Her mother did always praise her patience. On one such occasion, Kaelyn was down with the flu when her amma visited. They'd just moved into Sanctuary Hills, and all the light filtering through the front windows taunted her with open blue skies—a far cry from her cramped apartment in the city. What had been one of their house's selling points made her head ache and her eyes water.
After Eromi was seated and Kaelyn was curled on the couch with her legs folded beneath her, the doorbell rang.
It was none other than Mrs Cofran checking in. She must have been prompt in spreading the latest gossip to the neighborhood, because Kaelyn fielded three more visits over the course of the morning: Mrs Parker, Mrs Donoghue and Mrs Larson, all descending to cluck and fuss more than her own amma had. Was Kaelyn's tea hot enough? Did she need a cushion, or maybe a blanket? More tissues? Mrs Donoghue made soup, if Kaelyn wanted to eat.
Eromi watched the whole thing with an indulgent curling the corners of her mouth. With one eyebrow arched, her dark eyes danced with mirth as she said, "You have the patience of a saint."
So, naturally, when an insistent hand nudges Kaelyn's shoulder, she doesn't snap at the hand's owner for intruding on her dreams of better days. She can still see her mother's smile behind her eyes; takes a moment to savor it. Dragging her knuckles over sleep-glued eyes, she rolls over to face the prodder. The mattress beneath her sags under the weight of mold, let alone under the burden of a woman with the world on her shoulders, but its meager padding is preferable to the undercroft floor. Nothing can help with the smells, however: powdered mortar and bone dust waft into the corridor from the crypt, while the dank odor of wet algae somehow breaches the security door that keeps the sewer out of the church.
"What is it?" Never mind that she hasn't even opened her eyes yet.
"Time for practice." Deacon. She can hear the smirk in his voice, even when he whispers.
When Kaelyn manages to open her eyes she can confirm that Deacon is indeed smirking. "Thought you preferred dull, lazy days?"
He cocks an eyebrow in her direction. "Normally, yeah, but since I'm supposed to show you the ropes, I figured I might as well show you how to keep yourself from getting killed in the process."
Kaelyn flops onto her back. Takes a moment to stretch and sink into the thin mattress. Then she sits up. "Alright."
Since other agents are trying to sleep, Deacon only grins.
Kaelyn shakes out the wrinkles in her shirt and collects her meager belongings from their pile beside the mattress. Most of them are weapons. With a hasty finger comb, she secures her hair in a bun at her nape and untangles stray brown strands from between her dark fingers. Her boots grind against dust and tiny chunks of mortar as she rises to her feet.
Deacon detours through the hole in the wall to enter the undercroft proper. The Railroad's headquarters are surprisingly homey for a crypt. Even with some of the tomb lids cracked open like brittle eggshells to reveal a dusty femur or crooked finger bones, no one fears that the dead will rise in the night—not that one can tell day from night down here. It helps that Desdemona forbade desecrating the dead, aside from staining sarcophagi lids with coffee rings.
Carrington is already awake and perched at his desk. He spares Kaelyn a narrow look—two for Deacon—then ignores them. Deacon dodges around more occupied mattresses and sarcophagi, the latter of which are used as makeshift tables, to the crates of prepackaged foods. He holds up a tin of beans and a tin of corn, weighing them up with a contemplative expression as if it were a tough choice. With an eye roll, Kaelyn plucks the corn tin out of his hand. Deacon shoves his breakfast, along with some spare ammo, into his backpack. He then slings not one but two sniper rifles over his shoulder.
Kaelyn raises an eyebrow, then shrugs. As long as he carries them.
They backtrack to the corridor where mattresses and sleeping bags are shoved against the wall, leaving a thin walkway to reach the evacuation tunnel into the sewer. Kaelyn and Deacon manage to make it onto the streets without stepping on any fingers or slipping backside-first into five inches of muck, though it is far too early to smell this bad.
Predawn turns out to be an excellent time to prowl the streets. Most raiders are sleeping off the night's excess in their nests of wood and tin carved out of Boston's hide, save the unlucky underdogs who landed guard duty. Super mutants too are quiet in their towers of rattling chains and swaying meat bags—small blessings there. Even so, Kaelyn and Deacon keep to the darkest walls and alleys, and detour around a block to avoid crossing a wide street. A pearly fog rolls up the river and breaks over the banks to swallow the ruins of the city, smoothing over the wreckage with a damp, clammy touch until it could be any ungodly morning before the Great War.
Kaelyn pretends everything is normal, pretends she is carrying a handbag instead of a satchel holding enough ordnance to take out a small raider den, until a fresh chill causes her to tighten her leather jacket around her middle. She never knew, before, how practical leather jackets are; they certainly weren't acceptable fashion for any respectable lady.
Deacon leads her through the fog as if every step is familiar territory, so despite his every warning Kaelyn decides to throw some trust in his direction and follow without protest. Their footsteps are dampened by thick groundless gray, and with some coaching from Deacon she is able to move even more quietly.
"Are you keeping an eye out?" The swirling fog warps Deacon's voice, echoes it back on all sides, granting it a graveness that the man himself never conveys.
"For dew?"
"For anyone who thinks we'd make a good breakfast. Or lunch. Maybe dinner. You get the idea."
"Between the fog and the night, we're concealed. In fact, talking like this is what's most likely to make us targets."
"From the ground, you bet. But you need to start looking up."
Kaelyn does so. Her eyes are first caught by the billboards—one for RobCom in dark blue and gray, another stamped with Mass Fusion's logo, and of course a Nuka-Cola commercial. Such stark colors, noticeable even in the dark, serve their purpose two hundred years on. She forces herself to look past them, past their broken, curling panels bowing to the supremacy of a master more potent than consumerism. Looks past the crumbling skyline, where buildings tower over them, windows black and gaping like so many vacant eyes. Nothing stands out to her less-than-stellar night vision. But she knows Deacon is smirking at her again.
"Uh huh. I thought so."
Deacon abruptly changes direction, tapping her shoulder as he passes. He prowls down a narrow alley, motioning for Kaelyn to stay close, and avoids every loose brick she trips over. A stairwell pierces the rolling gloom—some emergency fire escape that isn't too rusted. As Deacon climbs, he points out the signs of rust that have feasted on the stairs' metal bones until they are too treacherous to stand on, as well as giving her adequate warning of any missing stairs. When they reach the rooftop, Deacon sinks into a half-crouch and sneaks up to one of the low brick walls marking the drop off. He motions for her to sit with him.
From here they have a clear view of the street below. When Kaelyn's eyes assemble the pieces from memory, at all the wrong angles, something cold and heavy settles in her chest. She used to emerge from the metro and walk the block to Padma's apartment, then they would stop in at Sadie's Coffee, a café whose cheery little awning is just visible from here—and now sports a gaping hole as if a super mutant dropped through it. One of her exes used to live a few blocks away, too, before he moved to Pennsylvania.
"Here." Deacon holds out one of the rifles. "Tinker Tom made a few adjustments to this for you."
"So it's either going to take off a super mutant's head or explode in my face." Kaelyn takes the rifle by its strap and handles it as she would a live snake.
"You never know, it could do both."
Setting the rifle on the concrete—carefully—Kaelyn inspects it as best she can. Her own experience with guns has not wandered into rifle territory beyond her laser musket. That is a contraption of wood and duct tape and wires, and it can't hold a candle to the gun at her feet. This sniper rifle is a matte black, all long lines and sleek angles, with the occasional scratch and scrape that intimates at prior adventures. A suppressor stretches the already impressive barrel to a truly unwieldy length. No magazine is loaded, that much she can tell, but the intricacies of the weapon are lost on her.
"This," Deacon taps the suppressor capping his own rifle, "is to suppress the muzzle flash, not so much the noise. Think of it like a storm: thunder is too loud to muffle, but that doesn't mean you're going to see lightning bolts."
Kaelyn blinks. "That is one of the clumsiest similes I have ever heard, and I'm a lawyer. Was a lawyer."
"How about this, then: sound might give you away. Light will give you away. "
She has to concede to the sense of that one.
"Okay, so. Rule number one: never fire this baby without support. You want to be lying or crouching down with the barrel resting on something solid. Take a shot standing up and it will knock you flat on your ass. At best. At worst—well, let's just say it's not pretty."
Taking up position beside him, Kaelyn perches her rifle on the crumbling barrier at the edge of the roof, trying to mimic Deacon.
"Almost." He corrects her posture then hunkers down beside her, peering through the scope of his own rifle. She can feel his body heat through her jeans, his leg brushing against her hip. "All clear, for the moment. But don't take my word for it: check it out for yourself."
The scope's zoom is incredible. Kaelyn startles at how much detail the scope can pick up: she can count the nuclear fallout-induced fractures in the bricks on the building opposite, which towered over the street until the roof collapsed and took the penthouse with it. Behind a window's broken glass there 's just enough light to make out a gray moth-eaten couch and a skull on the floor nearby. Not only is the scope incredible, it is also sensitive. When Kaelyn tries to look down to the sidewalk, she overshoots and somehow ends up eyeballing a pile of rubble in impressive detail.
Impressive detail that becomes stomach-turning when she spies an armless hand, coated in dust and blood, lying on a car door.
When Deacon is satisfied with her progress, he leans back and lets her put the rifle down. With care.
"And now we wait. If you want to be a decent sniper, you have to put up with the waiting times. Good positions are hard to come by, and harder to reach without being detected. And then you can only fire one or two shots—three at most—before your enemy puts two and two together."
Breakfast is a quiet affair. The water in Kaelyn's corn tin has since jellified, and she shudders at the awful texture but forces it down all the same. Deacon fiddles around with his bag—a faded blue backpack with a Jangles the Space Monkey motif, at odds with the leather-clad scavver look he's chosen today. What he pulls out earns him Kaelyn's undivided attention: a thermos of coffee. It's too weak and milky for her taste, and it does not mingle prettily with the aftertaste of corn, but she almost cries at the first sip. They pass the thermos back and forth while they wait for the Commonwealth to stir.
Nate once said that war is ninety percent boredom and ten percent terror. Kaelyn begins to understand what he meant.
The fog has all but burned away by the time something dares to creep through the streets below. A pack of mongrels nose through piles of rubbish, shoulders low, prepared to skitter away at the slightest provocation.
"Track them, but don't fire," Deacon orders.
Easier said than done, as it turns out. When Kaelyn puts her eye to the scope, all she can see is a brick wall no matter how she tilts the barrel. She has to find the dogs by eye and approximate where the scope should point before looking through again. Ah, there is the collapsed wall the pack just passed—and she finally catches up to the pack's tail-end as they prowl into an alley and out of sight.
Deacon has her repeat the exercise with a wandering feral, two Triggermen carrying a load of ill-gotten goods, and the pack of dogs patrolling their territory again. Soon enough she can keep the crosshairs aligned on her target while they move, or even aim in front of their predicted path and wait for them to walk into her line of fire.
By midmorning the sun fixes Boston with a fierce glare, and Valentine's hand-me-down fedora can't alleviate the oppressive dust-baked heat. Kaelyn's patrolman glasses help with the glare somewhat, though. Gunfire rattles in the distance, but after a quick scour Deacon determines they aren't in danger of being discovered. Probably. Kaelyn doesn't trust that they are invisible in their perch, and neither does Deacon. They both shrink down lower and keep wary eyes roaming for threats.
Not long after, something else dares to walk down the street. And it dares more than just that: the figure strides down the street with a cockiness visible even from their perch on the roof of a building several hundred feet away. Three figures, in fact. Kaelyn blinks, straining to notice all relevant details, bared for the world to see in bright daylight. These are raiders, no mistaking it. It isn't just what they wear, with cruel twists of wire reinforcing their stained leathers, but how they move over a pile of rubble as if it is a mountain they own, how their jeering laughter pierces the morning.
Deacon smirks. "Show time."
Kaelyn peers through the scope. Takes several moments to get her bearings, then finds the raiders again. She tracks one woman; the leader of the pack. The one who cuffs a fellow raider for some slight, and sends him staggering into a rusted car frame.
Just a few weeks ago, Kaelyn might have protested shooting someone who isn't attacking. Even an enemy. But now? Now she leans forward, intent, with barely a flicker of an eyelid.
"You want to fire between breaths. We'll work up to firing between heartbeats."
"Heartbeats?" Her heart pulses in her chest, just loud enough to feel in her ears. How can she fire between this steady tha-thunk tha-thunk tha-thunk, let alone when her heart is thundering?
"Shh. Focus. Watch the recoil—a sniper rifle has quite the kick. Center mass, take your time, breathe in, take the shot. Breathing out is optional."
"Right." Kaelyn fidgets, then returns her eye to the scope. She takes her time to settle the crosshairs on her target's torso. As long as the raiders don't know to be wary, they will be careless. Right now they walk down the middle of the street, far from the security of cover, but the target doubles over to check some piece of rubble or another. Kaelyn twitches.
"Remember: you've got all the time in the world."
Kaelyn waits.
Seconds drag into a minute. The target rises to her feet and keeps moving, snapping something harsh and guttural at her comrades. The crosshairs align again.
Kaelyn slips her finger inside the trigger guard. Sweat rolls down the back of her neck into her damp collar.
The patience of a saint, as your mother used to say.
Kaelyn takes the shot.