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“Courier.”
Graham’s voice stops her as she takes her first step into the Southern Passage to leave Zion. She didn’t expect him to come to see her off; thought he’d be too busy repairing his guns or marshalling the Horses or any one of the countless things that might need doing in the wake of the White Legs’ defeat. She didn’t even recall telling him she was going, although Chalk had probably let him know.
She almost envies the kid his ignorance, sometimes, to look upon the Burned Man and see nothing but a hero.
She stops short. Takes a few moments before she turns around.
“You’re headed back to the Mojave,” he says. It is not a question.
Her departure is abrupt, but it has to be. The skies over Zion are blue, and its waters are clear and fresh. The plants grow thick and green for a desert, the animals abundant. The touch of the Old World is light here, the ruins sparse and not filled with ghosts. The air is clear, and the radiation does not poison the land. The lights of Vegas, and its cares, are a very long way away. The people are friendly and open, not duplicitous like city folk, and their ways are familiar and comfortable. As the river rushes and the wind rattles the mesquites and she sits on rush mats by the campfire eating seasoned gecko as the Sorrows and Horses chat and laugh over dinner, she feels as if she is back in some long-forgotten memory, back to a time when she did not know the taste of grave dirt or the stench of burning flesh or the feeling of Cloud in her lungs, and she thinks she could stay here forever.
But she has a job to do, so she must go.
“Hope the Legion ain’t got too cocky while I been gone.” She tilts her head, summoning bravado to hide her true thoughts. “Someone’s gotta clean ‘em outta the Mojave; may as well be me.”
Graham nods approvingly.
“You’re doing the Lord’s work, keeping the people of Vegas safe from their ravages,” he says, his voice full of unwavering certainty. “Whether you believe or not.”
She doesn’t know whether to be bolstered by this solidarity of purpose, or whether to be furious that he should speak as if he had no hand in this, as if the Legion were not at least partly of his making. She doesn’t know, so she doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t seem to expect her to, anyway; just holds out his hands, and she sees that he holds his book in them, the one he and Daniel seem to read constantly by the evening firelight. The one with a fading gilt cross on the front, like she saw in Nipton, and Nelson, and she wonders briefly if the idea came from him. The book is important to them, she knows, for they believe it to be the words of their god. Their faith is as alien to her as Bright’s ghoul cult, as the cap-worship of Vegas. She reaches out uncertainly.
“Take it,” he assures her. “Daniel seems to have a limitless supply.” And there is a wry note to this sentence, a joke from the Malpais Legate, and she doesn’t know how to react to that.
She takes the holy book. Might never get around to reading it, but this is a book, and she is always hungry for knowledge
“You’ve saved the Sorrows,” he continues. “And by staying my hand, my soul. It may be inadequate repayment, but-” he pauses, and his eyes hold her own. “You’ll always have a home here, Courier, wherever you may roam.”
She looks into the ice-blue eyes of the Malpais Legate, the man whose armies destroyed her first home, as he offers her a second; wonders if he was there, at Twin Mothers, when the Legion killed and enslaved and hurt her people. Wonders if he watched.
I should kill you, she thinks. By all rights, I should kill you.
He knows what she is, who she is, now. She wonders if this is his form of apology; a request for forgiveness, perhaps, or an attempt to make up for his sins, by offering her what she wants so dearly.
She sees the angry scars around the eyes, where the Burned Man’s flesh melted in fire and pitch and never set back quite right. Sees the bandages that cover near every inch of his skin, the flesh beneath still keening, he says, still burning. Sees, in her mind, him lowering the gun when she barked at him, turning aside from his hated enemy. A mere shadow of the Malpais Legate, perhaps, but that’s a good thing, for such as he.
But it looks like Caesar beat me to it, she thinks as well. And now she has killed Caesar, and swayed Graham with her words, and perhaps, in a way, that counts as victory against Malpais twice over.
She holds Graham’s gaze for some time, before she nods and turns away.