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In Fort Hagen, Nick Valentine stands back at a safe distance.
A habit of his. He’s trying to be respectful, she thinks, to take up less space or stay out of her way, but there is still an instinct in her to calculate the space between them. It buzzes in the back of her head like the blossom of a migraine. It’s there without her counting.
(Twenty-five feet. A safe distance: She, with her knife, wouldn’t close the distance in the time it would take him to pull his gun and fire if he had to. Leftover cop instinct. It’s as much a part of him as his chassis.)
He smokes. He watches her dismantle a human skull with the same gold-eyed grimness as when she popped the fiberglass chest panel off a gen two and cut out its heart battery. He doesn’t say anything when her bare fingers plunge down into Kellogg’s soft brain matter, grasping for leverage underneath the implant until it pulls loose with an ugly squelch and a soft spray of red.
She holds it up, hands slick with blood like a field surgeon, glistening under the flicker of fluorescent bulbs. Valentine only offers a roll of his shoulders.
“He deserved worse,” she says to her reflection in the chrome.
“I told you before.” His voice is carefully modulated, coolly neutral, a chainsmoker’s gravel smoothed into asphalt. “Kellogg’s your business.”
She wraps her prize in a tea towel; she takes a long, calm breath; and she calls for her dog.
These are the things she takes home with her:
- 12 (twelve) units of food, nonperishable.
- 8 (eight) books, historical nonfiction.
- 8 (eight) bottles of water, purified.
- 4 (four) bottles of bourbon, sealed, year 2068.
- 3 (three) batteries, fusion, fully charged.
- 2 (two) canisters of coffee, sealed.
- 2 (two) cartons of cigarettes, sealed.
- 1 (one) custom .44 magnum, no ammunition.
- 1 (one) custom cybernetic implant, function unknown.
- 1 (one) robot.
The gates of Fenway are meant to be a parting of ways.
She stands back in the street. Valentine’s supposed to disappear inside, debts settled, but he pushes the money back into her hands, shakes his head. The expression he gives her is more complex than robots have any right to have.
“The job’s not done yet,” he says quietly. The sincerity aches, makes her jaw hurt. She doesn’t tell him to come with her, but she doesn’t tell him to go home either, and does not argue when he falls in step behind her, absently scratching behind the dog’s ears.
In the early months, before she learns whose distant lamps are friendly and how this new land lays, she builds.
It’s in the brambles of the brambles, the weeds out beyond the weeds. She finds an old storm cellar east of the city, snug under a foundation that no longer holds a house, padlocked and hidden in a clump of kudzu. Whatever was remembered here is gone, but the concrete is dry and the air is cool and the door disappears into the brush when she closes it. Safety is a commodity; feeling safe is a rarity.
She oils the hinges, saws and sands wood until her hands ache, mounts shelves, hammers together a bedframe. She paints the cabinets a chalky French blue. She finds things and hangs them: copper bottomed pots and chipped coffee mugs and a branch-like twist of antlers from a deer she killed the first week. She kicks the fusion generator until it shudders to life, clears out the ventilation, plugs in a radio and soft lights enough to read by.
Easy, now, to measure her world in woodworking units and quiet breaths and little things collected. She does not have a son or a husband, but she has a deerskin quilt and a stack of books and a lawnchair to watch the coastal sunrise. Boston creaks in the distance like an old jaundiced monster, but the sounds are swallowed, blissfully, somewhere in the granite gaps between it and her. She listens to the birds, the rattle of leaves, the rasp of her knife on the whetstone. She drinks shitty hot plate coffee and lives another day.
If it’s good enough for now, it’s good enough for her.
She tells that to Valentine in that first meeting, but in fewer words, in a voice rusty from silence.
“You’ll do.”
He’s not grateful for it like the dog was. Just huffs out an offended gust of air, gives a gold-eyed appraisal to the gun she holds out to him that makes her think he’s not going to comply. Then he says, dry as the wasteland: “Glad to hear it.”
She weighs the option of just carrying his chassis back to his secretary, but to his credit, he takes the gun before she makes a decision.
In the absence of home, she prefers ruined things. She likes the cold air and deep groans of long-abandoned shelter. She likes hide tents and the safety of evergreens. He keeps watch--she doesn’t have to strap herself to a high up branch or put out fires anymore--but the instinct to stay hidden is strong.
Parts of her will never leave Alaska. Parts of Alaska will never leave her.
“I can’t sleep in town,” she admits to her hands, palms facing a wood burning stove. They are three floors up in some old office building in Medford, windows facing the alley, listening to tidy pops in the distance. Boston at night is a gunpowder caucus. She thinks of tripwires she’s set in the stairwell and her body uncoils. “Too much noise, too many people. Always hated this city.”
“I was never too keen on Boston either.” Nick’s smile is sad, gentle. She offers him a bottle of bourbon, which he trades for his cigarette. Neither do him any good, but gestures are a kindness. “Chicago was my town.”
She wonders if he notices the pronouns. You, she wants to say, never saw Boston. Chicago was never your town.
Instead: “Hated Chicago too.”
He laughs.
When she sleeps that night, she dreams of a fire that burns Chicago out of history so completely that no one can remember its name.
When he asks her how she slept, she says, alright.
Some nights, if she doesn’t fall asleep fast enough, the dog’s weight in bed becomes her husband’s.
She doesn’t imagine much else; never did have much of an imagination. Just the weight, the maddening shift of springs, the oppression of body heat. He laughed during the day and shook like a child at night, limbs always questing for her like some mass of hungry vines. He’d snap awake sometimes, wild-eyed, his hand reaching for a weapon--mind left behind enemy lines, somewhere in a shitty motel half a world away--when she’d intercept it and run her fingers through his hair at his temples. We’re home, you’re fine, it’s over.
(But it was never really over. She hated this routine, hated sharing a bed with the things they both brought back with them. Can’t field dress a demon, can’t stick a knife up under its ribs, can’t argue it in court. That’s the hard limit on her skill set. What else could she do but stare at the ceiling in the dark and wait for an opening?)
She counts the ceiling joists until sunrise. Then she feeds the dog, puts the coffee on, and imagines what he’d say if he were here.
You’re the dumbest person I know sometimes. Leans on the table, fingers splayed, grinning like an asshole. Laughing. You didn’t need to get pregnant just to sleep on the couch.
“It was more complicated than that,” she says to the dog. It just looks up at her, tail slapping at the floorboards.
“It’s going to be the worst for you.”
Her mother, a woman of crisply pressed pantsuits and provoking expressions, sits at the kitchen island with a bellini in hand and a rare smile for her daughter’s swelling stomach. Continues: “Nesting. It happened to me, and with the way you are…”
“And what is the way I am, exactly.”
“Controlling.” It’s said bluntly but not unkindly. “And you get it from me. I had your father tear up the nursery four times trying to get it just right. Then he had to fight me just to get a chance to hold you.”
A heartbeat of silence. “Are you describing childbirth or the divorce?”
“Bitter’s not a good look for you. I hope you’ll finally understand when you get tired of playing house too.” Her mother laughs without the barest gasp of humor, looks at the vinyl countertops like they’re splotched with disease. “Marriages come and go. But that baby will wake things up in you that will never go to sleep, mark my words. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s just your blood.”
And she drinks her peach seltzer--
thinks something forgettable like we’re out of bread--
greets guests as they arrive for the baby shower--
“Sorry.” Amari’s voice, stretched thin like tin cans and string, vibrates down into her molars. “The program’s having difficulty parsing the three of you in there. Let me get it back on track.”
At the edge of the Glowing Sea, they make camp in a bunker while a storm outside keens like a freshly-made widow. Valentine sits at a console nudging radio dials with a safecracker’s precision. She busies herself with a rag and a paint scraper, lifting Gunner markings and arterial spray off a liberated suit of power armor.
“She was wrong,” she says to the breastplate. “My mother. I kept waiting for it to happen. The baby came, but the rest of it never did.”
Radio static. The pause is too long and the small hairs on her neck prickle with being watched. She says, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Look where we are.” There’s a space of air where he’d normally insert doll with another woman, but he’s never called her doll -- she is not soft enough. Dolls don’t keep a body count notched into their rifle stock.
He presses on: “We’re off the map in the deadliest strip of the Commonwealth and you’re doubting your devotion?” DCR crackles through the speaker, faint, fighting through the storm. When he places a hand on her shoulder, she does not immediately shrug it away. “We’re going to find him. We’re getting closer.”
“We won’t,” she says. It’s confident. Everything she says is confident and grim and ugly. Pretty words are useless to her; it made her a stranger in the Old World, when prettiness was the only thing that mattered, but here, she slots right in like a bullet in the chamber. “But we’re going to find the people responsible. That’s enough.”
Abstraction is the enemy. Survival is about reduction, about putting the nonessential parts of herself to sleep. She doesn’t have a job, but she has work to be done today and tomorrow and the next. She has cords of cut wood seasoning in holzmieten, salted fish and venison curing on racks. She has thick winter layers and reinforced boots. She has all the ways to kill a man carved like a prayerbook into her bones.
(There are moments near the bottom of the bottle where she thinks she should feel ashamed of this, the relief, like the end of the world is a good stretch and a hot bath. She was not made to be a civilian; not built to wear smaller titles like wife and mother and lawyer. She was trying to be better. Failure should feel worse than this.)
She doesn’t have a husband or a son, but she has a reloading bench for an altar and a matte black ka-bar strapped to her thigh like a priestess to the oldest kind of god. She has guerrilla warfare and terror-tactics. She has strings of raider ears drying in the sun.
And she has a plan.
If someone asks, "why is that lady
out walking in that lake storm?" Tell them
"months ago her husband went to the
store in a blizzard & never came back."
Tell them: "She can't stop looking for him.”
-- Susan Firer, He is Trying to Get Home From the Store