((Chapter heading is the title of a song by R.E.M.))

Chapter 6
Walk Unafraid

For the first time since she'd found Dogmeat, Kalyna was on her own. Much to their shared dismay, she had sent both Deacon and Nick ahead to Sanctuary. She needed to think. She needed to come to terms with the fact that her baby was no longer a baby at all. And that Nate was truly gone. It had taken her until now to realise that. Strangely, it didn't break her, like she had feared. She had struggled, every moment a drowning sensation, every morning a new torture, before. Now, she wondered if she was going mad. Thinking back to her former life was starting to feel surreal, as if it was someone else's dream. She was in the ruins of Boston, her house was all but destroyed, and what was waiting for her instead was little more than a shack she had built together with her Minutemen. Kalyna Mara, the lawyer, had never thought she could kill anyone, had never touched anything to do with construction, had known no greater worry than that she was out of milk when the nearest market was closed at the moment. Kalyna 'Whisper' Mara, the sole survivor of Vault 111, shot raiders and deathclaws, chatted with ghouls, and was making friends with spies that took pride in lying all the time. The two had very little in common.

Now that she was no longer hysterical, Kalyna decided to take a look at the radio stations. She had marked Diamond City on the map, the coast looked clear enough for the time being, and she wondered what sort of music people listened to these days. She found the classical radio and liked it instantly; she found Diamond City Radio and fled after the speaker had stuttered the third time in half a sentence; and she found Trinity Tower Radio. The voice came out with a lot of static. '…ing held prisoner at the top of Trinity Tower. I think the super mutants plan on eating me soon. I'm setting this to repeat. Oh shit! Gotta sign off, one of the super mutants is coming!'

'Oh God.' The message started over, twice, three times. She had no way of knowing if the person that had set it up was even still alive. She thought of what Deacon and Nick would say. Well, they wouldn't want her going alone, but there was no-one else there. 'Lesson learned. Next time, I'm keeping one of you guys around … and I will not start talking to myself.'

Kalyna turned off the radio and stared at her surroundings. If she looked close enough, she could tell where she was. Of course, Boston didn't look like it had, but the signs were still there. She could find Trinity Tower all right. 'Чорт забирай. Чертовски ідіот, для чого попався так?' She closed her eyes. 'Still talking to myself. Oh God. I'm getting fruitier than a nutcake. No, the other way round. What are you staring at, eh?' The last bit was directed at a caravan hand who scrammed quickly.

Trinity Tower still stood tall. Broken, yes, and probably hazardous, but it stood. Kalyna looked at the Deliverer. Deacon had given her a lot of ammunition, but thinking of the super mutants made her wonder if this little thing would do her any good. Crouching low, she glanced inside. There were two here and an abomination of a dog. There had to be more, further up. She also had a shotgun she'd taken off a raider. The revolver she'd returned to Deacon, as well as the small handgun he'd bought for her in Goodneighbor.

Kalyna had to be careful here. She didn't have many rounds for the shotgun. She had ample ammunition for the Deliverer. If she could take out some without being seen, she might even manage to do this.

Ϡ

Later, much later, when anyone asked her about it, Kalyna would say she had survived the madness she had started out of pure spite. She'd made her way up, had found a trapped man who had tried to teach the mutants Shakespeare (she always doubted anyone would believe that; even she barely did), and a mutant, captured with the man. The only one who had listened to Goodman. Not that he'd understood a word the man said, but at least he wasn't trying to eat him or Kalyna, and wanted to follow her. She sent him ahead to Sanctuary, too, and hoped her people wouldn't shoot him on sight.

She reached Diamond City soaked in blood and later Sanctuary in borrowed things from Piper, who had accompanied her after that interview. Strong, her mutant, was already waiting there, and predictably, Deacon and Nick were worried. Well. Nick was worried. Deacon was furious. 'Do you have a death wish?' he asked the moment she arrived. 'Did that super mutant tell the truth? That you stole him from under his brothers?'

'Kind of.'

'Whisper, you have a kid out there. He needs you alive, not in the gut of a monster! How can you be so reckless? If I'd had any kids back when …' He fell silent as if he choked on his own words and turned away.

Kalyna glared at him. 'Back the hell off. I'm really not in the mood.' She pushed past him and towards her house. The crops beside it looked better than they had when she'd left them and someone had written Kalyna Mara on the wall with green neon letters. Despite herself, she smiled at that.

'Hey, Whisper.'

She stopped and counted to then. 'What?'

'I … I'm sorry. I was out of line.'

'Damn. You've got the kind of face I can't be mad at.' She gestured to him to enter. 'Welcome to my shoe carton.' She lit a few candles on the table for lack of electric lights. One more thing for her to do.

'Looks like it can withstand a radstorm. That's more than can be said of some of the other houses here.' He looked awkward when he sat on her couch.

'Do you have kids, Deacon?'

He watched her intently as she sat down. 'No. No, Whisper. I'm a synth. We can't have kids of our own.'

Kalyna blinked. 'What? Oh.'

'Me and Glory and a few others. That … actually makes it easier for us. We don't have a family that can be endangered by what we do.' He stood and fished a cigarette pack out of her bag. Instead of helping himself to a cigarette, he tore off the top, grabbed a pencil and wrote something on it. 'Incidentally. Synths have a recall code. It resets us to faculty settings, wipes out all that we are. If I … should get out of control somehow, you should use it.' He had folded the thick paper and passed her the scrap.

Kalyna stared at it. She nodded slowly, walked over to her candles, and burned it. 'Not going to happen.' She swallowed drily. 'At least it looks like we're not going to starve after all. Someone here has a hand for plants, it seems.'

'That … would have been me. They were planted way too close together, I tried to rectify that while you were frolicking with your mutants. And I told your settlers how much to water what, what grows well where, and stuff like that.'

'How do you know that?'

'I've picked up my share of knowledge and then some. And Nick did the letters above your door. Preston wants to hang a minutemen-flag. I said he should check with you first.'

'Tell him to knock himself out.' She looked at Deacon. 'I want to bury my husband. Would you help me?'

She could see plainly that Deacon wanted to say no. But after a few moments, he nodded slowly. 'I'll help you. Of course.'

Ϡ

Nick had joined them, too. The synth was a lot more supportive, at least more obviously than Deacon. But for a moment, down in the vault, he stood next to Nate's cryopod at an angle, and she'd seen his eyes reflected. Not long or well enough to know their colour, but enough to see a haunted look that spoke more clearly than anything he could have said. The two men helped her dig a grave that would be deep enough, and somehow, the action gave her a closure she had lacked so far. At least after sobbing uncontrollably into Nick's shoulder.

Afterwards, Kalyna walked to the bridge and out of the settlement and off to the right. She climbed up the rocks there and looked at Sanctuary from there. She saw the sheen of a campfire behind the house where Sturges had his workbench. In the waning light, it gained in intensity and the glow cast everything in a light that was almost idyllic, as if the world was actually worth fighting for. She watched a figure approach and couldn't help smiling. 'Deacon! Up here.'

The man waved at her and joined her. 'Hi. Just making sure no-one's eating you.'

'Nope. Not yet. I think I owe you an apology.'

'Not that I know of.'

'For two things. First, for thinking that you wanted to … I don't know. Seduce me, if I was lucky. Something worse if I was not.'

'You can never be careful enough, Whisper.' He licked his lips. 'Truth is, I'm generally not that interested in people that way. Most of the time, I'm about as threatening to a person's virtue as Nick.'

'For some wild reason, I believe that.'

'What is the other thing you want to apologise for?'

'Ah, that. For what I'm going to tell you now. I don't believe what you said earlier. You're not a synth.'

'What makes you think that?'

'When you yelled at me, you said "If I'd had any kids". You also said synths can't reproduce. So that makes no sense, because you implied that at one point you might have had kids.'

Deacon chuckled. 'You're more observant than I like. You're right, synths don't get kids. But many synths don't know what they are. But,' he raised his hand when she wanted to interrupt, 'you got me. I'm not a synth. Maybe I'm just a normal guy with a family out there he wants to protect. But then again, maybe not.' He said the last two words in a robot-like voice, and Kalyna punched his shoulder lightly.

'You're an ass.'

'What I wrote on that paper is true, though. You can't trust everyone. People do get replaced by synths. Telling one from the other … well, let's just say, it's not easy. Sometimes impossible.'

'You're still an ass.'

'Is that what you said to me in whatever language you spewed out in the church?'

Kalyna grinned. 'Ah. I thought you bought my translation. I may have called you a son of a bitch. And it was Ukrainian.'

'Are you from there?'

'No. From Canada but born into the Ukrainian community there. It's … no, hell, it was quite large.'

Deacon bit at his lower lip. Then he spoke quietly, as if lost in himself.

'If you hear in the night at your window it seems

'Something weeping and mournfully sighing,

'Do not wake in alarm, do not rouse from your dreams,

'Do not run, dear, to see who is crying!

'It is not an orphan who, desolate, roams,

'No starveling, dear, troubles your sleeping.

'It is my heart that despairingly moans,

'It is my love that is weeping.'

Kalyna had almost stopped breathing. 'Of all the things,' she said, her voice low, 'I'd have expected you to do, quoting Franko at me is very low on the list. How the hell do you even know that?'

'I told you, I like to read.'

'Clearly. That … wow. You're not real. You just can't be real.'

'Can you teach me? The language, I mean.'

'Why on earth would you want that?'

Deacon leaned forwards with a shit-eating grin on his face, and the spell he had woven broke. 'Simple. Practically no-one speaks a foreign language. In a battle, you could holler instructions and I'd be the only one who understands them.'

'Sure. I'll teach you. God. Nate wouldn't even let me speak to Shaun in Ukrainian. He didn't want us to have a secret language, and he had no interest in learning it.'

Deacon opened his mouth and closed it again. 'But I do. Lessons start tomorrow?'

Kalyna couldn't help laugh at his eagerness. 'Yeah. Why the hell not?'

((What Kalyna says is: /Chort zabyray. Chertovsky idiot, dlya choho popavsya tak?/, which translates to, 'Damn it. Bloody idiot, what did he get caught for like that?'

The poem Deacon recites is taken from the cycle Withered Leaves by Ivan Franko.))