So I figured, first, Lady was just another one of those wasters brought over by that shifty guy with the boat. Well I wasn't half wrong, not really. Only it turned out she was a little more than that.
It took a while to make out the song from the static, for starters – that old radio barely broadcasted much of anything afore I set to tinkering with it – and some of the things this Three Dog feller said Lady did sounded downright unpossible. I'd take a hard look at her, I mean real hard, and wonder, could she really have done it? Lady said she been out in the wastes for a while, but she looked too clean, too pink. All right so some of it was the sunburn. I guess those Vaulties really don't see much sun, after all.
She showed me a picture of her and her dad when she was a littlun. Real pretty, real sweet smile, made my heart skip a bit but not for why you're thinking. Lady's brownie curls had gone grubby here and there since, and she'd got taller some, but her eyes, her eyes had still had that glint that scared me and a thousand others afore me fearful dead just to see it.
Lady wasn't some nonsense nobody. She was some kind of hero, not like Captain Cosmos, but a hero still, gray she mighta been. She kilt an army of slavers at some kind of paradise that really wasn't, armed only with a wink and a switchblade. She saved some kid from crazy ants what spat fire out of their antenner.
She kept away some mutie things that were tryna take over some big old town or something – what in the hell they were I didn't know, but they didn't sound good by Three Dog's word. And Lady did them all in.
I tried to scare her away by shaking chains and yelling boo. I told her I kilt crab kings for fun. I asked her to play tag.
Lady'd been up against fearsomer things without so much as saying hey. She'd kilt worser than I could even try to imagine. She'd been chased by bullets, lasers, turrets. Okay sure I was a kid then, but – how could I have been so darn kiddy? I turn plenty red thinking about it, even now.
But then I also think, as happy as I was to have someone to play with, she seemed pretty happy too. I shrieked louder, jumped higher, grinned wider, not just because I was glad, but because it made her smile, kind of soft and lopsided, like she couldn't even tell she was doing it. Must have been why I let my guard down, then. Maybe Lady wasn't a good person, but she did good things, and that was good enough for me then.
Doing something for someone else, for nothing much in return – only a fool would do that here. But I never was much the brightest spark in the plug, even after she sent me to live with Haley at his shop.
Did I tell you about that? Too dangerous to live on my own, she said. Could use some training, she said, like she knew better. Another one of her crazy ideas that, I guess, wasn't so crazy after all in the end. Damn near went hoarse protesting, but Lady gave me that look, eyes turned up, lips turned down. I sort of hated her then for pulling the same trick she pulled on everyone else.
Then I did what I always did, I wondered, I hoped maybe she meant it this time. That she meant it, when it was for me. Benefit of the something or other like that. Then I hated myself, a little, always falling for it, always making excuses for her.
I must have known then, just didn't want to admit it to myself. I figured, and I figured right, if I admitted it, then it was real, and out there, and absolutely, completely out of my control.