"Wake up! C'mon, you've got to wake up!"

Maeve rolled over, a dreamy smile on her face as she drank in the features of the most beautiful girl in the world. But at seeing the expression on Amata's face, ice crept into her heart. "What's going on?" She asked, sitting bolt upright. Amata's lip trembled, and unshed tears glimmered in her eyes. "Amata, you're scaring me."

It all came out in a rush, and the world shattered. Her dad was gone, without even a word to her. His departure had let radroaches in, and they were attacking everyone. Jonas was dead, and security was coming for her next. The only way to survive was to leave the only home she'd ever known.

There wasn't time to think. She told Amata to keep her father's pistol; she would need it if the radroaches came after her. They would meet at the vault door, past the overseer's tunnel; they'd made love down there more than once, no cameras, no interference, and now it was the last piece of home she would ever see. In a daze, Maeve swept up what few possessions she could carry: her baseball bat, the BB gun her dad had given her, the baseball cap from Stanley, a few extra jumpsuits. There wasn't even time to go by the tattoo parlor, to say goodbye to her little project.

She just took what she had and ran. She knew the vault's back ways, its ducts and catwalks and service doors, and it was easy to give security the slip. What was hard was to realize that these men, people she'd lived with all her life, were coming after her. It was hard to understand how the fathers of her peers could be planning to bash her skull in, just like they'd done to Jonas.

She found her old friend, her second father, really, sprawled in the room opposite the security office. She'd snuck through it often enough for a late-night rendezvous with Amata, but it had never looked so sinister by simulated night as it did now, under unrelenting light. His glasses were broken, shards of them cutting into the skin around his eyes. Blood pooled around the break in the back of his head, an unreal crimson. His stare was so blank, so empty; his humor, his kindness, everything that had made him Jonas was gone, leaked out through that hole.

She was too stunned to cry. It was all too senseless to be real.

Maeve gently eased off his glasses, shut his eyelids to turn that emptiness into peaceful sleep. She folded the twisted frames and tucked them into the breast pocket of his lab coat, like he used to do. As she did, her fingers brushed something square and metal. She pulled it out and held it up to the light: a holotape, marked with her name. She slid it into her Pip Boy, listening to her father's words, silently begging that it would make it all make sense. But it didn't. It only filled her with more and bleaker questions.

Voices jerked her from her reverie, voices she knew well. The Overseer's insincere pleading. Officer Mack, having his sick fun. And Amata, distressed, on the verge of tears. Black fury raced through Maeve's limbs. Mack had murdered Jonas; she'd heard as much from Butch when she'd rescued his mom, from Officer Gomez when he'd caught her but let her pass. And now the Overseer had turned him loose on the one person she had left.

At the very moment Amata's trembling hands closed around the gun, finally pushed too far, the door cycled open and the angel of rage strode through. Officer Mack, heedless of the fact that she'd almost put a bullet through his skull, turned to the new arrival with sadistic glee on his features. The younger girl, horrified at what she'd almost done, fled the room, tears leaking down her cheeks. But there was no remorse possible for the elder girl, not then.

Mack snapped his retractable baton out to its full length, then lunged in, eager to begin beating someone he was allowed to kill. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor, the world spinning around him. The shattered upper half of a baseball bat hit the floor next to him; his half-crushed helmet was the only reason he was still alive. And then Maeve stepped on his throat. She stomped, again and again, shouting, until his head lolled at an impossible angle on his mangled neck.

The black rage faded, leaving ice in its wake. Maeve bent to retrieve Mack's baton, then turned and leveled it at the Overseer. He had given the order; he was just as responsible. "I should kill you," she choked out, tears running down her face. But her own words, now years ago, rose up in her mind; no one chooses their parents, but they love them all the same. And there was one person left in her world that she would never, ever hurt.

"And I swear to God," she finished, "if you ever lay a hand on Amata again, I will." Giving Officer Mack's corpse a savage kick, she turned on her heel and left, letting the Overseer's words about the necessity of turning herself in fall on the empty air behind her.

It was several minutes later, as she was hacking the Overseer's terminal, that she thought about the fact that Mack was Susie and Wally's dad. She thought of her own dad lying in the wasteland somewhere, his neck turned back on itself, and vomited down the side of the terminal, crying harder. The man had been sick, but he'd been someone's family, too. There was no way she could face this place ever again. There was no way she could ever go back.

So there was only one thing that still mattered to her, one stable point. And she would be asking her to give up everything for nothing.