Charon found the book on her workbench, tucked between a dusty mason jar and a stack of rusted couplings.
He'd seen his employer stash it there, before. But until today, he never once felt compelled to look at it. In his mind, it was no different from the thousands of burned encyclopedias scattered across Underworld, their pages blackened beyond recognition. Just more debris and clutter, just part of the landscape. Worthless.
Obviously, this one was different.
He'd gathered as much, when he first glimpsed her with it over a year ago. She was keeping watch in an old lean-to north of Evergreen Mills, and shimmied it out of her pack when she thought he was asleep. He never thought much of it then, or the handful of times afterwards. But he'd seen more of it lately.
Much more.
Every night, since her father died, she cracked that old book open after Charon limped upstairs. Just last night, he'd watched her from the second floor landing as she stared at it, running her fingers along the page. Every now and then, she closed her eyes, lips forming words he couldn't hear.
He made a point to keep his nose out of her business. She was sensitive, and asking questions only ruffled feathers he didn't know how to smooth, but... For once, he couldn't help but wonder. Something drew her to that book time and time again, and he'd grown tired of guessing what the hell it was.
He pulled it from her workbench the next morning, an hour before she usually woke up.
Now, for the very first time, he held the thing in his hands. No telling what all the fuss was about. The book looked just as weather-worn as any other. Its spine was cracked, the binding loose, the pages yellowed and dog-eared. But the small print inside was legible, even through layers of water stains and gun-oil smears.
He let it fall open in his hands. Wedged between the pages was a scrap of soft leather, marking a passage underscored in pen.
...if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.
The recognition was instant, visceral. Charon curled his lip. He knew about God. At least, all he ever needed to know. Plenty of people used to believe in a higher power, before the bombs dropped. Even a few ghouls in Underworld clung to those old comforts, but life after the war inevitably withered their beliefs to nothing.
All the better for it. Charon didn't see any sense in fooling himself. If there was a God, the world wouldn't be half-burned and clinging to life like a cancer-ridden mongrel. People wouldn't die young for no reason, suffer for no reason. If there was a God, surely he'd have been struck down by now, for all the hell he'd unleashed on others with his own two hands. But instead, here he was, spending days on end in perfect comfort, thanks to the goodwill of a deluded girl who hardly knew half of what he'd done.
Idiotic.
He'd seen enough already, but sheer spite kept the book in his hands, as he flipped to the next place-marker - a scrap of gingham fabric folded into the tacky glue of the binding.
Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.
He scoffed, skipped over the rest of the passage, and flipped to another. This page stood out from the rest. It was flanked on both sides with illegible notes jotted in the margins - a feminine scrawl, faded and blurred, next to his employers' own crude chicken scratch.
I want to know Christ, it said. To know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.
Charon scowled at the text. The phrasing was odd, archaic. Unfamiliar. He read it over and over, until the meaning finally sank in.
The realization stung like salt on a festering wound.
It made sense, now. Of course she'd obsess over something like this. His employer always had a nasty habit of flirting with danger. He didn't understand her impulsiveness, at first, but it dawned on him, after her father threw his life away to stall the Enclave - she was only following his example. She was nineteen years old, then, and far too ready to die. He saw it in her eyes, when she woke up in the Brotherhood's med bay - the slow acknowledgement that her father was gone, their work was done, and she was still here.
She wasn't the same after that, though a stranger wouldn't have noticed it. She'd always been reckless, even before the Enclave's fall - but in the months that followed, she threw herself in harm's way with a kind of determination he'd never seen before. Overlooked tripwires, perilous errands, a blatant disregard for checking her six.
Charon blamed James for it. Cursed him quietly, when he saw shadows of that morbid disappointment linger on his employer's face. But he could see, now, that this all started with something far greater than her father's martyrdom. Beliefs like these left stains that weren't so easily scrubbed away.
"Never took you for a bookworm."
He snapped the cover shut and looked up. She was halfway down the stairs, hair tousled, her small body wrapped in a fraying quilt. When he met her gaze, she smiled, and the resulting shame tore into him like a ripper to the gut.
"Learn anything interesting?" she asked.
"No."
The lie came out harsher than he intended. It tasted bitter on his tongue, but he kept his expression stony, even when the tiniest flash of hurt pinched on her face.
"The writing is... Peculiar," he offered. "Difficult to understand."
A thin excuse, but it softened the blow just enough. She pursed her lips, then shrugged.
"Yeah..." she said quietly. "Fair enough. I'd probably feel the same way, but I got used to it a long time ago."
As she made her way to the kitchen, Charon watched her, standing still as a gargoyle as she passed. She walked with a slouch, arms tucked against her chest and circles under her eyes.
"Dad read scripture to me when I was a kid." She slipped the blanked off her shoulders and tossed it half-heartedly over the back of the nearby couch. "Said Mom would've wanted him to."
A familiar bile rose in Charon's throat. He resented the way she talked about her time in the vault, her voice distant and laced with nostalgia. Like she'd already seen enough, up here, to decide that place was the only place worth being.
It wasn't that he felt any love for the wasteland. It just irked him, how much she longed for the vault. She'd only spent a year on the surface. She was still a child, still had a lot to learn. Yes, the wasteland was shit. Everywhere was shit. The pit she was born in was no exception. Tempting to remind her, but they'd had that argument too many times already.
He opened the book again, instead, glaring holes into it as she rummaged in the kitchen. She shoved aside a pile of dishes to make room on the counter, plugged in the old coffeemaker, and pulled the glass pot free.
He thumbed to another marked page, scanning until he reached a passage with a faded underline.
...I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
More sanctimonious drivel. Nothing about this philosophy made sense to him - not that he couldn't grasp what she saw in it. No... That, at least, made perfect sense. Religion's flimsy logic summed up everything about her. It explained her compulsive involvement in every little wasteland spat, every settler's laundry list of problems, until she was so exhausted that she couldn't tell a junk jet from a brahmin's ass. He understood that, now. What escaped him was why anyone would bother being Christlike. What was the point in molding your life after a man who, despite all the good he'd supposedly done, still died a thankless and miserable death?
Charon fought the urge to shake his head. He felt her eyes on him, now, as she leaned against the counter. He pretended not to notice.
"Been looking at that page awhile," she murmured. "What's on your mind?"
"It doesn't..." He swallowed, thought better of it, then began again. "It is..."
He bit his tongue, then dredged up the only words he could think of.
"Baffling," he said at last. "Absurd."
She winced.
"I know it's... not for everyone," she said. She dragged a hand through her hair, then let out a slow exhale. "Kind of a dry read."
She turned on the faucet, let it sputter for a moment, then filled the coffeepot.
"But..." she said. "There's music to old writing, you know? Almost like a different language. Takes time to parse it out, but... It's worth trying. Right?"
He watched her, his throat tightening, as she hunched over the sink. He saw it in the way her shoulders knit close to her ears - she knew damn well where this was going. A part of him wanted to let her dance around it, and spare them both the inevitable discomfort. He could just as easily move on to lighter things, but... He'd had enough of walking on eggshells with her. It was all he'd been doing for months - letting her sulk and wither, when all he wanted was to grab her by the shoulders and tell her to screw her fucking head on straight.
"That is not what I meant," he said.
Her shoulders crept up another inch. She turned the faucet off, set the coffeepot in the machine, and stared into the sink.
Charon drew in a breath. With her, honesty felt like turning a corner and stepping into a firefight. No going back, once he started. To make matters worse, there was no gentle way of putting this. It rubbed him the wrong way - the scripture's dismal justification for self-sacrifice, her fixation on James. All of it.
"It is... Foolish to believe in something like this. Dangerous, even."
She closed her eyes, small fists balled tight against the counter, and when she spoke, her voice was so quiet that he could hardly hear her at all.
"Why?" she breathed.
"Because." He stalked over to the moth-eaten couch in the living room and sat, hands clenched around the book in his lap. "It is a luxury of the past. Perhaps that philosophy worked for your mother. Perhaps it worked for other vault dwellers. But you are not one of them."
She turned and narrowed her eyes.
"Are you crazy? Of course I'm-"
"No," he snapped. "Not anymore."
She shut her mouth, paled a little, then turned red as a hot coal.
"You live on the surface," he said. "You cannot go back there. So what does that make you?" She drew in a breath to answer, but he shook his head and barreled on. "You know the wasteland. You know what it does to people. But you do not know enough. You cannot apply the same logic to this place. It is disastrous when you do, and yet you continue to try."
He stopped, just long enough to catch the first glimmer of tears welling in her eyes.
"It is not my intention to be cruel," he said. "But I am tasked with protecting you. And I cannot protect you if you base your decisions on idealistic nonsense."
She tucked her chin, looked to the side, and shook her head silently. The sight made Charon's lungs constrict. It was all too familiar - she'd held herself the exact same way, in a dark corner of Doctor Li's lab, when James scolded her for being too reckless on their way to Rivet City.
It struck him, now, how easily he could step into the void her father left behind. She was rudderless, and he had the strength to guide her in ways that James never had the spine or sense to do. But the prospect grated him too much. It reminded him how quickly impersonal obligation had morphed into a breathless and paternalistic need to keep her safe.
That did it. All at once, the fire burning in his throat was snuffed out. He couldn't look at her. He could only fixate on the words on the open page, tensing when she finally pushed off the counter and picked her way across the room.
His stomach flipped when she stepped into striking distance, and he was quick to blame it on reflex. He'd been punished for less. For going through his past employers' belongings. For questioning their beliefs, their actions, their orders. Never mind that he was long past the point of expecting retaliation, or that she never once inspired fear. No, the crushing ache in his chest was more sincere - more painful - than anything his contract could wring out of him. Still, it was easier to pretend that it was just another vestige from the past, a lingering spectre of a darker chapter in his life. That, at least, was simple enough to understand.
Charon swallowed dryly as his employer slipped past him, lip pinned beneath her teeth. She didn't pause, didn't speak, didn't look at him - just made her way quietly up the stairs and latched her bedroom door behind her.
The silence she left in her wake was deafening. He wallowed in it, listening to his pulse throb in his ears, until his restlessness got the better of him. He sat up, rubbed his face, and looked around the room.
It was only a matter of seconds before his eyes fell heavy on the book once more. Against his better instincts, he picked it up a second time - hooking his finger behind yet another tattered piece of fabric. The page he flipped to was frayed on the edges and discolored from touch. Small droplets of moisture - tear stains, he imagined - had blurred some of the text beyond recognition, but the underlined passage remained clear as day.
...We also glory in our sufferings, it said. Because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.
He glowered at the page, chewing on the tangled phrasing until the bitterness of it was nearly two much to bear. Nothing about it resonated with him. He'd known every kind of suffering imaginable, and it only served to twist him and warp him into something hideous. Perseverance withered to apathy, character became depravity, and hope gave way to despair.
Charon shut the book, tossed it on the table, and flopped back against the couch. It felt like a cruel joke. Of course the only decent person he'd ever meet would lose herself in convoluted fairy tales, throw herself on the cross for any miserable wastelander that asked for her help. She was at the mercy of an ideology force-fed to her in captivity, and left with the impossible task of measuring up to a man who died for what he believed in. Nothing Charon ever said, or did, would fix that.
Then again... She found solace in this. It kept her going, for better or for worse. Who was he to take that away from her? His hostility and indifference never did her any good. It never served him, either, beyond fueling a spiteful inferno in his belly that carried from one day to the next. She was the only person to open his eyes to another way of living, another path he could choose. As much as it chafed him... What did it really matter, if God was the motivation behind it all?
He shut his eyes, then pinched the bridge of his nose. He wanted to will that thought away, before it could leave a lasting impression - but it was already too late. Doubt crept in, like a slow-acting poison. All he could do was let it run its course.
He'd seen what she'd done. He'd been beside her for all of it, bore witness to the improbable rise of a hero in a world that stripped most well-intentioned people to the bone. The monumental things she managed to accomplish in her speck of a lifetime - through sacrifice, through unfettered altruism - were fruits born of risks he never imagined anyone taking. She gladly bled for her friends, for perfect strangers, for the good of the wasteland. Whether or not he approved of that was beside the point.
It pained him to entertain the possibility. But if God were real - if God were anything more than a impotent salve for people who couldn't stomach reality...
If God acted through anyone, it would be her.