metallic sound of Samara closing the panel and the eyebot’s “ready” whistle again.

“ED-E!” Samara cried.  Arcade stood up and turned toward them.  ED-E had risen from the ground and was once again hovering slightly above head height; Samara was gazing up at it.

“God, ED-E, I thought--I was afraid--“

The eyebot whistled reassuringly.  Samara reached up to lay her hand along one side of the round thing’s housing.  Her face was almost glowing with happiness. A sudden, wild urge came over Arcade to simply march over there and shove her away from the bot; he fought it back, hard.

“Thank God I was able to fix you,” Samara said, beaming up at the round satellite.  The machine whistled again, and Samara laughed as if it had said something she understood.  “I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

Arcade kicked at the ground with one foot while Samara gushed over the bot, digging futilely at the rim of black blood under his nails. Samara herself was almost stainless, he saw when he glanced at her; the longer handle of the protonic inversal axe probably helped keep the mess away from her.  There were a few spatters on her cuirass and shoulder guard, but that was all. That migraine was still pulsing in his right temple, and he winced at a particularly loud whistle from the robot.   “That’s right, ED-E,” Samara replied, laughing again.  It sounded so wrong to hear her laugh like that that Arcade gritted his teeth.  “You are still alive.  And we can move on.” 

The bot beeped in acquiescence. 

“Come on, ED-E.  Arcade,” Samara called with a perfunctory glance at him.  “Let’s go.”

Sure.  Why not.  Some devil was driving what felt like railway spikes into the side of his head, and Arcade vowed silently that when he caught the little bastard, there would be vengeance.  “After you,” he replied with saccharine cheerfulness.  He waited to see if Samara would call him on it, but she didn’t even seem to notice.  She simply turned away and began climbing the ramp to the break in the concrete, that damned bot orbiting her.  There was nothing for him to do but follow.

[*]

They emerged from the underground to stand on the remains of the highway overpass: the broken and cracked concrete roadway stretched off into the distance before them, dotted with burned-out cars and missing large chunks of itself.  Above, the gloomy orange sky washed everything with somber light.  Arcade squinted after the darkness of the caverns, while Samara checked her PIP-Boy 3000. 

“Okay,” she said after a moment.  “It looks like we just stay on this roadway for a while.”

Arcade frowned, still massaging his temple. “Is it intact the whole way?  Because I’m not really in the mood to backtrack through that cave if it turns out otherwise.”

Samara studied the flat green screen.  “I think it should be okay.  This looks like--“

That high-pitched whistle emanated again from the eyebot, screeching across their conversation like fingernails on a chalkboard and echoing back from hills and valleys of wreckage around them.  Samara froze, yanking her eyes up from the screen to the eyebot; Arcade started in surprise, automatically raising his weapon.

“There you are,” that grating voice boomed out, seeming to come from all around them at once.  Arcade felt himself tightening up.  “You went quiet for a time.  Was beginning to wonder if the Divide had claimed you after all.  Should have known better.  Divide can’t kill you; you’re too tough, too mean.  We’re alike that way. If the Bear had some of your toughness, the fight for the Mojave might be an even match.”

 “You son of a bitch.”  That frightening white light had leapt up in Samara’s eyes.  She raised her LAER at the bot, then lowered it again after a moment.  Thunderclouds collided on her brow. It made Arcade’s gut churn to see her like that. 

“Haven’t you caused enough trouble?” he called to the eyebot.

“And your shadow,” the eyebot rumbled,  “still following faithfully at your heels. Thought you would draw on him, turn on him, payment for deception.  But you kept him, I see, even after learning what he was, what he stands for.  Him...and that machine of yours.  Even now.  Why, Courier?  Tell me that.”

“Come on out here and I’ll tell you everything you want to know!”

Samara’s whole body was drawn as taut as a cable on the verge of snapping.  Quickly, in an attempt to divert her, Arcade called out, “How did you know about--about who I was?”

The bot rotated toward him fully, with what seemed to be a faint air of surprise.  “Can smell it on you.  You reek of it--privilege, decadence; it’s buried in your bones.  Soft life breeds soft men.  Soft women too.  Take away that shiny Plasma Defender, that Ripper--you wouldn’t last an hour.  Not like her.  Take away her weapons--a different story.  A survivor from a line of survivors; we’re alike in that way, she and I. She had to fight, to struggle for everything in her life. It’s strengthened her, refined her steel.  If the Bear had that steel, this war would be over very quickly.  As it is...NCR hasn’t the strength to do what’s necessary.  Caught between the world they want to be, and the world that is; unable to choose; trying--failing--to navigate between ‘is’ and ‘should.’ Legion doesn’t try.  It does.  That’s what makes them better.  That’s why they deserve to win.”

“Over my dead body they’ll win!” Samara shouted.  Arcade felt his frown deepen as Samara’s anger spilled over to him.

“Wait a minute, ‘deserve to win?’” he demanded.  “Hey, I’m the farthest thing in the world from a blind NCR supporter, but how can you possibly say that the Legion is better than they are?”

“Because he’s Legion too.” The fire in Samara’s eyes leaped up; they seemed to glow with a terrifying white light.  Her face contorted in rage.  “You.  Legionary.  Bastard.”   She said the word Legionary as if it were the vilest insult possible. Arcade didn’t know whether to step away from her or to go to her and wrap his arms around her--if perhaps doing that could quench her blazing wrath. 

“Bull, you term me.  You say true.  Bull I am, now.  I walked the East as you walked the West, saw the miserable, barren tribes, clinging to life, saw the Bull come, swallow them, knit them together, make them strong in ways the Bear could only dream of.  Bear’s too squeamish; won’t stand for blood on its paws.  Bull...Bull isn’t afraid to trample its enemies, grind them into the dust beneath its hooves.  Strange truth of life in the Wastes: if you grind an enemy down far enough, crush them to abjection, the enemy can become an ally. Bear doesn’t understand this...or if it does, scruples to use it.  Bull knows this well, lives this knowledge...and Bull succeeds.”

Samara only snarled.  Arcade knew he should keep silent, but he couldn’t let it lie; he wet his lips and called back, “That sort of success isn’t worth the cost.  At least the NCR realizes this.” He paused for a moment in thought.  “Most of the time, anyway.”

A short contemptuous chuckle rolled out of the eyebot’s speakers, echoing back from the canyon walls as the bot turned to face him.  “Surprised you’d say that, shadow man.  Your Enclave knew this too, though rarely used it.  No, your Enclave preferred to eradicate, rather than to ally.  Scouring the Wastes clean of impurities...in the long run, could only weaken them.  Few who walk the Wastes are ‘pure,’ in any sense of the word. Enclave sought the peace of the grave...and that’s just what they got. Wonder, shadow man, how much of those attitudes you imbibed.  Is that what you’re working for, with her for?  To finish what your Enclave started?”

As that grating, grinding voice rolled over him, Arcade felt himself bristle with hostility. “Look, they’re not my Enclave, all right?” he called to the bot. “The Posiden oil rig base was destroyed before I was even born, I had nothing to do with any of that.  And furthermore--“

“Who cares!?”  Samara roared. “All I want to know from you right now, you Legionary son of a bitch, is how to find you!  Tell me!  Tell me now!”  She raised her weapon and pointed it again at the bot, trembling as if she were on the verge of shooting--

 “Wait!”

Arcade hadn’t realized he’d interrupted Samara until she swung on him.  He recoiled a step and held out his hands automatically.

“Arcade, stay out of this!”

“Samara, quiet.  We talked to a--a Marked Man,” he said, gazing up at the eyebot.  “He said something about a town?  That Samara had--had made a town here? In the Divide?  What was that about?”

“A town?”  The eyebot paused.  “Suppose you could call it that.  Place of houses, people, families...hopes. Dreams.  A town...or a new life, better life.  Better world. Yes, Courier,” and the voice out of the eyebot suddenly sharpened, “you built the place, caused it to grow out of the dust of the Divide; you found the path, opened the road for others to come after you; kept that road open through seasons, storms, bringing the stuff of life to those who settled the trail you walked.  Your home, Courier; perhaps not the place you were born, but the place you loved.  Must have.  Only love could have sustained that kind of dedication. ”  Samara stared at the eyebot without the slightest hint of comprehension, her face dark with wrath.  “Built from the Old World but not of it, forged from the lessons that were all that remained in the ashes of what once had been.  A place where new thoughts could take root, a new nation could grow--until it died.  Until NCR came.  And Legion.  And you.” 

Timbres of bitterness and pain laced the dark, distorted voice.  “What happened to that town?” Arcade asked.

“Not your place to ask me, shadow man.  Hers.”

Arcade glanced over at Samara and could tell immediately that all of what Ulysses had said had gone right over her head; there was only fury and a sort of baffled frustration.

“Tell me where you are,” she growled.

“Walk west into the sun, and keep walking until it dies.  There--I’ll be waiting.”

There was a click as the transmission shut off.  Samara gave a frustrated cry and pulled her LAER, aiming it at the eyebot again; then lowered it.   Instead, she stood still, rigid and staring down the open road ahead of them, her body trembling with anger.  Arcade went to stand beside her, reached out to her, almost touching her shoulder, then refrained.  Again, he wondered distantly if he should wrap her in his arms, if that might drain the fury from her.  Somehow, he didn’t quite dare.

“Wow,” he said at last, trying to lighten the tension. “I have to say, after listening to this guy, the NCR  never looked so good.”

He thought at first she had not heard; she made no outward acknowledgement, but slowly, the stiff set to her shoulders began to relax.  “Son of a bitch,” she muttered, so quietly, Arcade almost could not make out her words. 

“Samara, are you--?”

She drew in a long breath.  “We should go.  The faster we find this guy....”  She trailed off.

Together, they stepped out of the shadow of the arch and onto the High Road.

 

Chapter Text

The sun was dawning pale when they emerged from the underground; the sky was a mellow, washed-out gold as the sunlight reflected through the cloud of dust and grit that hung ceaselessly over the divide.  The ruins were transfigured in that light, concrete fragments and burned-out cars taking on an elegaic aspect more suited to the ruins of temples; the overpass was washed in rays of yellow and pearl and cream.  The highway, its lanes divided with a shattered row of concrete barriers, slanted up past the overpass arch; at the top of its rise, a defunct light post and the twisted wire skeleton of what had once been a highway sign were outlined in stark black across the soft pastel of the sky.

Leaving the protection of the overpass, they climbed along the right lane of the highway.  The slope was steep enough that Arcade had to work at it; his Combat Armor Mk. II seemed to weigh twice as much and he found himself breathing hard as he levered himself uphill. He watched Samara’s back as she strode ahead easily in her Powered Armor, and her little eyebot bobbed after her whistling happily to itself.  Its whistles ground on Arcade’s nerves, and he thought distantly he would gladly have seen the damned thing melted down for scrap.

They were almost at the top when Samara froze.  One hand reached for her weapon.  Arcade, coming up alongside her, started to ask what it was, and then he saw: two black forms, silhouetted against the sky at the crest of the overpass, coming toward them. 

“Samara--“

“I see it.  God-damn,” she snarled, raising her weapon.  “ED-E, if you--“

“Wait.”  Arcade laid a hand on her rerebrace.  “Not yet.”

She glanced at him, dawning anger on her face.  “Arcade, what are you doing?”

“I don’t think they’re attacking.”  And he pointed.  “Look.”

Both individuals were so heavily backlit that it was impossible to make out any fine details; but they appeared to be approaching slowly and neither of them had drawn their weapons.  The figure in the lead stopped and gestured sharply to the one behind to stay still; then he raised his hands.

“No....fight.”

With those words, the lingering question in Arcade’s mind was settled; the man’s voice was the same harsh, painful-sounding gurgle of the other Marked Man, Blister, that they had questioned before the overpass.  

“Closer.  No...fight.  We...no fight.”

Samara glanced at Arcade.  “What do you think?”

He shrugged.  “What have we got to lose?”

“The last time....”  She trailed off, and her hand clenched on her rifle.

“If they wanted to attack us, they could have done so by now,” Arcade countered.  “There’d be no need to go to all this trouble.”

She considered that briefly, then nodded.  “All right.  But be on your guard.”  To the two figures above them, she called, “Keep your hands where we can see them!”

The lead figure gurgled assent.  Slowly, Samara and Arcade climbed up the remaining stretch of slope that separated them from the Marked Men.  The eyebot bobbed behind them, whistling every so often.

As they reached the top, they found a small camp that had been built across one lane of the defunct highway.  To the east, a windbreak had been constructed out of a military transport truck and some large business signs; the north side of the shelter was a concrete divider that had been reinforced with sheets of corrugated metal to make a “wall” of sorts.   A small fire was burning in a hearth made of an old truck tire; two mattresses, some ammo boxes and a couple of chairs filled in the rest of the area.  Arcade took this all in at a glance, turning his attention on their two hosts.

They were Marked Men, all right; if that hadn’t been obvious from the man’s voice, it was immediately apparent in the flayed surfaces of their arms and legs, where their armor left them bare. The armor, Arcade observed, consisted of damaged and crudely repaired Legion armor, and the one in front--

“That mask,” Samara murmured, nudging him.  “What is that?  I’ve never seen anything like that before.”

Arcade guessed what it was--a copy of the mask belonging to Legate Lanius, Caesar’s brutal second in command--but said nothing.  He tightened his fingers around the stock of his weapon.

The leader had an assault rifle at his back and several frag grenades at his belt; his companion was carrying a shoulder-mounted machine gun, but laid it on the ground at a barked command--“Pone telum!”  Still, the follower remained tense, watching them closely.  Arcade thought he could see resentment in the set of his shoulders.  The leader kept his hands well away from his waist.  “Truce,” he rasped, his eyes remaining on Samara.

Samara glanced at Arcade, who nodded.  “Truce,” she agreed warily.

The Marked Man with the mask indicated her.  “Cou...ri...er.” 

“Samara,” she corrected, then gestured to her companions.  “Arcade.  ED-E.”

“We ... know.  We all know.  Sa...ma...ra.  Cou...ri...er.”   The Marked Man’s voice sounded hollow and tinny, coming from inside the mask; the sentence died with a choked gurgle.  He tapped his own chest.  “Beast.”

Arcade frowned.  “What’s this about?”

Beast turned that grotesque mask toward him.  “Not ... you.  Her.”  He turned back to Samara. “No...fight.  Leader say...no fight.  My...leader.  Bonesaw.”  Arcade’s throat and chest hurt just listening to that rasping voice.  “At village.  See....see you.”  He pointed up the road.  “Safe...no fight.  Go.”

Samara looked over at Arcade blankly.  “What’s he talking about?”

Arcade frowned, trying to put together what Beast had said.  “It sounds like, there’s a village up ahead with a leader named Bonesaw who wants to see you.  He’s offering safe passage.”

“Safe passage.”  Samara frowned.  “Why does this Bonesaw want to see us?” she called to Beast.

“Talk.” Beast gurgled.  “Talk...you.  You...Cou...ri...er.  Bonesaw....talk.”

Once again, she glanced at Arcade.  “What do you think?”

“What have we got to lose?” Arcade replied.  “Look, they haven’t tried disarming us, or taking us prisoner.”

Samara considered that, then nodded.

“All right,” she called to Beast.  “We accept your terms.  Safe passage.  But you better not be doublecrossing us,” she growled, glaring hard at the Marked Man.

Beast choked a negative.  “There.  That way,” he rasped, pointing down the highway.  “Go...to end.  Village...there.  Sentinels....will stand aside.  Watch--“  he coughed, a horrendous sound as if he were hacking up his own lungs; Arcade winced inwardly in sympathy “--Deathclaws,” he rasped. 

Samara glowered, but Arcade hastily called out, “Thanks for the warning.  We appreciate it.  Come on,” he said, turning to his Power Armor-clad companion.  “Let’s go.”

Beast and his companion stood aside as Arcade, Samara, and the eyebot started up the High Road, watching them go. The subordinate still did not look happy--Arcade could tell by the set of his shoulders--but he was silent as they passed by.  Arcade wondered distantly what he was thinking...and what they would find when they reached the village of Marked Men at the other end.

[*]

The High Road was a strange and rather eerie place, Arcade thought to himself as he and Samara traveled along the elevated freeway, their boots grinding on the pavement.  Looking over the side, he could see the remains of a town far below, the buildings, ruined streets, and destroyed cars rendered small and somehow pristine by distance.  From up here, the damage didn’t look so bad; Arcade could almost pretend that the war had never happened and he was gazing down on a flourishing community.  Except for the silent streets, that is.  The wind blew continually, a light breeze occasionally gusting strong enough to make him reel sideways a bit. As he walked on by Samara’s side, grit lashed their faces, but the road itself was mostly clear, except for drifts piled up in the lee of the walls on either side of the roadway and the concrete dividers in the middle.  

The road was almost empty.  Here and there were a few wrecked cars and trucks, a motorcycle or two, but for the most part the highway stretched out before them, clear and open, except where jagged chunks had been taken out of it by destruction and time.  Once or twice by the dividers or in the lee of a car, they came upon a fire circle and perhaps a mattress or two, indicating that someone had been using the spot as a campsite recently. Marked Men, Arcade thought.

Halfway down the road, a toppled skyscraper leaned at an angle over the risen bed of the highway.  Two Marked Men waited up there, one carrying a sniper rifle, the other carrying a strange, boxy weapon that looked like some kind of missile launcher.  Samara tensed, and her hand strayed toward her weapon, but the two sentries just gestured them through.

Samara strode ahead silently.  The distant air that had hung about her before was back, and thicker; she seemed wrapped in thought, distracted.  Something about the darkness in her eyes made Arcade uneasy.  He considered reaching out to her--trying to engage her in conversation--but didn’t think she would hear anything he said.

They walked on, through the sighing winds, the golden, diffuse light from the permanently overcast sky, the grit lashing their cheeks.  Samara called a brief halt for lunch at what looked like a ruined highway interchange, but was silent and withdrawn throughout.  Then they walked on.

It was late afternoon, nearing evening, when they came to the village.  The highway sloped down to dead-end in a collapsed tunnel through a high bluff; the mouth of the tunnel was filled with tons upon tons of rubble, concrete and stone. A wrecked semi was lodged under the mountainous mass of debris, and a few splintered, shattered crates were strewn around the rocky hillside.  The faded, almost obliterated stencils on the crates revealed them to once have held military ordnance.  To the right, an off-ramp branched down in a long sweeping arc; another ramp led up a steep hillside to the left, between piles of jagged rock. 

Someone was lurking there, in the shadows under the bluff.  Samara raised her weapon as the figure came forward, revealing itself as a Marked Man in what appeared to be damaged NCR Trooper armor.  The Marked Man raised his hands.

“You...Courier,” he ground out.

Arcade stepped forward.  “Are you....” He strained to recall the name they had heard earlier.  “Bonesaw?”

“No,” the man rasped.  “Sen...try.   Follow.  I...take you.  Come.” 

Without waiting for their acknowledgement the Marked Man turned and began heading down the road.  Arcade followed readily; Samara did so after a slight hesitation.  The tension in her shoulders was visible even through the Powered Armor.

Arcade glanced at her.  “If they wanted to kill us or hurt us, they would have by now,” he said in an undertone.

Samara’s jaw tightened. “This is wasting time,” she said at last.  “We need to be finding Ulysses.”

“Well, maybe they’ll know something that will help us,” Arcade tried to reason.  “If they can tell us where he is....”

“You! Follow!” the Marked Man barked from up ahead, cutting him off.  Arcade complied; Samara did likewise, though the distance did not leave her eyes.

The Marked Man led them down the offramp past a burning trash drum, and up through a cleft between two towering rock bluffs.  He stopped and turned back to look at them.  “Care....ful,” he said, pointing.  Looking closely, Arcade saw the yellow disk of a frag mine nestled in among a scattering of rubble on the highway’s surface.  “Follow.  Close.”

“Will do.”  Arcade tried to repress a shudder.  Samara said nothing, just shifted, glowering impatiently.  She showed no sign of fear at the sight of the mine; then again, she somehow always managed to stay clear of mines and other traps.  Arcade had no idea how she did it. As their guide started off again, Arcade made sure to follow his path almost exactly, avoiding the hazards he pointed out.

The stony heights to either side of the path loomed over them, shadowy and oppressive; cars were scattered here and there on the road, including one red fire truck.  In a couple of places, what looked like radio towers had fallen from the heights of the bluffs above, forming arches under which their little procession passed.  The path slanted upward to a new intersection, with a road to their right leading to a collection of ruins surrounded by high rock walls. The main road continued to a wire fence with an open gate, and a small square cement building beyond it.  The dim and lurid light from the overcast sky gave everything a flat, unreal appearance; Arcade found himself wondering for a brief instant if he’d strayed into some sinister dream.

 “Come,” the Marked Man rasped.  “Bonesaw.  Leader.  Come.”

He led them past a couple more overturned trucks into the large, open space among the stone bluffs.  Two one-story ruined buildings stood by the road, one on each side--really little more than skeletons--and the empty shell of a much larger, multi-story building was beyond them.  It must have been under construction at the time of the war, judging by the rusting, mangled crane nearby and a couple of faded yellow vehicles--Arcade recognized them from prewar holotapes as construction equipment.  He wondered if the smaller structures had been temporary quarters or offices related to the building project.

Among the ruins were five or six of those small, beehive-shaped stone huts he had noticed before; they were clustered in two groups, each around a central fire ring.  More Marked Men were sitting around the rings, occupied in repairing weapons or armor.

 

As the sentry led Samara, Arcade and the eyebot into their midst, the activity slowly came to a standstill.  At least two dozen pairs of milky eyes shifted to the newcomers.

One by one, the Marked Men began rising to their feet.

Samara visibly tensed, her fingers tightening around the stock of her weapon.  Arcade felt a chill himself, but the Marked Men made no hostile move--merely stood, watching in total silence as he and Samara followed their guide through the small village, past one of the wrecked bulldozers.  The corpse of a Marked Man was pinned to this one, and their sentry commented, when he saw Arcade looking at it, “Old...leader.”

The sentry led them to a huge chunk of concrete that had probably once been a wall-floor join; it was massive, placed on an elevated pile of rubble, and formed an angle like a crude throne.  A man sat on this throne, his arms folded, watching them approach.  His armor was an indeterminate mix of what looked like scrapped Powered Armor pieces, old tires, and a Legion kilt.  His face was hidden behind a steel mask.  In form, this mask was like the one Beast had worn earlier, but it was more finely wrought; Arcade thougt it might even be an intact piece of Legion equipment, carried into the Divide.  At his side the man carried a chainsaw; one hand rested on it as he watched them draw near.  Their guide went straight up to the man, and bowed roughly.

“She....here.  I bring....  Her.”

The man on the throne rose.  He leapt down from the mound of rubble, as agilely as if the armor he wore weighed nothing.  “You....do well,” his voice came, hollow and tinny from inside his helmet.  He turned to face Samara, noting and dismissing Arcade with no more than the briefest of glances, then held up his hands and rasped, “Cou...ri...er!”

“Cou...ri...er....” came the gurgling, grinding affirmation from many throats, and slowly, in twos and threes, the Marked Men around them dropped down to one knee.

Samara took a taut step backward.  Mounting unease showed in her face and again, she started to reach for her weapon. 

“What the hell is this?” she demanded, her voice harsh and strained.

Arcade reached out to her.  “Samara--“

She turned on him, glaring accusation.  “Arcade, what the hell is going on here?”

He drew a breath, biting back the temptation to say, How should I know?  “Samara, just calm down, all right?  I don’t think--“

“You.” Bonesaw spoke over him as if he weren’t even there, addressing himself directly to Samara.  “You.  Ulysses.  Dei.”

Arcade was not expecting the final word, wouldn’t even have understood the gurgled syllable, if it weren’t for the fact that the other Marked Men repeated it as well, in their harsh, grinding tones.A chill ran down his spine.

“What are they saying?”  Samara’s anger had mounted higher, and her scorching glare redoubled.  “Day-ee?  What the hell....?”

Arcade turned to Samara, who had incomprehension written all over her face.  “Not ‘day-ee.’  ‘Dei.’  Samara,” he said quietly, “They just called you a god.  You and Ulysses both.”

The unease on Samara’s face deepened into something like alarm, and she stepped backward almost automatically.  “What? That’s the craziest--“  Arcade frantically gestured for her to keep her voice down.  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said in an undertone, scowling ferociously.  “I’ve heard stuff from Freeside junkies that makes more sense than that!”

Arcade felt himself frowning as well.  He looked back at the Marked Men surrounding them, all kneeling, all watching Samara with--not reverence, exactly, he thought to himself--but at the very least a profound respect.  “No argument here,” he mused.  “I don’t get it.  I mean, for the Legion it almost makes sense--Caesar does a hell of a lot to instill credulity and gullibility in his followers; he likes to keep his men ignorant and superstitious--makes them easier to control.  But the NCR?  The NCR are good little children of the Enlightenment, they should know better than this--“

Samara shifted impatiently.  “Arcade, take a look at these guys.  They’re ghouls--“

“They’re not ghouls--“

“Close enough.  They’re all probably half-feral already.” She grimaced.  “Of course they’re going to pick up a few stupid ideas along the way.”

“You’re saying that the ghoulification process might render potential ferals more susceptible to implausible ideas?  Possible.”  Arcade considered for a moment, while Samara stared at him blankly.  “But why you?  Why not just Ulysses? I’d like to understand--“

“What does it matter?” Samara demanded.  “Why are we even here in this village anyway?  Why aren’t we out looking for Ulysses right now?”

“Good question.”  He looked back at the chief.  “Why did you bring us here?”

Bonesaw’s mask completely obscured his facial features, but there was something to the set of his shoulders that seemed to indicate he was considering carefully whether to answer.  From deep within that metal helm came the rumbling words: “You.  Not Courier.  Why .... you here?”

“He’s my friend,” Samara said at once.  “He speaks for me.”

“You....say....he talk?”  The Marked Man leader coughed, once, a deep, painful rumbling in his chest.  “You say.  Good.”  He coughed again, and Arcade winced in sympathy; he half expected to see Bonesaw cough up a chunk of lung. 

“Why did you bring us here?” Arcade repeated.

“See...you.  Speak...to you.  U...lyss..es.  Wan...der...er.  He say...kill you.  I say--“ here he pounded his chest “...No.  I.  Bonesaw.  Say...no kill.”

Arcade glanced at Samara.  No help there.  Samara was glowering at Bonesaw with a blank sort of impatience.  “Why?”

The Marked Man shrugged.  “You...gods.  Gods...fight.  Not us.”  He paused.  The masked face turned, as if he was surveying the Divide, and all that lay within it.  “This...ours.  Once.  Before...Wanderer.  Ours.  Ours.”  He pounded his armored chest again.  That blank mask was unreadable, but Arcade thought he saw a sudden fierceness in the set of his shoulders.  “No....Legion.  No...Enn See Arr.   Only...Marked Men...here.  Now.  Courier...kill Wanderer....ours....again.”

“Why don’t you kill him yourself?”

“Arcade....” Samara growled.

“No, it’s a serious question, Samara,” he said, turning to her.  “If they want him dead--“

“Ulysses is mine.”  She turned on Bonesaw.  “Understand this, ghoul:  If anyone so much as touches Ulysses, there’ll be hell to pay!”

A horrible, wet, tearing, rumbling sound rose out of the Marked Man’s chest, rendered hollow by the metal helmet; Arcade scarcely recognized it as a laugh.  “Yes,” rasped Bonesaw.  “Wanderer...yours.  Cou...ri...er.  Dea sola Deum caedere potest.”

Only a goddess can slay a god.  Arcade’s frown deepened.  “Sounds to me like you’re just trying to get someone to do your dirty work for you.”

“Who cares!?” Samara snarled, shouldering past him.  “All I want to know is, where is Ulysses?!  Where is he?!”

Again, that horrendous wet laugh came from deep within Bonesaw’s chest.

 “You...ask,” the man rasped.  “You...kill?”

“Damn straight,” Samara growled.  Her pale eyes had that flinty, stony, hard light in them.

“You...kill. Good.  Good.”   Bonesaw moved forward.  “I ... show. Come.”

He beckoned them over to a flat piece of ground that had been cleared in the center of the village, leading them through the gathering of onlookers.  The Marked Men rose from their kneeling posture as he led them, following them at a respectful distance.  The concentrated, focused way they watched Samara gave Arcade a creepy feeling, though Samara didn’t seem to notice it.  He wondered if Bonesaw’s adulation was fully shared by everyone in the village.

As they approached, Arcade saw that the space where Bonesaw was leading them had been smoothed out and incised with artificial lines.  Objects were scattered here and there on the flat surface, and it took Arcade a moment to recognize what he was seeing.  It’s a map, he realized with a start.

He glanced at Samara to see if she had recognized it also. Her pale eyes narrowed as she compared it with her PIP-Boy 3000, and then glanced up at the eye-bot behind them.  “ED-E,” she told the bot in an undertone.  “Record this.”

The bot whistled acknowledgement.  Some of the Marked Men in the crowd muttered among themselves at this.  Sounds like they don’t like the bot any better than I do, he thought.  Bonesaw knelt at the side of the map, and Samara joined him, looking slightly ludicrous as she kneeled in her huge Powered Armor, still fiddling with her PIP-Boy 3000.  Arcade quickly knelt as well.  

“Map,” Bonesaw said, his masked face turning toward them.  “See.   You....see.  Map.  Divide.  I...show.”

“Is it accurate?” Arcade asked Samara, who was still staring at the green screen on her wrist.

“Seems to be,” she murmured.  “Roughly at least.”  She looked back up at Bonesaw, her face hard.  “Show,” she commanded.

Bonesaw laid his hand down next to a large stone on the map.  “Here,” he rasped, his iron mask unchanging.  “Came in...here.  Wreckage.”  He tapped at places on the incised network of lines in the dirt.  “Came...past...Bunker. Past...High Road.  Here.  Village of Marked Men.  Here.”

“I know where we are,” Samara began, but Bonesaw held up a hand.  That gleaming, inscrutable metal countenance regarded her.  Samara fell silent, but Arcade, watching her, realized it was not the silence of the cowed.  She was waiting.

“To find....Wanderer,” growled Bonesaw.  “Here.” He touched the map.  “There.”  He pointed, further up the roadway along which they had come.  “Asssh...ton  siii...lo.”  The words reverberated oddly from behind his helmet.  “There.  Go down.  Inside,” he told Samara as she fiddled intensely with her PIP-Boy, recording his directions.  “Down.  At bottom...tunnel.  Stairs.  Through ... and out.  Sun...stone  Tower.”  He tapped another location.  “Down.  Village...Marked Men. They listen....Ulysses.  Enemies.  Fight them.  Understand?”

“Enemies.”  Samara’s face took on granite lines.  Arcade, remembering some of the tribal confrontations he’d witnessed as a Follower of the Apocalypse, found himself cynically wondering if Bonesaw was trying to get Samara to kill these guys for him as well.  No such calculations appeared to enter Samara’s head, however; she simply tapped the information into her PIP-Boy 3000.  “Ulysses’s men.  Got it.”

Bonesaw nodded.  “Go through...” he repeated, drawing his finger down a twisting line that might have been a roadway.  “Through...ruins.  Buildings.  Here.  You see?”  He touched a dark, greenish-blackish scale embedded securely in the ground; It took Arcade a moment to recognize it as a scale from one of the humanoid creatures they had fought earlier.  “Cave.... Cave....of Abaddon.”  The Destroyer, Arcade thought.  “Tunn-el-ers.  Be cautious. Tunnelers...kill.”

“What are Tunnelers, exactly?” Arcade interrupted.  Samara shot him a dirty look, but he ignored her.  “We fought some already, right before the High Road.  They looked humanoid--“

That deep, painful rumbling came from within Bonesaw’s chest.  “Human.  Once.  Not now.  They...live here.  Before.  Before great sky fire.  Fled.  Underground.  Changed.  They...become.  Tun...nel...lers.  Divide....”  He rumbled again here, uncertainly, and his mask turned toward Samara as if he expected her to know.  “Ulysses.  He tell.   How they come here.  What happened.  He tell.  Enough.  Look,” he rasped, indicating the map again.

Samara bent to the map, looking back and forth between it and her PIP-Boy, while Arcade listened as well.  Bonesaw touched a chunk of concrete, surrounded by small heaps of rubble. 

“Cave...come out here. Box...wood Hotel.  Roof.  Climb--“  He traced a fingertip down the side of the rubble chunk.  “Climb down.  Careful.  Dangerous,” he said, stabbing his finger at the dirt to emphasize his point.  “Here....Blade.”

“Like a knife?” Arcade asked.  Bonesaw shook his head.

“Blade.  Ruler.  Here...Village.  Stealth Men.  Blade....ruler.  Blade...Ulysses.  They guard...Ulysses.  With....their lives.  Blade...Kill.  Stealth Men...hard.  Vicious.  They ... kill.   Here....”  He paused.  Something about the tilt to his head made him look uncertain, even behind the mask.  “Here...Rawr.”

The Marked Man gave a horrible gurgling growl that made Arcade wince, both for its ferocity and for how painful it sounded.  Those...Stealth Men...he talks about must be real pieces of work.  He thought of some of the worst Fiends he’d heard of.  They can’t possibly be as bad as Cook-cook....can they?  He suppressed a shiver. “Dangerous,” he replied.  “All right, we’ll keep it in mind.”

The set of Bonesaw’s shoulders suggested hesitation, as if he’d missed some fundamental point.  Bonesaw started to speak, but Samara chose that moment to butt in.  “Where’s Ulysses?” she demanded, putting one hand on the stock of her weapon.  “Tell me where Ulysses is!  That’s all I care about right now.”

“Ulysses.  Yes.  Here.”  Again, Bonesaw bent to the map.  He indicated a structure shown by the broken neck of a beer bottle, jammed into the earth.  “Here.  Go here....”  and he traced another line on the map.  “And you find. Tem-ple of Ul-yss-es.”

He spoke the words with an evident reverence that surprised Arcade, and made him feel slightly abashed, though he couldn’t tell why.   The Marked Men gathered around and behind him all silently covered their hearts with their hands at the mention of the temple of Ulysses.  Samara frowned.

“Temple?  Like, an above ground structure?”

“No.”  Bonesaw shook his head.  “Bunker.  Deep...underground.  You go....go down.  Launch....siii-loo.  At bottom...Ulysses is.  Be....”  He looked up at the two of them.  “Be cautious,” he warned them.  “Ulysses....live down there.  His home.  He will have....two.  Like that.”  Here, he pointed up at ED-E. 

“Eyebots?” Arcade asked.

“Yes.  Eyebots.  Two.  With him.  They ... heal.”

“Medical eyebots,” Arcade murmured, glancing at Samara.

“We’ll have to take them out before we can get anywhere with him.”  Her face stony, she bent to tap the information into her PIP-Boy 3000.

“Yes,” Bonesaw confirmed.  “Eyebots.  They heal.  Guard.  Ulysses....have guards.  Marked Men.  Blade’s men.  They...will fight.”

Samara’s face was set and unmoving.  “We can handle them.”  Arcade said nothing, but privately wasn’t so sure.

Bonesaw, however, seemed to think it was funny.  “Handle.  Yes.”  He laughed, that horrible, tearing, wet noise echoing beneath its helmet.  “Yes.  Handle.  Ulysses...temple.  Defeat him there....and Divide...is ours.  Yours.”  His metal mask lifted from the map, gazing at her.  “Cou...ri...er.”

“I don’t want it.”  Samara stood up abruptly, and ED-E chirped.  That stony, frozen expression had set on her face, each line distinct and clean.  “All I want is Ulysses’s head.  I don’t care about anything else.”  Bonesaw laughed again, rising to join her.

“That...you will have.  Cou...ri...er.”

“Thank you for your help,” Arcade put in, and breathed a small sigh of relief as the distance in Samara’s eyes lessened a bit.  “I do have one question for you, though.”  As Bonesaw turned to look at him, he asked, “On the road, Beast warned us to be careful of Deathclaws, but we didn’t see any.  Are there Deathclaws around here?”

Bonesaw turned his mask to Arcade, as if pondering. “Death....claw.  Yes.  Rawr!” Again he made that horrendous gurgle.  “Dangerous.  Death...claw.  Here.  Death...claw.  Stronger.  Faster.  Come.  See.”  He gestured toward one of the smaller two buildings, and started toward it through the crowd. 

Samara’s face tightened again, but Arcade again laid one hand on her rerebrace.  “Just go with it,” he half pleaded with her in an undertone.  “I know this seems like a delay, but look at it this way: any information we can gather about what waits for us up ahead will help.”

For a moment, she seemed as if she wanted to resist some more, but then she gave a single nod.  She allowed Arcade to take her by the arm and lead her after Bonesaw.

Samara and Arcade followed him around the corner of the building to the place where a burned-out semi had crashed into the wall, collapsing a substantial portion of it.  Bonesaw led them through the collapsed portion of the building into the slightly sheltered interior.

Inside, lying in the center of the rubble-strewn floor, was the whole carcass of a Deathclaw, cut up in chunks; clearly the Marked Men had been in the middle of butchering it--for claws, hide, perhaps for meat, although Deathclaw meat was so unpalatable it was a food substance of last resort for most people. 

While the Deathclaw dominated the center of the floor, it wasn’t alone; perhaps a dozen mattresses arranged around the edges of the room held injured Marked Men.  Their bodies bore huge gashes and horrible, rending wounds that were clearly the work of the Deathclaw lying in chunks in the middle of the floor.  To a man, they were silent, bearing the pain stoically, but the air was filled with the rasping of their tortured breathing.

“Deathclaw,” Bonesaw explained, nodding to the carved-up creature in the center of the floor.  “Come.  Fight ... village.  We ... kill.  You see,” he rasped, indicating the men on the mattresses.  “You see... These.  Hurt.  Deathclaw hurt.”

“The Deathclaw wounded these men?” Samara murmured. She took in his words with no change of expression.  Her eyes flicked over the Deathclaw, the long claws on the hands that were strung on a rack to dry, noting the thick slabs of musculature that had been carved from its body; Arcade guessed distantly that she was assessing combat potential.  His own attention was focused on the injured men lying on the mattresses.  He approached the closest one, a man bearing huge, rending slashes from his neck to his torso.  He was appalled to see that the man had not even been bandaged; the slashes were open to the air, blood clotted dark and black at the ragged edges of the wounds.  His clothes were matted with blood and dirt.

A bright flare of outrage lit Arcade’s chest.  Almost without thinking, he turned on Bonesaw, fighting fury.

“Why haven’t these men been treated?”

The village leader’s masked face turned toward him.  “Trea....ted?”

“Treated, goddamn it!” Arcade knotted his fists.  “Look, you haven’t even cleaned his wounds!  You’re just going to leave them here, on these filthy mattresses in this--“  He flung one hand toward the Deathclaw chunks, curing in the center of the floor.  “This butcher shop?  What’s wrong with you?”

“Arcade....” Samara’s brow was furrowed.

Bonesaw appeared to consider for a moment, then nodded.  “Leave.  Yes.  They....wounded.  They.... Men.... no.... fight. Only....die.  Leave...leave here.  With.... Deathclaw.  It....”  He paused as if searching his memory, trying to find words, concepts to fit the situation.  “Honor,” he said finally.  “They see.... They know.... It....die...too.”

Of course.  The goddamned Legion influence.  Arcade knew that Legionaries looked down on healing, often devoting only minimal resources to it; they believed that a good soldier would never let himself get wounded in the first place.  He rubbed his eyes, trying to keep a tight grip on his temper.

“You can’t leave them like this.  Let me treat them.”

“Arcade....” Samara’s voice had grown sterner.  He ignored her.

“You....treat....?” Bonesaw asked. 

“Yes.  I’m a doctor.  I trained with the Followers of the Apocalypse.  I have--I can help these men, damn it!”

That hollow mask studied him for a moment longer.  “You....treat,” Bonesaw affirmed, and held up his hands, stepping back as if in permission.  “Treat,” he said, gesturing to the men.  “Treat.”

“Arcade.”  Samara grabbed him by the arm and turned him to look at her; her eyes were solid ice.  He could feel her fingers digging into him.  “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, quiet but vicious.  “We didn’t come here to treat ghouls.  We came here to find Ulysses and--“

“You know what?  Speak for yourself, Samara.”  Arcade wrenched away from her, that bright flare of anger stil burning in his chest.  “If you’re so desperate to continue on your little revenge quest that you can’t wait half an hour while I do the bare minimum for these men, then be my guest.  But I took an oath, Samara,” he said, holding her eyes.  “And I am not leaving here until I have treated these men to the best of my abilities.”

He faced her, angry and ready to argue, and a little afraid as well; he didn’t know how she would react.  Her eyes brimmed with that cold fire, her entire body was as tense as a coiled spring....and she backed down.  She stepped back and nodded. 

“All right,” she said.  “Go ahead.  But hurry.”

Samara stood with arms folded, practically tapping her foot with impatience, as Arcade moved among Bonesaw’s wounded men, doing whatever he could do for them. It was pathetically little.  The Followers of the Apocalypse were used to working with next to nothing, improvising, and making do with rudimentary equipment, and Arcade had worked under conditions more hopeless than this a few times--but not many.  The men bore their injuries silently as Arcade moved among them, washing their wounds with irradiated water (better than purified water for ghouls; the rads promoted healing), bandaging them with strips of cloth that might once have been rags of carpet, doling out what chems he had--in the absence of an operating theater, chems were all he could offer.  Buff-out, Jet, Med-X, Hydra--recklessly moved by the men’s terrible pain, he gave away almost his entire chem stash, keeping only a single dose of Med-X and one of Jet for himself.  He knew that he might need the chems later, but he could not, simply could not, deny such suffering.  The chems weren’t enough--none of it was anywhere near enough--but it was all he could do.

The Marked Men were quiet, accepting his treatment of them stoically, but he could tell from the changes in their breathing, the set of their filmy, white eyes, that they knew he was trying to help them, at least.  Their compatriots drifted in from outside, standing silently along the walls, watching; Arcade could not read their flayed, featureless expressions and wondered what they were thinking.  As he injected his last dose of Hydra into a man who had both legs and one arm mangled, he saw his ... patient’s? ... red, flayed brow furrow.  He sat back on his heels, watching the pulpy, fragmented appearance of the limb begin to firm and strengthen, and wiped at his brow with one hand.   God damn....

Footsteps behind him recalled him to himself, and he looked up as Bonesaw approached. Behind the Marked Man, he saw Samara, still leaning in her place against the wall; she hadn’t moved, but her face was shadowed, and there was something strange in her eyes as she watched him.

“You.  Heal...er,” Bonesaw rasped.

Arcade said nothing.  He didn’t feel like a healer at that moment.  He felt impotent.  Helpless.  He knew that the few shots of chems he could provide didn’t come anywhere near to being enough.  He was swamped with the feeling that the whole thing was futile.  The knowledge of what he could have done for these men, back at the Followers’ facilities in the NCR or even at the Old Mormon Fort in Freeside, filled him with a grinding, unbearable frustration and rage.

“Change their bandages daily,” he instructed Bonesaw as he climbed wearily to his feet, wondering if the other Marked Man was even listening to him.  “And when you do, wash their wounds with irradiated water.  Make sure they get plenty of rads.  It’s the best thing for them.”

Bonesaw nodded.  “As...you say.”  He paused, then laid one hand to his heart.  “Hea...ler.”

“Hea...ler,” Arcade heard the other Marked Men echo.

“Cou...rier.  Wan...derer.  Heal...er.”

Goddamn it.  Arcade could think of about a billion things he’d rather have happen than to be inducted into the Marked Men’s little religious cult as their newest demigod.  He managed a sour shrug.  “Whatever.”

The Marked Men accompanied the two of them to the edge of the village.  “There,” Bonesaw rasped, in that horrible, painful-sounding voice, pointing down the roadway that split off and continued between two bluffs..  “Siiii...loooo.  There.  Go.”

“Take care of those men,” Arcade pled with Bonesaw, having not the slightest idea whether the other ghoul would actually do it.

“As...you say.   Hea...ler,” Bonesaw rasped from behind his mask.  “And...you.  Cou...ri...er.  Kill ... Ulysses.”

“I intend to,” Samara said coldly.

As they took their leave, resuming their journey along the cracked and broken highway, Arcade looked back.  The Marked Men were gathered at the edge of the village, dark forms among the ruined pre-war buildings and the stone block huts; they watched silently, their hands on their hearts, receding into the distance as Samara and Arcade continued on down the road.

[*]

They reached the Ashton Silo Control building as the sky was starting to darken.  That stony silence had tightened its grip on Samara almost as soon as they had left the village of the Marked Men; it was an almost visible aura surrounding her.  It’s as if all she can see is the road to Ulysses.  The distance in her eyes scared him, but he couldn’t think of any way to breach it; he followed her unhappily, clenching and unclenching his hand on the stock of his Plasma Defender.

The Control Station was a one-room concrete building that had been constructed on an overlook, with the right wall abutting a rocky cliff face.  A solid-looking metal door was set into the side of the cliff; perhaps it was Arcade’s imagination but the door seemed to have an almost sinister air. A crumpled, chain-link fence bristled around the area, with a gate marked by a rusted, bullet-riddled sign:

WARNING

MILITARY INSTALLATION

ANY TRESPASSERS SUBJECT TO F.... TRESPASSING.... MILITARY PROPERTY....A FELONY .... WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW

 

The building’s walls were jagged stubs, no more than chest high, and its roof was gone.  A satellite dish stood on the cliff face above.  Wind keened mournfully through the ruins and whined in the links of the chain fence.

One of Ulysses’s white symbols had been painted next to the gaping hole where the door had been.  Samara said nothing, but he saw a muscle in her throat work.  She stepped over the doorframe and inside.  Arcade followed, with the eyebot bobbing above their heads.

The interior of the small room was devoid of almost everything save a computer console, standing against the ruins of the north wall like a mute guardian.  Its green lights flickered faithfully, signalling that even after centuries of silent waiting, it was still ready to perform its function.

“Those ancients knew how to build,” Arcade commented.

Samara did not reply.  He wondered if she even remembered he was there.  As she went silently to investigate the console, Arcade wandered up beside her.  He looked out over the jagged stump of what was left of the wall, taking in the view.

The control station had been built overlooking a large basin, perhaps the size of Freeside.  The walls of the basin consisted of the jagged, hollow remains of tall office buildings and skyscrapers, backed by rising bluffs; on the far side, a twisted ribbon of elevated freeway threaded its way through the wreckage.  The floor of the basin was almost completely clear of debris, as clean as if it had been swept with a broom, and in the center of it was a low shape that Arcade could not at first understand.  It seemed to be a rectangular surface of concrete, slightly elevated, and featureless except for a circular indentation in the middle bisected by a dark line.  He could not make heads or tails of it--and then it struck him.  He was gazing at the mouth of a missile silo.

“My God,” he breathed aloud, feeling sick.  He took a step back.  The hair was standing up on the back of his neck.  He was cold.  They put it right in the middle of town, he realized, taking in the surroundings: the ruined office buildings around it, the freeway looping throughout the area.  Right in the middle of....  His mouth seemed too dry; he wet his lips, wondering if he was going to be sick.

“Samara, did you see--“  He reached out, almost unconsciously, to touch her; she shrugged him off.

“ED-E,” she said, glancing up from her work.  The eyebot chirped and floated forward, examining the console for a moment; then an electric bolt arced from its welding tool to the console, crackling bluish-white.  The console beeped pleasantly, and a section of it opened up.  A panel with a red lever rose into view.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

“Going to open the silo lift,” Samara replied tersely, without sparing him a glance.

“All right.”  Arcade looked toward the metal door, inset into the side of the mountain.  “If you--“

“Hang on,” she interrupted.  She pushed the lever down.

A titanic rumbling filled the air; the ground shivered.  In the distance, an alarm began to blare, flat and authoritative.  Showers of tiny stones cascaded down the rock bluffs to either side of them; beneath their overlook, larger boulders dislodged themselves and went bounding down the slope.  What the hell--?  Arcade was glancing around, trying to get a handle on what was going on, when an ear-splitting, grinding metallic screeeeeeeech drilled into his ears.  His head jerked around automatically toward the source of the screech--and he froze, his blood running cold within him.

Down below, in the concrete structure at the bottom of the basin, the missile silo doors were sliding open.

Arcade was rooted to the spot.  It seemed as if he was watching the most hellish nightmares of the Old World becoming terrifing reality.  The alarms continued to scream, echoing across the Divide; that awful rumbling grew louder, stronger, threatening to shake their tiny enclosure apart. Slowly, the rounded nose cone of the missile that had slumbered below the surface of the Divide for centuries was rising into view.

Arcade’s skin crawled with horror.  It was as if the carcass of some ancient, long-dead monster was coming at last to life, hauling itself out of the grave to wreak untold devastation on the world.  As the length of the missile continued to rise from its tomb like the spectre of billions of deaths, he grabbed at Samara’s arm, almost completely unaware of what he was doing.  “No!” he cried, clutching at her uselessly.  “Samara, stop it somehow, you have--“

A brilliant light dawned below as the rocket’s boosters cut in, and his words were swallowed up in the thunderous roar of the engines.  That roaring filled the world, shaking the ground under their feet.  Slowly, the tall column of metal began to lift itself up, into the sky.  Samara stood silently, her face turned upward, following the rocket’s arcing trajectory.

By the time it reached the top of its parabola, it was evident that something was wrong.  The rocket began to wobble in midair, tracing a serpentine trail of smoke.  Its gyrations grew larger and larger, and Arcade threw up his arms to cover his face reflexively as a brilliant flash of light flared out.  The shattering detonation that followed beat against his eardrums and a rush of superheated air surrounded him; he heard the Geiger counter in Samara’s PIP-Boy 3000 begin clicking madly.  When he lowered his hands, he could see, far off in the sky, an expanding round cloud of smoke and fire. 

Oh my God.....

Samara’s grip on his arm jolted him out of his reverie.  “Come on,” she said, and jerked her head toward the iron door set in the side of the bluff; it was already folding itself away.

“Samara--“

“Move.”  Her face was as stony as the bluff above them.  She turned and started toward the gaping entryway.  Numbly, Arcade followed.

[*]

On the other side of the door lay Hell itself.

The door led into a large concrete vestibule that had been carved out of the rock of the cliff face.  Its roof was in shadow, and banks of electronic equipment stood against the walls.  The vestibule ended in a large, open wire cage inside a steeply slanting shaft; it took Arcade a moment to realize that he was looking at a rudimentary lift.

The vestibule was rocked with explosions.  Tremors ran through the floor underneath their feet; the bulwark of stone around them was shuddering as if from a series of mortal blows.  Detonations shattered the air, echoing from the rock walls and assaulting Arcade’s ears like the cracking and rumbling of thunder.  The entire place seemed to be shaking itself apart around them.

Roughly, Samara strode toward the lift.  With no hesitation at all, she stepped out onto the platform with the eyebot following.  Arcade started after her, the ground heaving under his feet like the deck of an ocean-going ship.  When he set foot on the platform, he felt it shiver and sway.  The ominous sound of creaking wires and cables could be heard even over the din.

Samara was tapping at a control console near the front of the lift.  He had to shout to be heard over the explosions.  “Samara, what the hell are you doing!?”

She didn’t spare him so much as a glance.  “Ulysses is down there!” she shouted back.  “So that’s where we’re going!”

He started to answer, but a huge detonation made him stumble; he caught hold of the wire side of the cage to steady himself.  The wire was hot enough to almost burn his hands.  Looking over the front edge of the platform, down the elevator shaft, he found himself staring into a solid wall of fire.  Superheated air filled his nostrils, reeking of burning metal.  As he gazed down the fiery tunnel, cold fear gripped him, turning his heart to ice and his limbs to water.  A very clear image filled his mind of what would happen when the two of them attempted to descend on the lift.  Nothing could survive that--

“Are you crazy?” he shouted at her.   “Going down there is suicide!”

“I don’t care!” Samara roared.  “That’s the only way to get to Ulysses!”

“You’re out of your mind!”  It suddenly struck him like a physical blow that that might be literally true.  Her face was lined and haggard, almost hollow with intensity as she worked the console.  Another roaring explosion came booming up the shaft; a blast of desert wind burst past them, and the lurid light of flames flared briefly over the planes of her face, painting it as if with blood.

“Samara, no--!”  He grasped at her arm; she shook him off as she might shake off an annoying insect.  “You can’t--  I’m not going!” he shouted desperately.  His throat was raw with the burning air and with straining to be heard through the roaring and rumbling shaking the shaft.  More cables were creaking, and there were a series of loud, shearing metallic screeches; a horrible clattering was rising up the shaft.  “I’m not going, you hear me!?” He stepped back, toward the vestibule and the iron door to the outside.

Samara swung toward him, and he took another step back, recoiling from her almost instinctively.  Her eyes were blazing with an absolutely terrifying white light; her skin was stretched so taut over her skull that he half-expected to see bone poking through. 

“Get on the platform!” she shouted at him, her face contorted with an almost divine rage.  In that moment, she looked every bit the avenging goddess the Marked Men had called her.  Dea.... whispered a voice in his jumbled mind.  “Goddamnit, get on now!”

 As he stared at her twisted expression, it seemed somehow as if the surroundings dropped away.  The booming of the explosions receded into dimness; their lurid light seemed to flicker silently behind Samara, backlighting her and flaring over her features.  The planes and angles of her face were suddenly completely alien to him; his eyes could not make sense of them, could not fit them into any recognizable pattern.  A brief flash crossed his mind, there and then gone--that this was not Samara at all, that he was standing in the antechamber with a total stranger.

She’s mad.

The thought seemed to have actual weight.  He turned it over in his head, examining it from all angles, savoring it while Samara’s ravaged features filled his vision.  The cold, icy fear that had swept him when he looked down the passage into the blazing inferno was back, filling all his senses, sparkling along his nerves; the world seemed to stand out with a numbing, crystalline precision.  Somehow, in that strange, disconnected state, it dimly amazed him that he hadn’t realized it before. 

“You’re insane.”  The words were calm, cool, spoken with almost diagnostic precision.

“Get on the platform.”

Arcade slowly shook his head.  “No.”  With that same distance, he found himself wondering who the person was; she bore some resemblance to Samara, but surely Samara had never looked like this--clinging to the ragged edge of sanity by her fingernails.  “No,” he said again, and took another step back.  “Go down yourself.  Without me.”

“Get.  On.”  And her finger curled over the trigger of her LAER rifle. 

Time seemed to stand still.  A bright thrill ran through Arcade’s nerves and prickled over his skin: not fear, exactly, but not far off.  She hadn’t raised the weapon at him--not yet--but she didn’t have to.  The steady, glowing light in her eyes burned hotter than the beam from any laser rifle.

She wouldn’t--

But a deeper voice whispered, Are you sure? 

Suddenly, he realized he wasn’t sure what he was more afraid of: the elevator shaft, or the woman standing across from him.

Arcade’s legs seemed to move almost without conscious thought, carrying him forward, out onto the hard metal floor of the lift.  Without taking her eyes off him, Samara pounded the console with a fist.  The lift lurched into motion.  They were on their way.

[*]

The air in the shaft was so hot it felt like it was scorching his throat and lungs.  He could taste the metal, an unpleasant sour tang heavy on his tongue.  As the floor of the lift sank underneath him, it shivered as if it were about to fall to pieces any moment; the heavy cables holding them groaned as if they were on the verge of snapping.  Showers of sparks jetted brightly as the lift’s sides scraped the walls.

We’re going to die....we’re going to die....we’re going to die....  The thought repeated itself in Arcade’s brain numbly as he struggled to keep his feet.  The noise was deafening.  Shrill screeches and squeals overlaid thundering booms and explosions, assaulting his ears with sound.  His eyes fixed on Samara almost as if by accident: a huge, bulky, blocky armored figure standing at the edge of the lift as straight as a heavy concrete monument.  His eyes clung to her as if she were the only thing helping him to keep his own balance.

There was a tremendous detonation and suddenly they were engulfed in a wave of fire.  Arcade felt the searing heat on his skin.  He started to cry out, convinced this was the end, but then the fire was gone, leaving only the stench of burning in its wake. 

“Samara!” he shouted.  “Samara!”

He had no idea what he was about to ask her to do--surely to go up was as dangerous as to go down--but it didn’t matter.  She didn’t hear him.  Even through the armor her entire body showed tense, as if every fiber of her being was focused on the goal at the bottom of the silo. 

More detonations rattled the lift.  The smoke was so thick it was choking him; the ozone stench of fried electronics seemed to coat his tongue and chew at the back of his throat.  His eyes stung, streaming tears down his cheeks.  Further gusts of fire belched at them, singeing his skin and leaving layers of soot over his armor. The screeching metal and thundering explosions were digging into his ears, along with a strange clattering sound that he couldn’t identify. He fought to stay on his feet, his hands clenched on his weapons so tightly his fingers were numb.  This can’t possibly get any worse--this can’t get worse--this can’t--

Another explosion sent him reeling.  His armored shoulder crashed into the chickenwire side of the cage, which absorbed his impact, and he looked up to see--

“Tunnelers!”

The eyebot sang its threat cue at the same time as Samara’s shout.  Her silhouetted form raised the glowing inversal axe against the backdrop of the fiery elevator shaft.  Arcade flung himself back toward the center of the lift, away from the deformed, greenish humanoid shape clinging to the wire above him.

The tunneler bounded after him in one smooth leap. Frantically Arcade clutched at his Ripper.  His hands were sweaty and the weapon felt like it was sliding in his grasp.  His heart was beating hammerblows in his chest.  Shit...Shit...Shit...Samara--   More tunnelers were scrambling over the front edge of the lift, and the crackle of Samara’s inversal axe reached his ears. The creature swiped at him with its long claws.  Arcade staggered backward another step, still fighting with his Ripper, and the tips of its long yellow claws raked along his armor.  Something about those claws seemed to stand out to him, clear and distinct. For digging, he thought in a kind of mad frenzy.  Just like a mole rat--

The creature lunged for him again and he dodged, as another burst of fire echoed through the raft--only to have another, unseen tunneler take a swipe at him from the side.  The lift was swarming with them--they were climbing up along the sides of the shaft, dropping down from the ceiling--a quick glance toward the edge of the lift showed that Samara was standing in a pile of tunneler corpses even as she continued to hack and scream with the inversal axe.  This is insane--we aren’t going to survive this--

Something struck at his heel and his feet swept out from under him.  Arcade fell heavily, banging his helmet against the corrugated metal floor.  The jolt was enough to temporarily blind him.  His blood froze as two broad, bright eyes, each the size of the moon, filled his vision, to be replaced by dirty yellow claws.  He jerked his head aside as the claws crashed into the metal floor less than an inch from his ear--close enough that he felt the breeze and heard them whistle.  Shit!  The creature was snuffling and growling.  The floor underneath him was so hot he could feel it through his armor: he felt as if he were lying on an oven.  He rolled to the side, trying to simultaneously evade the tunneler and scramble to his feet.  The claws crashed down again as the creature struck at him--

Then Samara was there, screaming in fury.  Her axe swept a glowing blue crescent across his vision as she swung it over her shoulder to embed it in the tunneler’s greenish-black neck.  Black blood sluiced out, almost scalding hot where it spattered over Arcade’s upraised arm.  Arcade barely had time to react when Samara reached down with one gauntleted arm and yanked him to his feet, the servos in her armor whining.  Her eyes met his in a brief flash, then shifted past him.  “Arcade!” 

He turned, and had the quickest glimpse of a looming dark-green shape with broad bright eyes, before a powerful impact jarred the side of his head.  His knees gave way, and he fell down, down, into darkness.

[*]

Arcade’s first conscious impression was the feeling of a sharp stinging in the side of his neck.  The wave of strength and vigor that flowed into him suggested that the sting had been the needle of a stimpak.  He opened his eyes to see Samara leaning over him, her forehead knotted with concern.

“Arcade?”

“Wha....what happened?”

“A tunneler hit you.”  Tunneler, his mind repeated hazily.  “I killed it.  I was worried,” she admitted, biting her lip.  “The tunneler hit you pretty hard.  I thought....”  She said nothing more, but he saw her swallow; she still watched him apprehensively.

Slowly, Arcade sat up.  His head was aching and he felt fuzzy, out of it.  Somewhere in the back of his mind, part of him was running down the checklist of questions he had been taught to assess neurological condition: Name...location....circumstances of injury.... a chill ran through him as he remembered the Tunneler coming toward him.  He shook his head to clear it and tried to take stock of his situation.

His immediate environs appeared to be concrete: a floor underneath him, walls, a ceiling.  Underneath him, he saw the outlines of the same seal that had appeared on the floor of the security room in the base when they had first come in.  Exitus acta probat, he thought, and grimaced unconsciously.  Slight shivers were running through the rock underneath him, and he could hear muffled booming in the distance, indications that the terrific explosions they had come through were still continuing.

He pushed with his hands, trying to stand up, and almost fell; Samara was there at once, offering her metal-clad arm to lean on.  The worry in her eyes hadn’t abated.  Solicitously, she assisted him to his feet, letting him hold onto her huge pauldron as he pulled himself up.  She seemed to have the solidity of a metal pylon.  Over her shoulder, he could see that eyebot bobbing and hovering, keeping watch for enemies.

Once on his feet, he had a better idea of where they were.  They appeared to be in some kind of a concrete landing platform; the lift they had been on was parked at the side of the concrete floor, and the empty missile shaft ran up above them into the darkness.  He could see occasional flickers of light reflecting dimly in the gloom and the distant sounds of explosions still came to his ears.  Across from him, set into the concrete wall on the other side of the shaft, was one of the metal folding doors.  Next to this was Ulysses’ white symbol.

“Are you all right?” Samara asked him again.

“Yeah...yeah, I’m fine.” He reeled a little as a particularly strong shudder ran through the landing, but caught himself again by putting out a hand and leaning on Samara’s pauldron.

“Good.” It was fascinating, some distant part of Arcade mused; he could see the cold stranger in her face advancing, wiping away the brief flare of intense relief that had come before.  The stony distance flowed over her like a cloak, drawing her shoulders back, tightening her jaw, coming down over her eyes like a veil.  She nodded to the door.  “We need to go.”

Arcade took a step away from her, unsteady, testing his balance.  The floor shivered again, but this time he was able to stay upright.  He shook his head.

“No.”

“No?” She turned to look at him now, and any concern she might have had for him was gone; her eyes were stone white.  “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean, I’ve had enough.”  Arcade crossed his arms over his chest.  A thrill of apprehension ran along his spine.  Samara was staring at him with an immobility of expression that seemed to betoken shock.  Arcade read in her features the contours of the stranger who had shown herself at the top of the shaft, and he wondered how well he’d ever known her.  “This revenge quest against Ulysses is yours and not mine.  I’m not going any further.”

He held his breath, waiting for repercussions, not entirely convinced she wouldn’t suddenly draw her weapon and shoot him on the spot.  Her face remained in that peculiar fixed expression.  “You don’t want to go any farther with me?” she asked him.  “Fine.  You can go right back up if you want to.”  She jerked her head back at the elevator shaft.  “But I’m going on with or without you.” 

The last words were almost a snarl.  She turned her back on him sharply and made for the door. The tremors of distant explosions still echoed down the elevator shaft, and shivers ran through the rock.  From time to time, showers of sparks drifted into view.  Arcade thought of the nightmarish trip down, and whether he could survive the ride back up--alone.

He stood there, staring up the fiery shaft, for a long time.

 

Chapter Text

Author’s note: Short chapter this time. Took longer than I thought; my beta was swamped.  Hopefully next chapter should be finished sooner.

---

 

Samara said nothing when he rejoined her, but the line of her shoulders relaxed a bit. Arcade said nothing either, though inwardly he was grinding his teeth and muttering a thousand curses in English and Latin. 

At Samara’s touch the door folded itself away, revealing a blue-lit metal room with a table and banks of computer equipment.  A staircase sank into the floor on the left.  Above the stairs were the words:

LAUNCH
DECK

Samara headed briskly toward the stairs, with Arcade trailing resentfully behind her.  Below was a concrete passageway, which came to an end at another metal door. The door had a sign over it:

 

ASHTON
----------------
LEVEL 2

The door opened to reveal a ruin-scape.

A metal walkway ran around the edge of a large pit perhaps 30 feet across, with a circular depression in the ground.  The bottom was a jumble of rock and twisted metal, with small fires burning here and there.  Arcade could feel the heat baking up from the ground.

A quick flash came to him of the missile launch they had seen above, and he suddenly realized they were at the bottom of the launch silo.  It came from here.  The twisted wreckage before them sent a chill down his spine, and his arms prickled with gooseflesh despite the heat.  This was what it did when it launched, he realized.  The thought of what it could have done if it landed--

“Arcade.” Samara broke into his reverie.  “Come on.”

One look at her and he could see the destruction hadn’t even registered.  “Fine,” he said with bad grace.

 The unsteady walkway led to a set of stairs down to the floor of the pit.  Stepping off, Arcade could feel the heat from the rock baking right though his boots; he felt like he was back in the Mojave at high noon.

Samara’s PIP-Boy 3000 led them through a tunnel in the rock that opened into a lofty underground space: a cavern that appeared to have been created from fallen rubble.  Shafts of light in which particles of dust danced illuminated the vast interior.  Across from them --

“It looks like the ground floor of a building,” Arcade murmured in surprise.

Red brick walls punctuated by broken windows stretched up to the roof of the cavern, above a set of arches with a gaping door frame.

“Must have settled during the war.”  Samara’s voice was shaded with relief, and she tossed Arcade an almost grateful look -- clearly taking his comment as an olive branch. Arcade was stubbornly silent.  It’s not that easy, he thought.

They crossed the cavern and stepped through the open door.  As they did, Arcade realized the tower listed severely to the right, enough to throw him off balance.  The walls were a dingy gray and the floor was carpeted in a filthy tattered red that squished unpleasantly under his feet.  He followed Samara to a set of stairs, and they climbed up and around past three landings to find themselves facing a door marked EXIT. 

Samara pushed it open.

[*]

 The now-familiar piercing whistle came from the eyebot almost the moment they passed the door; Arcade had a brief impression of a flat rooftop on the edge of a yawning chasm stretching out to a wall of solid rock in the distance, but it was no more than a flash as his gaze went to the bot.  Samara jolted as if from an electric shock, and her face set into a rigid mask of fury.  Once again that grating, grinding voice rolled out of the eyebot’s speakers, echoing back from the rock walls of the canyon.

“Hopeville, High Road, Ashton--tiny cracks in the earth.  Nothing compared to the road carved ahead.  Before you--this is the edge of the Divide.  Ahead lies your work, the history you burned in the earth.  What you brought to the people here.”

“You son of a bitch, what do you mean!?” Samara raged back at him. 

Arcade could feel his own temper flaring.  “You know, what the hell is your problem?!” he demanded of the floating eyebot.  “I don’t know what kind of effect you’re going for with this cryptic game playing, but it’s just making you seem like a dick.  If there’s something you want us to know, why don’t you just tell us straight out intead of ... of jerking us around like this?”

The bot turned toward him.  “Not ‘us,’ child of the Enclave.  Her.  You don’t count here.  Lost son of a dead and dying people, there’s no place for you in the Divide ahead.  No place...and no reason.  This is between me and her.  Might as well turn back now...walk away while you still can.”

I tried that.  Arcade’s jaw tightened.  “Just tell us the big damned secret and let’s get this over with.  We already know most of it,” he added.  “There was a town here that had something to do with Samara and it was destroyed.  Just tell us the rest already!”

The eyebot hummed.  Arcade was reminded unpleasantly of Dala’s hum, back in the bowels of Big Mountain, and he felt himself tense. “Not for you to ask me, shadow man,” crackled from its speakers.  “It’s for her.”

The amount of emotion in that single word made the bot’s speakers whine with feedback.  Arcade glanced over at Samara, who was tense, rigid and staring hatred at ED-E.  He reached out and rapped on the surface of her armor.  “Well, ask him.”

 He had never seen a better illustration of the term “boneheaded obstinacy” than Samara’s face right at that moment.  “That’s just what that bastard wants me to do.”

“I thought that was what you wanted too?” Arcade needled her.  “To find your history?”

She swung toward him, looking surprised and maybe a little hurt; Arcade sighed.  He stepped closer to her.  “Look,” he said in an undertone, “the son of a bitch is going to keep jerking us around until he gets what he wants. You might as well ask him to tell you and just cut this short.”  As she continued to stare at him, he added, “I suspect he isn’t going to tell you where he is until he’s gotten you to ask for his precious little secret anyway, so the faster you get him to spill that, the faster he’ll tell you what you want to know.”

For a moment, she remained tense, her eyes hard; then, to his surprise, she growled, “Fine,” and jerked away from him.  “All right, you bastard!” she called to the eyebot.  “Tell us.  What’s this history you want us to know?!”  She paused.  “Or haven’t I earned it yet?”

“Never thought you’d make it this far.  Thought the Divide would finish you, leave you lifeless, bleeding, like it has so many others--that you’d be just another body, left in the sands.  I underestimated you, Courier.  Shouldn’t have.  You’ve come this far.  You’ve earned your history.”

Samara looked like she was about ready to attack the eyebot with her teeth, and Arcade couldn’t blame her; even through the eyebot’s speakers, Ulysses’s voice dripped condescension.  Samara started to say something, then stopped and fought it back.  She drew a deep breath.

“Tell me.”

“Your shadow man had the right of it,” that booming voice rasped.  “You’ve learned most of it already...what it was, anyway.  Not the how of it, nor the why.  And the ‘why’...that’s what matters.  As if anyone can ever truly know.”  Samara was almost trembling with rage.  “Started with a package....or perhaps, I should say, ended.  We’re Couriers together, you and I; you walked the West as I walked the East.  Both of us know what sort of power lies in packages.  Messages.

“Town, your shadow man spoke of.  A town, and destruction.   A town you built, a town you maintained--“

“I never built a town!” Samara raged at him.

“But you did.  Opened the road, cleared the path, prepared the way--and kept those roads open, after the settlers came.  Settlers, wanting a new life, a life of neither Bull nor Bear.  Something new.  Something beautiful, combining the best of the Old World and the New together.  I saw this town myself. Following you.”

“What do you mean, following me?” Samara spat. She was standing as straight as a lightning rod, watching the eyebot with fixed attention.

“Caesar sent me ahead, sent me to scout the lay of the land.  Cut supply lines, cut NCR off, starve the Mojave...Bite and hold.  Methodical, separating the NCR from its sources of power, until the two-headed Bear itself must die.  Heard of you, Courier, caught whispers of you, like a long-lost ghost.  Saw it all.  Knew you saw it too--you must.  Why there is no future in either Bear or Bull.  Bear....Bear is diseased, barely clinging to life.  And the Bull--when it reaches the end, the sea, it will turn on itself and die.  That must have been why you built this town.  A new way forward.”

Incomprehension shone on Samara’s face; Arcade felt himself bristle again.  It was strange--the dismissive way Ulysses spoke of the NCR ground on his nerves like broken glass.  “The NCR is stronger than you think,” he found himself calling to the eyebot.  “I wouldn’t bet against them.”

“I would,” crackled from the eyebot’s speakers, short and contemptuous.  “They’re soft.  Weak. Divided.  Bull is strong. Determined.  All the things they’re not.  That’s why Bull will win.”

“The NCR may look divided, but if they sense an existential threat, you’d be surprised at how fast they unite.  Their social structure and institutions are a great deal more developed and robust than those of Caesar’s Legion, and they have a lot more practice at this,” Arcade parried.   “The Legion was a creation of Caesar and Caesar alone, and now that Samara’s taken him out, I’d give it less than a decade before it falls apart completely.  You know it and I know it.”  Samara was staring at him with that same, blank, uncomprehending stare; Arcade barely saw it.  He could feel anger starting to tighten its grip on him.

“NCR is built on the foundation of the dead.  Old structures, old institutions, old knowledge, worn out relics of a dead world, dead people.  Is that why you care for them, shadow man?  Because they remind you of your Enclave, clinging to the past, to traditions that failed?  Your Enclave failed and NCR will fail too.  You of all people should know.”

That anger tightened still further.  “First, I already told you: they’re not my Enclave,” Arcade called back.  “And second, the Enclave and the NCR are nothing alike.  Where the Enclave drew on -- drew on the worst of the Old World traditions--“ he stumbled only slightly over that admission  “--the NCR draws on some of the best.  When the NCR takes the Mojave, unlike your Bull, they’ll actually work to improve--“  He caught himself.  “Wait. Why am I arguing this with you? I don’t even support the NCR!”

“Wise of you, not to back the loser, shadow man,” rasped Ulysses.  “Perhaps once was enough.”

The casual taunt stung him further, and he started to reply, but felt a touch on his arm.  Startled, he looked over to find Samara.  Her brows were drawn together.

“Don’t, Arcade,” she murmured.  “You’re just giving that bastard what he wants.”

Arcade drew a breath, released it.  “I suppose you’re right,” he sighed.  “Just tell us your goddamned story and let’s get this over with,” he shouted to the bot. 

“Not much more to tell....at least, not the how of it,” the voice ground from the speakers.  It occurred to Arcade distantly that he really didn’t care if he ever heard the phrase “the how of it” ever again.  “Story begins with a package--yours and mine, Courier. Story ends with a package: the story of the town you built, the life you brought, the dreams you made, the way you showed.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Samara demanded.  “What was this package?”

“Something old, from a land long dead.  Old World technology, before the Great War.  Piece of equipment, with military markings on it....like that metal machine that follows you now.  When you brought it to the Divide, it started speaking...and the Divide answered back, in fire.  Codes, most like.  Military codes.  I was there, watching, waiting.  Learning.  I saw.  What it looks like when a dream finally dies.”  The eyebot’s speakers reverberated with bitterness.  “Why did you do it, Courier?  That’s what I’d like from you. Not that it matters. Or will matter.  Doubt there’s anything you could say that could lessen the power of the message you carried.  The message I’ll pass on.”

“And what message was that?” Arcade asked. 

Ulysses’s voice rolled back from the surrounding cliffs.  “That one can kill a nation.  That one can kill a dream, an idea.  That the strongest ideas are no match for a man or a woman who brings death at their heels.  This message I will bring home to the Mojave.”

“Cryptic bastard,” Arcade muttered under his breath.  He could see Samara standing still as if she didn’t recognize what she was hearing. “Look,” he called aloud again.  “So this town that you claim Samara killed--this town was your family?”

“Family?”  The crackling static voice seemed surprised. “No.  ‘Family’...that’s a word long dead.  Died at Dry Wells, died in Vulpes’s smile.  Not ‘family,’ shadow man: future.  One I never suspected existed, thought could not exist...and in the end, was proved right.  Would rather have been wrong.”

Arcade frowned, started to speak further, but Samara cut in.  “I don’t care!” she shouted at the bot.  “I don’t care about any of this!  All I care about is how to find you, you son of a bitch!  Where are you?  Where are you?!”

The machine hissed and spat more mechanical static.

“All right.  Done with words then, won’t get you where you need to go.  At the end of the Divide, through trenches, wreckage--that’s where you’ll find me.  Here amongst the Dead.  Keep your eyes on the tower that cuts the horizon.  You’ll find your way.  Made it this far; not much farther to go. I’ll see you there.  You.  The machine.  And your shadow man. Courier.”

A final burst of static like machine gun fire, and the eyebot chirped, the presence possessing it gone.

Samara made a sound between a snarl and a sob.  She looked for a moment as if she wanted to charge the eyebot and attack it with her fists; the small creature chirped nervously and retreated a bit.  Can’t blame it, Arcade thought sardonically.  He approached Samara.

“I’m going to kill him,” Samara choked.  Her eyes shone too brightly. “ I’m going to kill that son of a bitch, Arcade, I promise you, I’m going to kill him--”

Arcade laid his fingertips on her vambrace. “Samara, we can’t stay here,” he told her quietly.  “Come on.  We need to get moving.”

She pulled away.  “You bet we do,” she spat.  “We’re going to find that bastard, you hear me?  And when we do, he’s going to regret it.”  That low, guttural snarl came again, and her body tight with determination, she stalked to the edge of the roof.  Arcade followed, clutching his Ripper, uneasy.

[*]

 Samara crouched at the edge of the roof, studying her PIP-Boy intently.  Arcade knelt next to her.  The drop was dizzying.  He could feel air currents from below wafting up, brushing his face with sand and grit.

“They’re down there,” Samara murmured, her eyes fixed on the screen.  “Marked Men.”

Arcade shaded his eyes with his hand, squinting.  The building on which they stood was located at one end of a vast, giant ravine or cleft in the earth, demarcated by striated rock walls stretching up high above them, up to the sky.  Directly below them was an open space littered with chunks of massive skyscrapers, often several floors’ worth, embedded in the ground or fused into the rock walls somehow. The building chunks were strewn about in a haphazard array, like a child’s blocks.  Beyond the open space, the uneven walls of the ravine stretched into the distance, where, straining his eyes, Arcade could see that they seemed to dead-end in a distant rock face topped with a slim metal tower holding a blinking red beacon.

Keep your eyes on the tower that cuts the horizon, Arcade remembered, then cursed under his breath.  Now I’m hearing that asshole’s voice in my head too?

He dropped his eyes to the open space directly below him and saw what Samara had meant: there was a small gathering of those beehive-shaped stone huts below, and he could just make out the ant-like forms of Marked Men milling in and around those huts.  Behind the huts was a windbreak made of debris with -- Arcade’s blood ran cold -- a warhead lodged prominently in among the chunks of concrete and hunks of old signs.  Sweeping his eyes over the area, he saw another warhead nestled in the lee of a building to the left. 

Makes sense, he realized after a moment’s thought.  If the Marked Men really were a form of ghoul, then building their encampment around a warhead would be a good way to capitalize on the healing powers of its radiation.

“I see them,” he murmured in answer to Samara’s earlier comment, keeping his eyes on the milling dots below.  “Look like at least half a dozen, maybe more.  I don’t think they’ve noticed us yet.”

“They haven’t,” Samara murmured, her eyes still on her PIP-Boy.

“How do you want to play it?” he asked. “Do we go down there or--?”

He never got a chance to answer.   Samara lifted her eyes from the PIP-Boy screen and produced an olive-drab, boxy weapon from within her armor.  A flash of recognition raced through him.

“Samara, no, wait--“

She leveled the weapon and pulled the trigger.  A sizzling beam of light lanced out from the box, stabbing into the warhead embedded in the windbreak behind the camp.   Searing white light blinded him, and he felt the detonation tremble up through the bones of the tower to where they stood.  A moment later a second explosion smacked against his eardrums, and the tower shivered till he thought it would fall.  Then, silence.

Arcade remained still for a moment, blinking to clear the afterimages from his eyes.  Beside him, he could hear the sounds of Samara re-stowing the laser detonator within her armor, then drawing and loading Elijah’s LAER.  He was clenching his teeth so tightly he thought they might crack, and his hands were knotted into fists at his sides.  The eyebot whistled cheerily.

After what seemed like eternity, he drew a careful breath, then another. In a studiously neutral voice, he said, “They might have been friendly, you know.”

“They weren’t.”  Samara nodded at her PIP-Boy screen.  “This said so.”

“Did it.”  Arcade dug his fingernails into his palms.

“It did.” Samara turned.  “It looks like there’s a ramp down this way.  Let’s go.”

[*]

A fallen girder at one side of the roof formed a ramp down the side of the building.  The two of them cautiously picked their way down the beam--Arcade worrying that at any moment the beam would cave in under Samara’s titanic weight in her Powered Armor--and scrambled through a broken window into a trashed room with a stairwell set into the floor.  “Down there,” Samara nodded, and they started down the stairs, around and around and around.

White graffiti was splashed against the wall on one of the landings:

the Divide

Arcade frowned at the words.  White this time instead of red, he mused.  I wonder what it means. He glanced over at his companion, wanting to raise it with her, but she strode past the inscription without a second look.  Only a muscle in her throat tightened.  After a moment, Arcade sighed and followed her.

The stairs dead-opened into a C-shaped room--probably some kind of office complex in a past life, with joins from interior walls still visible on the walls and floors. The two of them stepped carefully around rusted shelves, through a jumble of desks and file cabinets--past a battered, fallen Nuka Cola machine and a couch tipped up against the wall, in what must have been a lounge space.  More broken out windows led to another girder ramp, which ended in a shattered building fragment with concrete steps down to the ground--and then, the two of them emerged into the smoking ruins of the Marked Men’s camp.

Here, down at ground level, Arcade found the scale of the destruction simply overwhelming. Huge chunks of skycrapers bulked up on all sides, many times higher than his head, looming like the wreckage of old ships’ hulls.  The grim rock walls of the Divide loomed higher still, stretching up seeming to forever.  Not a place built on the human scale, that’s for certain.

The ground in front of them, a level, rubble-covered plain that might once have been a parking lot or part of a street, was strewn with body parts, scattered around the remains of the Marked Man’s huts. The stench of burned flesh and decay filled the air.  Arcade could hear the clicking of the Geiger counter in Samara’s PIP-Boy as she strode out across the open ground, showing no reaction to the carnage around her.  She stopped in the center and bent her head, studying her PIP-Boy’s screen.  Arcade glanced sideways and his eye fell on a burned, bare skull.  One of Samara’s victims, he thought bitterly.  Then as he looked more closely, he saw the deep gouges and cut marks at the temples.

Not one of Samara’s victims at all.  He bit his lip.  There was only one reason to make those sorts of cutmarks on bone.  Arcade’s stomach lurched as he took in the implications, and he quickly looked away.

“We need to go straight,” Samara said tersely, gesturing ahead, past a looming skyscraper lying at a thirty-degree angle.   The eye-bot bobbed around her head.  “This way.”

She didn’t even see them, Arcade thought, glancing back at the mutilated remains. Sourly, muttering curses under his breath, he followed her.

She led him past a ruin of perhaps three shattered buildings to a place where the rock walls narrowed in to each other.  With no surprise, Arcade saw that another warhead was nestled right at the place where the walls met.  Samara stopped some distance away, withdrawing the laser detonator from within her armor.

Arcade drew a breath, carefully censoring himself.  “I suppose you’re going to detonate that one too?” he asked, his tone scrupulously neutral.

“Do you see any other way to keep going?” Arcade was perceptive enough to detect the edge of hostility in Samara’s voice.  Now is not the time, Arcade, she seemed to say.

“Fine,” he said, crossing his arms.  Samara turned away, dismissing him, and raised the weapon again.  Arcade shielded his eyes as the brilliant white light dawned before him, feeling the detonation press against his ears.  The ground shook, and he caught himself on the wall of rock beside him.

He raised his hand to shield his eyes and looked back to the road ahead.  A segment of building hanging precariously from a cliff in front of them swayed; then there was a cascade of boulders and the building went crashing to the ground with a dull roar.  In the distance where it landed, a cloud of dust rose.

Samara studied her PIP-Boy screen.  “Goddamnit,” she muttered under her breath.

“Problem?”

“I think that building is blocking the way ahead.”  She fiddled with the knobs for a moment.  “Okay,” she said at last.  “Let’s go.”

They forged ahead, between two jutting walls of rock, to emerge into a somewhat larger open space.  To the right was a two-story building with one corner collapsed, revealing the two floors in cutaway; ahead of them a solid wall of rubble loomed where the building had fallen. Checking her PIP-Boy again, Samara nodded to herself and then gestured to the right. 

“Over there,” she said.  “Around the rock wall, past the building.”

And yet again she went and Arcade followed, as the light grew dimmer and the sky darkened above.  Faint pangs of hunger were gnawing at him; he contemplated asking Samara if they could stop and rest for a bit...then glanced at her solid, unbending form and dismissed the idea.

They passed between more gigantic buildings lying on their sides, following a looping path until they came to another warhead embedded in solid rock.  Arcade didn’t even bother remonstrating with Samara this time; he just watched, silent and sullen, as she detonated this one too. 

Beyond it was a building, half-embedded in rock, with one wall fallen in.  Samara stepped through and into a darkened corridor that dead-ended in more rubble.  The corridor wall was shattered on one side, leaving a jagged gap.  Samara stopped there, gazing into the darkness beyond.

“What’s that?” Arcade asked.

Samara dropped her gaze to her PIP-Boy 3000 screen.  She fiddled with it a bit.

“The Cave of the Abaddon.”

[*]

They stepped beyond the wall into a small antechamber cut into the rock, lit by the remains of a fire in an old trash drum.  There was a short passage from the antechamber that Samara plunged through at once.  Arcade went after her....

And stopped, his breath caught in his throat.

Beyond the antechamber was an enormous, cathedralesque space, stretching up and up and up above their heads, with the other end of the cave--a vast distance away from them--lost in shadows.  The roof was composed of massive chunks of skyscrapers toppled like dominoes at odd angles, resting against each other to form a vaulting arch.  Shafts of sunlight worked their way through the fallen buildings above them, slanting down to the rubbled surface below and spreading a diffuse, mellow light through the huge empty space.  Motes of dust danced in the beams.

The ground slanted gradually away from them down to another fallen skyscraper whose face served as a floor; Arcade scraped his foot on the ground, dislodging a shower of rubble that echoed as it rolled down the slope.  The echoes whispered back to them dimly from the vast recesses of the cave. 

“My God,” Arcade murmured--somehow the size of the place seemed to command a reverent hush.  “This is incredible.  Samara, did you know this was here?”

She shook her head slowly, biting her lip.  Arcade turned, craning his neck and straining his eyes to make out details of the roof. 

“I wish you still had that camera Michelangelo gave you,” he murmured.  “You should take a picture.”

She shook her head. “We don’t have time.  Come on, we need to get through this.”

The two of them started down from the small ledge, the eyebot bobbing behind them.  As they traced a path between piles of rubble deeper into the depths of the cavern, Arcade winced at the sound of their footfalls echoing back to them.  He found himself almost instinctively trying to make as little noise as he could, so profound, so almost reverent was the hush.

Not that it did any good.  The clanking of Samara’s powered armor and the whining of its servos made Arcade want to cringe.  The noise carved a wide swath through the smooth stillness.  Worse, Samara didn’t seem to either notice or care about the assault her armor was mounting on the majestic silence; her eyes were stone white again, and her jaw was clenched as she forged ahead as if bulling her way through concrete.  Arcade desperately wanted to tell her to shush, but didn’t quite dare.

“Is there anything in here?” he asked her once, as they stopped near a huge concrete wall fallen sideways, jutting up like the prow of a ship.

Samara studied her PIP-Boy.  “I don’t know,” she murmured at last, frowning.  “It’s hard to tell--all the concrete, I guess maybe I’m not getting a clear signal.  Doesn’t matter.”  She looked up.  “If there’s anything in here, we’ll find out soon enough.”

They continued on past the fallen wall, past more piles of rubble. Arcade began to recognize medical debris; then, they came upon a fallen sign bearing a large medical cross.  Some kind of clinic?  Just then he spotted an Auto-Doc nestled against the base of a huge, fallen, sunken building, wedged into the rock and blocking off one end of the cavern.  A hospital, maybe?  He was about to mention it to Samara when she stopped so suddenly he almost bumped into her.

“What is--“ he started to ask, but she hushed him.  She had gone completely still, her head raised, poised on tiptoe, her entire body electric with tension.

“Up ahead,” she murmured back, so softly he could barely make out the words.  “I don’t think it’s seen us yet....”

“What’s seen us?” he asked.

Samara didn’t reply.  Slowly, she took her sniper rifle from her back.  It was a special weapon. Arcade had heard her call it the Gobi Campaign Scout Rifle; he had the vague idea that it was connected with Boone in some way, though how Samara had gotten it and why he permitted her to use it, he had no idea.  She raised the rifle to her eye.

“Boone, give me a hand,” he heard her mutter under her breath, and could not repress a reflexive wince at the words.  He couldn’t see what she was sighting; he held himself still, scarcely daring to breathe lest he interfere with her shot. 

The rifle cracked out--once, twice.  And a second later, he heard Samara hiss in victory. 

“Got her!’ she growled.

“What?” he asked in an undertone, reluctant to break the silence.

She lowered her rifle, returning it to her back; then glanced over at him with an odd lightness in her face; she seemed almost cheerful.  She jerked her head.  “Come on,” she said, and forged up a slow rise of rubble, headed unerringly in a straight line.  She stopped at the crest of one of those billowing waves, and Arcade followed, panting slightly.

“There,” she said, pointing toward the ground.

Lying on the ground before them was the largest Tunneler they had seen yet, perhaps twice as large as the ones that had swarmed them in the elevator on the way down.  One eye was  a bloody red ruin; the other was the size of a dinner plate, glowing faintly in the gloom. 

“It’s huge,” Arcade murmured.  A strange unease filled him.  “Why is this one so much larger than the others?”

Samara shrugged.  “Does it matter?  At least now we don’t have to fight it.”

As she knelt to check the large Tunneler for loot, Arcade let his eyes roam the area until he spotted an outcropping made of chunks of concrete, cemented together. They had seen something similar back in the Highway Overpass; Arcade frowned.

“Samara, look.” He pointed to the outcropping.  “I think it’s another one of those burrow things.”

Samara rose from her position beside the Tunneler and came forward.  Like the one they had seen previously, this outcropping had a large hole in it, so large that Arcade could not span it with his arms.  “Sure is big,” she commented.  “Do you think this is that Tunneler’s -- “

“Shh!”  Arcade cut her off with one suddenly upraised hand.  He thought he had caught the faintest of sounds, drifting upwards to him from the mouth of the burrow.

Samara fell silent instantly.  Noticing his fixed attentiveness, she tilted her head, listening too.  In the stillness, they could hear sounds: faint, clicking sounds, scratchings, rustlings, hisses, emanating from the darkness within the burrow.

“Something’s down there,” Arcade murmured.

“Damn right.”  From within her armor, Samara produced the flare gun they had gotten off the dead NCR trooper.  She popped a flare in the barrel, aimed it, and fired down into the mouth of the tunnel.  The red flare sailed down, a shining star.  The clicking, scratching sounds turned to growls, and panicked scrambles.  The light of the flare gun reflected off perhaps half a dozen rapidly retreating dark forms.

“Scattered them at least,” she said, glancing down at her screen.  “My PIP-Boy says this part doesn’t last too much longer; we should be out before they have a chance to regroup--“

“Samara, what’s that?” Arcade interrupted.  The concrete lip of the burrow was rough under his hands as he leaned forward, peering into the interior.

“What’s what?” She joined him.

Down below, the flare had come to rest, still sparkling.  The red light was shining off a multitude of round, shiny shapes, packed together on the floor of the burrow in rough rows.  The shapes were a glossy, dark green, the same as the tunnelers, and perhaps the size of a human head.  It took  Arcade a moment to figure out what he was seeing, but then he looked up at Samara and saw the same realization in her eyes.

“Eggs,” he said quietly.

Samara nodded, her face long.   “How many do you think there are?  Dozens?”

“Maybe. Maybe hundreds.”  He bit his lip.  “That big Tunneler you killed--I think it was a Tunneler Queen.”

The two of them stared down into the burrow, silently contemplating the huddled multitude of eggs below them.  A strange, cold unease was creeping down Arcade’s spine.  Somehow, that huge number of eggs down there bothered him.  He couldn’t say why, exactly, but he found his mind retracing the route they had taken from the Mojave....calculating distances, travel time.... attempting to estimate migration patterns, waves of advance....  He couldn’t guess what Samara was thinking, but she looked serious.

Her eyes met his.  As if an agreement had been spoken between them, Arcade rose to his feet and retreated from the mouth of the burrow, while Samara reached into her armor.  She pulled out of a couple of landmines, which she dropped down the burrow without arming.  The yellow, circular disks smacked into the middle of the egg mass.  Then, a bouquet of frag grenades emerged from inside her armor; she pulled the pins, tossed them after the landmines, rose to her feet and retreated rapidly.

...three....four....five....  Arcade counted under his breath, when a muffled explosion shook the rock under their feet.  Dirt, pebbles and chunks of rock drifted down from the ceiling, and a column of smoke rose from the mouth of the burrow.  After waiting for it to dissipate, Samara drew her flare gun again and approached.  She fired a shot down; Arcade, leaning over, saw the lurid red light reflecting off a sticky mess of smashed shells, embryotic fluid, and small blackish-green things that might have been tiny tunneler bodies.  

With an air of satisfaction, Samara returned her flare gun to her armor.  She straightened from the mouth of the burrow. 

“Come on,” she said, nodding in the direction they had been going.  She started off.  Arcade followed, wondering in his heart if they had done enough.

[*]

The lowest bank of windows on the building Arcade had speculated was a hospital was completely broken out; and past the Auto-Doc, the rubble heaped up into a small hill that rose to ground level of the nearest window.  They went inside, and up the slanting floor; a door led to another switchback metal staircase that shook and rang under Samara’s armored tread.  Arcade followed, with the eye-bot bobbing silently at their backs. 

i am all alone

was scrawled at the first landing, and under it, the word in all caps:

SMILE!

Arcade thought about pointing it out to Samara, but then dismissed the thought.  The eyebot chirped behind them.

At the top of the second landing, they stepped out into a long, L-shaped space that had probably been two rooms at one point, judging by the shattered remains of a wall between them. Arcade nodded to a door in one wall. 

“There?”

“There,” Samara confirmed.  Behind her, the eyebot whistled.  Samara pushed open the door and they stepped through the door and outside.

The orange-brown Divide sky arched above a flat open space that ended in a sheer, hundred foot drop-off.  The building’s roof, Arcade realized as his eyes made out details: the flat roof; the wind, the brown canyon wall across from them.. The eyebot gave another chirp--

And then again the familiar high-pitched whistle came, grating along Arcade’s nerves like broken glass.  He flinched involuntarily.

“You!” Samara raged, drawing her weapon. 

That piercing whistle came again, echoing across the vast open space surrounding them, and on the heels of it, that reverberating, booming voice.

“Thought that explosion, that building falling deep in the Divide, might have been your work--wouldn’t kill you, maybe close.  Perhaps your shadow man--but no.  Did you pull him through, I wonder?   Knew you’d survive--but no need to go any farther.  You’ve brought me what I need: that machine with you, sealed in the Hopewell silo.  Needed someone to unlock it, bring it home.  Now the signal’s strong enough, no need for you to carry it anymore.  I can call your machine to me.”

Call your machine--  Arcade glanced at Samara, and saw only confusion on her features.

“What--ED-E?” she demanded, speaking to the eyebot as if it could answer.    “What do you mean?”

Again, that screeching whistle, Ulysses’s booming voice--this time with a faint trace of surprise.  “You gave it a name.  What was it to you?  Companion?  Slave?  Weapon? Like your shadow man....all of that, nothing compared to its primary function.  It’s a messenger.  Like us--and it shares our history.”  Ulysses’s voice sharpened.  “If you feel its loss, remember--you could have turned away at any time.  Gone back home and none of this would have happened.  But you had to make one last delivery.  And that’s why I knew you’d come.  Courier.  Couldn’t stay away...it’s who you are.”

Samara was staring at the eyebot with baffled rage.  “What are you even talking about?”

“The machine you brought--it’s mine now.  It’s coming home.  I’ll reduce it to parts, just enough to function, to be aware of what’s happening.  What’s inside that machine, that’s all that mattered.  All the machines here, made of the wreckage from the Divide...and all that was brought here.  Inside its frame, it carries the message you brought here....and it’ll do what it was programmed to do: whatever it can to get home.  The giants here will listen to it.  I’ll bring the Divide to your home, your nation.  Let its flag burn, just like you let the Divide burn.”

The incomprehension on Samara’s face did not change; it was clear that whatever Ulysses had said had gone completely over her head.  Arcade, on the other hand, felt a cold, crystalline fear unfold in his chest; the implications of what Ulysses had said, and what he meant, burst on him with the clarity of a sunrise.  He means to do it, Arcade thought in a kind of numb horror.  He means to launch the missiles against the NCR...to punish Samara...for whatever he thinks she’s done to him...by destroying her home, just as he thinks she did his... And buried, darker, a flash of grim amusement:  If he thinks nuking the NCR will hurt Samara, he really doesn’t know her as well as he thinks.

“ED-E’s not yours!” Samara shouted at the eyebot.  “ED-E’s my friend! You can’t take him away--“

That whistling screech sounded again, and Ulysses’s voice: harsh, rasping, smug. 

“Big Mountain access code: Ulysses.  Command override: Navarro.”

The little bot shuddered.  Crackling sparks arced out from its frame shell, leaping over its round chassis.  It rose up above them, turned on its axis, and without so much as a parting whistle, shot over the edge of the building on which they stood, arrowing off, deeper into the Divide. Leaving them behind.

“ED-E!!!!”

Samara’s face went white. Arcade had seen healthier color on gut-stabbed victims.  She lunged forward after the bot, and Arcade’s breath caught in sudden terror, as he had a visual of her plunging right over the edge of the hotel roof.

“Samara!  No!”  Instinctively, if somewhat foolishly, Arcade grabbed her by the upper arm and threw his weight backward, trying to restrain her.  She could have thrown him around like a doll in her Powered Armor; there was no way he could have been able to hold her back, and she shouldn’t even have been able to feel his grip, but somehow she heeded him.  She jerked to a halt spasmodically. Her face was absolutely stricken. 

“ED-E!” The word was almost a sob.  “You bastard!  You bastard!  You son of a bitch, Ulysses!”  She yanked free of Arcade’s restraint and sank to her knees, rocking back and forth like an injured child. “You son of a bitch!  ED-E!  ED-E!”

Arcade knelt beside her, that churning fear still in his gut.  “Samara--“

“He took ED-E away!”  she practically sobbed.

“I know,” Arcade said, speaking gently--he was still afraid for her, though irritation stirred restlessly within him.  What am I, chopped liver?  “Samara, I know--but we can’t stay here.  We have to keep moving.  Look,” he said, pointing over the edge of the roof, where the bright lights of tracer bullets arced up over the edge.  She looked up at him blankly, with total incomprehension, and he cursed internally.    “See that?  We’ve been seen by the Marked Men down there.  We can’t stay here.  It’s not safe.  We have to move.  Samara.   Samara, please--“

He managed to get her on her feet, though that stricken expression did not leave her face.   She was reeling like a ship in high seas.  Arcade was half out of his mind himself just from seeing her distress; her white expression and obvious pain ran through his own gut like a knife.  Without thinking of what he was doing, he took her arm, trying to half-support, half-guide her.  Looking back on it later, he would shake his head at his own foolishness; in Powered Armor as she was, if she had tried to rest any of her weight on him, she would have squashed him flat. With effort, he managed to manuever her over to the edge of the roof, where he had seen a fallen girder leading down to the ground.  As he carefully helped guide her down it, he saw out of the corner of his eye that they were passing a billboard with the scrawled message:

LET IT ALL END

Any time now, he thought grimly.

His fingers closed around Samara’s rerebrace as he gently urged her downward.

 

Chapter Text

By the time they reached the ground, Samara had gained better control of herself.  Her face was still dreadfully white, but the stricken look had fled, replaced by a chilling silence.  Her lips were compressed into a thin line like the slash of a wound, and her eyes... Arcade couldn’t meet them.

She jerked away from him, with enough force to make him reel.  He flinched and stepped back, raising his hands, but she didn’t spare him a glance.  She took her LAER rifle from her back.  There was a terrible purpose in her face as she checked the load and raised it to carrying position. She glanced at her PIP-Boy 3000, before striding out into the ruins around them, each step ringing like the fall of doom.

Arcade glanced up the girder one last time.  He thought about just leaving.  He thought about trying to fight his way back.  Thought about tunnelers and Marked Men.  About Samara.   He looked at her retreating back.  Cursed, and went after her.

[*]

They stepped off the girder into a vast, empty, open plain, bounded on one side by a toppled fragment of highway overpass, as strong and solid as any brick wall, and on the other side by more shattered buildings.  Arcade realized distantly he was getting very tired of constantly being surrounded by the wreckage of massive buildings; he didn’t care for the feeling of diminuition that came with it.  He mused about such things, as they strode onward, in order to keep from thinking about Samara.

The icy distance had settled on her again.  She was totally silent, striding forward among the wreckage, checking her PIP-Boy 3000 occasionally, always keeping her rifle at the ready.  In her face, Arcade fancied he could see the dim, obscured outines of the madness he had seen in her earlier, at the top of the elevator shaft.  As they made their way among the ruins, Arcade found his mind circling the question of how sane, how much in control, she really was.  He tried to push the question away, along with the twisting fear in his gut, and just concentrate on following her. Just following her.

Ulysses’s last communication spurred him on.  Arcade didn’t know if Samara had caught the implications, but to him they had been all too clear: Ulysses had said he was planning on launching missiles at the NCR, the place he seemed to think Samara had come from.  Who knows, he may even be right, Arcade mused, though Samara doesn’t seem to think so, or care. The thought of a missile crashing down into one of the NCR’s tightly packed population centers such as the Hub turned Arcade’s blood to ice water; his traitor mind presented him too effortlessly with images of the masses of casualties such a strike would entail.  If we don’t get there in time--  His hands clenched on his Plasma Defender. 

He could have raised the issue with Samara--but one look at her white face, her stony eyes, silenced him. 

The slow pace of their journey was maddening.  It seemed to Arcade’s anxieties as if Samara was almost purposefully dawdling, though he knew intellectually that she was as eager as himself if not more so to see the journey’s end.  They moved throughout the empty, open space as the shadows crept further across the ground and the sun sank further toward the horizon.  Their surroundings were so vast that it looked as if they were making no progress at all, until Arcade might have screamed in frustration. His mind was consumed with thoughts of Ulysses and the danger he represented, and any delay at all felt almost intolerable.

He couldn’t have said how long they’d been walking--surely a couple of hours, at least--when they came to a sort of archway formed by one of the fallen highway’s supports, where it joined the curving road. The air here felt wet, humid, and beyond it, Arcade could hear the roaring of what sounded like a waterfall.  They passed under the arch to see a small clear space with a large pool, formed by an outflowing of murky water from a pipe several stories up in the solid rock background.  The dark space of a cave could be seen on the pool’s shore. And splashing in the pool--

“Deathclaws!”

Samara’s warning shout startled him badly; he realized later that he had been shocked to hear it without the eye-bot’s threat cue.  But he had no time to ponder it then because charging directly toward him were two massive walls of scaly, clawed flesh.

Sheer fright engulfed him--the Deathclaws were larger, their horns, their claws, longer, than anything he’d ever seen.  And so fast--!  In the time it had taken him to blink, the Deathclaws had already covered half the distance from the pool to their standpoint.

Samara raised her LAER and fired, screaming.  Blue light lanced from her LAER to strike the Deathclaw’s hip. It staggered a moment--and he saw Samara’s eyes widen as the Deathclaw kept right on charging.

It didn’t slow down--!  The fright deepened into something close to panic.  She hit that thing with her LAER and didn’t even stagger it--  His Plasma Defender felt light and useless in his hands.

“Run!  Arcade, run!” he heard Samara shouting frantically; he heard her LAER discharge again and again.  The second Deathclaw had broken off from the first and was coming straight for him.

Too fast--no way I can outdistance it--  With a split second to decide, Arcade turned and dashed straight for the wall of the fallen freeway overpass. He heard the Deathclaw roar behind him; its claws whistled through the air.  Fear seemed to lend wings to his feet.  He didn’t bother to slow down, but pushed himself off the wall with his hands, running straight along the side of it and for the rock face bordering the pool.  The Deathclaw bellowed in fury, its claws pounding the earth; he felt hot air on the back of his neck and then there was a sudden tremendous bang followed by a howl of rage and pain.

Right into one of the freeway struts--  He shot a glance over his shoulder and saw the creature back on its heels, shaking its head dizzily for a moment; then it gathered itself and charged again.  Claws raked the air above his head; he dodged instinctively toward the overpass wall.  The Deathclaw’s blow missed him by inches and smashed into the concrete, knocking out chunks; Arcade felt a small piece bounce off the back of his armor.  Faster, dammit!   He cursed, and put on a burst of speed.  His armor seemed to weigh him down like chains.  In the background he heard Samara screaming still, and then paired explosions.  Frag grenades?  The sound of her screaming froze his heart, but he couldn’t stop to look back.

His armored boots splashed into the shallow water at the pool’s edge, and right on his heels he heard the larger splashes of the Deathclaw bounding after him.  Water droplets spattered him from behind.  More explosions came from his right and he heard a gigantic bellow.  She scored a hit at least--

The dark opening in the rock wall loomed ahead.  Arcade skidded, altering his course, and on a wild gamble, made straight for the cave mouth, hoping that he might be able to lose his pursuer in there--find a passage too small for it to fit into. He bounded up out of the pool and over the lip of the cave, straight into the darkness.

Coolness closed over him at once, and the dark dazzled his eyes, but Arcade didn’t dare stop; he ran, his feet ringing off the rock flooring, until they tangled in something and he went sprawling to the floor, banging his chin hard.   He tasted panic like blood.  Scrambling, he flung himself over on his back, raising his Plasma Defender though he knew it was hopeless, the weapon would be like a BB gun against the Deathclaw.  He braced himself to see the monster looming above him--

There was nothing. 

What--?

His veins still bright with fear, Arcade picked himself up off the ground, weapon at the ready.  He was trembling with reaction.  His eyes were adjusting now; he was in a long passage with a wider area of darkness off to the right that might have been another passage or might have been just an exceptionally deep alcove. 

The mouth of the cave was a brilliant triangle against the darkness; in the center of that triangle, he could see the Deathclaw that had recently been pursuing him.  It was snarling, swishing its tail back and forth and gnashing its teeth, but it came no closer; just waited there, glowering.

I was right.  It can’t fit in here, was Arcade’s first thought.  But as he took in the dimensions of the place, he could see that didn’t seem to be the case; while not the cathedral-esque space of the Cave of the Abaddon, there was still enough room for the creature.  It growled and raked its claws through the air.  Then why is it not....

It wasn’t coming in, he realized, because something was keeping it out.

 It wasn’t coming in because there was something in here...

...that it was afraid of.

Afraid?  But what could make a Deathclaw--

“RAWWRRRRRR!!!!!!”

Arcade almost jumped out of his skin as, charging out of the dark passage to the side, came the largest Deathclaw he had ever seen in his life.  The creature roared again, stretching up and up above him, and the sound filled his eardrums.  Its long, curving horns were dark black, signifying age and dominance, and it lunged at him faster than should be at all possible for something that large.

Shit--!  Shit--!  Shit--!  His Plasma Defender would be nothing more than a peashooter against that thing.  Can’t go forward--  He turned and ran the only way open to him: deeper into the cave, praying all the while that nothing worse would be lurking down there.

“RAWWWRRR!!!!”  That titanic bellow came again, filling his ears, filling the space of the tunnel all around him.  He could hear the scuffling of Deathclaw claws on rock as it came after him.  Muted explosions echoed through the tunnel--more of Samara’s frag grenades?--and the barest tip of a talon grazed the back of his armor.  He lunged to the side, but too late: the next blow struck him on the shoulder and staggered him.  He reeled into the side wall, and talons clanged off his helmet.  Spots burst before his eyes.  Shit---!  Panic was filling him, crowding his thoughts.  Another powerful blow threw him to the ground, and searing agony sliced into his thigh.  He thrashed onto his back to catch sight of the Deathclaw, towering above him, its pale eyes shining and drool dripping from between its teeth.  It drew back its claws--

“Arcade!  Arcade!” He could have wept, forit was Samara’s voice, screaming, shrill with rage. He couldn’t see her, but blue fire sizzled across his vision that he recognized as bolts from her LAER. It struck the Deathclaw--Rawr?--in the flank.  The monster recoiled, its head drawing back and then swinging over to the direction the laser fire had come from.  With a snarl, it wrenched away from Arcade, raising itself to its full height, spreading its claws wide.

Samara--  The pain in his leg was burning, burning, making it hard for him to think.  Miraculously he had retained his Plasma Defender, useless as he knew it was; he started to raise it when another detonation echoed through the cave, so close that his ears rang with the explosion.  All sound died.  He saw the Deathclaw open its mouth in a growl, saw it lunging forward, but heard nothing.

But he felt something.  A distant vibration, almost a shaking, that was being transmitted to him through the rock on which he lay.  Shivers were running up into his body, hard enough to rattle his teeth.  Spatters of gravel were falling from the roof, bouncing off his helmet, his armor, followed by pebbles, then stones.  A rock the size of a fist smashed to the ground, missing him by an inch. 

Cave-in--!

The Deathclaw paused, raising its head uncertainly, and then the roof gave out entirely.  An avalanche of stones smashed down on and around it and Arcade, and the floor beneath him pitched like an earthquake.  Then a massive impact jarred against his helmet and blackness descended on him.

[*]

 Some time later, Arcade awoke to darkness.

He was surrounded by what at first appeared to be inky night, so dark that he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or closed.  Where am I?  Am I blind?  Maybe he was back in the Lucky 38, he thought feverishly; the casino suite had no windows, and could be as dark as a tomb with all the lights turned off.  The Lucky 38’s guest bedroom....

But he couldn’t hear the breathing and noises of Samara’s other companions, and the surface under him was hard, not soft. 

He tried to sit up, experimentally, only to be greeted with a bright flare of pain in his left leg.  Sheer white agony lanced along the limb, and Arcade bit back a scream.  What...am I injured?  His mind cast around for possibilities.  Maybe he had been wounded and Samara had brought him to this place, wherever here was.  But why hadn’t she used a stimpak on him? And how had he been wounded in the first place?  Legion? Fiends? Cazadores?  Deathclaws--

Deathclaws.

Memory came back to him then, of the huge Deathclaw rearing up above him, of the cave-in, Samara’s shouts--Samara!  Urgent fear spiked through him; unthinking, he tried to stand, only to be greeted by a monstrous bolt of pain as he tried to put weight on his injured leg.  It folded under him, and he couldn’t suppress a cry as he collapsed heavily to the ground; he lay there, shivering and moaning weakly, as the wave of pain slowly receded.

All right.  Standing’s out.  His breath came hard.  His own cries were ringing in his ears, and as he remembered the momentary deafness that had come after the explosion earlier, he realized it must have subsided.  At least my ear drums aren’t broken, he thought with what would have been, under different circumstances, a sardonic inflection.  Small favors.....

He put his hand to the compartment where he kept his chems, locating it by touch in the dark--but when he reached into it, his fingertips met shards of broken glass.  What--? he thought, and then as memory returned, he slumped back in defeat. 

The village of the Marked Men.  He almost wept.  He’d given away almost all of his chems there, keeping only a dose of Med-X and one of Jet, and the broken shards in his armor compartment gave evidence that they hadn’t survived the fight with the Deathclaw.  He could have kicked himself in fury.  You stupid fool, why didn’t you at least ask Samara for more chems? She carries a veritable pharmacy in that Powered Armor of hers, she’d have given you some....

Samara....  Again that numbing fear came over him, and he swallowed, hard, trying to control himself. She must be alive.  She has to be alive, he thought, unable to face the other possibility.  No.  Don’t think about it now.  Focus.  Like triage, he told himself, panting slightly.  Find the most immediate problem.

He tried to concentrate, but the pain in his leg drilled into him.  What was the most immediate problem?  He couldn’t think....  He pushed weakly at the ground, trying to turn over, but his limbs seemed to have turned to water; he only managed to heave himself onto his side...and then felt something digging into him.  Something....something.... his mind was hazy....  Then it came to him.

Lily.

His mind went back to the evening Samara and he had left the Lucky 38--God, it seemed a lifetime ago already.  Lily had met him in the elevator room, had handed him a knitted scarf, and wrapped inside the scarf had been--

Cookies.  Lily’s cookies.

His hands were trembling as he dug into his armor, fumbling with the straps, until his fingers brushed the texture of knitted wool.  He pulled the wrapped package out, extricating it by touch, and unwound the scarf with shaking hands.  The cookies spilled out onto the ground.  Arcade slid his hands along the floor, groping until he came on one of the flat rounds; he took a bite out of it.  The cookie was rock hard and tasted of sugar and grit with a strange, medicinal undertaste.  He swallowed it down, shaking, and then waited.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the pain in his leg began to subside.  A comforting wave of strength flowed into him, and his mind cleared; his thoughts sharpened.  He recognized the effects as a potent cocktail of chems-- Buffout, Med-X and Jet, he had to guess. He tried to get to his feet again, but his leg was too weak; he couldn’t even stand this time.  No Hydra, apparently.  He could tell, by the effects of the chems, that he hadn’t received anything like a full dose; and suspected that some of the active substances had been rendered inert by the cooking process.  Still, it was a long way better than nothing, and Arcade thought in a burst of gratitude that he could have kissed the old Nightkin.

He was feeling along the floor, searching for the remainder of the half-dozen cookies Lily had given him, when he noticed a strange bluish tinge bleeding into the edges of his vision.  Outlines began to swim at him out of the darkness.   It took him a moment to recognize the effect, because he’d never experienced it before, but something he had heard Samara say once swam into his murky consciousness and he realized what it was:  Cateye.

Thank you, Lily.  Thank God.

He blinked several times, trying to clear his eyes of grit and accustom himself to his new sight.  He had no idea how long the effect would last, so he tried to quickly take stock of his surroundings.

At once, he realized what a miracle it was that he hadn’t been crushed in the cave-in.  He was lying in a small space pressed up against one side of the rock wall, and the only reason that he hadn’t borne the brunt of tons of rock was that a huge slab of what appeared to be concrete had fallen at an angle above him, one end braced against the wall, the other on the floor perhaps three feet away.  Even if he had been physically able to stand, he couldn’t have straightened to his full height; the space in which he sheltered was small enough that he could reach up and touch the slab of his roof.

A groaning noise came from the rock above him.  A thin trickle of dust sifted down from the place where the slab rested against the rock wall.  The slab seemed to visibly shiver as the wreckage shifted.

I’ve got to move.

One end of the space defined by the slab was sealed with rock; but the other end was open, and his Cateye-enhanced vision seemed to make out a wider, open space beyond it.  There, he thought.  Have to go there.  Fumbling in the dust, he located perhaps three or four more of the cookies he’d dropped; the wreckage above him was creaking and groaning, and he didn’t dare take too much time.  Stuffing them back inside his armor, he gritted his teeth, gathering his strength, then pushed to his hands and knees. The delicate web of numbness that had stretched over his senses wavered, and his leg flashed at him in a strange, sick way--Arcade deliberately tried to avoid thinking of how seriously injured he was; he couldn’t deal with it yet--but the pain remained below the surface of his consciousness, and that was all he could ask for.  He drew a breath, and then, trailing his injured leg, began to crawl.  

It seemed to take years.  Despite what additional strength Lily’s Buff-out laced cookies had given him, his limbs were weak and his joints unsteady; his arms in particular kept wanting to collapse on him.  He would crawl a few steps, then pause and lean against the wall, catching his breath and bracing himself.  A few steps more.  Pause.  Breathe.  A few steps.... His injured leg flashed again, and he felt something trickling down the outside of his thigh; he sank his teeth into his lip, guessing he was bleeding but unable to do anything about it right now.  His emergency medical training floated into his hazy mind:  Safety before treatment. 

After a few steps his hand came down on something light and plastic-feeling.  Looking down at it, he realized he was seeing his worthless Plasma Defender, apparently lying where it had been dropped when the cave-in hit.  Mirabile visu, it’s undamaged. Balancing laboriously on one hand, he picked it up with the other and, fumbling a bit, managed to slide it back into its holster at his hip, then started on his agonizing, slow journey again.  When he finally made it clear of the end of the slab, he collapsed onto the floor for a moment.  He lay there shivering, trying to get his breath back.  It seemed like eternity before he gathered enough strength to go on. 

His blue-enhanced sight was fading; he dug out another of Lily’s cookies from within his armor and took a bite.  His throat was dry and choked with dust, and he realized he was tremendously thirsty.  Blood loss, he thought grimly.  Fumbling at his waist, he managed to locate an unbroken bottle of purified water, and while waiting for the effect of the chems to kick in, he gulped it down, spilling perhaps a third down his armor in his haste.  Eventually he felt a bit stronger.

He tried to sit up but his head swam and he pressed himself back to the rock, waiting for the dizziness to subside and simply trying to breathe. The blue tinge was creeping back into his vision and he felt his pupils dilating as the Cateye kicked in.  Slowly he pushed himself to his hands and knees. 

He had emerged from under the slab into a chamber, maybe twenty feet in width and twice that long, dead-ending in a blank rock wall.  He estimated that the chamber would be twice his height; the left-hand wall rose to about six feet and then stepped back, forming a shelf of rock.  On his right, the wall went straight up to the rock ceiling.  A slight breeze whispered past his cheek, and it took Arcade a moment to realize what that meant: there was some opening to the outside. Enough, at least to provide him with fresh air.

But just because air can get in doesn’t mean I can get out.  Laboriously turning to check behind him, he saw that the other end of the chamber appeared to be completely sealed; the fall of rock of rock earlier had filled the passage with tons of rubble.

Forget it.  Not important right now. Triage.  First things first, he reminded himself, grimly.  You need to get further away from that rock slab.  Drawing a breath to prepare himself, he lurched into motion. 

He’d crawled perhaps half a dozen yards before his hand came down on something cylindrical that slid out from underneath him, throwing him to the ground again; his chin banged hard on the rock, and he bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood.  Bright lights flashed before his eyes.  When his vision cleared though, he realized he’d been in luck.

His hand had landed on a human femur bone.  Pushing himself up on his arms, he realized he was looking at a small camp of sorts.  A single human skeleton lay in the corner between the floor and the wall.  Beyond it was a dufflebag that Arcade recognized as NCR issue, a pile of wooden sticks contained in an old tire--a campfire--and a small round metal and glass shape that he had to touch to realize it was a camp lantern.

Light--

His Cateye induced vision was starting to fade again; Arcade pawed at the lantern until he found the switch, then, holding his breath, flipped it on.  Light spilled out from the lantern, bright enough to dazzle his eyes; Arcade squinted and looked off to the dark recesses of the chamber until the dazzle fled.  

The lantern cast a small pool of yellow light over the immediate environs, throwing forbidding shadows into the corners.  Strange, uneasy rumbles and mutterings drifted to his ears, coming from the rock shelter he had just vacated.  The whole effect was eerie, sinister; in his exhausted, injured, half-delirious state, the rumbles and mutterings could have been the ghostly voices of all those who had perished in the Divide. 

Panting, Arcade managed to raise himself to a sitting position.  He was shivering uncontrollably, feeling chilled right down to the bone, and so thirsty he could barely think; he got the cap off another bottle of Purified Water and swallowed the whole thing down.  He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, waiting until a wave of dizziness passed.  Fatigue and pain dragged at him. His thoughts were growing fuzzy again, indistinct as if they were wrapped in fog. Something....something I’m supposed to do...what was it?

The trickling sensation down his thigh brought him back to himself.   Leg.  Injured leg.  Deathclaw... The thoughts drifted through his head, and he shook himself, forcing his eyes open.

What...what to do...first...Assess the wound.  He felt light-headed; it was hard to concentrate.  He steeled himself and glanced down at the leg.

Not good, was his first thought.  The wound was open, bright red meat showing through the blood-soaked fabric.  The Deathclaw’s talons had sliced right through his armor like cheesecloth, leaving a meandering scrawl at least six inches long down the outside of his thigh ending just above his knee: shallow at first, but then deepening to a gaping, ugly mouth.  Thick dark blood was flowing sluggishly from the wound; it had caked the leg of his armor, stiffening the kevlar fabric and turning it nearly black, and his entire lower leg was streaked with gore.  How it missed the femoral artery....

Another wave of dizziness overcame him and Arcade leaned his head back against the wall again until it passed.  Shit.  Shit. Shit....  More blood was trickling down the outside of his thigh.  Arcade couldn’t even estimate how much he’d lost.

He couldn’t reach the pressure point in his groin through his armor and he could feel that he was weak enough that divesting himself of the entire harness would be beyond his capabilities.  He cast about vaguely, and his eyes fell on the NCR dufflebag beside him. He reached for the bag with numb, feeble hands.  His fingers didn’t seem to be working right as he pawed at the zipper.  He managed to get it open, and slowly, painfully searched inside, hoping for stimpaks, chems, hell, maybe a field dressing; but there was no such luck.  All that met his eyes was a combat knife, a bottle of whiskey, a holotape and a few ruined books, probably field manuals or some such thing.   Damn. Damn.  Damn.... He slumped back in defeat.

At least there was whiskey; Arcade fumbled the cap off the bottle and took a gulp.  The burn seemed to affect him like a slap, briefly clearing some of the mist from his brain; the shaking of his hands steadied. He groped at his hip for his Plasma Defender. It seemed to take him forever to draw it, and even more so to change it to continuous fire, lowest setting.  The light little pistol seemed to have tripled in weight.   Squinting clumsily, he aimed it at the fire the dead NCR Trooper had so considerately laid in the tire-hearth.  The dry wood crackled merrily to life as he pulled the trigger.  Arcade poured some of the whiskey over the blade of the combat knife, then laid it in the flames.  He sat back again, soaking in the heat: the cold rock under and behind him seemed as if it were leaching the warmth from his body, and the fire felt wonderful.

While he waited, he used the time to devour another of Lily’s cookies, and to take a few more gulps of the whiskey. Not that either of those things will help much, he thought grimly.  The knife blade began to smoke.  Arcade stared at it.  He knew what he would have to do, but part of him quailed at the thought.  His leg was thick with pulsing agony.  Blood was continuing to ooze down the limb.

“Fuck it,” he muttered distantly.  Can’t put it off any longer.

He took a final gulp of whiskey to fortify himself, then braced himself against the rock wall and drew a breath. He took the chin strap of his helmet in his teeth.  It tasted like leather and sweat.  Another breath.  Two.  His heart was pounding; he swallowed, trying for calm.  Then, before he could lose his nerve, he seized the combat knife and laid it against the wound in his thigh.

Pain blossomed out to fill his entire world.  His head banged against the wall behind him and his teeth sank into the leather in his mouth; it wasn’t enough, and the cave walls rang with echoes of his strangled scream.  The sickly sweet smell of his own burning flesh filled his nostrils, overwhelming the metallic tang of blood.  Arcade’s fingers spasmed on the grip of the knife; it fell from his hand to clatter on the floor.

He ground his teeth into his chin strap, panting heavily.  The world around him was fading in and out; all he could feel, all he could concentrate on, was the searing pain burning into his leg, a knot of bright, brilliant agony. It seemed forever before the pain receded enough that he could think again.  He forced himself to look down at the wound: the surface of the wound was an angry-looking red and white, but there was no blood at least.  He’d managed to stop the bleeding.

But he was only half done. Even without the burn, Deathclaw wounds had a nasty tendency to fester, he knew.  His hands--his entire body--were numb except for the bright metal pain in his leg.  He was cold with fear.  Digging his teeth deeper into the helmet chin strap, breathing hard, he seized the whiskey bottle by the neck and upended the thing over the savage, angry weal.

Liquid fire rolled up his leg, and he screamed again, even louder, biting the chin strap to his helmet in two.  Gray fog rose to obscure his vision, and for a time, he blanked out.

[*]

When he came back to himself, he felt a little better.  His head felt clearer, not as if it were about to float off his shoulders. His leg still hurt--well, “hurt” was too mild a term; his leg felt as if it had been filled with molten iron--but the screaming agony that had taken him when he had laid the knife against the wound had receded.

He had no idea how long he’d been out.  His wrist chronometer was broken.  The facing over the display was cracked and the chronometer itself read a flickering 34:76; he grimaced in disgust.  Useless.  The fire had burnt itself down to embers, a bed of softly glowing coals, but the warmth it gave off had seeped into the air; the cave was, if anything, perhaps too warm.

He realized he was tremendously thirsty, and drank half a bottle of Purified Water, then forced himself to stop and put it to one side.  He knew that the Followers’ instructions in survival situations were not to ration water--to drink all the water you needed, and to worry about finding more later--but in this case, Arcade thought grimly, it was clear that “finding more water later” was out of the question.  Even if he hadn’t had a serious leg wound -- he checked it and saw the scar was still an angry red color, but at least there had been no more blood -- he was trapped in a cave sealed behind tons of rock.  The leg alone meant he wasn’t going to be going anywhere under his own power anytime soon, and the rockfall--

He exhaled and bent his head forward, rubbing his closed eyes.

I am in so much trouble here.

His helmet had fallen off; he pushed it to one side, laid his head back against the rock wall, and tried to take stock of his situation.  His leg was a burning, heavy pulse; he did his best to ignore it.  Think, he told himself.  Where are you?  What’s happening?

Slowly, he ticked off his conditions in his mind.   He was in a cave, the mouth sealed by a rock fall.  He could still feel the breeze against his face; fresh air was getting in somewhere, but from his location, he could not see anything that looked like an exit. His leg was severely wounded and he could not walk. He had managed to get the bleeding stopped, but he was still incapacitated--and if I manage to avoid infection, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle, he thought glumly.  He had limited supplies of food and water.  He had no chems, no stimpaks, no healing aids; and once both the fire and the lantern burned out, he would have no light. 

Samara....

If Samara found him, he’d make it.  As bad as his leg was, there was no doubt in his mind that a stimpak could heal it; and Samara had water and food, chems and weapons.  If Samara finds me....  But he had no idea if Samara was even alive.

When he thought about it realistically, he had to admit that the odds were very good that Samara had either been killed in the cave-in herself or else fallen to--to Rawr, he thought, picturing the giant Deathclaw.  She shot it with her LAER and it didn’t even flinch. Counting on her to survive is, as they say in New Vegas, a “sucker’s bet.”  Hell, even if she did survive, it’s entirely possible she’s in the same predicament: severely wounded, trapped, unable to move....

All of that was perfectly logical, of course, certainly possible--hell, even probable.  It made perfect sense except for one thing: Arcade just couldn’t make himself believe it.  Whenever he steeled himself to picture Samara lying dead, her skull crushed under a rock, or gutted by Rawr, some part of himself kept interposing a different image: the canopic jars, back in the bowels of Big Mountain, holding her brain, her heart, her spine--and Samara herself, whole and healthy, alive.  Having her goddamned internal organs cut out didn’t kill her, argued a deep, irrational, stubborn part of himself--his id, he supposed.  If that didn’t kill her, how on earth is a Deathclaw supposed to do her in?

Arcade groaned and passed a hand over his eyes.  He couldn’t believe it.  No matter how hard he tried.  He just couldn’t.  If the entire world collapsed into ruin, there would still be Samara’s bulky, Power-Armored form standing upright among the wreckage.

And besides...you’d know it if she were dead.  You’d feel it.   Total nonsense, of course--but that stubborn, childlike part of himself insisted it was true.

Fine.  He gave up.  All right.  Samara’s alive.  Now what?

His leg ground at him. Arcade shifted position, trying futilely to ease it a bit.  Even if Samara was alive, he thought dismally, he was trapped on the opposite side of a ten-foot-thick rock wall from her.  It didn’t follow that she either knew he was alive, or could get to him if she did. 

Or if she would even try, another, traitor part of himself whispered.

Arcade frowned.  He thought about Samara’s rage during their rooftop conversations with Ulysses.  About the icy coldness that had come to surround her as they traveled deeper into the Divide.  Of the contours of lowering insanity he had seen emerging in her face as they neared the end of their quest. It occurred to him with disturbing plausibility that Samara might very well decide the best thing to do was cut her losses and continue on, to the final confrontation with Ulysses.

“No, no,” he muttered restlessly, rubbing at his head.  He waited for his id to speak up and insist otherwise--but there was nothing, except a low feeling of bleak assent.

No.  She’d come back for me.  Look at--look at how she acted with the eyebot.

With the eyebot.  Not with you.  And Ulysses has the eyebot now.

The light from the glowing embers flickered on the walls.  As Arcade stared at the moving shadows, a black despair seemed to seep into him.  He realized suddenly that he was near tears.

She’s not coming for me.

He rubbed at his temples.  He was so tired. Pain ground at him from his leg.  At last, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep.  Perhaps things will look better after some rest.

[*]

When he woke again, things did not look any better. 

The fire had almost completely burned out in the little fire ring; Arcade dug into the duffle bag and threw some more ruined books on the embers.  It flared up again, giving off an acrid stench, but he knew that he did not have enough fuel to keep it going for long.  He took a few more swallows of Purified Water, then set the bottle aside; he only had two more bottles after this.

So thirsty, he thought distantly.

His leg was still painful, and when he checked on it, he did not like what he saw. It was hard to tell in the light from fire and lantern, but he thought the leg was slightly more swollen, and the burn site was beginning to turn a yellowish color.  He drew a breath, then deliberately put it from his mind.  Not a damned thing I can do about it.

Time passed.  The lantern grew dimmer.  He waited, but Samara did not come.

He realized he was beginning to feel cold, even with the heat of the fire; he wrapped his arms around himself and gazed into the embers, thinking of her.  The question, he thought with mordant humor, was what it added up to: his seemingly endless frustration with her, coupled with his grudging acknowledgement and sneaking admiration of her presence and combat prowess; his resentment of the fact that she had captured the heart of a man he wanted and could not have; his horror and wrenching, desperate pity at what had been done to her; his deep wariness of her potential for violence and pathologically obsessive tendencies.  He wondered what she thought of him.  If she thinks of me, that is.  He wasn’t sure how capable Samara was of seeing or registering anything outside her narrow area of focus. She seemed to experience some sort of affection, possibly fondness for him; she allowed him to see sides of herself that he suspected even Boone had not seen....

She knows about my Enclave background.  That was something he had never told anybody before.  She knew...and she hadn’t rejected him, hadn’t turned against him. 

What was that worth?  What did it mean?   Was he anything more to her than a simple vade mecum?

“Ah, hell, I dunno,” he muttered aloud.  He flung himself backward on the rock floor, draping one arm over his eyes.  In any case, it soon wouldn’t matter one way or the other, he thought blackly.  His leg ached and throbbed, a live wire in his mind.

He tried to sleep as much as possible; sleeping gave him some relief from the tedious present of pain that just went on and on.  It was strange to think of it that way, but he had never realized before just how monotonous pain could be.  It was always there, a grinding drone that flared to agony if he moved the wrong way or jarred his leg somehow.

He slept and woke, slept and woke; without his chronometer, he had no means of telling how much time had passed.  The fire burned down and the supply of ruined books diminished.  Somehow he was down to one bottle of purified water, though he couldn’t remember drinking the rest of them.  He was cold now, all the time; no matter how close to the hearth he pressed, he shivered uncontrollably.  Somewhere there was something he should be worried about, something to do with missiles, or perhaps -- her name eluded him at the moment, but he remembered her eyes, her stone-white eyes -- but he couldn’t recall what and in any case, it didn’t seem important.

By now, he could no longer deny it: his leg had festered.  Septicemia, whispered some part of his mind that was still functional, under the web of pain and thirst.  It had swollen hugely; the site of the burn--but wait, I thought it was a Deathclaw?--was weeping pus, and the leg was so painful that even the pressure of his armor on it was agony.  Red streaks were radiating outward from the injury, up his limb to his groin and when he leaned over it, he caught the sickish, bland smell of infection. Arcade tried to fumble with the straps on his leg armor, but his hands were weak as water and even touching his leg hurt; he lay back, exhausted, closing his eyes.  He was almost out of water now; there were only a few swallows remaining in one bottle and the others were bone dry.  His mind drifted aimlessly. 

He was in the Mojave again, feeling the sun on his face, seeing the rusted, corrugated shack where he and his mother had come after they had moved from the NCR.  His mother was there, outside, his mind suggested, working in the garden.  Tall green stalks of maize towered over the fence railings, and she smiled as he approached her.

“Arcade,” she said warmly.  “How was school with the Followers today?”

“Fine, Mother.” He went to her and let her embrace him, but there was a cold uneasiness in his stomach.  “Mother, I heard something today, from the other kids.  Something about--“  He drew a breath. “The Enclave.”

His mother stopped and put down the rake.  “Well? What is it, Arcade?”

“They were talking about ... something called Mariposa.  And Vault 13.”  He saw the shock of recognition in his mother’s eyes; the chill in his gut intensified.  “They said--“

“What did they say, Arcade?”

“They said--they said terrible things.” Arcade drew a breath, and pressed on.  “Mother.  I--I need to know.  Was Father involved in any of those--“

His mother turned on him with a look of fury so intense that he backed up a step.  He saw her raise her right hand, draw it back, but he had no idea what was coming until she swung at him with all her strength, hitting hard enough to stagger him.  His head rocked on his neck.  She had never struck him before, and he retreated, shivering and afraid.

“Your father was a hero, Arcade!”

He nodded, too scared to do otherwise.  “Yes, Mother,” he said rapidly.

“He was a hero!  He gave his life for us!  Don’t you dare believe anything you hear about the Enclave.  It’s all lies, you hear me?”  Her face was frightening. Arcade nodded again.

“Yes, Mother,” he repeated, swallowing.

She began to cry now, her shoulders shaking; her knees folded and she sank down on an old stump they used for chopping wood.   He went to her and put his arms around her instinctively.

“Please don’t cry, Mother,” he begged her softly.  “I’m sorry I upset you.  Don’t cry.  I don’t want you to cry.”

“Your father was a good man, Arcade,” she sobbed.  “Never doubt that.  He loved us both so much.  When you were a baby he used to hold you and play with you for hours.  Everything he did, he did to make a better world for us.  He was a hero, you understand?”

“Yes, Mother.  I know.  I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to make you cry,” he repeated helplessly. Slowly, her sobbing tapered off and she took his face in her hands, smiling through her tears. 

“My little man.  My hero.  Not so little anymore, are you?” He was taller than she by a few inches already; his mother said his height was his father’s.  “What would I do without you?  You are my strength, my life.  I never would have made it without you, Arcade.”

“Don’t say that, Mother,” he pleaded with her.  “Please, don’t say that....”

But she was wrong, Arcade thought vaguely, as he drifted in the land between sleep and waking, lost in time and place.  Father wasn’t a hero.  He wasn’t and neither am I.  Heroes don’t die like this.  And he was dying.  He was very sure of that now. 

He was lightheaded, dizzy.  The world seemed to be pitching like the deck of a ship.  The ground under him was shaking.  He could feel a series of shocks and vibrations being transmitted up to him through the rock on which he lay.

The vibrations grew stronger, jarring his injured leg, and he moaned at the pain.  Somewhere in the distance, a dull rumbling sounded; it seemed far away, not like it had much to do with him.  Then a strange wave of cool air flowed over him.  He felt himself shivering and moaned again.

Light flared through his closed eyelids, and something cold and hard slid under his shoulders, lifting him.  “Arcade?”  a voice was whispering.  “Arcade, please wake up--Please, God, wake up, Arcade--“  It was a female voice, and the first thought of Arcade’s wandering mind was, Mother....

He opened his eyes, and was jarred by a moment of huge disorientation.  Instead of his mother looking down at him, his vision was filled with the face of a different woman: one with a thin, not quite gaunt face, sharp cheekbones, ice-pale eyes and short-cut, reddish brown hair.  Tears were running down her cheeks, and her eyes were hollow with fear and desperation.  Who is she?  She seemed familiar, but it took a moment before his mind provided a name.

“Sa...ma...ra?” His voice was a rasping croak.

“Oh my god, Arcade--“  Her voice broke on a sob, and her shoulders shook.  The hard surface supporting him trembled.  Arcade barely noticed; his dreaming mind was occupied with the sight of the wetness on her face.

Actual tears, he thought with wonder and fascination.  He would have been less surprised to see water flowing uphill. Am I still dreaming?

“You’re....Crying,” he whispered.

“What?”

“Crying....” Half-consciously, he lifted one hand.  It seemed to weigh a ton, dangling at the end of his arm.  He clumsily brushed at Samara’s face, wanting to feel for himself, to see if the tears were actually real.  His fingers came away wet.

“I thought you were dead. I thought the Deathclaw had killed you, or the cave-in, or that I wouldn’t get here in time--Arcade--“

Arcade let his eyes drift closed, trying to think.  There was something....

“Leg,” he said finally, opening his eyes again.  “Samara....leg....”

Her face paled, and she swallowed once.  “It’s...pretty bad,” she admitted. “What do you need?”

“Stimpak.....”

“Hold on.”  The world revolved around him, and he heard the whining of her servos as she lowered him to the ground. He got a flash of her tear-stained face--she’s actually crying, his mind repeated in wonder--as she opened a panel in her armor.  She took a stimpak from it, then leaned down, out of his field of vision.  And then--

Monstrous agony ripped through his leg, a shock of silver-white pain so strong it blanked his sight.  Arcade heard himself give a high, bubbling scream; there was a thud, and Samara’s terrified voice crying his name.  One of his hands was seized; Arcade clenched it in a death grip, holding onto it as an anchoring point in the sea of torment engulfing him.

Slowly, slowly, the tide of pain started to recede.  It rolled back inch by inch, and consciousness came seeping in to fill the places left behind.  By the time his vision cleared, the pain had ebbed to a low drone--not perfect, but light-years better than it had been.  This is almost bearable.  And his head was clear.

He opened his eyes and looked at his companion. 

“Samara....” A little thin, perhaps, he evaluated his voice mentally, but even and in control.

Samara leaned toward him at once.  It was strange, to see her huge, Power-Armored form kneeling at his side; the bulky armor somehow accentuated the awkwardness and uncertainty of her posture.  She was still crying.  Crying. Over me....  He still wasn’t quite sure he believed what he was seeing.  “Arcade....”

He licked his lips.  His throat was parched.  “Water.  Please, water?”

At once, she handed him a bottle of purified water.  Arcade drank the whole thing practically in a single gulp, thinking that he’d never realized how wonderful water could be before.  The bottle fell from his fingers with a thud.  He realized he was exhausted.

“How do you feel?”

“Better. Tired,” he admitted.  “Think I need...need to rest a bit.”

“Go ahead,” Samara said instantly.  Her eyes shone with concern.  She was still clutching his hand; he could feel the pulse in her knuckles.  “You’ll be safe.  I promise.”

Arcade nodded, suddenly too weak to do anything else.  He lay back on the rock floor of the cave, his leg muttering restlessly in the back of his mind.  “Med-X?” he asked faintly.

Samara swiped at her face with the back of one hand.  “Got some right here.”  She took a hypo from her armor.  He felt the sting of the needle against his shoulder, and then sighed in blessed relief as the pain evaporated.  He closed his eyes. 

“I thought....thought you weren’t going to come for me.”

Her hand tightened on his.  “I’m here.  Sleep now.”

Arcade slept.

 

Chapter Text

When he woke again, he felt much better. Not back to normal, but at least within what Boone would call “visual range.”  He was still weak, and his leg was a dull, muttering ache--as if someone were sawing inside it with a blunt knife--but he felt like a reasonable facsimile of a human being again.

He pushed himself to a sitting position and was pleased to find that his arms did not collapse under him. His first priority was to check on his leg.  When he examined it, he was even more pleased by what he found: the swelling had decreased dramatically and the wound had faded from angry red to a pale pink and silver. Might not even leave a scar, he thought as he probed it with his fingers.  Some residual tenderness remained but nothing compared to what it had been.

He straightened, and took in his surroundings.  The rock wall that had sealed the mouth of the cave was now gone, nothing left but piles of rubble. That was the rumbling I felt, Arcade realized.  Samara must have blown it up somehow...but how?

A chill passed down his spine as he reflected that doing so could very easily have caused another cave-in--one that could have killed him, or her, or both--and that he’d been extremely lucky.

He couldn’t see the sky from his position, but reflected light on the cave wall showed him that it was daylight outside.  A quick scan of his surroundings showed him that Samara was not in residence, but when he glanced down, he saw that right by his location and easily within arm’s reach lay several bottles of purified water and a few hypos of Med-X--clear evidence of Samara’s presence.  Arcade mused on where she was, his eyes drawn back to the mounds of rock and dust at the cave mouth, when the scrape of a footstep preceded the arrival of Samara herself. She was carrying an armful of wood chunks from what appeared to have been pieces of furniture.

“Samara,” he greeted her.

Her face brightened and she almost dropped her burden.

“You’re awake!”  She hurried to set the firewood down near the fire circle, coming to kneel beside him.  “How do you feel?  Better? You look better.”

“How do I feel? Like a Deathclaw mauled me,” he said with a half-laugh, half-groan, “but compared to how I was before, I’ll take it. Where were you?”

She shrugged, though the bright happiness did not leave her face.  “Looking around.  I wanted to see if there were any enemies in the area, but it didn’t look like it.”

“Maybe the Deathclaws drove them all away.”

“Maybe.” Samara looked dubious, then dismissed the subject.  “How are you doing? Do you think you can stand up? Here,” she said with a solicitous look in her eyes, extending one armored arm.  “Let me help you.”

Arcade gripped Samara’s pauldron and together they tried to get him to his feet; he fell back as the dull muttering in his leg intensified.  His limbs felt like melting butter, and he exhaled in frustration.

“I guess I’m still pretty weak right now,” he admitted.

“Do you want some Buff-out? Would that help?” Samara asked, reaching into her armor almost instantly.

He pushed her hand away. “That would be like taking Med-X to walk on a broken leg. When it wore off, I’d be worse than ever.  It’s possible to kill yourself that way.  Something to keep in mind,” he told her, meeting her eyes; Samara’s reckless chem usage had often raised the hairs on the back of his neck, though she seemed to be pretty good about keeping any addictions under control.  She’s not on track to become another Dixon, at least. “I don’t think I’ll be in any shape to travel until at least tomorrow.”  He bit his lip. Cold fear filled his heart, as Ulysses’s last communication came back to him.  “Samara--“

“Then we’ll stay here until you are,” she said at once.  “No matter how long it takes.  I promise.”

“No, Samara, listen. “ Arcade gripped her vambrace. “You have to go on without me. You have to--“

A mulish stubbornness came over her face.  “I’m not leaving you, Arcade.”  She put her hand over his own in a grip hard enough to hurt.

“No, Samara, you have to,” he insisted. “Didn’t you hear what Ulysses threatened when he took--ED-E--away?”  Her face tightened, and he cursed internally, wondering if he had made a tactical error. “He said--He said he was going to launch missiles at the NCR.  He--“ A chill ran through Arcade. “Christ, he may already have done it by now.  Samara, you have to get there to stop him.  It’s the only way.”  She stared at him without changing expression.  Arcade offered a reassuring smile that he didn’t feel.  “Don’t--Don’t worry about me. Just leave me some food, water, and chems, and I’ll be fine.  Samara--“

“No.  I’m not leaving you and that’s final.” She squeezed his hand.  “Don’t worry about Ulysses and what he said he’d do.  He won’t launch the missiles until I get there.”  That stony coldness slipped back into her face and her eyes went distant. “He wants me to see it.”

Goddamn it-- “Samara, you don’t know that--“

“I know.” The absolute certainty with which she spoke forestalled further debate.   Then she looked back at him and her face relaxed. “Take as long as you need, Arcade. We’ve got time.”

[*]

Samara went to sit by the fire, piling wood into the fire ring and lighting it with a box of pre-war matches taken from within her armor.  Matches.  Where did she even find those? He watched her in a mix of exasperation and small, petty, shameful gladness: at least I won’t be alone now.  She raised her hands to the latches of her armor and began undoing the connectors, opening the suit so that she could extricate herself from it.

“Do you really think that’s a good idea right now?” Arcade asked.

Samara gestured toward her PIP-Boy 3000.  “No enemies around here. It’s safe.  For now, anyway.  Besides--“ She shrugged.  “My armor’s taken a beating.  I need to do some repair work.”

She climbed out of the pile of armor, laying her LAER rifle to the side, and began picking away at it with a set of tools she took from a compartment on her leg.   Arcade watched her moodily. His leg was still throbbing and he was unsure that she was right when she claimed that Ulysses would wait until she reached him before launching the missiles. But what else can I do?  

He studied Samara, kneeling in her underarmor jumpsuit, picking away at the heap of metal parts before her. As always, he was surprised at how much more normal--how much more human--she looked out of her hulking armor.  She looks...almost approachable.  Even those terrifying eyes were down, fixed on her work. His eyes went from her to the gap in the cave wall and the sobering implications came to him:  Samara clawed through ten feet of solid rock to get to me. 

He didn’t know whether he found that reassuring or frightening.

“How did you know I was back here? That rockslide looked pretty impressive; I’m surprised you could tell--or that you could even get in here to get to me.”

She glanced up. “Huh?  Oh, that,” she said dismissively.  “Well, my PIP-Boy 3000 showed me a friendly lifesign behind the wall, and I figured it was you.  When I saw the cave-in, I tried to get through it with grenades, but it didn’t work. I figured I needed something bigger, so I looked around until I found one of those warheads and dragged it down here.  Stuck it in the rockslide and triggered it.  That did it.”

“Oh.” Found one of those warheads and dragged it down here.  She makes it sound as simple as moving furniture, he thought. Do I even want to know how.....

No, he decided. No, he did not. “You know, if you had caused another cave-in that could easily have killed either of us.”

“I know,” Samara nodded; he was somewhat uncharitably surprised to hear that she had even considered that possibility. “But I figured if I didn’t, you were going to die anyway.” Her face darkened and she dropped her eyes to her armor.  “You looked...pretty bad when I got in here,” she said.  “Like, really, really bad. I thought I was too late.”

“Any longer, you probably would have been,” Arcade murmured.  “How long was I trapped back there?”

“Not long. Maybe a day and a half. I’m sorry I wasn’t faster, Arcade,” she said humbly. “It just took me a while to find a warhead and get it back down here. Even in Powered Armor those things are heavy.”

“Samara....” He was taken aback by the sincere regret he saw in her eyes.  “You don’t need to apologize to me.  You saved my life.” A flush stained her tan cheeks, and she dropped her eyes to her armor again.  He bit his lip.  “I ... I was surprised,” he admitted.  “I honestly expected you to cut your losses and go after Ulysses instead.  I didn’t think you’d come for me.”

The flush deepened. Samara didn’t say anything but continued to pick at her armor.  Curiosity piqued, Arcade prodded, “Not that I’m not grateful, you understand, but why did you come back for me?”

She shifted awkwardly, as if the conversation were making her uncomfortable.  “You’re my friend,” she muttered, her eyes on the pile of metal before her.  “I don’t have enough friends that I can afford to lose any of them.”

Arcade was silent, chewing on that for a moment.  He had the impression that “friend” wasn’t a word Samara used often, or lightly. After a time he said, “Well...thank you, Samara.”

“Don’t mention it.” She gave that awkward shrug and began to work with redoubled intensity on her armor.

Over the course of the day, shadows crept across the cave wall as the hours passed; Arcade could see them from where he rested against the side of the cave, rubbing his still-aching leg occasionally.  Samara spoke little, continuing to work on her armor or other weapons. No one would ever mistake her for a sparkling conversationalist, he mused. From time to time she would leave the cave to look for more fuel, but she was never gone long; Arcade’s chronometer was broken so he could not tell the exact time, but he guessed less than half an hour.  A few times he had to request Samara’s assistance to help him outside so that he could relieve himself, a hideously awkward and embarrassing experience for both of them. Arcade used the slow, laborious trips to evaluate his strength and his ability to use his leg; it was improving, slowly, over the course of the day, but he could feel the muscles were still weak and that it would be very easy to overstrain himself. Hopefully by tomorrow it will be better.  He still wasn’t sure he trusted Samara’s intuition that Ulysses would delay launching until she got there so that she could see it.

The hours wore on, tediously. Now, as the last of the light drained from the sky outside, Samara set down her sniper rifle and moved to the fire ring, to add another chunk of furniture.  The flames flared up, light dancing on the walls. As she moved back to her place, Arcade drummed his fingers restlessly.  The enforced rest and helplessness of the whole day was starting to grate on him.  He picked up a ruined book left in the duffle bag and tried to look through it, but had to put it aside after a few moments as trying to make out the blurred and faded print was giving him a headache.  His eyes rested moodily on Samara.  Half-glimpsed, half-formulated thoughts were churning in his mind. Pain muttered in his leg.

“Hey, Samara,” he said presently.  “Got any whiskey?”

She seemed startled, looking at him, apparently jolted out of her own thoughts.  “Sure,” she said.  “Here.” She tossed him a bottle from within her armor, taking one for herself before settling back down again. Arcade uncapped it and took a sip, waiting for the burn to spread through him.  Silence hung between them, broken only by the crackling of the fire and the clicks and popping sounds of Samara working on her sniper rifle. The light outside had dimmed; only the fire continued to throw shadows on the walls.  Arcade took another swallow, gulping it down, feeling the dim restlessness in his leg fade.   He knew he was using it to fortify his courage, but couldn’t find a reason to care.  Another swallow. He drew a breath, steeling his nerves.

“Hey, Samara,” he said again.

She looked up, startled again.  “What?”

“How about we play a game?”

Her brows drew together over pale eyes.  “A game?”

“Sure.” He leaned back against the cave wall, stretching his legs out before him.  “We’ve got nothing else to do.  We’re stuck here until tomorrow at least,” he said, nodding to the mouth of the cave, where the sun had set.  “How about it?”

She frowned. “What game?” she asked with a trace of wariness, then added, “You mean like Caravan?  Because I think I left my deck back in the Mojave--“

He took another swallow from the bottle.  “I was thinking more along the lines of something like...oh, let’s say, Truth or Dare.”

Now puzzlement crept into her face.  “I’ve never heard of that game.”

He shrugged. “It’s a pre-war game. Pretty simple, really. We each take turns asking the other questions which you have to answer truthfully.  If you don’t want to answer, you have to perform a forfeit--do a dare,” he clarified at her blank expression.

Her brows contracted still further.  “That sounds like a really dumb game.”

“Come on. It’ll be fun,” he needled her.

That wariness had not left her face.  “What kind of questions?”

“Anything. Usually people ask about personal things--the first time you had sex, whether you’ve ever done chems, things like that--but the questions can be about anything you want.”

Samara’s face closed. “No. I don’t want to play.”

“Why not? It’ll pass the time at least.”

Her mouth tightened. “I said I don’t want to.”

She shifted restlessly. Arcade could see her growing irritation, but pressed on regardless, helped by another swallow from the bottle. “Why not?” he demanded again. “Come on, Samara.   It’s not like you have anything to hide, right?”  Unbidden, the thought came for the first time that he didn’t have anything to hide, either.  It felt freeing.

“Arcade....” He could hear the clear warning in her tone. “Even if we did play, you’re not well enough to do any kind of a dare.”

Arcade, briefly thrown, considered that for a moment.  “Dares to be performed upon return to the Mojave.  How about that?”

Her face darkened. “I said no. It sounds stupid.  Leave me alone.”

“It’ll be fun. Tell you what, I’ll even let you go first,” he urged her.  As she glowered at him thunderously, he raised one eyebrow.  “Unless, of course, you’re afraid....”

Samara looked up at him. Her eyes glinted dangerously, and Arcade felt a moment of doubt, wondering if he’d gone too far. Uh oh....  “I get to go first?”

“Sure.”

“And I can ask anything I want?”

“Those are the rules,” he affirmed, though he felt a touch of unease.

“All right then. I’ll play.”

Samara flung herself back against the wall behind her, taking a swallow from her whiskey bottle; she cast her eyes down as if in thought.  Arcade felt a chill, realizing belatedly just how vulnerable he had made himself to her.  When she looked up, that cold glint was in her eyes.  She’s going to cut me, he realized, and suddenly wondered what on earth had made this game seem like a good idea.

“Tell me about your first time.”

“My--“ Arcade stared at her, taken aback; a series of memories that were not particularly pleasant intruded on him.  “Samara--“

“You said.” She swallowed some more whiskey. “You said yourself, it’s the kind of thing people ask.  There it is. That’s my question. Tell me about your first time.”

“That’s...private,” he protested weakly, all too aware that after basically arm-twisting her into this game he didn’t have a lot of ground to stand on.

“You wanted to play,” Samara pointed out, almost smugly. “Answer.  Or if you want, I can come up with a dare instead.”

Arcade’s first impulse was to blow her off--to say, You know what, just forget the whole damn thing.  Yet something stopped him--the same impulse that had led him to propose the game in the first place, perhaps.  He studied her, weighing potentialities....and what he might be able to extract from her in return.

“You really want to hear this?”

She nodded. “Start talking.”

Arcade heaved a sigh.   “All right, fine.  My first….”

He leaned back against the wall, stretching his leg out in front of him.  He took another pull at the bottle she’d given him, reaching back in time, dredging up scraps of memory he’d been content to leave long buried.

 “It was my first posting with the Followers, right after I’d completed the initial training; I was maybe twenty-one, twenty-two at the time.  He was ... fifteen, twenty years older and, ah, ‘devastatingly handsome’ I believe is the correct terminology.”  Devastatingly handsome, indeed …. Even now, the memory of those rugged features, those dark, melting eyes made his heart contract a bit.   Samara watched him, the shadows of the firelight leaping across her face.  

“He was my direct superior and the chief of the whole outpost.  He was ... “ Arcade paused in thought. “A brilliant man; an incredibly talented organizer, an extremely gifted physician, tremendously charismatic -- the sort of man that when he walked into a room, everyone sat up and took notice. When he spoke, everyone listened.”

I listened. He took another swallow of the whiskey and rubbed at his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Everyone wanted him,” he mused, letting his head roll back against the wall behind him and closing his eyes. “Men, women, didn’t matter.  I didn’t think I had a prayer -- who was I, after all? Just some dumb kid fresh out of training, just like a dozen others.  When he … when he started paying attention to me, I -- I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I could be so lucky, that someone like him would even look twice at someone like me….”

“Hm.”  He heard Samara shift across from him, and then a clink as she took a drink from her own bottle.  “And?”

Arcade gave a short laugh.  “And, well, you know how it goes,” he said with a rather stiff shrug, opening his eyes again.  “Or actually, maybe you don’t, given that you can’t remember anything.  We were alone one night, it was late, there was whiskey involved, et cetera, et cetera …. “ He trailed off, gesturing vaguely. We should never have been drinking on duty; that should have been my first warning.  “That’s how the whole thing started, anyway.”

“Started?”

“Yeah.  It … “ He sighed heavily. “It lasted about six months … just until the time the new graduates arrived at the outpost, strangely enough. He, um….”  Arcade drew a steadying breath.  “He took me aside one day and told me that we’d had a good thing -- that’s exactly what he said, ‘a good thing’ -- but that it was….” He paused to clear his throat. “It was time that we both moved on.”

Those pale eyes blinked.  “Wow,” Samara said only, taking a swallow from her own bottle. “Just like that, huh?”

“Just like that, yes.”  Arcade rubbed at his temples.  

“What did you say?”

“What could I say?” he asked, his mouth twisting.  “I was just a dumb kid, I didn’t know any better.  I said something, I don’t remember what, and he nodded at me and said, ‘Good kid.  I knew you weren’t going to be difficult about this.’ He patted me on the shoulder and walked off.” Arcade had stood there, rooted to the spot, staring after him for what seemed like eternity. His eyes were burning; the white of his own sleeves had blurred and gone misty. Everything had seemed broken around him. It had hurt to breathe; it had felt like bands of iron were compressing his chest.   “I saw him with one of the new trainees a week later. Eventually I learned that he did this with every new rotation that passed through his outpost. I guess I was just the lucky one in my class.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

He gave another short laugh.  “Hell, no.  What was there to tell?  There was no rape, no assault; he never threatened me.”  He didn’t have to. “I was of age, and everything that happened was consensual.  And everyone knew he did it too; it was an open secret.”  He shook his head.  “Besides, who was I going to complain to?  He was the head of my outpost.  If I’d said anything, all that would have happened was he would have made me out to be a jilted lover trying to cause trouble for him … which, to be perfectly honest, I would have been.”

Samara nodded thoughtfully.  “What happened after that?”

Arcade shrugged.  “We went our separate ways.  I requested a transfer, which he approved; he was promoted to district coordinator a short time later.  Everyone knew that it was going to happen; he was too dynamic to remain at some backwater outpost for long.” He exhaled.  “That man is now extremely high up in the Followers hierarchy, which is one reason why I haven’t told you his name, and from what I’ve heard, I wasn’t his last conquest, not by a long shot.”  He wrapped his arms around himself, rubbing slowly at his shoulders. 

Samara only nodded, but her face darkened. There was quiet for a while, broken only by the crackling of the small fire in the fire circle, and the wind keening through the ruins outside.

 “He told me he loved me,” Arcade said after a time.  He watched the fire because it was easier than watching Samara. “That I was special to him. I believed him. I came close to telling him … things I’ve never told anyone else.”  So close it scared him, in fact; there had been moments when he’d faced the other man with the secret of his Enclave background trembling on his lips, and it had only been the habits of a lifetime that had held him back. Thinking back on it now, it sent a chill down his spine.  His arms tightened fractionally.  “And it was all just….”  He swallowed a bit and gave another, forced shrug. 

Samara cast her eyes down, considering. Arcade was silent too, nursing old wounds.  At length, she looked back up at him. 

“If I ever run across that guy,” she said, her pale eyes ice, “I’ll bash his face in.”

Arcade was startled into a genuine laugh. “Probably not a good idea, but I appreciate the sentiment.”There was another pause, broken only by the crackling of the fire; each of them were lost in their own thoughts.  Finally collecting himself, Arcade returned to the present.

“My turn.”

Samara tensed, seeming to draw in on herself. She looks like she’s about to have a root canal done, Arcade mused with mild fascination.  Her hands clenched on the piece of armor she was repairing and her face hardened. “Ask.”

Arcade debated with himself for a moment, deciding how far he was prepared to go; then with a mental shrug, dove in. Quid pro quo, he thought. 

And after all, he admitted to himself, wasn’t this the real reason he had proposed this game?

“Tell me about Boone,” he challenged. “I suppose he counts as your first, since you can’t remember.”

 “Boone.” Samara glanced away. Her jaw tightened. “I don’t want to talk about Boone.”

“Well, I do,” Arcade needled her, perhaps somewhat unwisely. “What about you and Boone, Samara?”

“Let it rest, Arcade.”  She shifted in warning.

“Come on,Samara,” he pressed. “I told you mine.” She looked at him coldly but he pressed, undeterred.  “You agreed to this, remember?  Or would you rather take the dare?”

She glowered at him, but settled back. “What do you want to know?”

“What do you feel for him?”

“What?”

“It’s a simple question,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “What do you feel for him?” Because you honestly don’t act like you care very much at all, he thought.

Those pale eyes glinted, and for a moment he wondered if he’d gone too far, but she exhaled slowly and cast her eyes down, thinking.Arcade waited as the fire crackled in the fire ring, watching the play of the yellowish light over her features.

At last she flung herself back against the wall. “I don’t know,” she said, sighing in frustration.  “Honestly. I mean....  At first we were fine together.  I don’t know....it seemed right.  We seemed to fit, somehow.  We had some good times....”

Killing Legion together, Arcade thought.

“It seemed like we really understood each other. He really got me,” she repeated.   “We understood where each of us was coming from and we....what did he say....” She frowned, as if trying to remember. “We met in the middle,” she said at last.  “It really seemed to work.” Her eyes went distant.

Arcade took a sip of his whiskey. “But?” he prompted.

Samara exhaled again.  “He started to change.” She shifted restlessly. “Suddenly, it was like, nothing I could do was right for him.  He wanted to know where I was all the time, it was like--like I couldn’t go anywhere without having to check in with him.  ‘Where are you going?’  ‘How long will you be gone?’ ‘Are you taking anyone with you?’ ‘You’re not going anywhere dangerous, are you?’ ‘Why can’t you bring me along?’”  She hissed in exasperation. “He just got too controlling.”

“Did he?” Arcade swallowed some more whiskey, musing sardonically that Samara’s complaints were likely even true--for a certain value of “control,” at least. If “controlling” means requesting that your loved one stop simply disappearing off the face of the earth for weeks at a time without any warning whatsoever and without telling anyone where they’re going.

“Yeah.”  Samara hissed again.  “It was like... He started thinking he had the right to...to tell me what to do. To put limits on me, or something. I won’t stand for that.” The words were cold, clipped. Her pale eyes glinted and her face set, hard; Arcade drew back a bit, unsettled, though her anger was not directed at him.  “Not from Boone, not from anyone.”

“You realize he really cares about you, right?” Arcade murmured, watching her. Samara grimaced.

“Bullshit.  If he did, he would back the hell off.”

“Samara....”  Arcade sighed, rubbing his temples with one hand and reflecting briefly on how weird the whole situation was--serving as Samara’s relationship counselor for her relationship with a man he wanted for himself.  “Have you ever, even once, ever tried to see anything from his point of view?  Look, the man had to shoot his own wife because he failed to protect her.”  Something flickered on her face.  “Can you--can you try to imagine, for just one moment, how that might make him feel?  How that maybe might play out with the two of you?”

Again, that flicker; her eyes dropped briefly, but then her jaw firmed.  “I’ll see things from his point of view after he sees things from mine.”

Arcade resisted the urge to thud the heel of his hand against his forehead.  “And what’s yours, exactly?” he asked her instead.

“None of your damn business.”

None of my damn business. Right.  Arcade heaved a sigh.  “You know, Samara, have you ever considered that maybe the reason you don’t have more friends is because you treat the friends you do have abominably?”

She glowered at him.  “Don’t start with me, Arcade.”

“Why not?” Arcade challenged recklessly.   “Look--ah, hell, I’m not going to deny it.  I have a thing for Boone,” he admitted, the whiskey loosening his tongue.  “You know it, he knows it, hell, I suspect the whole suite knows it by now.”  He took another gulp from the bottle.  “I know I don’t have a chance with him. He’s made that very, very clear.”  Arcade swallowed a little, remembering Boone’s kiss, hard and hurting, contemptuous.  “But you--you’ve got him.  And--and you treat him like this?”  He hissed through his teeth in anger.  “Christ, Samara! Do you even realize what you have there?  If you don’t take care, you’re going to lose him--not just him, but the rest of the suite too!  The rest of them won’t stand being treated like this forever, you know. Eventually they’re going to get fed up and leave, and when it happens, I won’t say I didn’t see it coming, either!”

He searched her face for some sign that he was getting through to her.  Those pale eyes studied him.

“If you want Boone, you can have him.” She returned her attention to the pile of armor in front of her.

Arcade practically choked on a swallow of whiskey. What the hell--  It took him a moment to pull his thoughts together.  “Jesus, Samara, what the hell is wrong with you? You can’t just -- just hand Boone over like some kind of package!” Intriguing as the possibility might be, his traitor mind whispered, beginning to spin scenarios before Arcade ruthlessly squashed them. Samara made no answer, tinkering with her armor.  “Seriously, that was what you got out of everything I said?”  Still no answer. “Samara, do you care about him at all?”

That got her attention, he thought glumly.  Samara put down the tools with which she was working on her armor and stopped. She raised her eyes, looking not at Arcade, but off into the distance.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly.

Arcade drew in his breath.  “Samara--“

“Do you remember,” she said, turning to him suddenly. “I told you once, how I don’t know if I’ve ever loved anyone?  Really loved them, like they show in the holotapes, with birds singing and the earth moving and all that.  I don’t know if -- if I even can love anyone like that.”  Her brow furrowed in distress.   “Whatever that kind of love is...I’m pretty sure I don’t feel it for Boone.”

The admission hung there between them, almost visible in the air.  Arcade bit his lip. A strange coldness surrounded his heart. Don’t ask, he thought to himself.  Don’t ask, don’t ask...

“What about...about the rest of us?”

A line appeared between her brows. “You already had your question. Now it’s my turn again.”

 Arcade hissed in anger.  “Forget the damned game, Samara.  I want to know.  I deserve to know. After all we’ve given you-- Do you even care about any of us at all?”

The air seemed to crackle with tension. Arcade leaned forward, hanging on every change in her face; he was scarcely breathing.  Samara lowered her eyes.  The firelight flickered over her face. She did not answer. Unwilling, perhaps to say no, and unable to say yes.

A powerful anger suddenly snatched Arcade up in its grip.  Later, he could never have told where it came from; it was simply there, sweeping through him like a flame.  He felt his brows draw together.  “Goddamn it, Samara!” Some distant part of his mind that hadn’t surrendered to the furor brevis was surprised to realize he was actually shouting. She tensed, raising her head, her eyes pale.  “See, that is your goddamn problem!  We’re supposed to be friends--“

“We’re not friends.” The words were a growl. She had drawn in on herself, a compact ball of quivering tension--like a cornered radscorpion, claws at the ready and tail raised to strike.

“Yes, we goddamned are!” Arcade shouted back at her, angrier with her than he had ever been.  In that moment it seemed as if months of tension and frustration with her were coming to a head.  He wanted to cut her, to draw from her some acknowledgement of the pain she had caused them all--of the pain she had caused him.  Underneath that welcome rage was a cold fear: What are we to her?

What am I to her?

“You even said!” he shouted, digging for something, he didn’t know what. “You said I was your friend, you said--“

“I said you were my friend,” she snarled. “I didn’t say a damn thing about me being yours.”

The distant, rational part of Arcade’s mind noted the nuance and wondered at it, but that was far off; the anger was right there. “How do you even expect to keep your suite together, let alone fight the Legion like this?! You don’t act like you care about us, you don't even say you care about us, not even Boone--  Why should we stay with you, Samara?  Why should anybody stay with you?  Can you tell me? Can you even give me one reason?!”

If possible, she drew further in on herself, her shoulders tense and rigid.  Her pale eyes were stone white and her fingers clenched on the piece of armor she was holding.  The radscorpion’s upraised tail quivered in warning; she seemed to press herself back into the wall behind her as if she wanted to merge with it.  “I never asked any of you to stay with me,” she growled, bristling.  “Stay or go, I don’t care. I’ll fight the Legion by myself if I have to, and the rest of you can go to hell.  I don’t need you.”

The words seemed to roll from the back of her throat. If possible, Arcade’s rage flashed even higher, and that chill in his gut deepened.  She doesn’t care....she really doesn’t....

“Yes, you fucking do need us!” he raged at her.  “We guard your fucking back, Samara! God damn it--“

“No, Arcade!” Samara slammed one fist on the ground beside her.  The air inside the cave rang with echoes; the sound of her voice, loud after the low, bristling rumble, startled him into silence. “Nobody guards my back but me!  Nobody ever has!  Nobody--“ Her voice cracked, and she swallowed, startling him further.  “Nobody was ever watching out for me, but me. Even if I don’t remember anything else, I can remember that.  Nobody ever protected me, nobody ever guarded me -- there was never anyone but myself that I could count on.  There--there is....”

That stony light in her eyes dimmed. She looked away quickly. Her hands were shaking; then they gripped each other so tightly her knuckles showed bone-white. Arcade’s breath caught in his throat. His anger was gone as quickly as it had come; it seemed a small, petty thing before the desolation in her eyes.  He ached for her in that moment: a sharp, hot pain in his chest and throat that felt like if he indulged it for too long, it might turn to tears.

“Samara...” You can count on me, he might have said, but did not. Despite the way he hurt for her, he was honest enough to admit to himself that that was a promise he could not keep, and perhaps was not willing to make.  And in any case, what could I do to protect her? He raised one hand, intending to reach out to her; then thought better of it.  His hand hung there awkwardly for a moment, before he drew it back. Samara didn’t seem to notice.

“That’s just--that’s just the way it is, Arcade,” she said after a time, stumbling a little over the words. “Yes, I look out for myself first. Most other people do the same. And they should,” she said with a shrug that seemed only a bit forced.  “They’re right to do that.  It’s just--the way the world is.  You can’t change it, you’ve just got to deal with it.”

A question trembled on the tip of Arcade’s tongue--If you only look out for yourself, then why did you come back for me?  He bit it back, hard; he had no practice in saying such things without sarcasm. Instead, he gave a long sigh. “That’s a really...bleak...outlook on life.”

Samara shrugged.  “Am I wrong?”

He bit his lip and cast his eyes down, turning her question over in his mind.  Thinking back on things he’d seen, both during his time with the Followers, and traveling with her.  His Enclave background weighed on his thoughts. After a long moment, he sighed again. “No, I’d have to say that’s pretty accurate most of the time,” he admitted glumly.  “With one caveat--“

“One what?”

“Just because it is that way doesn’t mean it has to be,” he told her quietly.  “Things can change.”  They can.  They have to. Because if they can’t...then I’ve been wasting my life.

Samara studied him for a long moment. A strange expression crept over her face; it looked almost like a mixture of incomprehension and respect, maybe even awe.  “You...You really believe that, don’t you.”  It was not a question.

“I have to,” he admitted wryly, rubbing his sore leg. “If I didn’t, I think I’d lose my mind.”

“Heh.”  Samara actually laughed a bit at that, and Arcade spared a moment to realize how rarely it was he’d ever heard her laugh.  “You’re not me.”

“No.”  Arcade shook his head. He exhaled, running his hands through his hair, and taking another swallow of whiskey to settle his nerves.  Samara dropped her eyes to her armor again, busying herself with it.

There was silence for a while, a silence that hung heavily over the two of them, growing more and more awkward. It felt like a weight, pressing down on Arcade’s shoulders.  Samara seemed uncomfortable too, judging by the way she fiddled with her armor. At length, Arcade sighed.

“I’m sorry, Samara.”  He wasn’t sure why he was apologizing except it seemed like the right thing to do.

She glanced up at him and gave one of those small, brief smiles, there and then gone. “Nothing to be sorry for,” she said, pushing her armor away from her.  She studied him, frowning slightly.  “You look really tired.  Why don’t you get some sleep?  You probably need it.”

 “Might not be a bad idea.” Arcade suddenly realized that he felt completely and utterly exhausted--shaky and wrung out.  “I’ll take a watch though, Samara.  Wake me up when you’re ready.”

“Okay.”  Samara nodded.  Arcade slid down and arranged himself on the rock floor, trying to get comfortable, resting his head on his helmet.   Fatigue was dragging at him almost from the moment he closed his eyes, despite the crackling of the fire and the clicks and pops of Samara still working on her armor and weapons. He hadn’t thought he was this tired.

His drowsy mind roamed back through the events of the last two days, his wounding, the despair of the caverns, Samara’s rescue...and her tears.  The memory of her tears on her face recurred to him.  She cried...over me.... He still couldn’t believe he’d seen that.  He wondered.... and without stopping to think, he asked, “Has Boone ever seen you cry?”

The moment the words were out of his mouth, Arcade was horrified; he couldn’t believe what he had said. He held his breath, waiting for Samara to explode.

But no explosion came.  Samara looked up at him, her brows drawing together; she seemed to register his dismay.  At length, she replied, “Once.  Get some rest, I’ll wake you in a few hours.”

She dropped her eyes again to her armor. Arcade exhaled, feeling relief steal over him like a blanket.  Once....  I wonder when.... He closed his eyes again. Across from him, Samara sat up, working intently on her armor in the ruddy light from the fire.

 

Chapter Text

Arcade opened his eyes to sunlight slanting in from the mouth of the cave.  It took him a moment to place where he was.  Dammit...she didn't wake me, he realized, remembering he had told her to let him take a watch.

He pushed himself to a sitting position, looking around.  “Samara? Sam--“

“You’re awake.”  At the sound of her voice he saw her, standing at the mouth of the cave entrance.  She was back in her full Power Armor, with her weapons at her back; when she turned her head to look at him, he drew back a little at the coldness in her eyes. “Can you walk? Good.  We need to get moving as soon as possible.”

“Samara, I--“  He got his feet under him and pushed himself to stand; the diagnostic part of his mind noted that his leg was completely back to normal and the weakness that had afflicted him the day before was gone. Seems like the stimpak did its job at last. “I was thinking that maybe we could--“

She looked at him again, and he took a step back. The woman who had wept over him, who had assisted him solicitously throughout the day, who had drunk with him and conversed with him and answered his probing questions, was gone as if she had never been.  No trace remained of the relaxation and ease that had been between them the night before. Her walls had slammed back into place, higher and harder than ever, and a total stranger looked at him out of her pale blue eyes.

Who is she? A chill went through him and he swallowed nervously.

“Come on.  We need to go.”  Without so much as another word, she turned her back on him and started for the cave mouth.

Well, that was nice while it lasted...  Arcade hesitated; then, muttering curses, followed her.

[*]

They spent the morning wandering among the ruins--in, around and over slabs of collapsed highway, overturned  cars and buses, fallen signs and billboards, and huge toppled chunks of skyscrapers, tracing an erratic, looping path among these obstacles as they followed the cryptic dictates of Samara’s PIP-Boy 3000. Having never possessed one himself, Arcade had no idea how they worked; but Samara’s faith in hers seemed to be absolute, even when they had to backtrack for half an hour because it led them down a blind canyon.

The ruins were absolutely deserted. There weren’t even any bodies to testify that humans had once been there. The only sound apart from their footsteps was the wind whining through the broken windows and downed powerlines. The silence had Arcade on edge. He remembered Bonesaw back in the Village of the Marked Men telling them to watch out--that this area was under the control of a man named Blade.  He was right about Rawr at least, Arcade reflected, touching his healed leg, so where is Blade?  The ruins were as silent as a ghost town.

And Samara drifted among them like a specter herself. The stony light that he had seen in her face was gone; if anything, her eyes were now dark, veiled--as if they opened onto another world.  A creepy absence hung about her, as if her body was there, but her mind was not.  Following her was like following a ghost. A powerful unease seeped into Arcade’s gut as the hours crept by, a deep-seated, grinding fear, as ever-present and monotonous as the pain in his leg had been. The silence made him want to crawl out of his skin.  He wound his way after her through the ruins, wishing with all his heart that he were somewhere--anywhere else. He followed Samara only because he was afraid not to--and he could not tell whether he was more afraid of her or for her.

 That ridiculous prophecy the Think Tanks had given him at Big Mountain kept recurring to his mind: Death... Fire... Loss... The end of everything that has gone forward.  Except that somehow, in his present mood, it didn’t seem so ridiculous.

Something bad’s going to happen. I can feel it. More than ever, he wanted to snatch Samara up and shut her away, somewhere safe where nothing could hurt her.

The entrance to Ulysses’s Temple was halfway up one of the cliff walls of the divide; slowly, as the sun rose higher into the sky, they wound their way up a trail with several switchbacks along a pile of broken buildings.  The trail led to a narrow pathway along the side of the cliff face which ended in a small landing area or plateau.  Several of the Marked Men’s stone huts stood in a loose circle around a cement block fire ring in the center; two splintery bookcases formed a rough barricade. A couch was back against the rock wall at one edge of the plateau and mattresses, ruined books, crates, and other odds and ends were scattered around the village.

“Here,” Samara said, checking her PIP-Boy 3000.  It was the first word she had said in hours.  “This is the place.”  She was not looking at him.

Arcade followed the direction of her gaze.  An unassuming metal door was set into a recess cut into the side of a cliff. 

“There?”   He indicated the door. Samara nodded.

“Stop here. We’ll eat something and do a final equipment check before we go further.”

They settled down around the fire ring, not saying anything.  As Samara began laying out her weapons, Arcade examined the ring. Wisps of smoke were rising from the ashes, faint in the air; Arcade leaned forward and touched the cement blocks. Still warm.  Someone was here recently.

“Samara,” he said, then, seeing her engrossed in her weapons, “Samara.”

It took a moment before she pulled her attention away from her work. “Huh?”

He studied her, and then sighed.  It’s not going to matter anyway.  “Never mind.”

Arcade lit a fire in the fire ring, using some ruined books from a trunk, while Samara worked on her weapons.  The trunk also contained a few MREs; he picked up one for himself and tossed another to Samara, which she barely acknowledged.  Arcade opened the pouch and dug into heavily processed meatballs and marinara sauce, his eyes resting uneasily on Samara.  That air of absence surrounded her like a thick blanket; he felt almost as if he were suffocating. Though she was sitting no more than a couple yards from him, she seemed very far away, as if he were viewing her through the wrong end of a telescope. The chill had settled in his gut, becoming an all-consuming sense of dread; he could scarcely choke down the centuries-old protein and starch, and the food tasted like ashes in his mouth.

The silence dragged out as Samara continued to work intently and efficiently on her equipment. Arcade knew he should be checking his own equipment as well, but he was so tense he couldn’t concentrate; he stood up and began to pace, trying to work off some of his nervous energy. Samara paid him no heed; she had gone away completely inside herself, to some place he could not reach. He could feel some sort of disaster looming, one from which he was powerless to protect himself--or her.

After a moment, he realized she was humming, low and tuneless, as if unaware of what she was doing.

“Samara. Hey.  Samara.”

He had to call her two or three times before she looked up.  Even then, he could see that she was only about half paying attention to him. “Huh?”

“What’s that song?”

“Song?”

“You’re humming,” he said. “What song are you humming?”

“Oh.” She looked down for a moment. “I think it’s called ‘Ballroom Blitz.’”

“’Ballroom Blitz?’” He tried to think; he couldn’t remember hearing it on either Radio New Vegas or the Mojave Music Station.

“Yeah.” She paused, then sang a few bars.

“Now the man in the back is ready to crack
As he raises his hand to the sky
And the girl in the corner is everyone’s mourner
She can kill with a wink of her eye

And the man in the back said Everyone attack,
And it turned into a ballroom blitz
And the girl in the corner said Boy, I wanna warn ya
It’ll turn into a ballroom blitz
Ball-room blitz...”

Somehow the words did not exactly reassure Arcade.  “Doesn’t sound familiar.  Where’d you hear it?”

“Don’t remember.” Samara gave a noncommittal shrug and turned her attention back to her weapons, lapsing back into silence.  The sun, high in the sky, cast shadows over them from the walls of the canyon; from Arcade’s perspective, it looked as if the dark mouth of the temple entrance was about to swallow Samara in its gloom.  The shadows hung over her like doom; she seemed alien, unreachable.

Arcade flung himself down across from her, running a restless hand through his hair. He racked his brain, desperately, searching for something, anything he could do to penetrate that crystalline shell of distance around Samara--to bring her back to him from wherever she’d gone, to erase that frightening absence behind her eyes. He was seized with an overwhelming sense that this was his last chance to avert whatever darkness he could sense was coming. Wild ideas roiled in his head, forming and bursting like bubbles: if I could-- if she did -- maybe if -- He tried to grasp at them, but came up with nothing usable. He leaned forward, bracing his forehead on his hands, and rubbed at his temples.

Samara....

She stood up. Her shoulders went back and her jaw tightened.  She turned her head toward the door behind her. 

“It’s time.”

Too late.

[*]

The door rumbled aside at a touch from Samara, and the two of them stepped into a dim, shadowy interior. The left side of the room was filled with boxes and barrels, while a defunct computer station stood against the back wall.  Samara ignored both of these and headed for the door on the right. Arcade followed numbly. A sick sense of dread was hanging over him, nestling deep in his gut, and with every step they took, that dread deepened.

Where is everybody?

The entry room opened onto a long hallway with a supply closet to the left.  As they stepped into the hallway, Samara held up a hand, staring at her PIP-Boy. 

“Wait,” she murmured.

They held still a moment, listening, and in the silence, Arcade could hear faint sounds: an electronic voice, muffled by walls of metal and concrete, rasping through the silence of the bunker.  He glanced at Samara.

“Sentry bot?” he murmured.

She nodded, and took her LAER rifle from her back.  Arcade drew his Plasma Defender. At another gesture from Samara, the two of them proceeded stealthily down the hallway, pressed to the walls, until they reached another metal door.  The sentry bot’s chatter was very loud now.  Samara motioned Arcade to a halt, then held up one finger and indicated the door.

Let me go in first. 

Arcade nodded in response, though his heart was in his throat.  Memories of Samara, moving on a diagonal across a tunnel as a hail of red laser fire strafed around her, came to him; he clenched his hand on the stock of his Plasma Defender, tensing as Samara touched the door control panel. The door folded itself away, and quick as lightning, Samara spun away from the wall toward the center of it and fired three shots from her LAER. An explosion echoed from within, but he did not relax until Samara lowered her weapon.

“It’s safe now,” she said. That absence was still in her eyes; they seemed to open onto a dark place.  Perhaps, Arcade mused, somewhere deep inside herself, she was gathering her resources, for the confrontation to come. 

The room on the other side of the door was shaped like an L.  They had stepped into the short, stubby leg of the L, with a longer, narrower segment of the room to the left.  Against the left-hand wall were various pieces of large computer equipment, lights flashing silently to themselves.  The sentry-bot Samara had shot lay tipped over in the middle of the room, one wheel still spinning.

Samara checked her PIP-Boy and proceeded to the door at the far end of the room. After fiddling with it for a moment, she shook her head.  “Locked.” She glanced around abstractedly; a blinking computer terminal set on a counter on the right-hand side of the room caught her gaze.  The terminal was under a bank of scratched, scuffed windows.  Samara went to tap in a few commands on the computer terminal--then stopped. She looked up through the windows and her eyes widened.  A strange alertness crackled around her.

“Samara?” Arcade ventured.

She didn’t respond. Instead, she tapped frantically at the computer terminal in front of her, then drew her LAER. That hyperfocused intentness filled her.

“Samara--“

“Stay!”  A sharp gesture cut him off.  Samara moved to the left of the bank of windows; Arcade saw a door there, in shadows, that he had not seen before.   She touched the door and it folded itself away.

“Sa--“

Samara plunged into the room with a yell, and Arcade heard her LAER firing. Bright fear flooded him. Goddamn it, Samara-- He raised his Plasma Defender and started to go after her, only to hear her call, “All clear!”

He lowered his weapon, taking a breath, trying to settle his system after the fear in his gut. Another breath, and another. “You could have warned me,” he accused, stepping over the door sill into the room. He started to ask what was so important about the room anyway, when his eyes fell on them.

The room was a large square, with two destroyed sentry bots gathered close to the door; against the far corners, Arcade could make out the remains of laser turrets, detonated by blasts from Samara’s LAER.  Two tables pushed together near the center held another computer terminal, and behind the tables...

God-damn it, Arcade thought with weary anger. Three Bot Maintenance Pods stood in the center of the room, and the one in the center was occupied.

It was clear Samara had seen it too; at once she was fiddling with the computer terminal, and then the center pod hissed open.  The round eye-bot within floated out with a bright chirp.

“ED-E!”  Samara cried. Her face lit with happiness, and for a moment the frightening absence that had been in her eyes all day was gone. The eye-bot bobbed over to her, and Samara beamed up at it with clear, unfeigned joy.   “Oh, ED-E! I can’t believe it!  I thought you’d have been taken apart for scrap by now, or melted down, or--“

The bot whistled cheerfully, and Samara fell silent, listening to it as if it were actually speaking. That rapturous expression had not faded from her features; she gazed up at the eyebot as if she were enchanted by that hunk of metal. Arcade could feel his own frustration rising. Should I even bother to point out to her the possibility that this isn’t even the same eye-bot that was following us earlier? he mused darkly. He crossed his arms over his chest.

“But what did he even want with you?” she asked, gazing up at the bot.  The eyebot whistled again.  Arcade’s nerves were so overstressed that the piercing sound made him want to jump out of his skin.  For a wild moment he fantasized about just shooting the damned thing out of the air.

Yeah, that would be a good idea.  Try it and see how Samara reacts, he mused sardonically.

“Well, I don’t know either,” Samara replied, “but I’ll tell you something, ED-E: We’re going to find out.  I won’t let that son of a bitch get away with this. It’s one more thing he’s going to answer for.”  Her back straightened. That cold distance was seeping back into her face; Arcade could actually see the veil of emptiness come down behind her eyes, and he shuddered. “Come on, ED-E. We’re going to find that son of a bitch, and everything he’s done, he’s going to get back double. I swear it. I swear.”

She started back for the outer room, that absent intent in her face, and the bot chirped again before it followed her.  Perhaps it was just Arcade’s imagination, but the bot’s little beeps sounded almost uncertain.

Goddamn it, I’m getting as bad as she is, he thought wearily.

In the outer room, Samara pecked at the computer terminal again, and the door at the far end of the room folded open.  Beyond it was a long tunnel, looking somewhat like the one where they had first entered, with stained concrete walls and a trash strewn floor.  Emergency lighting blinked on and off, flickering above them. The near end of the tunnel had collapsed in on itself and was filled with rubble; an Auto-Doc machine lay at a slant angle in the wreckage, suggesting to Arcade that perhaps a medical clinic had rested above the tunnel at one point.

At the far end of the tunnel loomed a massive, metal door.

“This is it.” Samara studied her PIP-Boy and nodded to the door.  In truth, Arcade hadn’t needed her to say it; he could sense, just by looking.  The door seemed a brooding, malign presence waiting for them. The dread in his gut was almost all-consuming; he wrapped his arms around himself and rubbed at his shoulders.  As they approached the other end of the tunnel, every step felt as if he were walking to his own execution.

Or hers.  He stole a glance at Samara’s face and looked away.  The stranger he had seen in the missile silo was rising, slowly yet inexorably, to the surface.  The emptiness in her eyes looked like lowering madness.  One last time, he searched his mind, seeking desperately for something he could do to bring her back to him. Yet he sensed it was useless. If there had ever been such a chance, it was long gone.

Samara cracked open the control panel to one side of the door.  “Ready?” she asked him, her fingers poised over the circuitry.

No backing out now.  Arcade’s mouth was dry. He wet his lips. “No,” he said, “but go ahead. I can’t stop you.”

Samara fiddled with the circuits.  The door folded open.

[*]

On the other side of it was a completely unassuming elevator lift. 

Samara stepped onto it, the metal ringing with her armored tread; Arcade followed, as did the little eye-bot.  She touched a few buttons, and the door slid closed like the door of a tomb; there was a low humming sound, and the lift lurched into motion.

The long ride down was mostly silent.  Arcade’s heart was racing in his chest; he drew deep, steady breaths, trying to calm himself. If Samara was nervous, she showed no sign.  The stranger he had seen in her face before was becoming clearer, more distinct, and an almost visible air of something he could not name hung about her.  Readiness, perhaps. The bot hovered behind Samara, humming softly to itself.

What am I doing here? Arcade found himself wondering.  He tried to trace the chain of events that had led him from his comfortable if slightly dull existence researching broc flowers and xander roots and treating the occasional junkie in the Followers outpost in the Old Mormon fort to here, descending into the depths of an active nuclear missile silo at the side of a madwoman.  He couldn’t do it; there was such a disconnect between then and now that he couldn’t bring the two together.  Whatever possessed me to leave the Followers? What was I thinking?

As the elevator began to slow, indicating they were finally reaching the bottom, Samara spoke. “Here,” she said, turning to him. She pressed into his hands a bundle of chems, including several stimpaks.  “Don’t know if you’ll need them, but just in case.”

Arcade took them from her. “Samara....“

She didn’t answer. Actually she seemed to have already dismissed him from her thoughts.  Arcade didn’t know what he wanted to say anyway.  He stowed the chems in his armor and lapsed back into silence.

The elevator came to a stop.

[*]

The door opened onto a low-ceilinged deck or lobby, lined with banks of dead computer equipment on either side.  Metal doors were set into the walls to the left and right, of the folding type that Arcade had seen in military bases all throughout the Mojave.  The floor was corrugated metal, rusted, with planking missing in several places and strewn with the detritus of two hundred years and more.

The far end of the deck was open.  Beyond, Arcade could see a vast, cavernous space, hewn out of the living rock of the mountain. A temple, he thought in those first, terrified moments, a temple to Armageddon. The walls of the temple, which might have been a hundred feet across, maybe even more, were rough, unfinished stone; six of the titanic nuclear missiles stood three to either side in between stout metal buttresses, stretching up to the heavens like gigantic trees, lining the walls like sentinels.  Half-a-dozen more loose warheads were littered around the space beyond: the carelessly strewn toys of some giant child.  A raised walkway led from the floor of the deck out into the cathedral, running above pits to either side filled with banks of computer equipment and work stations where, two centuries ago, technicians would have tirelessly monitored these massive implements of destruction: swords great enough to reach around the world, arrows able to fell millions at one blow. Above this vast cathedral space was a ceiling of metal tiles, and set into it was a huge circular oculus of overlapping strips of metal, its basilisk glare closed. 

In the center of the temple, as if in a position of veneration, was the raised dais of a launch platform. A circular catwalk surrounding a deep pit where missiles slumbered, with a gantry like a steel skeleton rising above it, a ladder to the heavens.  Two bent and crippled girders stood one on each side of the platform, and hanging from a line stretched between them, the flag of the Old World resplendent, hanging almost to the floor.

In front of that flag....

And there he is. Arcade’s breath caught in his throat.

He was a tall man--even at this distance Arcade thought they might stand nearly equal in height--with dark hair in short dreadlocks; he had broad shoulders and muscular, pale-brown arms, displayed by the sleeveless duster he wore, which fell to just above his ankles.  His back was to them, displaying a stylized image of the flag of the Old World, stenciled on the back of his duster--the same marking that Samara and Arcade had been following through the Divide.   He took no notice of them; his head was tilted back as if he were gazing up at the towering edifice of girders, flag and gantry in veneration--or hatred. One hand clasped a golden staff topped with an eagle, and by his side hung a 12.7mm submachine gun: one of the favored weapons of the Legion.

Even at this distance, a tremendous presence hung about him.  Arcade would have sensed who he was even if they had met on the street; there would have been no mistaking him. And he was a spy for Caesar? Arcade thought inanely; it seemed utterly absurd to him, in that moment, that a man so formidable could ever have passed unnoticed.

The lift was whining. Behind him, one of the giant missiles was slowly rising into view.

“Ulysses....”

The rolling, rumbling growl raised the hairs on the back of Arcade’s neck; his arms prickled with gooseflesh. He glanced over at his companion reflexively and immediately wished he hadn’t.  Ulysses had been recognizable at first glance; now, his first thought on seeing his companion was completely instinctive: Who is this?

For Samara was gone. The total stranger that had shown herself at the Ashton missile silo had risen completely to the surface, rearranging the familiar geometry of Samara’s face into alien and terrifying shapes. Her skin was stretched almost to transparency over the knife-sharp bones of her face; her eyes seemed to glow with a steady white light, as broad and bright as the eyes of the Tunnelers they had fought under the earth; and her lips were drawn back from her teeth in a snarl of Deathclaw-like ferocity.

Arcade would never have recognized her as Samara.  He would only have given fifty-fifty odds that she was even human.

Samara’s entire being was totally focused on the man standing on the dais.  She lurched into motion, those broad bright eyes locked on him like salvation.  As she strode toward him, her armored boots rang like the fall of doom.  Arcade didn’t try to hold her back--he would no more have dreamed of it than of trying to seize the arm of a rampaging Deathclaw.

“Ulysses!” she howled, her voice echoing throughout the vast space of the temple.

The man on the dais turned, two eyebots rising to take their place on either side of him. The lower half of his face was completely obscured by a breath mask, and Arcade wondered at it distantly--but his eyes were alive.  They shone a bright, almost metallic golden, and they never blinked as he turned to face then both. Those golden, gleaming eyes glanced at Arcade and then looked away, dismissing him; it was clear that Arcade did not matter here.  Only Samara did.

“Even in this place, the NCR’s shadow falls.” His voice was raspy, distorted by the hissing and gurgling of his respirator.  “Or is it just you, Courier, without the Bear’s corpse to weigh you down?  And your shadows, both of them--carrying the legacy of a dead and dying world. Doesn’t matter now. Either way, the Divide giants are awakening.  The missiles here, on their way home.  There is no way to stop them.”

His words fell on deaf ears. Samara did not acknowledge them in the slightest.  Her eyes were still that shining white and her face that of a demon’s. Without breaking stride, she took her LAER from her back, raised it, and then flung it aside with contempt. She drew her protonic inversal axe, and then hurled it from her; it skidded and spun on the walkway, landing just short of the computer pit to one side.  The sniper rifle was next, and despite everything, Arcade winced to see the delicate weapon being treated that way. Watching her slow, deliberate advance, it seemed as if no power in the world could have turned her back.

Servos whined as she raised her fists, and Arcade was close enough to see Ulysses recoil in shock as with an incoherent scream, her massive, armored form closed the last few yards between them at a run.

In a split second, Ulysses leapt agilely backward; if he hadn’t, she would have smashed him into a red stain on the catwalk right there.  Samara’s huge weight crashed into the rail separating the catwalk from the missile bay. The rail gave dangerously; anyone else would have gone right over.  Yet Samara handled Powered Armor like no one Arcade had ever known; she whirled with the grace of a dancer and lunged at the other man again with a howl.

Once more Ulysses leapt backward, evading Samara’s full-on rush at the last second. He was visibly startled; Arcade guessed he had not been prepared for such raw ferocity. As he stepped back, he swung at Samara with the eagle-headed staff.  Arcade had no idea what he expected it to do and he never got a chance to find out.  As he swung at her, Samara stepped to one side, reached out, and locked her hands around the staff.

It wasn't even anything close to an equal contest. Even without the armor, Samara was strong enough that Arcade suspected she had had some modifications put in somewhere along the line; with it, she could rip a steel girder in half with her bare hands, and outweighed Ulysses by a couple hundred pounds to boot.  She wrenched the staff away from him as if she were taking a toy from a child. The other man was flung, sprawling, to the floor. Samara raised the staff over her head, brought it down over her knee, and with an animal’s snarl, snapped it in two.

In the distance, a klaxon began to blare.

Everything seemed to happen at once.  Ulysses scrambled to his feet, grabbing for his 12.7 mm submachine gun with an alacrity that spoke of outright alarm.  Arcade could hear pounding feet thundering along corridors, and then the rumble of metal doors folding away; panic gripped him as he heard the gurgled and growling shouts and yells of Marked Men soldiers.  Overhead, the two eyebots that had flanked Ulysses whistled; one of them rotated and struck Samara with some kind of glowing ray.  Her armored form staggered, and she grunted in pain.

“Arcade!”  Samara shouted, catching herself.  “Get the Marked Men!  ED-E! Handle the bots!”

“Ulysses?” Arcade shouted back, though he hardly needed to.

“He’s mine!” And she gave another howl.

Get the Marked Men? Is she crazy!? Even as he thought that, Arcade was already moving, taking up position at the head of the catwalk, where it debouched into the platform where the missile gantry was located. Marked Men were pouring into the lobby on the far side of the temple, from the two metal doors on either side of the lift.  To Arcade’s fear-sharpened senses, they seemed like a flood, armed with huge swords, assault carbines, hunting shotguns and thermic lances.  Goddamn it, goddamn it, I never wanted to play Horatius at the bridge, I never wanted --  Behind him he could hear the chatter of Ulysses’s 12.7 mm machine gun and Samara’s yells of fury, but he didn’t dare look. His Plasma Defender was already in his hands, though he didn’t remember drawing it, and he poured green fire into the Marked Men at the far end of the catwalk, dropping them as fast as he could pull the trigger.

“On ne passe pas,” he growled between his teeth, scarcely aware of it.

For the rest of his life--as long as he lived--Arcade would maintain that that moment in time was the closest he ever came to dying in battle. The Marked Men were an endless stream, constantly pouring in through the metal doors; it seemed as if for every one he felled, two others came to take his place.  Power Armored Samara with LAER in hand could have handled that many--perhaps--but Samara was fully engaged fighting Ulysses, if the sounds behind him were any indication--he did not dare to turn and look, not even for a moment--and the beeps and electronic crackling sounds told him that the eyebot was likewise occupied. It was only him, alone against the oncoming tide of Marked Men, and he fired his weapon and dropped them with speed born of sheer, mortal terror.

Now I guess we know where they all were earlier, Arcade thought inanely. He must have every Marked Man in the Great Divide after us!

Two things and two things only saved his life that day: the chems Samara had given him in the lift on the way down and the fact that, as he had noticed all the way back in Hopeville, the Marked Men were terrible shots.  A few puffs of Jet here, a lightning quick jab of Psycho there, a gulp of Hydra during a seconds-long lull in combat--it wasn’t much, but it was somehow enough to keep him going.  Bullets sang around him, bouncing off the rails, the catwalk plates, glancing off his armor hard enough to stagger him; Arcade felt a trickle down his side, and knew that it was either sweat or he had been hit, though he wasn’t feeling it--but somehow, nothing hit him anywhere vital.

It couldn’t last. He knew this.  Even as the Marked Men fell in heaps and he heard Samara and Ulysses raging behind him, he knew his luck would have to run out. There was no getting out of this situation. He was essentially a dead man, had been since the moment he had stepped off the lift--since the moment you entered the Great Divide, he thought grimly.  In the medical phrase, this was not a situation “compatible with life.” Aside from the fact that he didn’t want to think about what the Marked Men would do to him if they took him alive, the only thing stopping him from just throwing down his weapons and getting it over with was the fact that Samara had told him to keep the Marked Men off her and if he failed, she was as good as dead.  She was counting on him.  She needs me to get the Marked Men, and dammit, that’s what I’m going to do, he panted to himself, his Plasma Defender hot in his aching hands as he fired again and again. Not for the first time during this whole sorry escapade, Arcade found himself wishing desperately for something more powerful.  A Plasma Caster, now, that would be about perfect-- He was going to stay here and guard this bridge--guard Samara’s back--even though it cost him his life.

Stranger, go and tell Samara that here I lie, obedient to her command, the sardonic thought came unbidden, and Arcade cursed viciously between his teeth.  He was starting to see shimmers now, moving among the other Marked Men, and though he should have recognized it immediately, he didn’t figure it out until he hit one by accident. The shimmer dispersed, falling away to reveal another Marked Man behind it.

Cloaks--goddamn it--  Stealth Men, he remembered Bonesaw saying back in the village of the Marked Men a lifetime ago, and he cursed again in despair.  This can’t get worse--

And yet it could, for one of the shimmers was moving forward, separating itself from the horde beyond and moving out onto the bridge, toward him.

It should have been an easy shot.  Arcade pulled the trigger--but instead of the familiar bolt of green, there was only a click and an electronic fizzle.  Shit!  Shit! Shit!  A bad energy cell-- It happened sometimes--at least he prayed that was all it was--but he had no time to clear it; the Shimmer was closing fast.  At least he had the presence of mind to slam the Plasma Defender back in its holster instead of dropping it; he grabbed for his Ripper with trembling hands--

The shimmer stopped.

The cloak fell away to reveal another Marked Man.  He was a few inches shorter than Arcade, although most people were; but he had the thick musculature of a Brahmin steer.  He wore a battered version of NCR patrol armor, patched with the usual street signs, but it was the mask he wore that truly identified him: a half-helmet with a crest and horns to either side, covering his eyes and leaving the lower portion of his face bare.  At his back he carried a huge blade that Arcade recognized as a replica of Lanius’s signature weapon: the Blade of the East.  His mind went back to what Bonesaw had told them in the Marked Man village, and he realized:

This is Blade.

The Marked Men at the other end of the bridge were holding fire, as if they were waiting. Blade studied Arcade through the mask. He drew his massive sword from his back--Arcade powered up his Ripper at the same moment--and then, the huge blade raised in salute, Blade offered Arcade--a bow?

What? 

Arcade’s breath was coming too rapidly; his mind was racing with fear and he fumbled, thoughtless, before it came to him what Blade was doing.  Is he challenging me to--a duel?  What the hell---?

It seemed like the craziest idea he had ever heard in his life.  His first impulse, which he immediately squashed, was to glance back over his shoulder at Samara, to see what she thought; but explosions and the full-throated chatter of Ulysses’s weapon told him their combat still raged. Completely at a loss, Ripper racing in his hands, Arcade bowed back; he didn’t know what else to do.

The moment he straightened up again, Blade swung his massive weapon for Arcade’s head.

Completely caught off guard, Arcade barely got his Ripper up in time to parry. The whirring teeth of his chainblade screeched against metal and the vibrations jarred Arcade’s hands.

Blade yanked his weapon back and swung again.

Arcae parried desperately, thrusting, stabbing, doing everything he could to push Blade back. The Marked Man fought in grim silence, his masked face expressionless.  Nevertheless, Arcade was in big trouble, and he could tell Blade knew it.  Hand to hand combat had never been his forte, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that his Ripper was a better weapon, he would have been dead in seconds.  As it was, the racing teeth of his chainblade chewed into Blade’s massive sword again and again, digging so many notches in the blade that it began to look as if the edge had been deliberately serrated. Glowing hot metal fragments seared his cheeks, and the roar of his chainblade began to stutter and skip. Arcade could tell by the vibrations in his hands that the chain would slip its track soon, and prayed desperately for it to hold just one more moment, just a second longer...

There was no more time. His Ripper jarred against Blade’s weapon; he recovered incorrectly, and his foot slipped on the edge of the catwalk. He fell to his knees. Blade swung his weapon at him. Arcade managed to yank the Ripper up again, and this time, the chainsaw sheared all the way through Blade’s weapon; the huge sword snapped in two about midway down its length, leaving Blade holding about a two-foot long remnant.  Wild elation surged through Arcade, and he started to get to his feet, only to have Blade deliver a powerful kick to the chest, throwing him onto his back. The metal catwalk rang as he crashed down on his back, his Ripper falling from his fingers.  The Marked Man put a foot on his chest.  Blade loomed above him, that terrible, dispassionate metal mask seeming to fill his world.  He drew the stump of the blade back so that its sharp edge faced him; as if hypnotized, Arcade could see the gleam of light along the keen edge of the blade. His breath was coming too fast; he was panting, desperately gasping for air to fill his lungs. This is it.  This is how I will die. His heart was racing in his chest. Blade started the downswing....

....and then stopped. He raised his head, looking past Arcade toward the dais beyond.

In that same moment, Arcade became aware that the sounds of battle coming from behind him had fallen silent. The intensity in Blade’s body compelled him; he rolled onto his side and looked back at the altar.

Ulysses was lying on his back, his gun several feet away, with Samara kneeling astride him--actually on top of him.  Even at his distance, Arcade could hear bones cracking and the other man groaning in agony, even over the wailing klaxons. He was struggling against her titanic weight; he seemed to be trying to speak, but Arcade could not make out any words. Samara’s face was fixed in an absolutely terrifying mask of rage.  Her armor whined--she laced her fingers together and raised her joined fists above her head--

“Samara!  No!” Arcade cried out in horror.

With all the strength of her armor behind her, Samara swung.  Arcade jerked his face away at the last moment, but it didn’t help; he heard her savage cry, the hollow splat sound, the grating of metal on metal as she ended Ulysses’s life.

“Dea!”

Above him, Blade tossed down the shattered remains of his sword. He reached up, and pulled off his half-helmet, revealing flayed features beneath; then slowly sank to one knee, pressing his helmet to his chest.  Arcade could hear the clatter of countless other Marked Men discarding their weapons and going down on their knees as well, and like a great wind, the word rolled back from many throats: “Dea.....”

Samara took no notice. She was weeping.

Her armored form had bent forward over what was left of Ulysses’s body; she was bracing herself on the ground almost on all fours.  Her head hung down, hiding her expression, but her massive pauldrons were shaking. Huge, painful-sounding, gasping sobs were tearing their way out of her chest, harsh and unlovely, filling the temple air.  The eyebot hung behind her.

In the distance, the klaxons still wailed.

Arcade glanced quickly at Blade; his erstwhile opponent was still kneeling, helmet pressed to his chest, his head bowed.  Carefully, Arcade rolled over and began to get to his feet.  He felt a hundred years old; every part of his body ached, and deep, stinging pain drilled into his side with every breath.  He hadn’t noticed it before.   I must have taken a bullet, he realized, and glancing down at himself saw that his armor was indeed streaked with blood.  He fumbled out a stimpak, and leaning on a rail, plunged it into his neck; then reeled, gasping as the shock of healing ran through him.  He was still a little tender when he straightened again.  His Ripper was a few feet away; Arcade gathered it up, noting grimly that the chain was almost off the track, and hooked it back at his waist. His limbs were trembling with exhaustion; his armor seemed to weigh a hundred times more, and for a moment, he wondered if he were going to fall flat on his face. 

Slowly, limping a little, he began to make his way toward Samara.

She took no heed of his approach, simply kneeling there and sobbing as if her heart were breaking. Those sobs tore at his heart--and frightened him a little too.  The audience of Marked Men did not move or speak, simply watching.  Feeling intensely self-conscious, Arcade went to her and knelt--at her side, and slightly behind her, where what remained of Ulysses was hidden from his view. 

“Samara,” he said quietly, reaching out to put one hand on her shoulder.  “Hey.  Samara.”

She heaved another one of those gasping sobs and her entire body shook.

“Are you all right? Are you...”  He groped for something to say, some way to reach her in the depths of her pain.  “Are you injured?” he asked, groaning internally at the inadequacy of his response.

“They didn’t come back,” she sobbed.

“What? I don’t--“

“The memories. They didn’t come back. I thought--but there’s nothing there, I don’t remember anything! They didn’t come back!”

Arcade swallowed. “I know.  Samara, I’m sorry,” he said quietly, though privately he was unsurprised; hell, I told her that when we first talked about this months ago--that the cure for amnesia was usually more complex than that.  “I’m sorry for you, I really am, but -- “  He bit his lip and looked up at the missile, fully in position now, towering far, far above them.   The oculus was open; he could see bright sky above. “But Samara, we’ve got bigger problems right now.”

“Wh--what?”

“Samara....” He wet his lips and glanced upward at the open missile silo.  Not much time left.... “Remember?  Ulysses said he was going to launch missiles at the NCR. That’s what he was doing when we got here.  We’ve got--Samara, we’ve got to find a way to stop that launch.”  She glanced up at him now, over her shoulder; her tear-streaked expression wrenched his heart.   The raging demon that had charged Ulysses barehanded was nowhere in evidence; there was only Samara now, her face ravaged by pain. He drew a breath, steadying himself. “We’ve got to, or a lot of innocent people are going to die. I can’t--Do you know anything about this technology? Does your PIP-Boy tell you anything?” As she continued to stare at him blankly, he begged her, “Samara, please. Please--we’ve got to do something, Samara--“

Slowly, what he was saying seemed to get through to her.  She sat back on her heels, slowly getting herself under control, then pushed to her feet. As she did so, Arcade carefully positioned himself so that she blocked his view of Ulysses; he didn’t think he could take looking at the ruin of the other man right now.  Samara’s cuirass was splashed with blood and bits of brain matter, and red stippled her arms all the way up to her pauldrons. Her face was streaked with tears and spatters of blood.  She drew a few long breaths, getting herself under control, swallowed once, then drew distance around herself like a cloak.

“Right,” she said. “What do we need to do?”

She’s with me now.  Thank God. He felt he was seeing her--seeing her--for the first time all day. Aloud, he said, “I don’t know.” Arcade bit his lip, casting around himself.  “There’s got to be a console somewhere, maybe a control panel--“

Samara nodded. She glanced down at her PIP-Boy screen, then grimaced; it was covered with blood.  She wiped it against her armored side, somewhat ineffectually, and then tapped at it with her other hand.  She raised her head.

“Over there,” she said, indicating one of the control pits on the right of the walkway. “Come on.”

Blade rose from his kneeling position as she approached, and behind him the rest of the Marked Men did as well. “Dea,” he said reverentially. “You....slay....Ulysses. Divide....yourrrs.”

Samara glanced at him, then looked away dismissively.  “Whatever.”

They went down a flight of steps to the right of the walkway, down into the pit of computer equipment, with the eye-bot bobbing after them.  Every nerve in Arcade’s body was screaming at him to hurry! Dreadful images of the aftermath of the Great War--images he’d seen during his training with the Followers--haunted his mind.  Urgency prickled along his skin. Goddamn it, we’ve got to do something--

Smashed, dead computer banks lined the walls of the computer pit, with here and there a few consoles with their lights still blinking.  Samara ignored them, consulting her PIP-Boy, while Arcade shifted from foot to foot and tried to throttle his impatience.  The klaxon continued to blare in the background, hammering away at him. After what seemed a year, Samara looked up. 

“There,” she said, pointing to a platform that stood a little below the edge of the catwalk, holding one of the few active remaining consoles.  Next to it was a lit, battery-operated lantern, probably dropped by Ulysses when setting the launch up.  “Up there.”

The two of them scrambled up the short flight of stairs to the active computer bank. Arcade thought he could hear the song of engines powering up, and ground his teeth.

“Hurry, Samara,” he urged her as she fiddled with the computer bank.  “There might not be that much time left--“

She shook her head, biting her lip.  “There’s no time left.  It’s counting down right now.”

“Shit!”  Arcade cursed viciously. Horrible images of charred cities, burned flesh, ghouls, filled his mind--the images of what had been left in the wake of the Great War. Never again, his Follower instructors had always told him. We must make sure this never happens again...  What the hell is wrong with humanity anyway?   The Marked Men watched silently from the walls, living reminders of what the consequences of failure would be.  “Goddamn it, Samara, there has to be something-- Can you abort the countdown somehow?”

Again, she shook her head. “Abort code’s been overridden. Ulysses didn’t want anybody interrupting this launch.”  Her cool dispassion was maddening to him. “I can’t hack this, it’s beyond my skill.  I might be able to change the target, but I can’t cancel it.”

Frantic, Arcade cast about wildly.  His eyes fell on the little bot, still hovering behind Samara’s head.  “The eye-bot.  Can the eyebot do it? It hacked the door earlier--“

Samara glanced up at the bot. “ED-E?”  The bot whistled.  Arcade flinched; his nerves were so overstressed that the whistle ground on him like broken glass.

“He says he can do it but it’ll cause him to overload.”

“Well, have him do it then!”

Samara was silent. The klaxons blared in the background.

Arcade stared at her, feeling a touch of unease.  “Samara?”

Still, she said nothing. Again, the contours of the stranger were beginning to surface in her face, alien planes and angles coming to the fore in the dull lighting.  The unease was blossoming in Arcade’s chest.

“Samara, what are you waiting for?  Tell the bot--”

Her jaw tightened. “I’m not sacrificing ED-E.”

A horrible dread filled him, raising the hair on the back of his neck, turning his gut to ice. “What do you mean you’re not sacrificing ED-E?  Samara, you have to! Don’t you understand--“

She was already tapping at the console, her face set in iron, unfamiliar lines. “The Legion has this coming.”

The Legion--  Arcade felt as if he had been punched in the gut.  His legs felt shaky, his limbs weak as water.  She’s going to-- “You--you can’t be serious,” he breathed.

“This is a chance to strike a knock-out blow against the Legion.  I’m not going to waste it.”  The dull emergency lighting painted her features with lurid colors.

A tide of black horror was seeping into Arcade’s chest.  He barely heard the words he was saying.  “Samara, you can’t--  You don’t know where that’s going!  You could kill hundreds of thousands--not just Legionaries--there could be women--children--“

“The women will be better off dead.  Boone would agree with me,” she said coolly.  “And the children will just grow up to be Legionaries themselves and continue the cycle.” A snarl leapt across her teeth. “Better to end it here and now.”

That black horror had closed over Arcade’s head completely. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing; it was almost as if the words didn’t make sense.  Never again, the Followers said--never again--  “No, I won’t let you do this!” he cried.  Without thinking, he reached for Samara’s arm, meaning to pull her away from the console--

Wham!  Something impacted hard into the back of his head, hard enough to stun him. He realized he was lying on his back on the grated floor of the platform; Samara had flung him away with force enough to throw him down.  He struggled to get up, meaning to take her down by force if he had to--if I can--when he heard a click. His eyes focused on the open barrel of a pistol.

General Retslaf’s pistol.  It was the same 10mm pistol that Samara had retrieved in the Hopeville Missile Defense station, what felt like a lifetime ago.   Without taking her eyes off the console, she had aimed it directly at him.

Arcade felt as if his body had been turned to ice.  A frozen numbness seemed to pervade him; a sense of distance, of unreality. The end of the gun barrel seemed as large and dark as a train tunnel.  She wouldn’t, he tried to tell himself, as he had in Ashton Missile Silo.  She wouldn’t actually.... But the granite lines of her face, seen in profile as she worked the console, told a different truth. At that moment, there was no doubt in his mind that if he moved so much as an inch, she would pull the trigger without a second thought--or even a first one.

Get up.  Get up! he shouted at himself.  You’ve still got your Ripper--get up, do something--  It was useless. He might as well have been paralyzed for all the good it did. He could only watch as Samara tapped at the console, inputting the final destination codes. The ground began to shake under him, and roaring filled the world.  A blast of superheated air washed over him, but he could not take his eyes from the end of the gun barrel as the missile roared up into the sky, carrying the deaths of millions with it.

“Dea!” the cry rolled from the throats of the Marked Men watching. “Ave, Dea!”

Samara paid the acclaims no heed. She stowed the gun inside her armor, then turned and strode toward Arcade, her face as grim as death.  Alarms were howling, and explosions were rocking the launch bay, shaking the floor under them and billowing smoke into the air.  That strange paralysis still held him; he could not resist as she gripped his arm and hauled him to his feet. She dragged him along with her as if carrying a piece of baggage as she strode toward the lift, and Arcade was so discombobulated he simply allowed her to.  He was numb inside, frozen, almost shell-shocked.

Blade met her at the door. He stepped into her path and held her weapons out to her, the ones she had discarded in her final charge at Ulysses. “Dea,” he said, in that horrible, rasping voice.  “Cou...ri...er.  Killer...of....Ulysses.  Here.  Yours.”

She spared him a glance as she took her weapons from him; then shook her head and shoved Arcade ahead of her into the lift.  The doors slid closed, and the lift began to rise, carrying them away from the missile silo, and the Divide.

[*]

The sky was a faded blue, instead of a murky reddish brown; it arched above them like a dome filled with clear water.  Wisps of clouds drifted past, and the sun cast clean, warm rays over it all. Before them, a cracked, dry land with tufts of grass waving here and there sloped gently away from them, down a long run to a flat, level plain; farther beyond were the low, dark brown shapes of mountains, rendered small by distance.  To their backs were more mountains forming an almost solid wall; the only gap in the wall was gated with old cars and corrugated metal, a jumble that would have to be carefully threaded to reach the passage on the other side.

A footlocker lay at their feet.  Still further off, even beyond the far mountains, was the looming smoke from what remained of a mushroom cloud.

Arcade crossed his arms over his chest.  His whole body was aching from tension. The rasping voice of Ulysses drifted from off to his right:

“...message is this:  the destruction that has been wrought in the Divide--or elsewhere if you couldn’t stop me--it can happen again.  It will keep happening.  If war doesn’t change, men must change, and so must their symbols.  Even if it is nothing at all, know what you follow, Courier--just as I followed you, to the end.  Whatever your symbol, carry it on your back--and wear it proudly--when you stand at Hoover Dam. [/click.]”

Samara hissed through her teeth.  “Even in death, this guy can’t shut up.”

She closed her gauntlet, crushing the holotape that held Ulysses’s final message to fragments. Then she turned to the other items Ulysses had left for her in the foot locker--a replica of his eagle-headed staff, and a duster, similar to his own, with the NCR’s two-headed bear on the back of it--and busied herself with settling them for travel. It was just the two of them standing there; the eyebot had taken off the moment they had gotten out of the base. Now or never.

Swallowing down nervousness, Arcade turned to her and spoke the words he had decided on during the long trip back from the Divide--possibly even earlier, at the top of the Ashton missile silo.  “Samara, I’m leaving.”

She stopped. Her head lifted and her pale eyes stared at him.

“I’m going back to the Followers’ outpost at Freeside. It’s where I belong. I never should have left in the first place.  I don’t know what I was thinking.”

He swallowed again, and braced himself, waiting for the explosion.   It never came.  Samara’s face might have been carved from stone; perhaps her eyes tightened a bit, and a muscle quivered along her jawline, but that was all.

“Your choice,” was all she said.  Sliding the staff into place at her back, she turned away and started off, striding away down the long, grassy slope.

Arcade stared after her, somewhat unbelieving.  That’s it?  Really? A strange, prickly sensation welled up inside him, not unlike hurt; his arms tightened a bit across his chest. “Don’t try to stop me,” he called after her, only half sardonically.  “My mind’s made up.”

Samara did not so much as look back.  Arcade stood, his arms wrapped around himself, gazing after her as her figure grew smaller and smaller in the distance.

[*]

“And then what happened?”

He pulled himself out of memory, to look at the girl--almost a young woman--sitting in front of him, listening eagerly.  Jade, her name was, one of the many urchins rattling around Freeside: she was one of the students in the Followers’ free school. She had come in for some medicine; her brother had one of the many wasting diseases all too common among Freesiders, and Arcade had been treating him for a while now. Jade had long black hair roughly pulled back and clear green eyes in a snub-nosed, brownish face; she showed the scrawniness typical of the Freeside gutter rats who managed to make it to some semblance of an adulthood, but unlike so many others, there was still a kind of innocence in her eyes.

Arcade shrugged, stretching his legs out in front of him, pushing back from his camp table. “What happened? Oh, about what you’d expect. She went back to Boone and they managed to patch things up, or so I heard; they killed Legion together, lots of Legion, just as Samara had promised.  They fought together at Hoover Dam, and helped bring about the NCR’s victory, ushering in this brave new world.” He gestured around himself, a touch sardonically. “They helped out with the aftermath too, hunting down and eliminating remaining Legion squads. I used to see Samara around occasionally, and we spoke a few times; usually not much more than a couple words, though.  Yeah....” He paused for a moment in thought. “The NCR tried to turn her into a hero--her and Boone both--but it was never a good fit for either of them. She sort of let them for a while, but it didn’t last.  I guess I knew it wouldn’t, watching her.” He remembered, the few times they’d spoken, how her eyes would gradually slip past him--past the walls of the Fort, the walls of Freeside--as if her immediate surroundings could not hold her interest, only to settle on the distant horizon. “Eventually she and Boone separated. Boone’s still around here, so they say, protecting the caravan routes and the Long 15; don’t know if you’ve heard the legends of the Ghost Sniper, but that’s supposed to be him. As for the Courier--“ Memory touched him; he pushed it back. “She just walked into the East one day and never came back.  Maybe she found whatever it was she was looking for out there.”

Those big green eyes watching him never blinked.  Jade sighed in admiration.  “I think the Courier was a hero.”

Arcade raised one eyebrow. “Have you even heard a word I said? Samara was many things, but I would not call her a hero--“

“I would,” Jade said firmly. “She went where other people wouldn’t go and did what they couldn’t do.  If it weren’t for her, the NCR wouldn’t have won at Hoover Dam! She changed the world.  That makes her a hero.”

She gazed up at him, buck teeth showing in an eager grin, her green eyes bright and earnest. Arcade sighed.

“Shouldn’t you be running along?  Class starts in--“ he checked his chronometer “--five minutes, and if you don’t hurry up, you’ll be late.”

Jade jumped as if she’d been stung.  “Oh, wow, you’re right! Thanks, Dr. Gannon!” She leapt up from his footlocker where she’d been sitting and dashed out of his work tent as if a Deathclaw were after her.  “See you next week!”

“Don’t forget to take that medicine to your brother!” Arcade called after the skinny little brown figure. Jade waved one hand in acknowledgement, then disappeared among the other work tents.  He gazed after her for a moment, thinking.

A hero...no.  A symbol.... Maybe.

With a quick shake, he pulled himself out of his thoughts.  All right, that’s enough time on memory lane.  Back to work. He picked up his stylus, and turned again to the stack of patient files before him, marking and making notations as the sounds of Freeside drifted in from outside.

Finis.