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.