A Dead World

by Laluzi

He had been captured; Alex Mercer knew that much was obvious. But if that was the case, why had his captors just left him there without security? How had he ended up in a bunker buried in some kind of giant desert? Where was everyone? And when the hell did bottlecaps become currency?

37. Through a Mirror

Cain opened her eyes to the Villa's perpetual sunset.

She yawned, filling her lungs with muted fire, and stretched her aching joints. One finger dabbed a bit of drool from the corner of her mouth. At least she knew where she was this time. The reality of the Sierra Madre was not a happy thing to wake up to, but it was better than forgetting. And remembering.

She wondered how long she'd slept. Probably not the full eight, since she hadn't woken up to a charming ultimatum, but she felt rested enough to throw her legs to the side and slide out of bed. The idea of closing her eyes and sinking back into unconsciousness didn't hold much appeal when she was lucid enough to remember everything that lurked outside. She tossed the sheets unceremoniously back and worked on lacing up her boots.

Creaking floorboards made her tense. But the silhouette that emerged from the balcony was one of the few things in her life she was grateful for right now. She unfroze her muscles and threw Alex a passably lazy salute. "Morning."

He inclined his head in greeting. "Think it's evening, actually."

Huh. She wouldn't have known it to look outside – the thick carpet of Cloud only lent itself to one time of day. The sun was somewhere up there, but that was as far as she could tell.

She pulled away from the window and went through her bags, tallying her supplies to make sure none had wandered off during the night. Day. Whichever. "Morning begins when I roll out of bed and ends when I get moving. Morning is a state of mind."

He didn't look convinced, but she spoke with the gravitas of everyone that actually slept, so that was his problem. "Then let's move."

They got about as far as the front door before the Madre threw a Nightkin-shaped wrench in her plans. Dog was right outside her tenement, curled up like… well, a dog. The door bumped against him, and he blearily roused.

She wasn't sure she liked that. She was still trying to get a read on Dog, and she could think of a few reasons for him to hang around her doorstep. But she knew enough to peg him as completely guileless, so she could probably get away with asking him outright. "Hello, Dog. What are you doing here?"

The mutant stood. Massive muscles flexed with audible pops as he stretched, but much louder was the grind of chains that accompanied it. A thick bead of blood splattered on the cobblestone, welled fresh from the bear trap on his arm. "Like you best. Others don't talk to Dog. Don't have orders."

That… didn't really do much to reassure her. It was one thing to be in charge, but she didn't want to be the one giving orders. His counterpart's accusations rang a little too true for that.

She snuck a glance at Alex. A particularly ugly thought had just crossed her mind, one she couldn't quite shoo away.

"We'll get going soon," she promised, in lieu of dwelling on it. It was probably for the best she took Dog to his station first. She even had reasons that didn't involve her growing discomfort. "We're just going to check in with everyone first."

"Okay," Dog agreed, and fell into step behind her. His shadow was very long.

…Yeah. That really wasn't going away.

The Villa square had all the charm of a desiccated corpse, which made far too much sense if she stopped to get poetic about it. She made her way to the fountain with Vera's dead, flickering gaze on her back. It was a little easier to deal with than the other two, right now.

Apparently she'd been the last to rouse. Dean was sitting on the fountain's middle ledge, eyeing the nearby Christine as he sipped something from a chipped mug.

"And somebody's finally done with her beauty sleep. Brought your personal staff along with, I see." So that was how this was gonna go. He stood, joints creaking audibly, and brandished the cup at her. "Care for some coffee, start your day off with a little kick?"

It was only then that Cain noticed the liquid inside, while dark enough to fit the bill, had a distinctly foul smell. "Guessing that's the house special brew. Mind if I ask the secret ingredient?"

"Why, the Cloud, of course. What, did you think you'd find coffee beans after a couple hundred years?" He took another sip. It wasn't worth the effort to hide her grimace. "Improvisation is the spice of life, I'll have you know."

"I think I'll pass, thanks."

"Ah, a lightweight. She said the same." Smirking, he jerked a fleshy thumb at Christine, who watched him with slightly narrowed eyes. Her resting stance was nearly motionless – it reminded her of Alex, now that she thought about it. "Or she didn't say, if that's more accurate. Not much of a talker, is she?"

"Can it." She brushed past him. He'd arranged yesterday's finds into neat piles, and she grabbed a few Stimpaks, snagging a box of devilled eggs on the side. The filling was chalky, but a bit of spit and they were good to go.

Dean gave her a sour look. "Sure, help yourself to all of my stuff, why don't you?"

Cain made a point of chewing with her mouth open. "No 'I' in team, Dean." There was, however, room for several 'U's in 'go fuck yourself.' "That is what you gathered these for, right? I seem to recall somebody else helping you along the way." She swallowed. "Christine, you want something?"

The mute woman shook her head and flashed an empty box. Either Dean had been more generous with her, or she'd resolutely decided not to put up with his shit. Cain kind of hoped it was the latter. She took a couple for Dog, this time making sure to remove the food from its packaging before handing it his way. She doubted it mattered to him, but… all the same.

"Yes, and there he is… seems a bit more of a mouth-breather than he was yesterday. You've got yourself a fine little entourage, you know that? It's clear you've got a type."

There was a rustle of movement to her side. Alex's face had gone dark, and he crossed his arms. "Want to try that again?"

Dean didn't look at him, but his lips quirked. "It's funny," he mused, facing her. "You're the one wearing the collar, but he's the mutt on the leash." He took a drag of his cigarette. "Well-trained, that one."

Knuckles audibly cracked. "Wrong answer."

Dean went still for a second. Then he released a long breath, and one hairless eyebrow crept above his shades. "Oh, I'm petrified," he deadpanned. "Care to share what you've got in mind? 'Cause the boss-man won't be too pleased if this shindig turns out to be a dud. It's a hazard when you mess with explosives."

Cain set down her eggs. The ambience hadn't changed, but it had gotten quiet all of a sudden.

Alex regarded the ghoul for a very long time. She was teetering on the edge of worry when he finally spoke. "I don't need to make threats," he said. His voice was very low.

She minutely relaxed.

"Sure, sure… whatever you say." Dean shook his head, and a thin smile curled his lips. "I swear, the Sierra Madre's turning into a dog park."

Alex moved very fast.

Cain heard the thud of flesh on flesh, and the smack of flesh on stone, but her eyes lagged behind. All she knew was that Dean had been sitting on the fountain's edge, and now he was spread-eagled in the basin, choking for breath. Vera stood through him, the starlet's light placid and unbroken on rippling water.

She yelped in alarm, and made to intercept him; his arm shot up, fingers splayed and rigid, and she froze in her tracks. He loomed over Dean, flicking water from his sleeves. His eyes were – terrible. Blue-lit as the dead things that haunted the Sierra Madre, and every bit as merciless.

Christine, too, had moved. The knight hung at a safe distance, light on her feet, gaze darting from him to Dean. Her expression hadn't changed, but one hand had found her shotgun.

Dog merely looked… intrigued.

Holy shit. Cain dragged her attention back to the scene at hand, and tried to figure out what was happening.

Dean heaved himself upright with a splash, propping himself with shaking arms. His shades had been knocked askew, and for the first time, she could see his eyes. His mouth gaped wide, and she would have taken vindictive pleasure in his utter disarmament if not for the tightness in her chest. He wasn't moving like anything was broken, but Cain wasn't reassured. Ghouls were notoriously fragile, and she'd seen those fists break solid metal.

"Wh- you-" He wheezed and spluttered, hacking up water. "Did you just-"

Mercer regarded him coldly. "I don't need to make threats," he repeated.

"You attacked me. You can't – you can't do that, he said, you're not – who the hell do you think are? Do you know who I–" There was more disbelief than pain, and Cain dared to hope the hitching cough was breathlessness and not broken ribs. She'd almost started to relax when she remembered Elijah's missive.

If Mercer did, he was far past caring. "Don't fuck with me," he growled, placing heavy emphasis on each word. Dean's wheezing oaths fell silent. "Remember that, and I won't have to remind you."

Dean stared back. His arms trembled, but those milky eyes were full of hatred.

She'd hoped to present a united front, but this was getting way too tenuous. She swept forward, Christine's scrutiny electric on her back. When Mercer turned that terrible look her way, she valiantly smothered her flinch. There were many times she liked to draw attention to herself and this was absolutely not one of them. At least she could pretend she had any sort of handle on this. "'Scuse me, but can we have a minute?"

He did not look like he wanted to give her that minute. She held his eyes and counted seconds. Finally something yielded, and he broke away to shoot Dean one last glare. "Don't forget," he spat.

Pulling Mercer away from a target was a bit like trying to fit a leash on a hurricane. It did not get easier with practice. She kept her mouth shut until they were back at the safehouse, and she was certain enough that they hadn't been followed.

"Alex." A long-held breath whistled through her nose. "What the hell."

"Tch." The sound clung to his throat, terse and derisive. "This is what you dragged me here for?"

"Like hell I did – don't try and turn this around on me, you know full damn well why we're here." Anger was good. She didn't have to consider who she was grappling with. How he'd looked. "You can't just go nuts here – what were you thinking?"

"I was thinking that idiot needs to learn where we stand."

Incredulity lent her a new pitch. "By punching him into the fountain?"

"I didn't hurt him."

There was nothing resembling regret in Mercer's voice, and her jaw tightened. "That's not how it looked to me."

"I know exactly how much force the human body can take before it gives out. That wasn't even close."

"Yeah, human! I don't know if you noticed, but Dean's a few centuries old!"

He had the audacity to shrug. "I was gentle. I won't be next time."

"There won't be a next time, Alex!" Instinct told her to grab his arm. Logic swatted it down, and she gripped her own wrist. "You can't pick fights here! Did you forget about the explosives, or did you just decide they're less important than your raging need to deck everyone who looks at you the wrong way?"

"I wasn't picking a fight. I was sending a message." Half-lidded, his eyes were slits. "I want him to think twice before he tries something. He wants to. You know that."

And now Dean wanted it a little bit more. Hatred wasn't rational – but if it was, she wouldn't be having this conversation. "He's not the only person you're sending messages to!" She tugged at her neck, and finally his expression changed. "Don't you remember why we're here?"

"Listen to your handler." Cain jerked when her Pip-Boy crackled to life, hand flying back as if electrocuted. "I don't care what just happened and I don't care why. It won't happen again. You're only here because I allow it. You are expendable. Your friend is expendable. If you assault any of my recruits again, I will kill every one of them and let the Sierra Madre have its way with you, do you understand?"

Mercer's teeth ground enamel.

"I asked you if you understood."

"…Yes." His hands clenched into fists. "I understand."

"Good," Elijah spat. "Now get to work. I've rewarded your success with leniency, Twenty-One – that was clearly a mistake. So don't make me repeat myself. This has dragged on long enough, and I am done with waiting."

Static hissed, and silence followed, ringing heartbeat-loud in her ears. It felt like a long time that she and Alex simply watched each other. As the seconds crept on… she might have found contrition there, as anger faded. But that wasn't enough.

Eventually, he looked away.

"You can't tell me he didn't deserve it," he muttered.

Well. She couldn't.

But a little bit of that gratefulness had evaporated nonetheless.

0o0o0

The farthest wings of the Villa were marked Salida Del Sol and Puesta Del Sol – sunrise and sunset. Neither of them saw much sun these days, but it was for a spot in the former that Dog had been slated.

His location was the shortest walk from the Villa square, but that hadn't been the real reason she'd picked him first. Cain wanted Dog accounted for. He seemed to listen to her well enough, but if she had to leave two people behind while she led a third to their position… well, it was like one of those old logic puzzles. One order worked out and the rest got somebody eaten while you weren't paying attention.

All cannibalism aside, Dog was the conscript best able to take care of himself. He wasn't clever, but he was strong. He'd outlived dozens of Elijah's other victims, surviving the Madre not through cunning or care but brute force, and she had other testaments to how terribly well that strategy worked. If she had to split her group, and she did, he'd last the longest.

And if Cain were honest with herself… she was eager to put some distance between them.

It should have been easier than this. She'd been ready to head to her spot and crack open a casino. But Dog had stared blankly when she tried to describe where the substation was, and a rather ashen-faced Dean had flat-out refused to traverse the Villa without an escort. Only Christine had been ready to strike out on her own, but she too guardedly agreed that it was safer to travel in groups when prompted. And at that point, Cain might as well have gone three for three.

So here she was, overseeing everyone's business. Again.

Dog was… well, if she had to look for a bright side, she always knew where he was. Christine had moved like a shadow – Dean might have suffered two centuries of joint atrophy, but fieldwork with mines lent a certain necessary lightness of step. Alex had a heavier presence behind her, but he was unnaturally soft on his feet when he wanted to be, and now was one of those times. The same had went for God, who'd carried his hulking, towering form with the grace of an assassin.

Dog did not. In his hands, unleashed from God's tight control, their body became a juggernaut. He loped close to the ground, a tread that saw him on all fours as often as not. His footfalls were heavy, and she winced at every crack and thump. They hadn't encountered any Ghost People yet, but it was only a matter of time. God had claimed his alter ego didn't consider them a problem… but that wasn't something she was eager to see firsthand.

Unwieldy as he was, he was terribly fast. She didn't have a prayer of taking point when he bounded ahead at every turn. Alex kept pace easily, but it had been a quarter of an hour since she'd last managed to catch her breath. Her lungs burned, and her legs had begun to chafe against her gear.

Dog also, she was learning, had a rather distressing tendency to talk to himself. She wasn't really a stranger to making conversation with herself, but she could have lived without knowing what was on his mind. It rarely strayed far from his favorite topic.

But sometimes he said other things.

"Don't like this place. Want to go back to the base. Or the church, miss the church."

Cain had long since decided to keep her eyes forward and pretend the mutant's mutterings didn't exist, but this time gave her pause. Mostly because for once it wasn't about how hungry he was, but even if she hadn't silently been begging for any other direction to steer his thoughts in, she would have been curious. Dog was hopelessly tangled in the Madre's web, an extension of Elijah's corruption, and for all that he seemed inseparable from it, she'd nearly forgotten that he had to have been somewhere before. Someone.

"The church?" she echoed. "Where was that?"

"Church was… far place, at bone cities, in way where sun sleep." Dog's face, already a rictus at the best of times, scrunched further. "Weh… west."

Bone cities… the Angel's Boneyard? "I'm from around there, too. Maybe I know what place this is. Can you describe it for me?"

"Was church." His voice, guttural as it was, contained all the essence of a shrug. "Church and base. Went other places, sometimes, but always come back. Church was quiet place… sometimes Dog sit and listen, when nothing else to do. No voice then, just Dog and wrist-collar and lights in sky." There was wistfulness there, for a breath. "Base was loud, but good loud. Had others like Dog. Sometimes new ones there, and some no come back." His brow furrowed again. "Maybe get lost. Maybe stop moving? It okay. Master stay, so Dog always have orders at base."

Cain chewed on her bottom lip. Either Elijah had a host of soldiers one state over or Dog was reminiscing about a different master entirely, and one of those theories held a lot more water. She knew the rumors…

"Master not go away until later… and then Dog go away too." The reverie paused for a wavering moment. "Dog miss Master sometimes," he confessed, voice very small.

Definitely theory two. "Who was your Master?"

"Master was Master." Shouldn't have hoped for anything else. "Always at base. Sometimes in wrist-collar too, but very small, because Dog never see him there. Spoke in lots of voices, like many Masters at once. Dog not always hear all the words, because Master very smart. Knew lots of things, like Lou."

"Lou?" There was a deceptively ordinary name if she'd ever heard one. It stuck out of this tangled account like a loose board.

"Lou… ten? Ten ant. Was at old places. Told Dog what to do, like march, or kill."

A lieutenant. It all made sense. Most Super Mutants had served in their fabled army, and the Nightkin were supposed to be the remnants of their stealth corps. Information on the mutant half of history was scarce, but the consensus was that it had been massive and structured, and that it had fractured apart a long time ago. The first-generation mutants had dispersed over the years, congregating into enclaves or occasionally falling in with a human settlement. Their simpler brethren had not adapted so easily, and rumors held that the roving bands of kidnappers and raiders terrorized so on memory of their old marching orders.

It was old enough history that the details had confused themselves with legends. But even if their forces were gone… "Would you ever go back?" Slowly, she traced the edge of her collar. This was probably something she wanted to word carefully. "It sounds like you were very happy there."

"Can't." Dog's voice held an old, unutterable mourning. "It gone… all gone." He was quiet for a while. "It better now that Dog found new Master."

A derisive scoff came from Alex's direction. Dog didn't seem to hear it. "New Master tells Dog what to do. Dog fetch people, make stop moving and drag all way here. Like vat." The sun rose across his face, dawning childish glee. "If people fight, Dog hit them until they stop. Dog knows how to do that. And if more than one, Dog can eat them, so Dog hunts hard for as many as he can find. Makes Master pleased. Sometimes even has reward for Dog – if people mean to Master, he make head red rain, and lets Dog have rest. Then Dog gets to bring more."

Yesterday, Cain had vouched for Dog's innocence – claimed his sense of morals hinged on Elijah's words, that he'd been manipulated into what he was now. Today she wasn't so sure.

There was far too much relish in his voice for that.

And maybe that wasn't his fault either, but it did make her wonder what the hell she was doing. She'd always known Dog was dangerous, but pity had a way of dropping one's guard. Sometimes that wasn't wrong. But to think… if she hadn't been alone in that trap…

Her sympathy for God ticked up another notch. Little wonder he was so desperate to keep his other self contained. Perhaps he could see her now, not lifting a finger to help him. Perhaps that was a mistake.

"I don't plan to be mean to your Master," she said cautiously. "Maybe we can find a different reward?"

"That okay." Dog shrugged. "You nice. Dog rather eat other one anyway."

Ghrk. Did she just… attract these, or something? Was it something about her face? 'Threnody Cain, Monster Whisperer' was not a title she'd wanted to add to her repertoire, but it was broadcasting like a cheap ad on Radio New Vegas. And look what that had brought her.

She wasn't being fair. The White Gloves could get in line, but she owed Alex more than that. She'd seen the same glee on his face before, but he tried to temper it. He didn't always succeed at not scaring her, but he wasn't… this.

Maybe man-eating horrors were just Nevada's flavor of the month and nobody had passed her the memo. December couldn't come soon enough.

…Dog liked her. He thought she was nice. With the company he kept, he wouldn't know what the word meant.

If things truly got out of hand, she had the recording. Until then, pity was going to have its day.

She'd been silent too long, and Dog had lost interest; he'd already wandered ahead, picking up speed as he went. He tromped past a bear trap by the narrowest of margins, and she hurried forward to close his lead, choking on spit. "Hey – wait – for fuck's sake, slow down–"

She barely managed to stop herself from crashing into his back – her soles shed rubber as she stumbled to a halt. Dog had stopped much quicker, and hunched over, curling in on himself. Massive hands gripped the grooves on his chest. "Dog is sorry," he keened.

The planned rebuke died on her lips. This wasn't contrition, this was despondency. Like a single gasped demand had crumbled his self-image to sand. "Just… let me keep up, yeah? We're a team. We've gotta stick together."

"Dog doesn't mean to be bad… Dog tries…"

"You're not bad! You're a good Dog." Ugh, no, that was horrible, he wasn't a dog, he'd just decided to carve that word on his chest because holy shit, individuality issues. And now he was wringing it hard enough to draw blood. "It's not your fault. You were just a little too fast for me." The fingers loosened. "Okay? You're doing a great job looking out for stuff ahead. Just try not to leave us behind, alright?"

"Okay…" He stared up at her, face a grotesque mask of cautious, childish hope. "Dog will try," he repeated. "Dog will keep trying."

"That's-" It wasn't all she asked, and she groped for words that couldn't be taken literally. "That's great. Really."

A sudden clatter made her flinch. Alex had tossed aside the bear trap, now in three jagged pieces. He gestured brusquely on ahead, pausing just long enough in his stride to shoot her an impatient glower.

She couldn't really fault him for the no-confidence vote. Between the three of them, there was one person who thought she knew what she was doing, and it wasn't her.

She jogged to catch up with him, silently cursing the flaring ache in her legs. Dog was already mumbling to himself, but she let him be. She wasn't one to pass up a history lesson, but those nuggets of information were scattered throughout a minefield, and maybe she wasn't the only one who was going to suffer if she stepped the wrong way.

She had enough material to mull over for now anyway. Dog's account was barren and confused, its parts only strung together by hearsay and guesswork, but it was a glimpse nonetheless – of the past, but especially how that affected the present. If Dog had switched allegiances from one master to the next, maybe she could persuade him to move on again and leave Elijah behind, for…

For what? For her? No. No, she wasn't playing this game. Not ever. She had rules. Maybe the rest of the world wasn't going to play by them, but the rest of the world occasionally needed to be shot in the face. Owning a person was the deepest violation she could think of. Control –

It was a stupid notion anyway. Elijah was willing to give Dog what he wanted. The reign to hurt and kill and eat… she had experience with flexibility on that subject, and she wasn't particularly proud of that, but she knew where she drew her limits, because she had limits, damn it. Any leash she could extend would have far less slack than Elijah's, and Dog couldn't really be tempted with anything else.

So it wasn't an option. It wasn't going to happen, and she could forget she'd ever had the thought.

She didn't notice she was staring until Alex abruptly stopped and turned around. She looked away from him, cheeks burning. Cloud. It was the Cloud.

Actually… it probably was the Cloud. The end of the street was hazy, hung thick with something heavier than distance or the usual rusty dim of the Madre. She flung out an arm automatically – she needn't have bothered, Dog had dutifully trailed in her footsteps ever since that little ultimatum and had stopped moving the second she did – and ticked on her Pip-Boy's flashlight with the other. The beam filtered through rolling, shimmering waves.

"Bad smell. Air has teeth, tastes like pain." The mutant gave her a furtive look. "Dog will go, if Master says."

"No. Nobody's going through the Cloud." She shouldn't have shaken her head like that – Cain swore she felt her brain bounce against her skull, and it had yet to realize that she'd stopped. But seriously, what did Elijah order him to do? "We'll find another way around."

"I can go up top, get a better view of the area."

"Nah, you're good, Alex. I've got this one. Just give me a minute to pull up the map on this thing."

"Does your map show the Cloud? Collapsed buildings?"

"Do your thing and you'll collapse a building. I'm pretty sure the corpses noticed you on the way in." The quarry was still vivid in her mind. Hard to believe it had happened only a week ago. Cain had never thought she'd yearn for a time when Deathclaws were the biggest problem she had to deal with. "Really, though – I'm sure you could save us some time, but I don't know if it's worth it. The walls have ears. And spears. How does this one look?"

The route in question did look promising, but was proved a filthy liar when it ran headlong into the same patch of corrosive death as the first. She spent the next fifteen minutes scrambling back and forth, weighing the threat of Ghost People against Mercer's decreasingly-veiled smugness, until he either took pity on her or ran out of patience. She had just enough time to get a panicked 'where the fuck did he go' through her head before she heard the crash.

She found him next to a man-sized hole through a house, shrugging a metal strut from shoulder to ground. "It collapsed."

"…So it did." She had a few good remarks about how the door on the far end had just happened to get concussively unlocked in the process, but there was a reason why Alex had gotten away from her collar before he'd picked fights with walls.

Another crime Elijah was guilty of – not letting her say that. God, she was looking forward to shooting his brains out.

The plaza on the other side wasn't exactly where she wanted to be, but at least the Cloud was thin and she had another street to try. A skeleton sagged as she climbed through the doorway, barely held together by grime and tattered cloth.

"Just bones." Dog eyed it mournfully. "Bones not taste good… wish there was more left."

Urgh. Cain was glad there wasn't. Her fallen predecessors were a little too close to compartmentalize, and while she supposed they were too dead to care what happened to their bodies, she liked to think they deserved that much dignity, after everything.

Funny. She was the only one that felt that way in this particular group. So there was another incentive to stay alive.

…Man, but that really wasn't a good thought.

One of the pouches still had enough cloth to support some concealed thing, but all she found were a pair of empty cans that rolled free and clattered to the cobbles at her touch. She sighed and straightened up again, wincing when the Kevlar scraped across raw skin.

Then she froze.

Dog was staring at her. Dog was usually staring at her, patiently awaiting her next directions, but this was not that stare. This was intense, with blown pupils and cutting focus and a nameless something else she'd learned to recognize and shy from. When she met his eyes, she found something hungry peering back.

Cain's heart hammered. Something crunched behind her, unnaturally loud in her ears, and she thought Alex might have moved – a thought that filled her panicked brain with relief and primal terror in equal measure. She couldn't turn to check. Not when Dog was sizing her up.

Then she heard it - the rasping wheeze she'd come to dread.

She spun in place, but the Nightkin was first to react. A slow and terrible smile revealed each of his blocky teeth, and a spot of saliva splashed against the ground.

"Food," he growled, and it was thick with anticipation.

She always saw the eyes first; dead green things that swam from the gloom, at least three sets. Those were clustered in the street ahead. The sounds were not, and even without looking up, she made out shapes moving on the roofs. One dropped from a balcony, stumbling towards her. Loops of jagged metal gleamed around its gloves.

Dog lunged like a well-trained hound. She couldn't see past his sloping shoulders, but they didn't block the spray of gore or the hiss or the mutant's terrible howl. A gas mask rolled in a gentle arc, painting a liquid trail with something that almost resembled a head-

His charge sent him straight into the others, who converged like three arms of a single entity. Knife-spears flashed. Alex was still rigid at her side, and she whirled on him. "Help him," she snapped, panic heating her words. "Don't let him get himself killed!"

He visibly hesitated. She knew he avoided close-quarters combat with friendlies in stabbing range. In most cases, she'd have agreed with him, on account of him being a human wrecking ball. But that hesitation only lasted a second, and then he was leaping after Dog – a motion far more fluid, but no less determinedly lethal.

Another Ghost Person had cut between them, lurching out of some shadowed alcove; he backhanded it with enough force to splatter it against the row whence it had come. He soared to a roof and kept moving, and the Ghost Person there never got the chance to pitch its crude bomb. Alex pitched it much farther.

She was gawking. Cain yanked herself back to earth, fumbling with the straps on her back. The pistol she'd drawn was good as useless here, friendly as it was in her hand; she needed something heavier if she wanted to help. Dog was a snarling behemoth, fists swinging gracelessly at the shapes that bobbed around him. The spears biting into his flesh only seemed to anger him; she watched as he seized the closest of the three and squeezed it until it popped.

Something dropped from a rightward roof, and for an instant that was only cursory interest. But Alex didn't move like that, and even in the Sierra Madre's washed-out red, the color profile was wrong. The thing that snapped upright and charged for her had no face, and after she'd plugged it with the energy of four fusion cells, it didn't have much of a body, either. She reached for the chamber, but the rest of her ammo was buried somewhere in her bags, well out of reach; she let the useless Holorifle drop and fell back on her magnum.

The next collision cracked cobblestone, and there was Alex, splattered with sickly gobbets. He stabbed a spear into the ground – the handle cracked, but the knives bit through brick – and dove after Dog. The Nightkin had finished pulling his Ghost Person apart and was snarling at the rest, swinging at figures that swayed out of reach.

She tried to line up a shot, but Alex had darted into her line of fire. He yanked one of Dog's assailants up by the neck and leapt away, leaving a single Ghost Person to fend off the raging Super Mutant. Dog threw it to the ground with a horrible crunch, and Cain watched in appalled fascination as he began to feed.

Meaty hands ripped aside the thick sackcloth, scooping hissing chunks of green into his gaping mouth. But even that short delay was too much to bear, and he bent double over his prey, tearing in with his teeth, growling like a dog with a bone all the while. Cain tasted acid.

The sudden squelch did not belong to this grisly show, and she mustered the willpower to – mercifully – wrench her eyes aside. Mercer had dealt with his cargo. He turned, black jacket speckled bright with blood, and stiffened when his gaze fell a few degrees left of her. Watching the reel of expressions play across his face, she wondered if hers had looked the same.

Which was pretty ironic, really. This couldn't possibly be the same for him, when he took Dog's place on a regular basis. Death was a banality to him; predation, necessity. He wanted to be horrified, he could damn well get in line.

Yet even that was wrong – and the universe indisputably hated her, that she was forced to compare and contrast the methods of almost-cannibalism that her various travelling companions practiced in front of her on a casual basis. The blur of tentacles and screaming and waxen red-black stretched on towards forever in her memories, but in a more grounded world, it had lasted a few seconds at most. He enveloped his prey whole, and past an awful moment, everything was over. And she'd thought it had to be the most horrific display of biology this side of giant parasitic wasps, and yet – the thought of Alex in Dog's place, ripping into a corpse on his hands and knees, made her want to vomit.

Funny where one could find perspective.

It wouldn't end. She'd managed to stop staring and she wasn't falling into that trap again, but she couldn't block out the sounds – savage, primal, eager. The grotesque display carried on and on and she didn't dare interrupt.

She stared at Alex instead, watched his features contort and wondered what was on his mind. Until he obliged her.

"How do you eat those things?" His voice was off, but it was less the disgust of someone sane and more the frustrated confusion of a person presented with a particularly difficult puzzle. "They're toxic."

Okay, maybe she'd been a bit too quick to declare kinship.

Dog didn't answer immediately, and Cain suspected he wouldn't – he seemed content to gnaw away at his meal. But his eyes darted up, looking nearly shrewd, and a few seconds later he straightened, if reluctantly. "You make them dead first. Crush, break, then bite when stop twitching." His voice was weirdly intent, but she was stuck on the new and alarming depths to which chewing with one's mouth open had sunk. "Else they make noise, hsss-chk, get back up, and need to smash again."

"I know how to kill them," Alex said, annoyed. "You can't eat them. They're poisonous. I-" He cut himself off, and the world was probably a better place for him leaving that sentence unfinished.

Dog shrugged. "Taste bad. Like plastic and copper. Gas inside, in pockets, goes hsssss when teeth sink in." Finally, mercifully, he swallowed. He looked mournfully to the corpse at his feet, and she expected him to drop back down, but evidently he'd decided he was done with it; with one foot, he nudged it aside.

"That's Cloud. They should kill you."

"Dog kill better." He made a face. "Dog doesn't always like to eat them. Sometimes so many of them. Keep stabbing Dog, cutting him. Hard to keep them all down, can't hit in good place."

"What place?"

"Place where Dog can hit, snap loud, make them stay if no time for feeding. Or if mouth already full."

"Where's this spot?" Now Alex looked tentatively interested.

"Spot is… look where back of collar is." He pointed at hers, and she braced against the very powerful urge to cover her throat. "Follow down, at base of neck. Then lower, hit right on spine, and hear crack. Then they not get back up, and you can eat later."

"Upper back, along the spine…" He frowned thoughtfully. "Wonder if there's a brain there."

There were a lot of questions that had loudly begged asking over the past minute, and the one Cain interjected now was one of the tamer ones. "Why would there be a brain there?"

"Why wouldn't there be? They're not human. I've seen biology like this before – redundant systems, backups for when you break the first set. There's usually a trick to it, if brute force isn't enough." His lips twitched, but that nascent smirk quickly fell. "Though I've gotta admit, the exploding Cloud pockets are something new."

"O… kay." Maybe this train of logic made sense to somebody, but Cain was but a humble mailwoman. Occasionally there came a time when one had to stop struggling to hang onto a conversation and start looking for safe ways to disembark.

Experimentally she rolled her shoulders, and found them light. Right, she'd dropped the Holorifle. Wouldn't do to leave that behind. She retrieved it and tied it back into her straps, brushing clean a stripe of reddish dirt.

"…think it's easier to put holes through them. Whatever their flesh is made of, it's really spongy. No tensile strength at all."

"Uh-huh. Outside is bad to chew, but inside is soft, even more than red. Sometimes Dog grabs arm or leg, pulls hard enough. Goes sploosh when comes off, makes rain come out for little bit."

"I still have no idea why that kills them." A pause. "Brings me back, though."

From the sound of it, she'd bailed at the right time. Cain turned around and winced. Alex was the same as he ever was, but from this angle, it was apparent that Dog hadn't emerged from that fight unscathed. Blood trickled from several fresh gashes, staining crusts on his ruined rags. Not all of them looked shallow. But he wasn't acting like he was in pain. His breathing was steady, and he wasn't moving any differently. If she didn't know better, she'd have thought he hadn't noticed his wounds at all.

…Maybe she didn't know better. "Dog? You doing alright?"

"Dog fine."

Fine – the answer of choice when somebody was either fine or distinctly not fine. Dog wasn't clever enough to prevaricate to her, but he was absolutely broken enough to consider anything short of imminent death fine. "You're not hurt?" she pressed. "Some of those look pretty bad."

"Pain is okay. Makes things quiet."

Right. She swallowed. Not all of Dog's wounds came from the Sierra Madre.

At least these ones weren't beyond her reach. She dropped to one knee and shrugged off her duffel, feeling around within as she surreptitiously checked the damage. Shallow scratches around the bear trap, a bad one on the back of one leg, and some nasty mangling near his waist – last one might require some deeper care. She unwrapped two Stimpaks and contemplated a third. Even with the boost she'd gotten from Dean's supplies, she didn't have many to spare. And Dog was tough. If left alone, these would scab and heal, and fade into the endless crisscross of scars on his hide.

…Three it was. It was nerve-wracking, poking and stinging a being that didn't comprehend what she was doing and could crush her into flatbread on a whim, but Dog was a good patient, to the point where she was starting to get unnerved. Even when she sponged lukewarm whiskey into a gap wide enough for her fist, he just sort of whimpered a little, if the tiny sound he made even counted for that much. Not once did he twitch, and there was no way that was natural.

Alex quietly watched. His interest felt… a little more than clinical.

At least it was a simple job, within the scope of her bastardized supplies. She was counting small mercies, but these knives that kept turning up, the ones the Ghost People had cannibalized for their weaponry, had an extremely clean cut. A close-quarters brawl usually left messier marks. Involuntarily, her eyes wandered to his arm. The links on the chain had rusted shut, and she wondered morbidly just how long it had been there. She could probably get it off if she used one of these things, but… she wasn't sure his compliance would stretch that far.

"Done?" Dog asked her, and if anything, he sounded a little afraid.

"Almost. I just need to… well, this is going to sting a bit." The wounds were as clean as she was going to get them; all that was left was the syringe of magic Pre-War juice. The mutant watched in bewilderment as his skin knit back together.

"Itchy," he said, and squinted.

"That's normal. Try not to scratch it." He yanked back his wandering hand like a guilty child. Cain usually felt a lot better about people listening to her. "It might break open, yeah? At least give it a couple of minutes. How's it feel?"

"Hurts less." There was wonderment there, but not exactly happiness or relief. "Hope voice doesn't come back."

Maybe God could come back now. Wasn't that a thought. Certainly said things about her, that she had it. But it wouldn't be her fault, if she was honestly trying to help.

She still wasn't sure why she was doing this. Or why the easy way out seemed so hard.

"Why does the voice scare you?" she asked. Maybe she could do this much for God. "Is it really that bad?"

He nodded so fiercely that his teeth clacked. "Voice hates Dog. Always yell at Dog, say no, say stop, say Dog's fault. Voice yell until Dog hurt it, make it hide in dark for while. Dog not like pain either," and this was murmured with the guilt of a secret, "but voice likes pain less, so Dog will hurt self until voice go away, never come back."

"That's not-" Cain choked on her words, aghast. "That's not how it works!"

"All things go quiet when Dog hurts them enough. Dog know how to hurt things."

"But you're hurting yourself! You're making things worse!"

"Hurt voice more." Dog shrugged. "Pain better than voice."

She'd heard their stories, seen their scars, but it hadn't truly struck her before that moment that God wasn't the only one of the pair that might well kill himself. Both of them were more focused on murdering the other one out of their body than saving their own skins, and hell, but how fucked up was that?

If she told Dog that Elijah had new instructions for him, if she ordered him not to hurt himself, would he listen? If she took that route, would it be worth it if he did?

"Dog will look out for voice, fight it off. Not want to go in dark place. You nice to Dog."

Ah, that was her missing reason. "It's nothing," she said, and checked her Pip-Boy's map so she didn't have to look at anything else. "Anyone would do this."

It was just as well, because she'd nearly forgotten that she had no idea where she was going. She had some very nasty invectives for whoever had designed this deathtrap – everything looked exactly the same. And that wasn't even touching the issue with the plumbing.

It didn't take long to plot a course. They'd gotten close.

"There was other one nice to Dog, before." Footsteps filled the spaces between the mutant's words, ponderous as they came. "Dog will be good this time."

She didn't think he was talking about Elijah. "Who was that?"

"Girl. Looked after Dog, said good things to him."

One of the previous prisoners? Or someone further back than that? "What else do you remember? Do you know her name?"

But Dog shook his head. "Don't want to think anymore," he whined. "Makes Dog's head hurt."

His hands, she noticed, had clenched tight.

"That's… okay. Don't hurt yourself over it." Was that God, struggling in the back of his head? She wanted to ask. She didn't. "Let me know if it comes back to you."

"Yes, master."

Her heart skipped a beat and stuttered back to pace. "I'm not Elijah," she blurted. She swallowed and forced a little calmness back into her voice. "I'm not your master. Don't – you don't have to call me that."

The outburst seemed to baffle Dog more than anything. He puzzled over her for a few seconds before telegraphing realization. "You not Master," he said slowly, as though she were the child here. "Only Master is Master. But Master says Dog listen to you, so you master like Lou was master. Not Master, but still master."

She was going to need way more time and probably the clipboard to try to puzzle out what he'd just said (and the biting irony was not lost on her), but she was still pretty sure it wasn't the answer she wanted. "But I'm not. I'm just a friend."

"You are too. Master said so, and Master always right." He frowned, and for the first time, there was an inkling of a threat aimed at her. "He your Master too. You do what Master says."

Eep. "I am doing what he says. We're almost at the position, see?"

"Then Dog follow you." He sounded pleased. Like it was all so simple. So right, in his world.

With a nonzero chance he'd eat her for questioning Elijah, she didn't dare keep challenging it.

It truly disturbed her, how eager Dog was to obey. She wasn't his master, no matter what he said. No matter what he did. No matter what she did. It wasn't like she'd wanted this. She'd just wanted to establish a few ground rules, keep her ramshackle party as stable as she could. It wasn't her fault Dog had decided she made a suitable part-time Elijah, and it wasn't her fault he was hanging off her every word.

Cain thrived on attention, reveled in the raptness of a captive audience, but this was the unthinking devotion of a slave.

She glanced behind her. Alex had not been happy with Dog's little lesson on hierarchy, she'd seen his budding outrage, but he'd held his tongue. As she'd wished he would… as she'd so sternly impressed. Now he silently followed, and with him followed thoughts she hadn't quite been able to quash.

There were – parallels, ones that expanded and clicked into place the more determinedly she tried to ignore them. Because here, now, it was impossible not to wonder: was she stringing Alex along just as badly? Abusing the loneliness of someone lost in time, someone without any connections or purpose or anchor to grasp? She knew Alex wasn't Dog, was grateful for that, but maybe there was something ugly and reminiscent in their relationship – often shooting down his suggestions, chastising his actions, expecting him to obey. The fact that in spite of everything, he did. She'd drawn him into her web, strung tightly enough to trail her all the way to the Sierra Madre. Was she using him now?

Even this morning. Alex had been furious with Dean. Elijah's looming specter, he'd forgotten completely. There'd been nothing stopping him from bringing Dean to the edge of death, no compunctions for doing whatever the hell he wanted. But he'd yielded as soon as she pressed, no questions asked. Blind trust that she knew more than him. That she was right.

Just like Dog.

What had she done, when she'd taken it upon herself to be his leash? What empty, waiting slot in his tangled mind had she wedged herself into? It was one thing to think he let her do it, gave her that authority because he trusted her, but Dog was painting a nasty picture of how allowance was not inherently free of compulsion.

She cared about Alex. She clung to that, because that had to be something. She wanted to help him – help both of them. Elijah didn't care about Dog at all.

Though he did think he knew best.

And she wasn't sure if she was angrier with Elijah or herself at that moment, because she had not gotten this far just to kill herself through inattention. Dean's little mine obsession had spread all the way out here, and then she had to perforate a Ghost Person while Alex was busy dismantling Domino's welcome mat.

At least Dog noticed its buddy closing in from the side. She really didn't like the way he swung around. Something in the motion evoked an alert predator, something big and heavy with a taste for Cains. Revisiting his taste for Ghost People did little reassure that part of her brain, but sometime during Dog's second lunch break, Cain managed to stop cursing herself and went back to the much more comfortable position of cursing everything else in her life.

And the Sierra Madre did provide plenty of things for her to swear at. Was that glimmer up ahead a wire? The Pip-Boy could have all gizmos it wanted – the guy who first got the idea to stick a flashlight on somebody's arm was a genius, and she was not changing her mind.

She pocketed a few shotgun shells, and her Pip-Boy gave a clear little chime as she stepped across the dismantled remains of the tripwire trap. They were here.

Dog's slated position didn't inspire much confidence. Bloodstains had that effect on her, and these were extensive, splashed and smeared and clumped in thick dark mounds she opted not to think about. Not fresh, though. She had that much solace.

She'd expected a building, not a crammed little recess. And there would have been a roof, once, before wind and Cloud and two hundred years had stripped it bare. As it was, two massive iron gates could hint at a proper room if shut, but no protection from the elements would be offered to anyone inside. The switches themselves were bare against the wall, the row of cases worn nearly free from their moorings. The wall beneath was flecked thick with flaking brown. When she moved closer, she saw grooves in the plaster that looked suspiciously like nail tracks.

But she could see why Elijah had assigned Dog to this spot. The switches were caked with centuries of rust. She could have flipped them given a penknife and a few hours, but the massive lever at the end of the row was quite literally out of her reach. It might have budged if she jumped up and hung from the top for a while, and even that was dicey. When life gave you guys with super strength, you used them for the heavy lifting. Vault doors, rusty levers, really stuck jar lids. That was only logical, right?

…'Use' might have been a little too on-the-nose, there.

Though presumably Dog had to do something with those switches. 'Pull the big lever when you get the signal' was a simple enough instruction, but she wasn't sure the Nightkin could handle a complicated pattern. There wasn't much to distinguish the switches from each other. Color coding would have gone a long way for this particular operator. Maybe if she taped paper to them, made labels? Then she could remotely walk him through it, over her Pip-Boy… but she didn't know what to do with these, either.

She glanced down, tracing the metal lip that jutted beneath her chin. She was pretty sure she could get Elijah's attention if she called for him, unless he was asleep or in the bathroom or whatever Jet-head megalomaniacs did in their spare time. Doubtless he knew exactly what to do here, and she was willing to suffer his company if it meant getting this over with.

But she wasn't keen on letting him speak to Dog. If she extended the invitation… Dog was defenseless. It wasn't right.

It shouldn't have mattered. Her instructions for Dog were hand-me-downs; one way or another, his master gave the orders. But even if God was right, and she was merely Elijah's hand, she didn't have to be cruel about it.

Last resort, she decided. The further Elijah stayed from her affairs, the better.

There was a heap of rubble near the lever – not the kind from ruined architecture, but metal and plastic. Were there more parts to this setup? It was an unnerving possibility. All the instruction in the world wouldn't help them operate broken machinery.

One way to find out. She knelt down, pulling up her gloves. 'Alex, you wanna give me a hand?' came as second nature. She didn't make it past the first syllable.

Superpowers. Sure were useful to have around.

"What's wrong?" he asked. Like he always asked.

"It's nothing," she said, and stuck her hands into the rubble. "Don't mind me."

But he came over anyway. And he was better at it than she was, because he arm-wrestled Deathclaws while she had trouble carrying her own gear sometimes. Between the two of them, ten minutes' grueling work was condensed down to twenty seconds. It didn't make her feel any better.

Most of the debris, now organized, looked to be part of a frame or awning that had at some point collapsed. There was a single human femur, which she hastily set back down. She kicked at a crushed speaker and paused over the mangled remains of what looked like a rifle, but those were forgotten when she turned over a broad plastic frame and found a diagram.

Its relevance was not in question; it had the same number of switches in the same orientation. The crisscrossed arrows and numbers around them were slightly harder to understand. From the looks of it, the chart had been printed in two languages. Unfortunately, time had made off with the top third of the board, and the section that remained wasn't the one Cain was fluent in. She knew it was Spanish, and she could pluck out a few words here and there, but rattling off paragraphs from an electrical diagram was reaching a bit far from her expertise. The last couple English steps clung to the top, and she might be able to use those to translate…

"Let me see that." Alex. Of course. The guy knew how to read lips, and she was pretty sure his understanding of Latin hadn't come from a textbook. Not firsthand, at any rate.

Sure enough, the language barrier only delayed him a second before he was reading aloud. A trace of an accent crept into his voice, then faded away.

"Hold up, I can't-" Practicality won out, and she ripped a fresh sheet from the clipboard. "Could you copy that down? I'm gonna need this later. Or he is."

"Sure. Pencil?" She passed it over, and Alex set about transcribing. That was the instructions covered. Now for the hard part – getting Dog to understand them. She turned around.

It only now occurred to her that Dog hadn't followed them inside the gate. He lingered a few paces outside, hands clasped tightly across his chest. He looked… uncomfortable.

"Is something wrong? …Dog?"

He stared at her for a while, long enough to elicit an irritated "what?" from Alex's corner. That at least jolted something into the mutant, and he glanced side-to-side before giving her a tight, guilty nod. "Why here? What here?"

Something was wrong. Dog hadn't shown this kind of trepidation about walking into Cloud. "This is the place Elijah wants you to wait at."

"Master… Master says?" Beady eyes darted between the switches and the sky. He still did not move. His voice was tiny. "Master says Dog stay here? He must?"

Of all the times for Dog to grow an opinion. But she wasn't going to order him to stay. She would not. Surely she could cajole him to come around. Surely that wasn't the same thing.

"Why wouldn't you want to stay here?" she tried. "It's only going to be for a little while."

"Bad place. Cage." The words were stilted, even for him. "Dog remember cage."

Cain eyed the gates. God had hated cages; Dog couldn't be any different, what with the places his counterpart left him. And maybe the gates were solid enough to keep out Ghost People, turn a dead end into a defensible location, but to seal yourself in was to become a mole rat in a trap. "You don't have to worry about those. I'm not going to lock you in. You'll stay here, right?"

It was like he hadn't heard her. He backed away, shoulders swinging side-to-side with the motion of his head. "Dog not want to stay again. Not want to go back. Master, please…"

"Back?" The word echoed strangely in the narrow confines. "You were here? You're not talking about the cell?"

He nodded vigorously. "Was bad place before. Lights and noise, too much noise."

"It's-" Cain broke off mid-sentence, letting her platitudes flap uselessly in the wind. A horrible suspicion had taken root. "Dog… can you tell me about the lights? What kind of lights were they? And the noise? What was the noise like?"

"Bright," he moaned. "Loud. Like sky on fire. Burning everywhere, too many colors. Couldn't make it quiet… couldn't get out of cage…"

Fires in the sky. Fireworks. The Gala was supposed to have fireworks.

Dog was speaking like this had already happened. Like this operation had been triggered before. She couldn't interpret this any other way, but she was scrambling to understand what this changed. If the casino had already been unlocked – why wasn't it now? Why was Elijah still trying to get in? Why were they doing this again?

What had gone wrong the first time, and would it repeat itself?

Dog hadn't stopped. His voice was somewhere dim and distant. "Boom made voice angry. Yell at Dog… Dog yell back, but sky yell loudest. Ears hurt."

"Elijah made you wait here before?" she pressed. "You set off the Gala?"

"What?" Alex was suddenly right next to them, crushed papers all but forgotten in his fist. "When did this happen?"

"Not want to think. Not want to do again. Head hurting." He reached for the bear trap, and she lurched forward, catching his hand in hers.

He stopped. A thumb larger than the rest of her fingers put together curled around the back of her hand and squeezed it experimentally, and slowly Dog peered up at her, face curiously grave. "The way to casino – it hurts you. Inside."

"Dog…" Cain hesitated. "Please. This could be really important."

He let go of her, and his arms snaked back to hug himself. Seconds oozed by in silence.

"Dog do what he was told," he mumbled. "Didn't mean to eat her."

A sick chill swept through her.

She drew away, and sucked in a breath of air that had suddenly turned thick and cold around her. The question was on her lips, but the answer came faster than she could voice it. The bloodstains, the wreckage. A girl he didn't want to talk about.

Someone who was nice to him.

…It always came back to regrets, didn't it? Like as any of them would to change the past and undo their mistakes. The poor decisions recognized even then. The moments of weakness and the excuses, bouts of self-delusion to justify them until they'd collapsed under their own weight.

But she wasn't that lucky. All she had was the situation now. And she knew she'd earned this.

"Dog knows he did bad thing. Dog tried not to… Dog won't do it again, Dog promises…"

"That…" Cain swallowed down a sigh, then decided it was better set free into the world. "Don't worry. You won't have to go through this again."

Dog cocked his head, and the hope there was needles in her heart. "Dog… not have to stay?"

There was nothing she could say.

"Dog can help. Dog want to help. Maybe Master put Dog somewhere else? Or he go with you, guard you, make you get to casino okay. Dog knows the bad things, not let them hurt you too."

When she flicked through her Pip-Boy and a beat of static crackled out, he reeled back as though she'd brandished fire.

"Dog will do it!" He reached for her and seized halfway, unable to complete the motion. The bear trap's chain rattled as he trembled. "Dog will sit through noise, close eyes, pull sticks when he has to. Dog will be good. Dog will be good!"

"…I'm really sorry, Dog." She'd known this had to happen eventually, from the second she chose to let him stay. Now she wondered if she hadn't only made everything worse. "It's only for a little while. I'll see you again… I promise?"

These kinds of lies were always the worst.

"No!" he howled, clutching his chest. "No! Dog doesn't want to go back! Master-"

"Dog!" her Pip-Boy snarled. "Back in the cage!"

And so, with a final whimper, he went.

Cain watched, wretched, as a new mind picked up the fallen body. Felt its scars, pushed itself up from the ground. God was slow to regain his balance, and slower still to absorb his surroundings, but when his eyes fell on her, he found all that he needed.

"You let Dog out after all," he mused, lips curling into a sneer. Distrust dripped off every syllable. No… something worse than that. Disappointment. "Put me in the cage, just as I knew you would."

"It wasn't me." She couldn't show weakness, not now. "Elijah gave us orders, back at the fountain. Dog heard them." And that was proof positive that God's original plan never would have worked, but seeing the fury in his eyes, she doubted that was a wise thing to bring up.

"And why didn't you change us back? You had the power, after all… you carry my voice on your arm. Did you realize a mindless pet was easier to control?" His eyes travelled to Alex, watching silently behind her. "Perhaps you found that role familiar."

He bristled. "I'm here because I want to be."

"In the Sierra Madre? Seldom are more foolish words spoken. No… your master called, and you came running."

"I have no masters. I kill masters." Alex crossed his arms. "But I look after friends."

Cain felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the Cloud burning away at her skin. Hearing it from his mouth… it meant a lot. More than she thought it would, even. Different people had different prices for words, and Alex's never came cheaply. He was the kind that let actions speak for him, and actions had taken a confusing cast as of late.

And maybe they shouldn't have. She'd fretted over what subversive part of his mind she'd rooted herself in, but distress had obscured the plainest answer.

She crammed as much sincerity as she could into a smile, and smiled double when she got one in return. It was small and a little wry, but it reached his eyes.

"Your keeper can call it whatever she likes." God scoffed. "We all know her penchant for honesty."

There were a lot of things she could have said in that moment – could have said confidently for the first time since waking up, and wasn't that something. But she'd barely begun to pick her words before she realized there was no point. God was trying to get a rise out of her. These weren't the justifications he was interested in.

So she stepped forward. This was really not a conversation she'd been looking forward to, but it was her mess, not Alex's. God's ire was hers to bear.

"I was going to. Let you out, I mean. I was ready to, but Dog… Dog was afraid of you. He didn't want to go back in the dark."

"And so you thought to coddle the beast, is that it? Pet him and feed him treats, and tell him what a good boy he is? Do you think that helps him? You just create a new dependency, string another leash around his neck."

"He's a person too." That was the wrong answer; she knew that from the second the words left her mouth. God's face grew dark, curved.

"He liked you, you know," he leered. "That much I can feel, just as I know he lights up at the Old Man's name. Yes, he came to trust you, up until you called my name and shut him out. Now he cowers, whimpering, confused and betrayed in the dark."

Cain held back her flinch. Now she felt wretched all over again. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

"What I wanted?" His voice swelled like a stoked bonfire, all cresting heat. "For you to parade around like you – rrrgh!" His hands balled to fists, and she felt Alex stiffen, but they remained trembling at his sides until eventually they unclasped as one. "The only desires you heed are your own, human. Tell me," and he sneered, "what was it that made you put the beast away? Were you frightened by what you saw? Or was it pity, that you could not bear to continue looking at him? Perhaps you found him too stupid for some task you doubtless intend for me? Unfortunately," he growled, "it would be too much to hope that you learned how he bites."

Cain said nothing.

His eyes narrowed further. "Well?"

"…You don't really hate him."

Whatever answer God had been expecting, hers was not. His expression lurched once, then froze like glass; hard-cast, fragile. She studied it carefully, picking grains of truth from what she found there. "You acted like you did, but that's not why you're angry now. I kept him out of trouble, and I let you back out, so why…"

She sucked in a breath. In hindsight, it was plain as day.

"That's why you're doing this," she murmured. "You're not trying to protect yourself. You're trying to protect him."

God's mouth opened, but for once, no vitriol lay in wait. He stared at her for a few long seconds, and something unspeakably heavy settled in the lines of his ruined face and the slope of his shoulders. At last he turned away, and the edges of his scars gleamed in the Cloud's half-light.

"I've watched over Dog for so long. Tried to stop him from hurting others, killing others." He spoke lowly, words thick with frustration, but the heat of his endless anger had finally fled his voice. Without it, he just sounded tired. "Hurting himself."

"Because you care about him."

"How could I not? He's my brother. Kin. Perhaps something more than that, once. I wouldn't exist without him. Maybe I was nothing more than his conscience, trying to rein him in."

The answers fell into place like toppled cards. God was a dick to people for the same reason Alex had been so standoffish when they'd first met, and she'd already seen through Alex's game. It wasn't malice, exactly, though it was easy to mistake for it. It was an attempt to drive people away.

Don't get close, they both begged, not with words but with snarls and bared teeth. Because I'll hurt you and you'll hurt me.

It didn't mean either of them liked people, far from it, but it was distrust that drove their actions, not hatred. God was so tired of Dog being used, of being unable to stop the same nightmare from playing over and over again, that he met people with threats and rage. If he kept them away, they couldn't manipulate Dog, couldn't hurt either of them through his shadow. He couldn't control what his other half did, but he could do his best to keep others away from both of them with what little time awake he had.

But then Dog would come back, and undermine whatever progress he made, hurting himself time and time again – and wasn't that like Alex's own struggles, where his desire to change his nature was thwarted constantly by his hunger? Yet even that hunger seemed manageable compared to Dog's, and Alex could take agency – both of his hunger and himself – in a way that Dog never could, and God continually fought for and failed in his shadow.

"What happened?" she asked softly.

"I couldn't tell you if I wanted to." He paused. "Perhaps… perhaps I do. I want to believe I was a part of him once. That I was the one in control, or that Dog was someone different. But by the time I came to know me for myself, he was already a broken thing, starving for food, purpose, validation. All too eager to seek it in the wrong places. He's just a child. He knows when he does wrong; he just can't help himself. I tried to protect him from that."

"Your position didn't make it easy."

"There's no need to placate me, Cain. I know how well I've fared." Even her name didn't have much bite to it anymore. "He carves reminders in my skin. He's stronger than me… the instinct is stronger than me. When I speak, he howls, digs down, tries to peel me out of his flesh. When I'm silent, though?" His fingers traced a much smaller set of tracks on the wall. "He does worse. And so I speak."

"Do you remember her? Dog's… the one he liked?"

"Dog likes many things he shouldn't, and there are few things from you humans I care to remember." He said nothing for a while. "I warned her. Much like you, she did not listen. Though I think you both learned the same lesson in the end."

"It wasn't a lesson." Cain shook her head, because it really hadn't been. It was alarming, and maybe even a little sad, but it was just a reaffirmation of what she'd already known – that she could not place her life in Dog's hands. "I knew all along that it wasn't going to work out. I just…"

She trailed off. She'd just what, exactly? She'd had her reasons, but they hadn't even sounded that convincing at the time.

"You wanted to see for yourself. And then you pitied him, and then you believed you could help him. And then he proved to you that you could not."

Well, damn. God didn't pull his punches. "Is that speaking from experience?"

"Perhaps." He barked out a laugh, but it was short-lived. The silence that followed lasted much longer. "It would be worth it if just once I would wake and see blue sky overhead. If once, I could know that I kept him away. If he would just listen to me." A not-smile tugged the corners of his lips. "But if Dog could practice restraint, then I'd need never wake at all."

And Cain didn't think he was wrong. Seeing both sides of the equation for herself hadn't made the dilemma any clearer; if anything, the situation seemed more impossibly tangled than before. Dog and God seemed almost less like two conflicting people and more two faces of a single organism. Still diametrically opposed, but instead of mutual antagonism, the war between them was purely a thing of self-destruction. They struggled against each other by existing, constantly hurting themselves to try and help the whole. And on that front, neither of them was succeeding.

God might have hoped to be free of the Madre, but Cain didn't think getting rid of Elijah would solve many of his problems.

Still… it was a pretty good start. And so she tapped her Pip-Boy. "You know what we have to do."

"I do." He frowned. "Unless you meant my petty task here, which you have yet to convey to me."

"You'll need these." Alex stepped forward to pass along a sheaf of notes; he was quick to pull back once God had taken it from him. "Instructions on how to operate this thing."

The mutant gave them a cursory inspection. "Simple enough. Do not worry, would-be king – machinery that the Old Man expected Dog to operate will not stymie me for long."

"Then you'll be okay here?" Cain asked. "Until the Gala event goes off?"

"I believe so. Dog is quiet, at least for now, and I am patient. So long as you don't waste days, but you've already proven you handle things quickly. I don't expect to be here long." He looked up. "And… thank you, Cain. No… Courier."

In any other circumstance, being referred to by her occupation instead of her name would have been belittling. Here, it conveyed respect.

She nodded back. "See you in the Sierra Madre?"

"Yes." God took a deep breath. "And then we'll finish this."

0o0o0

They'd left God at the station, with the promise that he'd wait until the signal came.

Hopefully he wouldn't die before everyone else got into position. The enclosure was a dead end, with nowhere to flee but through any attackers, and those gates wouldn't shield against much. Though he was the least fragile of Cain's teammates. If they had to prioritize, and they did, he was the natural first pick.

Admittedly, he was relieved to leave the mutant behind. He didn't like either of their personas, but at least God was simple. He could deal with smug assholes, even if they were off-limits. That was a known quantity – aggravating, but rarely worth thought. Dog, though… Dog straddled that too-familiar line between man and beast, of questionable lucidity and even less comprehension, driven by base instincts and the programming of merciless masters.

He'd thought he was done with that, but apparently there were things even nuclear war couldn't change.

The Infected, though, he could rationalize. They were dead men walking, sense of self burned out by the virus; their brains were little more than clusters of neurons for a Runner to manipulate. There was no coming back from that state. But God did, regularly, and Alex was starting to think death might be as merciful a solution here as it had been in the past. He remembered the Hivemind, brief and desperate as that foray had been. Moaning screams louder than his thoughts, the feeling of suffocating in open air – the sense that something incomprehensibly greater than him was trying to drown him out of his body and fill it up with something else.

He'd been able to escape that. And it had reached back for him from time to time, when he burned its Hives or sought to sense the disease the way it taught him, but Greene's death choked its lingering whispers into silence. And finally there'd been peace.

If things had gone differently – if he'd been dragged down completely, only able to claw himself back for a time before he succumbed again–

It was… confusing, to learn that Cain had apparently tapped into a method to switch the two of them around, and he couldn't understand why she hadn't used it sooner. He didn't like God, but being a dick didn't deserve being buried, having choices taken away and given to something that couldn't make them. Empathy, as human as the sentiment was, wouldn't allow for less.

Though empathy came with other problems.

"Didn't mean to eat her."

He kept coming back to that sentence. There were better things to relate with someone over, and Alex wished he didn't have to. Understanding Dog was not a realm he wanted to explore, and yet there were several things about God's lesser half that were difficult to see on someone else. Especially someone like that.

The sooner they got this over with, the better. If God (or Dog, or whoever the Super Mutant was at any moment) was the least likely to get themselves killed, Dean was the most – both for being several centuries older than the human body was ever meant to get, and because he was a conniving jackass that couldn't leave well enough alone. Cain must have thought the same, because she'd picked up Christine next.

The path they took through the Villa was convoluted, leading them across rooftops just as often as ground level. He could have removed some of the obstacles, were it just him and Cain, but even he had no desire to mess with those plazas filled with roiling red haze. The Cloud was the greatest danger; between the three of them, any Ghost Person died quickly, and no holograms waylaid their path. Traps, on the other hand, remained irritating; he'd gotten slammed by a rebar stem while dismantling a net of grenades, and that was only one of many that they'd encountered. Worse, he'd noticed certain primed bear traps along the way that he knew he'd seen disarmed earlier. He wasn't sure if the Ghost People were cleverer than they acted or if Dean was just begging for a spinal injury in his own obnoxious way, but whoever had rearmed the traps would find it significantly more difficult after he'd torn them apart.

He could have been more thorough about it, but Christine was watching him. She was watching everything he did, now. He didn't like the scrutiny. Her gaze reminded him of Cain's, but with none of the understanding they'd gradually built between them. There was a wariness there that he hadn't seen yesterday, and he could guess to its source.

He didn't regret it, exactly. But it might not have been the wisest thing he'd ever done.

Now they stood before a wide building, a long and tiled archway differentiating it from the rows of sagging apartments. Cain had consulted her Pip-Boy, holding up her other hand in the universal gesture to stop.

"This is the one," she announced, her voice hoarse. And then, unnecessarily, "Hope you're ready to go in."

That much had never been in any doubt, he thought, when Christine nodded brusquely and gripped the handle. Revenge was a powerful motivator.

His first impression was industrial grey. Unlike the plaster housing, the electrical station was all metal paneling, though any luster had long since vanished beneath reddish dust. The entryway was narrow enough for him to scrape its shelves, and a patch of floor was splattered with blood, ancient enough to pass as rust.

He could hear Christine's heartbeat quicken, but her face was impassive, betrayed only by the sweat on her crown.

The lighting was poor, and flickered intermittently; strips hung loose from the ceiling in places, sparking. Cain's first order of business was to go through the shelves, but Christine had lighted upon the same thing he had; a long, ridged machine attached to several computers. His first thought was that it was a generator of some sort, but he didn't recognize its make. One end sprouted tubes as thick around as his torso, disappearing through the walls into rooms beyond.

About a quarter of the machine was lit by red pinpricks, but the rest was dark, and he couldn't get a response from any of the terminals when he thumbed through their buttons. Christine, meanwhile, had found a breaker box on the wall, and busied herself tampering with it, prying screws loose with her nails.

She glanced briefly at his approach. "It's busted. Two of these fuses are blown, maybe more."

He was still getting used to Christine's way of communication; he often missed the first few words of any exchange. His accumulated skills didn't atrophy, exactly, but none of his Blackwatch officers had used it quite as extensively as he did now. He could pick up her movement easily enough, but he couldn't keep an eye on two places at once. Not without going a route that might be hard to explain.

At least nothing else vied for his attention now. "Can you fix them, or do you need new ones?" He could probably scrounge something if he tried; a place like this had to have them.

She frowned, and laid her fingers against the panel. "I might be able to salvage them, but no guarantees. The whole box is gummed up. Could have bigger problems."

"Who needs new whats, now?"

Cain had come over, bearing a precarious armload of duct tape. She'd fit a few tools through the loops; he spotted the head of a wrench and a screwdriver. Normally he'd make those himself, or apply a more percussive sort of maintenance, but these were useful in present company. "Wouldn't happen to be one of these whats, by any chance?"

The knight didn't bother with words this time, instead going straight for Cain's hoard and extracting the screwdriver, along with a pair of needle-nose pliers. Cain looked a bit nonplussed throughout, but grinned back when Christine gave her a thumbs-up.

"Putting this place back online, huh?" she said, as the other woman set to work. "It's seen better days, that's for sure."

"Hmph. Find me something that hasn't, and then I'll be surprised." He eyed her findings as she stuffed the rest into a duffel. "Was there any wiring? Might end up needing it."

But he needn't have asked. There was a loud crackle, and the room henceforth hummed to life. Emergency lights bathed the room in sharp white relief, and previously dim displays danced with color as they rebooted themselves.

Christine tossed her tools back, but Alex was already checking the computers. There was nothing particularly interesting on the one he grabbed, just the work logs of a disgruntled employee, but a flashing header imparted one piece of relevant information – that the facility had automatically shut down due to power failure, and that most systems were offline.

Someone tapped his shoulder, and he flinched, hungry tendrils stirring. He wrenched his head around. It was Christine, peering over him with an expression he couldn't identify.

"What does it say?"

Right, she couldn't read. He twisted in place; she was much too close, and she wasn't leaving him room to extricate himself. He forced his wandering awareness elsewhere. "Building locks down on low power," he ground out. "Hasn't undone itself yet."

She leaned closer to the computer, blissfully unaware of how tasty she was starting to look. "Try running a diagnostic. If there's a central system, that should ping it."

He did, and moments later, a sharp hiss to his right heralded the pneumatic release of a door he hadn't previously noticed. Christine startled at the sound, and he took advantage of that to put some distance between them.

"What the – oh, hey, nice work." Judging by the tiny piece of metal in Cain's hand, she'd been trying to pick the lock herself. He nodded curtly, and swerved to avoid her when she lingered in his way.

The walls were still whirring, the old facility waking up piece by piece. He'd barely started down the new hallway when a sharp beep rang behind him, followed by muffled cursing as Cain pulled herself back through the door. "Damn it, radio." She edged in a half-circle, testing her collar's response. "I think it's around the corner. Alex?"

He found it hiding above the lip of a pipe, an old mounted speaker that garbled audible static. The bend in the hall conveniently blocked the Brotherhood knight from seeing him send a tentacle through it. "Clear."

Except it wasn't, and both collars started beeping again when they neared the corner. It turned out a second speaker was perched above a workstation, one where some previous conscript had seen fit to immortalize their claim to the Sierra Madre's treasure in angry black paint.

Cain gave that epitaph a very sour look, once Alex had cleared the way. "Yeah, the problem with turning this place back on – it turned on all the audio, too." Her lips formed a very thin line. "I'm not even upset anymore. It's just par for the fucking course."

"…close together." He noticed Christine too late, but it didn't look like she was waiting for a response; she was leafing through the table's contents.

The corridor was narrow, and he leaned back when Cain brushed past him to take point, not quite managing to avoid her.

They'd reached a set of stairs when the collars tripped again. This time, the speaker was at their base, hidden between gaps in the ceiling piping. Wrecking these was turning routine. But the building's smell had changed on the descent; the entryway had been fairly sterile by Villa standards, but now that cloying-sulfur burn was in his lungs again, and it worsened as he neared the hallway's end.

Suspicious, he forged on. The hall opened into an elaborate catwalk over a wide industrial space. The slatted metal rattled distressingly under his feet, and parts of it had given out in places; there was another door perhaps fifteen feet across from where he stood, but all that remained of the bridge between them was a bit of dangling railing. From what he could see, the parts of the walkway that hugged the room's perimeter were intact, but that was a long and precarious trek. He spotted stairs on the other side, but they terminated in a pile of rubble, and beneath that-

He blanched. The base level was choked with Cloud, a roiling haze upon the floor that rested thick enough to be water. What hung above was smoke, and he could taste it even here, three stories up. Everything ahead was tinted slightly red. Was it just imagination, or was his skin prickling more than usual?

He scrubbed at his sleeves, and ashen flecks fluttered down.

If the Gala controls were down there, they were shit out of luck. Bits of machinery peeked through the miasma in places, some belonging and some clearly fallen from above, but there was no way they were going to reach them. He was already uneasy about being this close, and he was the one that wouldn't die if his skin melted off.

"What's going on? Alex?" Right, he'd forgotten to signal the others. Cain sounded faintly peeved, though that changed when she reached his side. "Oh. That. Well, isn't that just perfect."

He edged away from her, only for Christine to fill the gap, pressing past him to peer over the edge. He wrestled back another surge beneath his skin; his biomass did not want to settle. He inhaled deeply, and immediately regretted it; when he coughed, he felt something wet shift in the base of his throat. But at least the burn was a distraction.

You can't eat her, he reminded himself. She's rigged to explode.

In truth, there were several reasons he'd rather not consume the knight, and probably nobler ones, but talking down his impulses was rarely a complex affair.

Now Cain was frowning at him. She glanced away when she caught his eye, but that familiar suspicion hadn't left her face, and he felt her stare resume the instant he broke contact.

"What?" he snapped.

That only deepened her frown. "Are you… not feeling well?" she ventured.

Oh. It was an odd feeling to realize that she could tell – sort of useful, but it turned his biomass in ways that had nothing to do with hunger. It wasn't something he enjoyed talking about, but it was probably safer for both of them to make things clear. "It's not the worst," he admitted, "but I've been better."

"Hmm." The bags under her eyes were very dark. "Do you think you'll be okay?"

"Depends how long we'll be here."

"Yeah…" She sighed and kicked halfheartedly at the ground. "I feel you. This place isn't good for my health, either."

Christine's brow creased, twisting her latticework of scars. "Are you sick?"

He chuckled dryly. "You could say that." The irony was plain, but he couldn't find much humor at the moment.

She didn't press further. Her gaze was familiar, and not in a good way.

"What?" Cain glanced between them, worry shadowing her eyes.

His smile was similarly mirthless. "She asked if I was sick."

"Oh." Now she was fixed on Christine. "Yeah, so, don't worry – it's not contagious, he's just got a condition. It's, oh, what's the word… chronic. Yeah, chronic. Pops up every now and then. He picked it up in a hotspot out east, didn't walk out the same as he walked in. You know how these things go. He's lived with it for a while now."

He'd started out wary, but by the end of her spiel, he was honestly kind of impressed. Not one word she'd said had been false, yet she'd still managed to blatantly lie with them. He pocketed the cover – could come in handy in the future.

"It's not life-threatening? Debilitating?"

Cain had to hide her amusement when he translated that. "Oh, no, it's not like that. He's a bodyguard, right? His off days are still ten times as dangerous as my good ones."

He kept to himself that her number was pretty low – and where everyone else was concerned, his off days were a lot more dangerous than his good ones.

"So yeah, I'm not worried." Her hand moved toward his shoulder, then gave an abortive little flick and changed course, reaching up to smooth her matted hair instead. "Not the greatest timing, but I can't say I'm surprised. This place is shit on everyone's health." Whether the following cough was coincidence or emphasis, he didn't know. "I'm sure he'll be fine. He's a tough guy."

Christine didn't respond beyond a brief nod, and Alex was glad to drop the topic. Cain might be a good liar, but the less thought her onetime teammates gave to his health, the better.

Nobody was enthused about the state of the catwalk. Cain let him lead, for reasons left unsaid between them. There was some sense in the arrangement on the surface level – anything he could pass, lighter and smaller individuals could traverse without difficulty. That he weighed several times more than he appeared to and could rebound from a fall were just… extensions of that.

Still, he kept his steps ginger. The room widened, bending back around the bit of hallway they'd just passed, and the walkway zagged around a thick tower, framed by massive, segmented pipes on the near side. The structure was mostly solid, but there were windows at its top. From this angle, he couldn't see what was inside – the glass was maybe ten feet above him – but there had to be a room within.

It had its own catwalk, or maybe a fire escape to nowhere, but it didn't seem to be attached to anything. The way inside was probably from the ground floor, and that wasn't happening anytime soon.

They kept walking. His lungs ached. The adage of 'don't look down' had never carried weight with him, but he was starting to understand the morbid fascination behind it. It was difficult to ignore the choking mass that sat a few scant stories below – difficult not to think about how it diffused upwards, how he bathed in its vapors now. And it was difficult to forget how eerily similar it looked and smelled to something else which he'd spent quite a lot of time getting painfully melted by.

Cain swore, and he looked up. What he'd thought was a roundabout path ended in another set of stairs. This one was intact, but led straight into the Cloud below. He turned around, looking for the bridge he knew had fallen.

"Was there another door back there?" Cain despaired. "Anyone?"

He didn't wait for Christine's response; he already knew what it was going to be. They had no way across this mess. More accurately, they had no way across.

There were a number of ways he could have dealt with this. He could have jumped to the other side. Fifteen feet was nothing; he could carry a car without difficulty at that distance. He could have anchored a handhold with a Whipfist and reeled himself across. He could simply climb sideways across the wall, spider-like, if he wanted to be delicate. He could glide, or airdash. He could use his tentacles to seize some broken struts and cram them into place; hell, he could have sent cords of biomass across the gap and formed a solid bridge that way.

But Christine was watching.

His hands clenched.

There had to be a way around this; he just needed to be clever about it. He'd operated under worse constraints in the past. He swept the room, looking for something he could use – something humans could use. Taking the stairs and making a break for it was right out. Even if he was willing to tangle with the Cloud for that long, the set on the other side had collapsed. Navigating those in a concentrated fog of toxic gas… people died to less.

There might have been a partial walkway on the other side of that spire, but he couldn't see around it from this end. Backtracking dashed that hope, though it lent him a better view of the pipes. Each was much thicker than he was, and those ridges were pronounced, bolted segments that would be relatively easy to grab and balance upon.

At its closest, they passed roughly six feet from the catwalk. Perhaps…

Well, he didn't have any other ideas.

"I'm going to try and climb this," he announced. Cain and Christine had been in the midst of something involving a lot of wild hand gestures, but now both turned. "The pipes. I want to see what's up there."

"You can reach them?" Christine asked. "The ground floor's impassible."

"Yeah. I'll make a jump for it."

Cain studied him. "You sure that's wise?" She hesitated; her eyes weren't worried, but they were definitely scrutinizing. "That sounds… dangerous."

"You know me."

"I do. And I also know that you're a bit reckless." It was a testament to her self-restraint that she didn't side-eye Christine. "Are you sure about this? I mean… do you know what you're looking for? Because that'd make you one step ahead of me."

"Could be a control room." Christine squinted upwards. "The vantage point – it lets an overseer watch what the rest of the workers are doing. Common Old World design."

He relayed that to Cain, who looked thoughtful. "Makes sense. Not sure what good that will do, though. There could be something interesting up there, but short of a crane, you're not fixing that gap. Maybe a bunch of builder bots could do it, if you programmed them." She peered down. "You know RobCo termlink protocol?"

He wracked his memories. The term sounded familiar, but he couldn't come up with anything coherent, just the edges of a headache. "No."

"Figures. The one time I actually catch you empty-handed, and it's this."

"Do you have a better idea?" The contents of the tower weren't half as important as the cover it'd give him.

The look she gave him implied she did, and that she didn't share it told him just what kind of idea it was. Which meant they were on the same page right now. "Not really, no. You think you'd be able to jump to the other side, if you reached the top?"

"Worth a shot." It'd put him out of sight, so the answer was yes.

"If you're sure about this." She clasped her hands; they'd been unusually subdued. "Be careful."

He grunted noncommittally and swung himself over the handrail, balancing on the thin strip of metal between his feet and the seething Cloud. It didn't leave much room for leverage, and he doubted someone like Christine would miss that. Angle was going to be key, because for once he'd be forgoing power. The leap he was about to make, if he wanted to hit the pipe, would not strictly be possible with human legs, but it was close enough for Hollywood.

It still felt horribly like a mistake, and his instincts screamed to catch the air and glide as the Cloud surged up to meet him. But his hands seized metal before he broke the fog, and if his first few hauls were faster than his cover called for, there was always adrenaline. The Cloud curled around the displaced air, and thin tendrils of it grasped at his feet.

Immediately he knew the difference. It had been an itch before. This was the sensation of fire, of burning oil and Javelin heat, and flames haunted his memory as he dragged himself to safer heights.

But he forced himself to slow as he drew closer to the catwalk above. Both women were peering down at him, two very different types of concern written there, and humans were not quite this agile on vertical surfaces.

So he feigned effort, pretended to strain for his next handholds and struggle to hoist his weight. Without the tentacles he normally used to anchor himself, the task became slightly more precarious, but by far the most difficult part was refraining from forming them.

The pipes curved inward beneath the top, leaving a gap slightly taller than his height for him to stand in. Hm. He jumped a human jump and seized the handrail. It screeched as he pulled it, and the entire balcony swung downwards, screws clattering; he cursed and propelled himself up what was now a very temporary ramp, clinging to the edge of the door.

Cain cheered when he reached a stop, clapping and whistling loudly. For all he knew, it might have been sincere. The door was locked, and he extruded a single worming tendril from his palm as he pretended to force the mechanism. Then the lock clicked, and he was in.

Christine's guess had been dead to rights. He had a few factory workers floating around in his head, and through them found his surroundings familiar. He idly crushed a speaker attached to an elaborate sound system; whoever had manned this desk either enjoyed music or preferred to yell at their subordinates in high resolution. He noted a trapdoor in the corner, though any ladder there would lead straight into the Cloud, and he wasn't eager to open it.

That was the only other exit, so if he wanted to jump to the other side of the chamber, he'd have to climb around. Which was doable, but he might as well check out the office computer first, see if there was anything on it.

It turned out the terminal was password locked. It also turned out the password was 'password'. Having a gestalt of ingrained human tendencies came with its perks, even if it also came with a lot of endless screaming.

The work logs were nothing special – just a centuries' old back-and-forth complaining about overly hot conditions, and towards the end, toxic backups in the pipes. Those distinctly more panicked entries led him to the station's controls, where a flashing notice informed him that high levels of contamination had been detected in the building's ventilation system. Below that sat a prompt to activate the sector's fans.

Well, that sounded useful.

He felt a split second's regret when distant metal squealed in protest, and he heard a muffled shout of surprise from outside. There was a crash and thud as some unknown object was dislodged, and then the hum of industrial fans built in earnest.

Through the windows, he watched the Cloud shudder and disperse, rippling like liquid as it was sucked into parts unknown. Only sluggish traces remained by the end, twisting in the powerful currents below. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but already he thought the room smelled fresher.

It was an interesting concept. While morphing a functional fan sounded irritating, he knew a few techniques that pushed air around.

He wouldn't test them now, of course. He deactivated the fans and shut off the computer, then dropped through the trapdoor. Immediately his biomass crawled – this chamber had been sealed off, and he hacked wetly as he groped for the door at the base.

He tore out of there before his skin could start melting. These sensations were familiar enough for him to recognize that was a real threat.

The burn was slow to fade, but the factory floor felt blessedly cool in comparison. He scrubbed dead flesh free. The Cloud's removal had revealed the landscape of debris below, and his line of sight was littered with broken platforms and ceiling panels. There was machinery down here as well, things that actually belonged in this mess. Most had collapsed, either from disrepair or beneath fallen debris.

He picked his way through them, making his way to where Cain and Christine watched from above. "It's clean. You can cross now."

Cain seemed a little hesitant to test that for herself, but Christine wasted no time. The clang of brisk footsteps on metal echoed loud in absence of any other sound, and halfway down, Cain scurried after her, evidently in no mood to be left behind.

"Nice work," she said, once she'd decided she wasn't at immediate risk for horrific chemical burns. Curls of the stuff oozed from the base of the control tower, and from the look on her face, they had a monopoly on her attention. "How'd you pull it off?"

"Ventilation system controls. Lucky they still worked."

"Did you find anything else?" Christine asked. Cain voiced the same question a second later, though in more words.

"Useful? No." He shrugged. "Apparently the Cloud showed up during construction. They didn't know how to deal with it."

"Right – there was an accident, wasn't there? Those logs in the clinic." She glanced up, thoughtful. "I'd hope those guys ended up okay, but there was kind of this nuclear war. Makes everything else a bit of a moot point."

"We shouldn't linger here." Christine gestured from the massive vents to the stairs ahead. "It won't take long for it to seep back."

Alex started to translate, but Cain must have figured out the gist of the warning, because she agreed. Or maybe she'd come to the same conclusion on her own. It was hard to forget the Cloud; its metallic tang still lingered in his mouth.

The way up began with a mound of rubble as tall as he was; wide, but not particularly steady. The lowest rung of the stairs hung loose, more pinned to the pile than it was attached to the rest of the staircase.

He didn't like it. "You need help getting up there?"

Cain wasn't looking at him, but her head-shake was answer enough. "Should be fine, I think. I've done worse. Hm… I guess it wouldn't hurt to have a safety net." She glanced his way. "Is that okay? Catch me if I fall, I mean?"

He nodded. It was probably better that way. His hunger was getting… noticeable. More so than he'd have liked.

Christine insisted on going first. She scaled the rubble gracefully; her small size helped, but it was clear she knew where and when to step. He'd gotten that same training, in other lifetimes. The stair barely shuddered when she finally boosted herself up and signaled an all-clear.

He watched Cain more carefully. Her one leg was stiffer than the other, and once or twice she kicked something loose, but she clambered onto the stairs without incident.

Alex waited until both had reached the top before attempting to work out a path. Were it up to him, he'd have skipped the broken bits and simply leapt to the top… but that was a few stories higher than he could get away with, in present company. It had always baffled him that humans were so shit at jumping.

He and rubble rarely got along, and he'd fallen through enough crumbling buildings to learn that lesson. But he wasn't without his tricks, and he feathered out his mass as he approached. The ripple that passed across his skin was barely perceptible, a trick of the faulty lighting. It wasn't a perfect job, he'd need to alter his shape for that, and this was something more accustomed to a soft landing than a climb.

From the first step, he knew this wasn't going to work. Each one made something groan, no matter how gently he placed them, and it wasn't even a surprise when a beam shifted and rolled loose beneath his shoe. When a quarter of the heap squealed free to follow – well, that was his cue to abandon subtlety and scramble for the top.

He didn't have time to hesitate, but he knew for a fact that that bottom stair was going to snap off if he stepped on it. He could mess with his density, but not that much. The part above that was sturdier, but he'd need to jump, and the impact would cause its own problems.

He looked up. The others were directly above him; a multi-levelled staircase sat in the way. He couldn't see their eyes.

When he jumped, he did so with arms outstretched. A close observer would have noticed the skin shifting, tiny cilia extending along his sleeves. The pile was already collapsing, but less explicable was the tiny gust that stirred eddies of leftover Cloud across the ground.

The staircase shuddered when he lighted upon it, but otherwise held fast. He quickly climbed before it could change its mind.

"That looked close." Cain wet her lips, and he followed her gaze down. It was no longer strictly correct to call the rubble a pile. "Maybe we shouldn't do that again."

He didn't answer. It had been close, and he could have avoided this entire waste of time if Christine wasn't watching him. That would never stop being frustrating. This wasn't how he operated, playing human. His first stint with Cain and Arcade had proven that. Hangers-on were handicaps, and he didn't want them.

But he rarely got what he wanted.

When he looked up, she'd returned to her favorite pastime of staring holes through him. "What?" he grunted.

This time, she simply shook her head. But the tiny twitch she made towards Christine passed its own message.

He fought the urge to roll his eyes as he pushed past her. That wasn't going to happen. She had no grounds to nag him on this. Everything had worked out, and that was all that mattered.

That damn door was finally within reach, and he grabbed it in lieu of having to respond. A flickering panel announced it as a utility room, and the contents were true enough to a glorified storage closet. Cain made a beeline for an emergency first aid kit, testing the lids on some clear bottles. He moved around her. The shelves were surprisingly useless, unless they found themselves in desperate need of a mop. There was, however, a surplus of coffee mugs, the majority of which covered the desk of some long-dead technician.

Christine hovered over the computer. Her face creased when the display filled with text. He drew beside her, though he kept a safe distance.

"Can you read this?" Even without sound, words could be muttered.

He preferred not to read aloud, but he humored her. The accounts here were a follow-up to what he'd read in the ventilation control center; the speaker was worried about the gas leak, and Christine's lips twitched wryly when they expressed concern over what would happen if the toxin escaped into the Villa. But he paused when they described a batch of Hazmat suits that had been shipped to deal with the Cloud. Hazard suits did tend towards a particular look, but the descriptions here lined up disturbingly well with the Ghost People outside.

Not for the first time, he wondered: what were they?

"…passwords." He blinked. "Look for passwords," Christine repeated. "This looks like maintenance; techs often keep system backdoors. Might need them for whatever Elijah's got planned."

The twist of her mouth was ineffably bitter, and he felt a moment's… respect, if not kinship. "Do you know what that is?"

She was slow to respond. "Bits and pieces. It's mostly guesswork. We knew he was using the collars, the conscripts… this place answered a few questions on what for." For a few seconds, she was still. "I know it's his endgame. It has to be; he's never stayed anywhere this long before. He's been on the run for years, always moving. He's hard to pin down."

Christine wasn't quite looking at him anymore. "The places he's been… there were things he couldn't be allowed to have, and he took them. I've seen what he used them for. What he's done here – it's nothing compared to what he's done in the past. Everywhere he goes..." Her fists clenched. "I've always been two steps behind him."

And hell, but he knew how that felt, chasing revenge that always slipped through his hands. Some, he'd pinned down in the end. Some had taken different ways out.

"He ends here," he promised. Even if he wasn't doing it for her, she'd earned that much.

But when she looked up, her face was guarded in a way that it hadn't been before. "It doesn't matter what he wants. He needs to be stopped."

He didn't disagree, but whatever quiet empathy had passed between them had departed. He dipped back into the logs silently, scanning for anything he might have missed. Apart from some surprise requisitions and an official admonishment about bringing vodka on the premises, there wasn't much to see.

"Hey, Alex." He turned; Cain was headed their way, a familiar packet and syringe in hand. "Good news for once – I found some Rad-Away."

She was a little late on that front. It was possible the official compound might have more effect than his Blacklight-based bootleg, but the more time he spent in the Cloud, the more certain he became that radiation wasn't the cause of this creeping malaise.

So he waved it away. "Don't think I need it."

She looked genuinely taken aback. Once again, her gaze darted over to Christine. An eyebrow crept up and crashed, and her expression gradually shifted into something shrewder. "I'll hang onto it, just in case."

She passed a clear water bottle to Christine, who drank gratefully. "You guys find anything on that?"

He flipped back to the Hazmat message and stepped aside. "Take a look for yourself."

She did. From this angle, he could see the exact moment that realization set in.

"Hell. Okay. That is not what I was expecting." She leaned back; the breath left her lungs in a sharp exhalation, or maybe it was a sigh. "Makes more sense than I wish it did, but – that means–" She swallowed, and her collar bobbed. "You think the Ghost People are the workers, like, the original ones? Like ghouls, or – or something?"

"I don't know how ghouls work, but the Ghost People are nothing close to human." From DNA alone, Hunters had been closer, and Hunters were pretty far gone.

"Huh. I guess you'd know." His eyes narrowed warningly. "I almost don't want to know the answer. If they were human once, they aren't now. And... not in a good way."

"Don't feel guilty over killing something that can't think anymore. Nobody wants to become that. At that point, death's a mercy." He'd granted it to many, once the infection had twisted their bodies and burnt their memories to cinders. Most would have thanked him for it. It was a fear that was both alien and terribly familiar.

Again, her eyes lingered on him longer than they should have. "Yeah," she said eventually, quiet. "It would be, I guess. Still…" A sigh. She rubbed her eyes. "Hell of a place, this."

She wasn't wrong.

The cubicle was connected to a breakroom, which explained all the coffee. He spotted another door on the end – a relief, because he'd have been pissed if all his effort had led to a dead end. He also spotted a box of ammunition in a sink, which seemed like a strange place for ammunition to be. He took it anyway. Empty guns were useless; they didn't even make very good clubs.

Alex wasn't certain what Cain was doing with the coffee machine, but glanced over when she abruptly pumped her fist. "Ha!" she crowed. "Still has grounds. Take that, Dean!"

She was markedly less exuberant when the machine, after a lot of sickly gurgling, sputtered a cupful of reddish sludge into her waiting mug.

"You were saying?" Christine mouthed, and that was too good not to pass along.

"I didn't need coffee anyway." She poured the contents on the ground; gravity seemed hesitant to take responsibility of the mess. "Dean did not win this round. He drinks this stuff. That has to be an automatic loss. That's worse than losing."

The ammo seemed to cheer her up, though. There wasn't much else to see; a row of office lockers had been wedged into the corner, but they were indeed locked, and that was something he couldn't get away with changing after it had been established aloud.

Sometimes, he wasn't sure what he hated more – the questions, or having to avoid them.

…Yeah, it was probably the questions.

The breakroom led straight to another catwalk over a massive chamber, nearly a mirror to the other side – right down to the various breaks in the walkways and the Cloud seething along the distant ground. The last part came as an unpleasant surprise. Either there were separate ventilation systems for each chamber, or there was a blockage somewhere.

Alex wasn't sure how to go about fixing that. There was no tower on this side; instead, several offices seemed to be consolidated on the far end of the room, walled off by dusty plastic or glass.

The collars remained silent, but he spotted the telltale shape of a speaker above that block, hugging the edge of the high ceiling. That was a problem; he wasn't going to reach that one without a Whipfist. He might be able to get away with pipes, but climbing sheet metal was too blatant a stretch.

He jolted at the too-close crack of gunfire, whirling on enemies that weren't there. But it was only Cain, revolver in hand, and when he looked back to the offending speaker, smoke was curling from a fresh and bullet-shaped hole. He'd almost forgotten that he didn't have exclusive rights on wrecking those – just on efficiency.

She caught him staring, and gave him a faint smile. "Thought you might have trouble with that one."

At least she was on his side. He'd been worried she might try and force the issue, but apparently she valued her promises even when she didn't agree with them. He'd done the same for her, come to think of it.

Christine shifted in the corner of his vision, and he moved to avoid her tap. Her eyebrows rose. "There's another at four o' clock."

Another round solved that.

"I'm gonna hazard a guess that what we want's over there." Cain gestured to the offices with her gun. "Might be wishful thinking, but with that many terminals, one of them's bound to be useful." Christine nodded. "Don't suppose anyone knows where we can get another giant fan?"

"No point." The stairs on the far side descended into the haze unbroken, but the ones on theirs had come off entirely. Even without the Cloud, that route would be a one-way trip. Unless he broke his charade.

And that wasn't necessary. The catwalk looked intact, though he noticed one spot where it sagged dangerously. "We've got a straight shot," he continued. "Just don't fall."

Cain snorted. "Got any other pearls of wisdom?"

He knew it was sarcasm, but if she was asking… "Sure. Try not to die. Don't wander off on your own. Don't take candy from strangers."

"Don't think I can't dock your salary, Mercer, because I can and I will. I will start charging you for the pleasure of my company."

That elicited a breathless huff, but not from him. He turned. Christine's lips had parted, and she could have been an entirely different person for the curve of her mouth alone.

Cain peered at her curiously, their game forgotten. "I think that's the first time I've seen you smile. Looks good on you."

"It's nothing." At once, the laughter was gone, leaving her countenance flat. "Just reminded me of someone."

Cain couldn't hear the words, but her sudden dolefulness was message enough. "What did I say? I'm sorry – you know I didn't mean that as a jab, right? Place like this, nobody's asking you to be happy. Especially not after… you know."

"It's fine."

Cain hovered, torn between propriety and her need to know. "I, um." When she glanced at him, there was a plea in her eyes. "Alex, what did she say?"

"She's not bothered. Said you reminded her of somebody she knew."

"Oh." She hesitated for a while, but as it always did with Cain, curiosity won out. "Who was that?"

Christine's response was stiff. "Doesn't matter."

Some sentiments transcended language. "Right. Forget I asked."

She hurried to catch up with them. The catwalk amplified each footstep, returning it with an echo and a little more vibration than he was comfortable with. Alex winced when he stepped wide over a missing rung. They were closing in on the damaged spot – as if this whole place wasn't damaged enough. He'd be a lot happier once they got out of here.

"Alex? Christine's trying to talk to you."

He turned, just as his foot came down.

He heard the sudden tortured groan, the snap-clang of something coming loose, but comprehension really set in when gravity tugged at his ankles.

Oh, shit.

Alex had very good reflexes. Blacklight went a long way, but the basest fact of the matter was that he'd spent far too much time in motion to not build his reaction times. So when he hesitated, even as the panel beneath his feet swung down, it wasn't inability or panic that held him back. There were several things on his mind at that moment, and as usual, they weren't getting along.

This whole section was damaged. He had to get off of it.

He was falling. He needed to jump back.

He weighed several times more than anyone else here. If he jumped for it, that panel might also come off.

Both Cain and Christine were close behind him, barely starting to react. If he broke the catwalk beneath them, they'd fall.

Christine was watching. He had to do this human.

So against those reflexes, that very keenly honed spatial awareness and its excellent advice, he reversed his half-pivot and ran forwards. And because his reflexes were very good, this was entirely the wrong action and it took less than a second to prove that. The sagging walkway was already loose, and somewhere between his crashing footfalls and the bolts already coming free as the one end folded in, the whole thing decided two hundred years was a good enough run and chose that moment to cascade.

Reflex told him to get to solid ground; forward preferable, backward closer. Twenty feet ahead. An easy jump. Unacceptably far.

He spun again, and fled back across the falling catwalk.

He was playing for keeps now; every step he made sent panels tumbling into the abyss, and he took them three at a time, more concerned with keeping ahead of gravity than with acceptable speeds. He knew where he had to be. Christine had seized Cain by the shoulders, had dragged her backwards. The latter's mouth was open, but he wasn't listening to anything right now. He had a landing, one that rose further above him with every passing instant – but he couldn't truly jump, was already moving far too fast–

When he leapt, it was exactly as far as he needed to grip the edge. The rest of him dangled free, and his shoes brushed seething fire. He swung them up, teeth gritted, and the catwalk groaned and dipped. He had to haul himself up before it broke. That would drag it down faster. Humans didn't have that kind of leverage.

He inhaled deeply, filling both his lungs and another organ he'd just formed, and sent streams of air downwards to cushion his weight. The sinking halted. He reached out and pulled himself up a little further. He was running out of air, he could never hold this for long, but he just needed a few more seconds and he could–

A hand gripped his arm. Unwanted tendrils skittered to life, and he peered up. Christine had anchored herself against the rail and was trying to help him to safety.

It was one thing to play human like this, but this was something he couldn't feign. He was far too heavy for her to lift, and she'd realize that the longer she tried. She was pulling, struggling with his other arm now, and his fingers dug into metal.

Fuck it – this had gone on long enough. He hauled himself over the edge, pushing back to stabler ground the moment his feet touched down. Christine's hands slid free. Her mouth moved rapidly, but he didn't wait to see what she had to say.

The last of many fragments hit the ground, though the resounding, rattling clamor was slow to settle. The whole debacle had taken maybe fifteen seconds at most. He bit back a sigh. Usually he appreciated any excuse for action he could get, but the only feeling he could muster right now was deep-seated annoyance.

"Utmost sincerity right now – I didn't think anything could make more noise than me." Cain looked a little winded, but he'd been with her long enough to know a distraction when she was spinning one. "I'm thinking we want to back up, because taking five here might not be the world's brightest idea."

They did, and their destination drew farther away. Cain rattled on about structural damage and swindling construction firms and shit jobs in the middle of nowhere, but he couldn't pay attention. He always knew when somebody was staring at him, and with Christine – he'd made a number of mistakes just now.

He wasn't half as good at distractions as Cain. "What did you want to tell me about?" he muttered.

Her lips curled, but it couldn't rightfully be called a smile. "I was trying to say the catwalk looked loose."

Oh. He glanced at the remains of their way forward and snorted. Already the Cloud was settling over it. "Thanks."

"You're welcome."

He wasn't in the mood for humor. Once again, their little group was stuck with no way across, and she was the only thing holding him back. He pivoted in place, searching for something that'd fix this for him. Something he could use to scrape by with this half-human charade. Nothing came. The Cloud sat thick below; the gaps, too wide to pretend to jump.

This had been so much easier when he didn't deal with people. Or when he didn't have to feel guilty about killing whoever caught him in the act, which was why he didn't deal with people. It was easier on everyone if he kept a safe distance and nobody had reason to call the cops. It had been different, back when panic was a default and the city burned a little more each day. He'd belonged there. Or maybe it was just because he wasn't the only target. But the calm that had descended afterwards was a fragile, stifling thing, and that had never really changed.

Honestly, he was tired of it.

It was bad enough in Manhattan, forced to keep his head down – but he'd had his distance, then. He hadn't bothered with company, shook any tails he happened to pick up with ease. But a different face wouldn't work here, and he had to keep wasting his time again and again, hidden in plain sight. Dealing with people on their terms, because he couldn't get away on his, and the option of dropping everything and not bothering with company no longer held the singular appeal it once did.

Something had to give, because this wasn't working.

What had Cain been harping on about? That Blacklight wasn't too strange and sordid for this world? Well, he'd prove her right or he'd prove her wrong.

The edge hadn't softened, but some of the tension bled away once he realized he'd made his decision. That he'd drop the disguise. Not completely; he didn't have to, and he wasn't that far past caring. But there was a very peculiar relief to be found in this particular plunge. If this went to hell, for once, it wouldn't be on him. And maybe Cain would finally understand why he did what he did. Why her way couldn't work for him, and why it never had.

Though – treacherously – he wanted to hope she was right.

He couldn't speak, not with their omnipresent listener. And she couldn't read any words he wrote. But there was another option.

"Christine." Each word was mouthed slowly, deliberately. "Mute your collar."

She stared back, her face quizzically blank. Too late did it occur to him that lip-reading didn't necessarily go both ways.

Her mouth opened, but he'd already held up a hand, scowling to himself. He didn't have time for charades, not with the axe he was recklessly about to drop, but he tried anyway, clutching both hands around his neck before drawing a finger to his lips.

That, she understood. She took Cain's collar, ignoring the other woman's yelp of surprise. Cain seemed to cotton on quickly enough, but he knew the sound of an elevated heartbeat when he heard one.

Finally, she stepped back. "He's deaf," the knight said. He hadn't dared to confirm that aloud. "What is it?"

Cain managed to ask the same question at the same time. "Alex?"

No turning back now. "Before we go on, there's something you need to know about me."

Comprehension seized Cain's face at the same instant it left Christine's. For a second, she was a portrait of guileless surprise – and then she went very deliberately blank. If he knew her at all, she was itching to speak, but she kept her word. That left just one thing for him to focus on.

"I'm not human." He watched Christine as he spoke, trying to gauge her reaction, but she gave remarkably little. At least she wasn't screaming. But if he were honest, he'd known she wouldn't be the type.

After a long moment, she nodded. "What are you?"

"Something else." Her brow furrowed, and she shook her head. Fine. "Nothing you would know. I'm one of a kind."

"You're a mutant?"

"Not like Dog is." It might have been easy to seize that connection – to play himself off as, if not a known quantity, something close to one. But that was a comparison he shuddered to make. "If that's what you mean by mutants, then no, I'm not."

"It wasn't." She paced a quarter-circle, eyeing him from the top down. "You're stronger than you should be. And you move faster. Both are hallmarks of FEV infection, but you lack the other characteristics."

"FEV?" Damn it, but that was a mistake. Infection meant too many things for him to let it lie, but the gaps in his knowledge spoke loud.

"FEV is-" Cain choked off into an abortive squawk. She hovered there, leaning forward, her mouth still half-open. He paid her only a moment's distraction. Christine was already talking.

"Forced evolutionary virus. It's what makes the Super Mutants, among other things." She folded her arms; her face was shrewd. "But not you."

So his hadn't been the only virus to rewrite the human genome. From the looks of it, this had spread farther than Blacklight ever had. The implications were… interesting. Disturbing. Later. He filed it away for later. He had more pressing matters at hand.

He'd lost an excuse he hadn't known he'd had. What was he left with? The truth? He wasn't going to bring up Manhattan if he could help it. In any other company, the age wouldn't have been half as important as the shapeshifting or the apocalyptic death virus. But there was no telling what the Brotherhood knew, and he wasn't here to jog Christine's memory.

Though… perhaps he should test her. He was speaking to one of their agents, but the Brotherhood wasn't here. If she couldn't connect a few choice tricks to the Manhattan Incident, then ZEUS's existence was not common knowledge among her order and Blackwatch had maybe done its job for once. If she could, it was forewarning. And really, what could she do about it? They had a common enemy and she needed his cooperation to survive long enough to see things through. Cross had swallowed his pride enough to band against a nastier foe, and the Specialist had a hell of a lot more reason to hold a grudge against him than any post-apocalyptic warband could claim. Christine could deal. If she wouldn't… he'd cross that bridge at the end.

He hoped he wouldn't have to. He hoped Cain was right. But Christine knew too much already, and he needed to know whether or not she'd be a threat.

She was staring expectantly; he must have missed something. Her next words were precise, even exaggerated. "So what does that make you?"

There were many answers to that question. He was an experiment, a biological weapon, hubris shaped into a cataclysmic mistake. The last spiteful laugh of a sociopath. Killer, monster, terrorist. "I'm a shapeshifter."

Cain whistled. "Going for the big guns, I see."

He glanced at her, tense. "If I'm doing this, then I want the freedom to stop screwing around." His choice had been slightly more nuanced than that. The ability to cut and run beneath a different identity was a prized one, but it was already compromised – he'd presented one face to the Brotherhood and another to Christine. Keeping the two separate was a lost cause when Veronica had already seen both.

"Hey, I'm not complaining – all the more power to you. I'm just…" She trailed off. Christine had moved. Her expression was far too sharp-edged be called thoughtful.

"Explain," was all she said, but it was nothing so polite as a suggestion.

"You're gonna have to be more specific than that."

"I could say the same." Quietly, she deliberated. "To what extent can you… change shape?"

"Full-body. Muscle density, environmental adaptation, cosmetic… whatever I need at the moment." He sharpened his senses and listened. There was surprisingly little reaction to that – certainly not the reaction of somebody who associated shapeshifting with Interpol lists and viral outbreaks, but not really the reaction of someone who didn't, either. Surely a bona fide shapeshifter was worth some surprise? Maybe this bullshit future had turned that commonplace as well.

"You used that just now?" Christine gestured to the fallen wreckage.

"Yes."

"How quickly can you activate this?"

Alex recognized exactly what she was doing; this was threat assessment. Even now, he wasn't sure how accurate he wanted her to be. He could have given a demonstration, but… he was taking this gradually. "Instantaneously. Few seconds at most."

There was a tiny cough, the kind with working vocal chords behind it. "It's a little difficult to get this secondhand," Cain hinted.

His sidelong glance was reluctant and short-lived. "It's nothing you don't already know."

She made a sound that implied she did not agree with that, but then her little attention-grabbing cough morphed into a full-blown hacking fit which robbed her of the chance to interrupt further. But now Christine was watching her as well.

"How do you two know each other, really?" The question came slow and suspicious; her eyes crossed back to pin his. "And don't lie this time."

"Never lied in the first place." At least, not on this. He didn't precisely consider himself a bodyguard, but… "I stick around and make sure she doesn't get herself killed, and she drags me to new and interesting places."

"Were there many of those out east?"

What? "We met in Freeside. I got to the Mojave on my own." He paused. "New York."

Christine processed that with a slight frown. "I take it this was your condition." She glanced up. "Both of you implied it was a sickness."

Hm. Now she'd asked the right question, but was it because she understood what it meant, or because she was trying to figure that out?

"It is, technically." No reaction. He chose to chance it further. "It was a virus that did this to me."

That was more than enough clues now, and he watched her expression carefully. He didn't see recognition there. Interest, wariness, but no realization or telltale fear. It was possible that she was masking it, that her poker face was simply that strong, but he was tentatively comfortable dismissing that. Her heartrate was slightly elevated but calm, and he didn't smell adrenaline.

No, he decided then. Christine Royce did not know what Blacklight was. Neither, history implied, did Veronica. Between the two of them, he could be reasonably certain that the Brotherhood had never heard of him.

"I haven't heard of another mutagenic virion."

If she didn't know the specifics, he wasn't going to feed her information. "It happened on the other side of the country."

"I wasn't doubting you. Just… surprised." She frowned slightly. "East coast, you said? I shouldn't be. There's a lot of dangerous substances in the old industrial centers. It was the most heavily bombarded in the war – the radioactive hotspots react with the chemical runoff in unpredictable ways."

If she wanted to think he had a radioactive origin like some kind of comic-book superhero, he wasn't going to complain. Though if Dana were here, she'd have taken the moment to laugh in his face.

He didn't respond, and Christine didn't press. She studied him, her hands folded across her chest. "You're bringing this up because you can get across."

"Yes." He paused. "I can get all of us across. Carry you, I mean."

"How strong are you?"

"Very."

"You're being evasive." That warning crease was back.

So he took a page out of Cain's book. "I don't know the exact limit. People are easy. If you're asking if I could hold up these catwalks by myself, the answer's no." Because they'd fall apart under their own weight without evenly distributed support, but details. He wasn't lying about his ignorance; he'd never pitted himself against anything that more specialization and more biomass couldn't best.

Christine was still frowning, but it lacked its earlier bite; less suspicious, more thoughtful. "Not the answer I was hoping for, but it does line up with what I saw earlier."

His eyes narrowed, and she met them unflinchingly. "And what was that?"

"I've done enough recon to know that I couldn't have climbed those pipes without grips." Apparently he wasn't as clever as he thought. "And I saw what you did to Dean. A single jab shouldn't have taken him out so easily. You were barely in form."

"Domino's feebler than I thought. Even I wasn't expecting that."

Cain's face, at that moment, couldn't decide whether it wanted to be victorious or exasperated. Her strangled bark of laughter gave no further clues. "Didn't I tell you that going after Dean was a bad idea?"

"You didn't, actually."

"Mercer, honest question, do you actually ever listen to a word I say, or do you just put up a really good show of being annoyed on principle?"

He cocked an eyebrow. "I told Christine, didn't I?"

"You did." She did not immediately continue. "I don't mean any offense here – like, I'm trying to mean the farthest thing from it, and I want to make that clear – but I didn't think you were going to listen to me on that one."

"I didn't think I was going to listen to you, either," he admitted.

Cain snorted. "Hey, we didn't put you off anything. And Veronica was totally cool about the whole thing, so I don't know why you were that dour to begin with." She paused, and the easy geniality slid from her face. "Maybe not so now. Shit, I hope she doesn't think we just left her there. We kinda just dropped off the map. According to McNamara, this was supposed to be an easy job."

Christine's eyes went wide, and her head jerked up so fast that Alex swore he heard something crack.

"With Elder – Veronica?" The words left her with a rasp of hopeless air, and she hesitated, startled by her own vehemence. Her eyes, though, remained intense. "Veronica Santangelo?"

"You know Veronica?" It made sense; they were both Brotherhood, and about the same age besides. But an old detail hung in the corners – when she'd asked to come, the Elder had held Veronica back.

Cain blinked, and then the full force of her curiosity found its next target. "She does?"

Christine ignored them. "How is she?" she demanded.

"She's… fine, I think." He glanced at Cain, well aware that he was not the right person to answer this question. "She's still with the Brotherhood."

She took pity on him – or more likely, she just wanted to get involved. "Don't worry – she's not here. Elijah doesn't have her. We came alone." She frowned. "Unless you wanted her to be here? Thought not," she added, when the other woman instantly shook her head. "She doesn't deserve that. Not saying that you deserve it, or any of us could have done anything bad enough to merit this shit, but… she's a really nice person," she finished lamely.

"How did you meet her?" Some of the frantic urgency had departed, but she couldn't be called relaxed. "You're not Brotherhood."

"It was only a week ago." Though true, the words tasted strange. It all felt much longer. "Found her on the side of the road. Cain?"

"Alex, I would be happy to answer a question if I had any earthly idea what it was."

"Veronica. How we know her." She'd allowed him the chance to play his secrets as he saw fit; he should offer her the same.

"Oh. Yeah, it was," and she swallowed, "only a few days before this whole disaster." She waved loosely. "Kidnapping. He still can't hear us, right?"

Christine nodded tersely.

"Okay. Just checking." Her hand had migrated to her collar; only now did she seem to realize this, forcing her fingers apart. "So I said before that the Brotherhood sent us to check Elijah's trail, and we're here because we did way too good a job. But it was Veronica who led us to the Brotherhood in the first place."

The knight's mouth twitched. It could have been fondness or disapproval. "She would do."

"Alex?"

He shrugged. "It's definitely the same Veronica."

"Right." Cain's stare was fixed in place, but it had turned a shade appraising. "I don't know how you feel about outsiders. I'd hope the current situation makes it irrelevant."

"My mission is to terminate Elijah. Allies are useful. Politics aren't." She held his gaze, even though her words were ostensibly for Cain. "And you've been straightforward enough with me, given the circumstances."

Never mind, she was definitely speaking to him. Nodding back, he wasn't sure if he felt satisfaction or squirming unease. But that didn't matter. She didn't need to know about his diet. It wasn't like he was going to eat her.

A sharp sound – Cain had snapped her fingers. "Her answer?"

He gave it. "I was hoping you'd say that. For the purposes of pasting this guy, I am all yours. Well… within reason, that is. I was kinda planning to walk out of this alive." She lingered there for a few seconds; when she next spoke, it was softer. "Veronica wanted to come with us, when we were asked to check Elijah's safehouse. If your Elder hadn't forced the issue, I would have let her."

"I…" Christine rubbed her throat. "I'm glad she didn't."

Cain stared at him until he relented. He wondered if he could teach her to read lips. Probably not, since she couldn't skip practice by eating someone. They'd be long gone from this place before she got the hang of it. Damn shame; he was starting to get annoyed.

"Me too. I can't say this place would have eaten her alive, she seemed like someone who knew her way around, but it's still… I mean, you know. Unnecessarily cruel. There was someone else with us, a doctor – a Follower, actually, he's from Freeside – and it's pure chance that he didn't wind up in that trap with me. Yeesh, but that's not a nice thought at all. Nobody should end up here."

Alex had to raise an eyebrow at that. "And here I thought you were happy to see me."

"Don't make that face, Alex. You live for this stuff. And you're the least killable person here by a large margin. Uh, sorry, Christine, but you're gonna get used to that. Seriously, even if Elijah had stuck a collar on you, you'd give maybe an eighth of a shit at most."

Point. She wasn't completely right, corrosive gas and forced conscription was not his idea of a good time, but the danger was largely outweighed by annoyance. The notion of Arcade Gannon being here was unpleasant. He'd have spared him that, if he'd had the choice, and he was grateful the doctor had opted to stay behind. Better he was safe at Freeside than here, a vulnerable link in a very touchy chain.

"I'd be more worried about accidentally blowing you up if he had."

"My point exactly. You're on a different pay grade. The rest of us just have to suffer."

"You don't pay me anything."

"I would if you asked." She cocked her head. "Come to think of it, nobody who's followed me around lately to help me shoot at things has asked for a salary. It's weird. I could actually give a fantastic one right now."

"Veronica's not a mercenary." At least, he thought the first word was Veronica, because he'd only caught the tail of it. "If she's travelling with you, it's because she likes you."

"Uh, yeah." The translation was met with some discomfort. "Can't speak for her judgement," she joked.

Christine's face was stone. "It's usually good." He wasn't so sure of that, but he still passed it along.

"I think that was a compliment. So how do you know her?"

Christine shrugged. "Brotherhood."

He got a frown when he shared that. "I kind of figured, but it sounds like you know her better than that."

"We were young. Not many trainees in our age group." Her eyes slid over to Alex. "You said you could get us across."

"I can." And then, to avoid having to repeat himself a moment later, clarified "Carry you."

"Then we shouldn't waste time." She studied the gap, and a flicker of distaste breached her neutrality. "Any preparations you need to make?"

He considered it. "Should probably take you one at a time. Other than that, won't be a problem."

"Could you demonstrate your ability first?" She smiled wryly. "I admit I'd be more comfortable if I could gauge it for myself."

"That's fair." He wouldn't trust a stranger's claims either. Seeing was believing, and it wasn't a bad idea besides – might as well test the integrity of the structure beforehand. If he was going to fall through, better it happened now than with a squishy human in his arms.

Cain looked very lost, and somewhat petulant about that fact. "Uh, so, Veronica?"

"Later. We're moving on." His legs bunched and he sprang, metal and Cloud whirling into pale blurs beneath him. The far catwalk rattled under his weight, but it held.

While that was good… it didn't speak well for how much biomass he had left.

His return to the other side was gentler, buffered into a glide. If Christine was surprised, she hid it well. He might have felt a bit disappointed over that. "Satisfied?"

"Yes." She stepped forward after a moment. "However you want to do this."

Human beings were not precisely his favorite things to heft around – unwieldy, squirming, not even slightly aerodynamic, and with no real impact momentum to make up for those traits. Admittedly, keeping his passengers alive was rarely one of his priorities. After some debate, he scooped her up horizontally, trying not to fold her in on herself too much. She was faintly warm against his chest, and whispering impressions welled from the thousand other times he'd cradled living flesh so. His biomass shivered.

Time to get this over with. Jumping with a plus-one required only a little more power than without, and far less than he could bring to bear. Christine never made a sound, though she pried at his arms the second he landed.

He let her go (pushing aside how wrong it felt to do so) and crossed the gap once more. Cain stared at him. He stared back. "So do I get a say in this, or…"

"Do you have any objections?" He admit, the reluctance stung. Did she not trust him, after everything?

"Do you?" Her head didn't turn, but her eyes briefly landed on Christine's distant, waiting form. "Last I checked, carrying people was not your favorite thing to do."

"I'll deal," he said shortly.

"If you're sure about that. Be careful with me, alright? I have enough bruises as it is."

He snorted as he swung her up. She yelped when they left the ground, but midair the sound changed to a whoop of exhilaration. She stumbled when he set her down, and took a moment to catch her breath. "So that's what flying feels like."

"It's not." Gliding across Manhattan's skyscrapers was a different kind of exhilaration entirely, one that even an Apache's hairpin maneuvers couldn't match.

"Pedant. Harassing the laws of physics, then." She looked ahead. "So, the offices?"

"Yeah." The others seemed pretty confident that whatever they were looking for was in here. After the trouble he'd gone through, he'd be pissed if they turned out to be wrong.

The door hitched halfway open, and he forced it the rest of the way rather than unjam the mechanism. The room beyond was filled with computers, and that was promising, but his eyes were drawn to the odd protrusions on the ceiling. He had a second to register a barrel's head swivel towards him before the lasers started.

He shoved the others behind him, scrambling for something to throw. It was difficult to see through the flurry of red, left and right converging in concentrated fire. His hands closed on nothing, and his flesh smoked and blackened.

To hell with that. He pulled his biomass together and shifted. Leather and skin turned dark and crystalline, expanding into seamless plates over dense insulation.

Immediately the pain lessened. His vision was still awash with neon red, but he was soaking only a minimum of heat from each impact. Reflective had been the right way to go after all. Except reflective was reflective, and now jets of searing light were ricocheting off him at unpredictable angles – the doorframe, the office, some even caught between the curve of his shoulder and his jaw for several rebounds before they lanced off somewhere else.

Somebody swore behind him. They'd taken the words straight from his mouth, hidden behind his faceplate as it was. Design flaws could be fixed later; he had to end this quickly.

Two; there'd been two turrets, left and right. One arm lengthened into a corded tentacle, and immediately there was sensation again, fiery and unpleasant – his Whipfist wasn't protected like the rest of him. It wouldn't matter for long. He wound it to middling length and swept half-blind in an upwards arc. The impact reverberated up his arm, tearing a turret free. The Whipfist went with it, flung from the ceiling to the floor, and its hook ripped grooves into the dented metal. The whole room shook.

A shotgun blast interrupted his second strike – a barrel had snuck around his side. He glanced sideways through his pocked eyeholes. Christine's suit was scorched deeper black down the front, and there was an angry red line across her cheek. She pumped the gauge with a brisk ker-chunk.

He moved to swat her out of the way, but the arm he raised was sharp and coiled for a killing blow. And… she had surprisingly good marksmanship with that, because it struck him that he was no longer under fire. A tight ring of buckshot peppered the ceiling, and the turret's barrel hung at a strange and twisted angle.

Awkwardly he let his Whipfist fall. Wouldn't do to wreck this place any more than he had to, but for fuck's sake– "Who puts turrets inside a fucking office?" His snarl came out more like a cough as he rearranged his biomass. Some of the charred parts were salvageable. Not enough. With a thought, he brought back his default form, dismissing the reflective armor.

"Sierra Madre, man. At this point, I'd be more surprised if there weren't turrets in the offices." Cain ducked out behind him, and he edged back to give her a wider berth. "Serious answer, it's not that uncommon. I've been to some places… RobCo, Repconn. Murder-bots if you didn't have a worker ID. Kinda got the impression that it was standard operating procedure towards the end."

"It was." Not once had Christine taken her eyes off him. He stared back, and wished he still had his mask. "Workers' Protection Act of 2063."

He waited. She didn't ask, and he didn't answer. "Ironic name."

"They were rarely intended that way."

"I just hope you didn't break anything important." Cain gestured ahead, and he followed. He wasn't impressed. A desk had been knocked sideways around the divot in the floor, and one of the computers might be a loss. It was a pretty light touch, all things considered.

He said as much, because seriously, credit was due. "I was careful."

"Yeah, on a scale of one to you, I think this rates as a four. You get points for the tentacles, but I have to dock some for, y'know, leaving this room mostly intact. Not that I'm ungrateful for that! Look, I'll bump you up to a six if it turns out you destroyed the control station. How's that sound?"

"Hmph." He couldn't quite muster the proper annoyance. As much as she needled him, he preferred the sound of her banter to the eerie absence of it.

He leaned back, and Christine's reaching arm fell inches short. It didn't stop the anticipatory stir. "Two more around the bend, flanking the opposite entrance. Through the glass." She pointed, and he saw the telltale tip of an arm. "Can you deal with them without line of sight?"

"Easily." The window didn't provide a good view, so he flicked his Whipfist into range. Barrels spun, and he yanked it back as the first lasers flew. Shifting to infrared, he found the turrets to be nice and hot. He stepped closer to the edge of the wall and sent it sideways. Immediately his thermal vision was ablaze with bright colors, but he'd seen where his targets were, and powered through sustained fire to wrench both from their mounts.

His Whipfist came back blacker than usual, and a few segments wouldn't fold properly, so he deformed it and rebuilt his arm from there. Workers' Protection Act, his ass. Gentek could have taken a page from these people. Heh… could have killed their employees themselves and saved him the trouble.

At least the place was clear, a second check confirmed. He peered around the bend. The office chamber had been built around a massive generator, whose vibrations he could feel from here. Both wings, freshly de-turreted, covered rows of computers. The conjoining leg held a few additional cubicles, but most of the center was taken up by an elevator dock.

His favorite. Hopefully the controls were somewhere else. There had to be enough computers for that.

"Hey, check this out." Cain neatly stepped over the mangled guts of a turret to read the labels. "Switching station, maintenance level. Primary and secondary switchboards."

For fuck's sake.

He suppressed a sigh. Why did these keep popping up? New York had had far more excuse in its architecture, and they'd still managed to build staircases on the side. Or windows. He preferred the windows, historically. And maybe that wasn't an option underground, but the world had been ravaged by nuclear bombardment – if he was going to lose everything he'd known to atomic fire, it could have at least had the decency to take these with them.

It had been two centuries since anyone had been around to maintain this thing, and yet when Cain pressed its buttons, the doors slid open instantly and without complaint. Christine flung an impeding arm before anyone could enter.

Cain glanced down, startled. "What's wrong?"

"Send it up first." Christine jabbed at the control panel. "The ground floor was covered with Cloud. Need to see what's down there before we go into it."

"Smart." Maybe he had a way out of this yet. The knight sent the elevator out of the way, then overrode the safeties to pry the doors wide.

But when he stared down the empty shaft, he found the bottom clear.

Guess this was happening. He steeled himself, and forced the hunger into that dark and waiting part of himself. The elevator settled, and the cramped darkness within evoked the same things it always did.

"Didn't mean to eat her."

No. He hadn't. But no amount of memory could change the past, and that shadow was a thousand miles away.

He stepped inside, and began the descent.

0o0o0

While Cain was glad that the elevator wasn't taking them to a pit of Cloudy doom, it could've stood to give them a little more breathing room along the way. She doubted it had ever been meant to hold this many people; the three of them stood nearly shoulder-to-shoulder, as much as Alex was trying to press himself into the wall. A particularly unhappy creak made her wince, and muse that perhaps she should have checked the weight limit.

The air was stale even by recent standards, and it was a relief when the old machine dinged. But what lay behind the doors didn't exactly fill her with enthusiasm.

To say the switching station was cramped was to say that Elijah was mean, or that the Sierra Madre suffered from air pollution. It took some shimmying and climbing through tangled cords to reach the single seat, and Cain was not a large person. Alex wouldn't have fit in here at all. Once she finally squished herself into position, several screens hummed to life, and a steady high-pitched whirring quivered in her eardrums. Her fingertips rested on an array of hundreds of buttons, keys, and switches, but the only thing she could think of was the way the ceiling brushed her scalp.

Cain managed about three seconds before she was gulping deep, measured breaths. She managed about fifteen before she stopped fooling herself that she was inspecting the controls and scrambled back. She fought her way to the elevator half-blind, sweat gathering on the small of her back.

"What's wrong?" Alex's voice was curt. She mutely shook her head. He wouldn't understand. She hadn't understood, a single madcap month ago.

She felt a nasty gratitude that Elijah hadn't given this station to her, because he sure as hell wouldn't have brooked her complaints. Expertise aside, Christine was shorter than her; she might find more wiggle room.

That gratitude lasted for all the time it took for her to lift her eyes.

Christine was very still. Christine was always fairly still, but this was less the kind of quiet, attentive stillness that conserved movement for purpose and more the kind of paralytic stillness where – well, she'd know. That was a place she'd visited not long ago.

She was staring straight ahead, but Cain got the impression she saw something else.

"You think you'll – manage?" The words caught in her throat, and she rather wished they'd stayed there. Her sole recourse was that she didn't think Christine heard them.

Or not. The woman blinked, and her eyes seemed to, with difficulty, focus on the sight ahead of her. Her throat bobbed once. Cain watched as her breathing quickened and her hands began to tremble at her sides.

She never said no, but Cain could only think of a single person who'd take that as a yes.

"Alright," she said. "Okay. We'll find another way to do this."

The gratitude on Christine's face was – intrusive. Cain quickly looked away, busying herself with the switchboard ahead. Maybe there was something they could take from it, somehow.

"What do you mean, another way?" Mercer still looked irritated, and she felt her own spike. He might not have much experience with people, but he'd seen the Auto-Doc – surely it wasn't that hard to string two and two together. "This place isn't big enough to have duplicate stations lying around."

Christine said something to him, and his brow creased. "You didn't mention this earlier?"

She made a motion that would have been a shrug, on a less tense posture. Whatever she mouthed was lost on her, but Cain sensed she was starting to miss something useful. "Anyone want to clue me in?"

"She says there might be remote access to this thing." Mercer jabbed none too gently at the elevator panel, and the switching station vanished behind sliding doors. "Anything to get out of this box," he muttered.

Oh. Her temper heeled and slithered away. One of these days, she was going to find out what his deal was. Was it just the tight quarters, compounded with his very specific dislike of being touched? Or… maybe it was one of those things she couldn't understand yet.

What special kind of hell it'd take to leave that sort of impression on a guy like him, she had no idea.

But Alex wasn't the only one relieved when the elevator chimed and deposited them back in the office. If he was the first one out, it wasn't for lack of trying on her part. Cain kind of needed some open space right now.

"Right, so." She coughed and tried to clear her throat. There was a thickness at the base that wouldn't go away. It tasted coppery. "Remote access. What are we looking for?" There were a lot of terminals in here. She hoped it wasn't the one whose blackened screen was still smoking from turret fire.

Christine didn't answer that directly, trailing one slow hand across the line of conjoined desks as she examined each workstation. Several times she spoke something to Alex, who would lean in and read a name or sentence aloud. She tried not to be jealous of that – there was very little room for her to wedge herself into, both physically and in terms of utility – and wondered if Alex appreciated the chance to be useful, or saw it as just another human nuisance.

She followed close behind anyway, trying to catch snatches on the booting terminals, and leafing through the cast-off papers. Little looked promising, and she was beginning to despair a return to the manual station when Alex spoke from two computers ahead. "She says it's this one."

'This one' ended up having an entry lock. A very good lock, she amended with a growing frown, after her first queries came back worthless. Cain had modest experience with hacking into these things, reconstructing passwords through cipher strings a few characters at a time. A worn RobCo manual half as thick as her head had taught her all about the security flaws in the standard model – the notes scrawled in the margins had provided helpful suggestions on how to use them.

Unfortunately, anyone else who knew those flaws could circumvent them, and that held for the user end too – plugging the memory leak, or just using passwords that took too many tries to get. From the strings she'd coaxed out, she had a bad feeling she was dealing with the former.

"Let me try," Alex rumbled from behind her. She stood aside, and watched curiously as he took her chair. Who knew what kinds of Old World tricks he'd collected?

"…1234, Alex? Really?"

"You'd be appalled at how many people do that." His fingers moved too quickly for Cain to catch all of his attempts, but 'help' was followed by 'letmein.' "Not this guy, apparently."

"Point," she admitted. "I found one that was 'ice cream' once. Don't try it," she added, when he started to type that in. "Enter too much garbage and it'll lock down on you."

"Some things haven't changed." He pushed the chair back with a kick that loudly scraped the floor, and stood. "What now?"

Good question. "I was kind of hoping you'd have some super hacking skills, if I'm perfectly honest."

One side of his mouth twisted. "I do, but not with this operating system. Show me Windows or Linux and then we can talk."

Christine said something then. It wasn't terribly obvious (which was standout enough, because all of Alex's tells were obvious), but she didn't think he liked it. "That's my specialty," he said gruffly.

It took a second to puzzle out, but between his age and the fact that she'd never heard of either of those names, she could piece together the gist. "Alex is a bit of a historian when it comes to the early 21st century. He worked with that stuff before his accident."

Christine squinted. Only after a few seconds had passed did she nod, slowly.

"It's not important," Alex cut in. "You still want to crack the terminal, or are we going back down?"

Not if she could help it. She had a rebuttal half formed when she opened her mouth, but she never finished the thought. She'd just noticed the yellowed edge peeking out from beneath the keyboard, and tugging on it produced an ancient sticky note. She wedged a hand beneath the computer to pull it free, careful not to tear the fragile paper.

"Damn it, Ennis, you can't keep losing these," she read aloud, squinting at the faded handwriting. "One of these days, the wrong person's going to find your little notes, and then security's going to be all over our asses. I slipped the code in your locker. This is the last time I'm covering for you; I mean it this time."

"Ennis?" Alex frowned. "There was a message to that name on the maintenance computer. Broke a rule, or something."

"Sender or receiver?"

"Unless this place's boss moonlighted as a low-level tech, I'm going to go with receiver."

"Then we know where to look." Cain made for the door, only to be confronted with the yawning lack of a way across. She couldn't even see the fallen catwalks anymore; the Cloud had swallowed them whole, rippling softly below. "Um."

He'd already cut ahead, twisting in a neat half-circle to avoid actually touching her. "I'll get it."

"Thanks. You saw those lockers, right? You know where they are?" They'd been locked, but one way or another, that wouldn't be a problem for him.

"Yeah." His knees bent, and then he was soaring through the air like it was a perfectly natural place for him to be. His back was to her, masking his face, but he held his arms slightly outstretched, palms splayed, and surely he had to feel at least a fraction of the exhilaration she had, if not the awe. Something like that could never become commonplace, could it? For one second, she wondered what it was like not just to hitch a ride but to be him, to have that freedom and easy power at her fingertips. To brush aside any shackle, from bomb collars to identities to something as immutable as gravity itself.

But that wasn't really true, and when she thought about it, suddenly it wasn't much of a fantasy anymore.

Christine came up behind her, conspicuously peering around her shoulder, and Cain moved aside to give the shorter woman room. Her thoughts, too, had plenty of space to spare.

Hell of a coincidence, that the sole member of the Brotherhood of Steel she knew ended up being connected to the one she was tied to now. It wasn't that strange, they were supposed to be tight-knit, and yet. Christine had been far too invested in Veronica to be a casual acquaintance, or coworkers, or whatever the Brotherhood equivalent was. The two were close. Or… they had been close, because Christine was MIA-presumed-dead – and even though that wasn't quite true, it was a real enough risk that she couldn't have set out on her mission without accepting the possibility.

Veronica had mentioned that she'd had a lover, past tense. And the only time she'd gotten Christine to loosen up, it was with words that would have been right at home on the scribe's tongue.

Maybe it was coincidence; maybe she was mashing together pieces that didn't truly fit. But glancing at Christine now, worn-faced and closed off to the world, she felt pretty confident about her hunch.

She could ask. It was a yes-or-no question; she didn't need Alex to pass along the details, as tempting as they were to know. But it wasn't lost on her that Christine had changed the subject when she'd stopped fishing for reactions and asked outright how the two had met.

Intent to avoid a topic was usually a reason to dig harder, yet this time she hesitated. Veronica's side of the story implied there was no happy ending here, and Christine had enough bullshit to deal with at present with without dead relationships getting dragged into the mix. She thought of last night, and then imagined what she'd have felt if Alex had started prying about her mother. It was not an ambiguous reaction.

She still had half a mind to ask. She always did. But when she finally worked up the nerve to break the silence, the words that emerged were harmless, and probably better for that. "Crazy sight, isn't it?"

Christine looked at her, a wordless question in her eyes.

"The jumping thing. I've been with Alex for a while now and I'm still baffled every time he does it."

One eyebrow climbed, a lattice of scars twisting around it. Her shoulders twitched in what was not quite a shrug.

Christine couldn't really reply, not to her, but it was strangely comfortable to fill the silence like this. "It's funny – when that thing started falling, I actually thought he was in trouble for a second. You'd think I'd know better by now."

The knight cupped the crown of her bare head with both hands, as if to pantomime hair. Slowly, she brought them down across her torso, then wiggled her fingers wildly. She was watching her expectantly, and Cain squinted, trying to parse the question. After a second, Christine pointed to the weapon slung across her back. "You want the Holorifle?"

Evidently not. Christine thought on it a while longer before trying again. She held one hand flat; with the other, brought single fingers to strike it, deflected back at random angles. Then she tapped her gear, and once more mimed something around her head.

Not hair – a helmet. Oof. She was happy for Alex, she really was, but he could have eased into his him-ness a little softer. "I've never seen him do that one before. Stuff like it, sure. He's got a pretty deep bag of tricks. Eventually you stop being surprised by it."

Christine motioned for her to go on, and Cain hesitated. This was one of the rare promises she actually meant when she'd made it, and while recent events might have altered the terms, it was better she erred on the side of caution. "I think you'll have to go to him for that. Fair warning, he's not big on the questions, and I almost want to ask that you don't push too hard. He's been more open with you than I've ever seen him. We've been, uh, trying to work on that."

Christine's nod came a little later than usual, and it occurred to Cain that in trying to hold Mercer's secrets, she'd just slipped an implication that he had more of them. She was still learning who Christine was, but she seemed sharp enough to pick up on that. Oops. Then again, she might have spotted that one already. The guy wasn't exactly subtle.

Still, Cain was glad he wasn't here right now. "Thanks for that, by the way. For how you handled it. Not jumping to conclusions, or… you know."

Christine smiled slightly as she shook her head. She touched her forehead, then her throat.

"Right, you've seen worse." Christine did not strike her as a very flappable individual. The most reaction she'd ever gotten out of her was when she'd heard news of her maybe-girlfriend. Even the Auto-Doc hadn't cracked her composure quite so badly, and the smile she wore now was all the more a rarity for that. Cain hesitated, then decided to go for it. "I wasn't kidding earlier, by the way. That's a good look on you."

She lifted an eyebrow, but that faint upturn hadn't left, so Cain figured she was safe. "You should really loosen up. This place was a pre-War paradise, you know."

Christine's laugh was a silent thing, and yet Cain thought it was a very nice sound.

It didn't last long. A resounding metallic groan signaled Alex's return, and he touched down on their side with a rattle that shook her teeth. He ducked outside the window's view; a moment later, he appeared in the door. "Found it. Password is T7GF0SEW."

She punched it in a few repeats later, Christine's intent form hovering over one shoulder. The computer hung on the security screen for several agonizing seconds, but then it gave a pleased little ding and they were in. It booted to a bland green screen that primly informed her that this system was only to be used in times of emergency, that the main board had to be brought back to sync manually each time it was circumvented and could she please do her job properly instead of cutting every corner known to man.

Total bullshit, of course. Cutting corners was supposed to involve less effort, not more.

But she found the controls after several screens of diatribe, and Christine tapped her elbow. She let the other woman guide her through a series of prompts, for once unhindered by the words. She didn't notice she'd been steadily inching further to the side until she noticed she was squashed against one arm. The screen was quickly a mess of diagrams and circuits, and just trying to parse it gave Cain a dull headache. She finally relinquished the chair and stepped back; the knight ran through the display, scrutinizing the few labels before turning to her and giving her a brisk nod and a thumbs-up.

That meant her work here was about finished. "You'll be okay here?"

Another nod. After a moment's deliberation, she held out her hand. When Cain took it, Christine gave her a brief squeeze, and an even briefer smile.

By the time Cain managed to smile back, she'd already pulled away.

"Wait." Alex leaned forward. "Do you have an escape route?" Christine merely looked at him. "When we set this off, this place is supposed to go haywire. We won't be able to come back for you." He nodded at the ruined catwalk. "Will you be trapped here?"

Wow, that might have actually been concern. Christine pointed at the elevator and said something she couldn't follow. He glanced its way with a little more undifferentiated malaise than he usually wore. "It goes up. Don't know if it's rooftop access."

Christine's reply was very short. Alex sighed as he straightened up, expression very dour. "Fine, I'll check."

Cain thought of Auto-Docs and graves. "I can do it."

"…Thanks." His voice was devoid of gratitude, but she found it in the eased lines of his shoulders.

She wasn't sure what to expect of the elevator's third landing, and had a split second's panic when it opened up to rolling red – but that was just the sky. The building's rooftop was concrete, a little sturdier than some of the ones she'd traversed today, and a set of steel rungs provided an easy way down.

The air was unpleasant, and scraped at her like a sunburn, but scoping the landing out, she thought that Christine wouldn't be the only one using this exit today. Travel-by-Alex was… undeniably pretty neat, but it was the kind of experience she'd rather repeat on sturdier ground. And maybe when his grip on his appetite wasn't so… tenuous.

She dipped back down, very carefully avoiding the button that led to the lowest floor. Christine and Alex appeared to be having a conversation, the latter slouched against a desk – and unfortunately for her, not the one speaking. Both stopped when she emerged, and Cain was forced to note that both of them had very piercing stares. She wondered if one could weaponize that. Alex probably could.

"Well?"

"It works." She gestured upwards with a free hand. "The way down looks pretty clear."

"Right." Alex pushed himself loose. "Then you know what to do. Good luck."

She squinted. Her platitudes were usually safe from him, on account of him never giving any. "What he said," she echoed, and then threw Christine a crisp salute to one-up his game.

The knight returned the gesture with a far more practiced hand, then shooed them away with the tail of the same motion. The remote maintenance terminal lit both her face and tapping fingers in pale green when she turned around, and she looked very natural there, scars and all.

She'd be fine. "Come on," Cain said, and waved Alex towards the sliding doors.

He looked like she'd suggested his deliberate execution, but in a really stupid and baffling way. "Through there?"

"It's either the elevator, or you have to carry me again." And because she owed him that much, little as it was, "I'll leave the call up to you."

"…Elevator."

That was the answer she'd hoped to hear, she mused while they quietly rose, but she couldn't help but worry over what it meant for him to give it.

Maybe she was overanalyzing things, reading too much into his tells, overstating all the damage she'd seen him take. Maybe she wasn't. It almost didn't matter, in the worst sort of way, because it was nothing she could change. She had no recourse in the Sierra Madre, and Alex had even less.

He'd have to bear it a while longer. As would she, and Christine, and God alike. They were all trapped here, unlikely allies bound by misfortune, and there'd be no quarter for any of them until Elijah breathed his last.

Just Dean left, and then she'd make it happen.

---

[God has left your party.]

[Christine has left your party.]