The preparations passed in a haze. There were maps and routes and supplies and waypoints. Verity let Christine handle the majority of it; she knew the roads through the wasteland well, and directed the others with near-military precision.
Every so often Verity caught Veronica watching her with a strange expression; half-smiling, half-puzzled. She'd shaken her head the first time Verity asked her about it, but the second time bitten her lip with a shy smile. "She's more – well, more the way she used to be. After the Sierra Madre, she was so withdrawn and angry. I didn't know if she'd…" She'd finished with a shrug.
Gabe was getting used to having people around, although unwillingly. His size made his growl seem a lot more threatening than a smaller dog's growl would have. Verity was already trying to figure out where to keep him – maybe if she bought out that molerat ranch she could-
"You look like you're sad to be leaving," said Veronica, breaking into her thoughts. She'd come up next to Verity, sitting at the top of a small outcropping of rock overlooking the railway tracks near the Forbidden Zone Dome entrance.
She sat down next to her.
"I'm-" Verity paused. "I don't know. I just feel like – like all the energy I've been running on for the past few weeks has run out."
"Boone said you weren't sleeping well." Veronica tilted her head curiously.
Verity's eyes narrowed a fraction. "Did he?"
Veronica ignored the ice in her tone. "He's worried about you," she said, gently scolding. "It's not like that's way outside the boundaries of your relationship or something."
Verity sighed. "Y-yeah," she said. "I – yeah. Alright. I've – been having some – weird dreams."
"Nightmares?" Veronica asked.
Verity shrugged.
"What about?"
Verity looked away. "Don't remember, once I wake up."
She could feel Veronica's eyes on her, but there were no more questions. She rubbed her eyes. How long could she keep this upfor? Even now, in broad daylight, she could feel her muscles struggling to hold her up, to stop her from sinking into the hot rock she was sitting on. Her head was cloudy and unfocused.
How long could she go without sleep? How long really? A week, maybe? A month? If she just got an auto-doc in her room with the adrenaline functionality – but there was the trip back, first. Maybe she should just take the transportal-something back to the Mojave now, so she could get back early – there was so much to do, after all, and god knows what Benny was doing by now.
But – she looked out at the ragtag group slowly forming in front of her; the ghouls in a miserable, confused huddle; Gabe snuffling at the boxes of food they'd collected suspiciously; Christine and Raul having an animated discussion over a map. Arcade was probably talking to Mobius again, which was convenient due to their proximity. Verity knew she'd inevitably get asked to lend him the damn transport-gun-thing so he could come back. What would Arcade do with the combined secrets of the Big MT? Save the world? Destroy the world? Dump his own brain into a robot and live forever?
"You didn't hear anything I just said, did you?" asked Veronica.
"What?" Verity turned her head. "Did you actually say something or are you just trying to trick me?"
"No, I was actually saying something, this time," Veronica said, a puzzled half-smile on her face. "Is this what you're like in meetings?"
"Twenty-minute rule," mumbled Verity, pulling her knees up and letting her head fall forward to rest against them. "If they can't get their point across in twenty minutes I tell them to fuck off. It's pretty effective."
Veronica leaned a little closer. "You really aren't doing that well, are you?"
"Need a holiday," she muttered.
Veronica laughed. "Yeah," she said. "You probably do. An actual holiday, with nothing to do and no one trying to kill you."
Verity managed a small smile. "No poison clouds or vicious tribals or brains telling you off for making poor life choices."
"No horrific monsters or ex-legionaries or bear traps," said Veronica, smiling.
"Bear fucking traps," said Verity. "Why? Why? I much prefer bears to bear traps. There was one in fucking Zion valley, right, and it was like the size of a deathclaw and like on fire or some shit and it was pretty cool."
"I- what?" Veronica looked at her sideways. "Was this a dream?"
"I don't think so," Verity said thoughtfully. "Although I did get poisoned by some weird shit around the same time."
"So you were tripping?"
"Uh – maybe." Verity frowned. "I don't remember it so well." She shifted her shoulders uncomfortably.
"You feeling okay?" Veronica tilted her head questioningly.
"Everything hurts," Verity grumbled. "My back and my head and my stomach and everything else."
"That's what happens when you don't get enough sleep," said Veronica gently.
Sleep did sound awfully tempting. If she lay down on the sun-baked rock, she'd probably fall asleep straight away. Maybe, if she had a nap every four hours for twenty minutes at a time she wouldn't even have time to be able to dream and she'd still-
"I think we're about to leave." Veronica stood up.
Verity lifted her head. The group beneath did seem to have formed itself into some kind of order. She grimaced. The prospect of starting the trek back to the city – which from the maps that Christine had shown her did not seem to be a short walk – was remarkably unappealing. Still, she didn't have to be on foot the whole time, Gabe was somehow still more-or-less willing to carry her.
She took Veronica's outstretched hand and pulled herself up. Veronica raised an eyebrow. "Have you been eating okay?"
"About as well as I've been doing anything else," Verity offered bleakly.
Veronica's eyes widened, just a little.
"I'm just so fucking sick of cram and insta-mash," Verity continued hastily. "It's all I ever find. It's ridiculous."
"Spoiled by city living, huh?" Veronica turned and hopped gracefully down to a lower rock. "Too many nights at the Ultra-Luxe?"
Verity followed, a little more carefully. "Room service whenever I wanted it," she said, regretfully. "Still. Lost some weight."
"Not like you needed to," scoffed Veronica.
"Image is important," she said half-heartedly.
"That one of Benny's phrases?" asked Veronica disdainfully. "Sounds like him."
"I think he says 'image Is everything', but that sounds dumb," said Verity. "Anyway, he's right. You gotta look like someone smart and powerful and who can get things done. So that people believe you can do it, and then that belief gives you the power to actually do it. It's kind of cyclical."
"Recursive," said Veronica. "I think. Anyway, we're moving. Let's head off."
Gabe was surprisingly docile, plodding along at the back. She'd expected him to be nervous about leaving, going somewhere new. Maybe everything she'd exposed him to recently had built up his tolerance.
Verity was almost used to the dips and sways of his walk, and was half-dozing when she heard a voice beside her.
"What was it like?" said Arcade. "Not having a brain."
"You know," she said. "If you want to try it we can turn around."
He frowned. "You don't have to be like that," he said. "Just curious."
"I think curiosity is why I got here in the first place," she said. "So I can't fault you for it too much. Um, it felt – different. Distant? I guess because of the actual physical transmitting distance, so like my thoughts had to kind of bounce from me to the brain and then back to me."
"Would you say it was unpleasant?"
Verity looked down at him. She wouldn't have been surprised if he'd pulled out a pen and clipboard and started to take notes. She lifted her head to look back up at the horizon. The sun was hanging low in the sky, huge and golden, halfway between afternoon and evening.
"How do we know what to take, and what to leave?" she asked, instead of answering his question.
"I'm sorry?" The sunlight reflected off his glasses.
She sighed. "From the Big MT. From the old world. We can't take everything."
"I'm not following."
"I don't think I'm explaining myself very well," she admitted. "Did you see the holography people? In the lightwave something place."
He nodded hesitantly.
"At the Sierra Madre they could shoot lasers. You could only stop them by destroying their emitter things, and, you know, they hid those."
"You're saying they were too dangerous to bring back."
Verity frowned. "I'm saying they were too dangerous to leave behind. We destroyed the ones we could, and then me and Christine blew up the place. Not the whole place. Enough to – to stop people from getting in easily. If anyone ever wants to get in there, it'll take them a while, and hopefully – hopefully the Cloud would put them off." She trailed off, thinking about how many people had made it to the Sierra Madre before them. A legend like that couldn't die. She bit her lip. It wouldn't be enough. Not forever.
"We can't ignore what the old world has to offer us," said Arcade.
"Of course not," she said quietly. "The auto-docs. The vending machines, if we can get some of those. Old solutions to old problems."
She cast a quick look down at him, still looking quizzically up at her. "I remember, one of the first things you said to me when I asked you about your work was about how we can't just keep relying on stimpaks. Sure there are a bunch lying around in old vaults and destroyed buildings and places like that, but, you said there's not an infinite supply. Except – I think, with the vending machines there can be. Is that cheating? It feels like cheating. Skipping ahead without earning it."
"The vending machines can create stimpaks?"
She waved a hand dismissively. "Yeah. But – that's the point. It just creates a new level of dependence. There's no innovation, and no one knows how to make them, so we just rely on the machines to keep going until they run out of whatever it is that powers them. What you were working on, at least, were new solutions to old problems."
She fell silent. The sun sank lower, changing colour from gold to a rich copper.
"I – see," said Arcade, after a minute. "It's pointless to disregard old world tech, though. It's handicapping yourself for no reason. You can't just acknowledge that solutions exist to all your problems and then turn around and leave them behind. That's one of the things the Legion never really seemed to get. You only hurt yourself in the end. And the concept of earning tech, when it already exists, is just – well, meaningless. If it exists, and it helps, then we should use it."
"So what do we keep?" she asked. "Just the helpful stuff? Leave the poison gases and death rays and forcefields where we find them? I wasn't the first to make it to the Big MT and the Sierra Madre, and I won't be the last. Also, I miss my fucking holo-rifle."
"We need some of that stuff to deal with the things that this type of science has helped create," Arcade said gently. "Cazadores and nightstalkers and centaurs and deathclaws. Pretending these things don't exist won't help. Neither will starting again from scratch."
"I understand that," she said. "Well, mostly. It just seems like – if we keep going back to old world stuff then the same thing will happen again. We keep building up and using all this stuff without really understanding it – we're just going to end up in the same situation people were in before the war. It's just – just so fucking complicated." She sighed, again. "I'm not even sure I'm making sense."
"I see your point," said Arcade. "I do. And I think your ideas have some merit. We need to keep moving forward, after all, and if that means finding new ways of doing things then all the better."
"No going back," she said quietly.
"That's right. But if we can just incorporate parts of the old world tech we find, we can prevent so much suffering. Starvation, disease – the focus should be on the end result, not the way we got there."
"And just hope like hell no one ever finds what's hidden here."
Arcade looked at her sympathetically. "We can't plan for every eventuality, Verity," he said. "It might not feel enough to just take what we want and leave the rest, but it's the best we can do. You can't go around blowing literally everything up because you're scared someone will use it to hurt people."
"We can't rely on people in the future to use their good judgment," she said, though she sounded less certain. "Christ, if another Elijah comes through here in five years or ten years, picking up bits of tech here and there and turning it into something monstrous – I just – I don't know. It could hurt a lot more people than we're trying to save with vending machines and auto-docs. It doesn't feel – right, exactly. Like I'm doing the right thing."
"It's not something you can really predict," said Arcade. "You just have to be careful, and responsible, and use what you have wisely. That's it."
"Doesn't sound like much."
Arcade shrugged. "Maybe it's not. But it's the best we have."
Up ahead the group had stopped. "Looks like we're making camp," said Verity. "Uh – thanks. For talking to me about this."
"No problem," said Arcade, looking at her with a curious expression. "Any time you feel like it."
She was standing on a road, tarmac cracked under her feet.
Blood was dripping down the blonde man's leg. He held his hand under the wound, cupped, to catch the drops.
"Why don't you just use a blood pack, Jax?" she asked. "Wouldn't need to slice yourself up for that."
He grinned up at her. "You don't know where that shit's been," he said. "Could be dirty. Much better for you, this way." He smeared a streak of the red liquid across her thigh, in almost the same place he'd cut himself. "And some here-" he drew his fingers across her stomach, "-and finally-" he reached out and wrapped his bloody fingers around the back of her neck, pulling her close for a kiss.
She smiled against his lips.
And then she was gasping into the darkness, barely able to breathe, desperate for air. She was being crushed, weight pressing down on her, and then suddenly – she was awake. She looked around. Four thin canvas walls. Boone was asleep. Still dark outside. She crawled out of the tent. Maybe she could spend the rest of the night counting the stars as they faded from the sky.
