6

A week after that, Xen underwent her second battery of vision tests. The next day she went outside.

She dressed carefully in the clothes Tori had altered for her, a cut-down set of jeans and shirt that had belonged to Dr. Graber. Xen never remembered seeing her wear them, so she didn't let this bother her. Normally she wore a small jumpsuit Tori had brought back for her from a shopping trip, but that was getting worn and anyway, was currently dirty and waiting for Bunni to wash it. She had to wear her laboratory slippers. She brushed her hair, now long enough to gather into a very thin ponytail, and tied it back with a rubber band. She put her goggles on last of all.

"Too bad about the slippers," said Tori. "I keep bugging Masterson for some real shoes for you, but it's hard for him to get kids' stuff. Especially small enough to fit you. You're not as big as most ten-year-olds."

"I know," said Xen.

"And it's not like I can make them for you. We could tan a mole rat's hide, but then what? I can just barely alter your clothes as it is. I don't have tailoring subroutines. Besides, sewing is boring."

"Maybe I can learn to make shoes," said Xen. "I bet there's something in the computer."

"They won't be as good as the prewar stuff, but it'd be a good project," said Tori. "Here, you can carry the bag on the way down." She handed Xen a burlap sack. Xen held it under one arm as she hugged Bunni. The padding on her chassis was lumpy now, and tended to slip no matter how many times they glued it back on.

"Don't worry," she said. "I'll be very careful."

"Do whatever Tori tells you to do, Xen," said Bunni in her soft, uninflected voice. "She is an annoying person, but she will put your safety first."

"Yeah, you, too," said Tori. "Come on, Xen. It's a long walk for short little legs."

"You're just jealous because you don't have legs," said Xen, following her out and down the hallway. She felt her heart beat faster as Tori unlocked the door out into the tunnel. Bunni followed them to the doorway. Xen knew without asking that she would wait there until they were out of sight.

"We're going to the store, Tawnee!" Xen said to the turret.

"Be very careful," said Tawnee, which was one of her few preprogrammed responses when Xen talked about trying anything new. "We will wait for your return."

"Do you require escort?" asked Stephanie, pausing on her patrol past them.

"Not today, sweetie," said Tori. "Move along."

The sentry bot rolled past them, fat little tires bumping over broken concrete. Xen followed Tori toward what she knew to be the South end of the tunnel. There was a larger opening between the debris mountain and the ceiling here. There was a steep path that had not been there before, with evident wheel marks indicating where it had come from.

"Up you go," said Tori. "I'll be right behind you. Try not to slip, though, you'll get your new jeans all dirty."

"Okay," said Xen, and scooted up the incline.

They were gone most of the day. They had to walk through a long stretch of tunnel, which wasn't that interesting (it looked a lot like the stretch of tunnel outside the Lab). Xen strained her eyes looking for new things. Sometimes she caught tantalizing glimpses of heat from what must be a neighboring tunnel, but there was no connection between them.

And then they came to the narrow staircase, and Tori went out first to check around. "Okay, come on up," she said finally, and Xen shut her inner lids and ran up the stairs as fast as she could go.

The first thing she noticed was that there was nothing over her head. She flinched, momentarily terrified that she would fly off into the endless gray, but after a minute she managed to concentrate on the tall buildings around them. Walls, she told herself. Pretend there's a ceiling. Don't look up.

"Good," said Tori. "I halfway thought you'd have a panic attack the first time you saw the sky. Some agoraphobia is pretty natural. You might grow out of it."

"Might?" said Tori. She looked around. They were in a small plaza. She had seen pictures of one very much like it, but that one had been in better shape. A junked car sat in the middle of the nearest intersection. It seemed to be missing most of its windshield, and the front hood was open. Bits of paper, empty cans, and old Nuka-Cola bottles littered the concrete, and the fountain in the middle of the space had weeds growing in it. The dank smell of the tunnels was replaced by a choking scent of dust and rusted metal.

"Some people never get over what scares them as kids," said Tori. "And people don't reprogram as easy as robots."

"I have poor system optimization," said Xen. "It took me a long time to learn to read. You just have to upload a new program."

"That's just how it works. You've actually got pretty good optimization for wetware. You done looking now?"

"Yes," said Xen. "It's not as bright as I expected."

"It's cloudy," said Tori, waving a manipulator at the sky. Xen did not look up. "The shop's over this way."

"All this is because of the War 200 years ago?" Xen asked. "The buildings all have holes in them."

"That's right," said Tori. "Most of the people who live here moved in a long time after it was over. A lot of the bombs landed right on the Mall, so there was too much radiation right after it happened. Underworld wasn't even here then."

"Underworld?" said Xen. She retraced recent memory. "That's a Ghoul city?"

"Yep," said Tori.

"Can we go there?"

"Not today," said Tori firmly. "Anyway, it's probably twenty miles North of where we are. You won't be in shape for a walk that long for years, probably. You'll have to start exercising more."

"I can do that," said Xen. "I've never seen a Ghoul. I want to." Ghouls had captured her imagination every since she had learned about them from Bunni and the computer. They were closer to human than she was, and looked less like it. She couldn't imagine a person being alive with their skin peeling off, and she wanted to see that, too.

"Sounds like an insufficient data error to me," said Tori. " Let's wait and see how you feel about other humans first."

"I'm not a human," said Xen.

"Yeah, you are," said Tori. "More than seventy percent by nucleotide count. To say you weren't human would be like saying you weren't the Doctors' daughter. Doc Montalban was right about that. Anyway, don't mention that to Masterson. You look a little sick, but you'll pass."

"Okay," said Xen.

She followed Tori around the edge of the plaza to a boarded-up storefront in the first floor of a twenty-story building (she made herself count them, despite the fact that looking at something that high made her want to throw up). The wooden door was closed, but she could hear voices from inside. Tori evidently could, too. She stopped on the sidewalk.

"...Hand it over," said a man's voice. "I know you got the cash 'cause I know you been selling more than usual. We'll get that robot when it gets here, too. Oughta be worth somethin' to somebody."

"Oh, shit," said Tori very quietly. "Threat assessment acknowledged. And you know, I liked Masterson, too. Xen, you're going to have to go back to the stairwell and stay there until I come and get you. Do it right now. Run."

Under other circumstances she might have tried to argue, but everything around her was strange and terrifying and enormous. The man's voice had an unfamiliar accent. It sounded rough and angry. Xen turned and ran back to the stairs, still clutching the burlap sack, and went down them as fast as she could without tripping.

She crouched at the bottom for a whole minute before curiosity got the better of fear. Xen crept quietly up the stairs on all fours and peeked over the top one.

Tori was on her way back from the wrecked car, hauling something with all four arms. Xen squinted hard at the tangle of tubes and metal parts. She must've yanked out its power plant. The Mister Handy unit seemed to be holding up the weight with three arms while she did something else to it with the fourth one. Xen, whose vision was (as she had been repeatedly told) better than human, could distinguish the sparks from Tori's welding attachment. Why is she welding two wires together?

Xen watched the robot finish her soldering, apply a small spark, and drop the power plant in front of the storefront. Then she turned and shot toward Xen faster than she had ever seen the robot fly. Very correctly taking this as a bad sign, Xen scooted back down the stairs and into the door well. Tori dropped down over the edge of the stairs a moment later. "Back inside," she said, and Xen scrambled out of the way. Tori shut the door behind them. "Better get down," she said.

Xen went to her knees just before the earth-shaking BOOM from outside. She covered her head with her arms belatedly, but there was no second explosion. Tori, who still hovered in the air, remained stable.

"Stay here a minute," Tori said, and opened the door again. She hovered upward until she could raise one eye sensor above the edge of the stairwell. "Whew. Looks like I got him. Let's hope there was only one."

"You blew him up?" said Xen, standing up carefully. The knees of her new jeans were dirty already, so she didn't feel too bad about wiping her sweaty hands on her pants.

"You better hope I did," said Tori. "Like I told you, I'm not a combat bot."

"What about Masterson?" asked Xen.

"Yeah, too bad about that," said Tori. "But nobody programmed me to keep him alive. And the other guy was an immediate threat to you and, incidentally, me. I had to do the best I could with what was here."

"Aren't you going to go see if he's alive?" asked Xen. "He sells things, right? Doesn't he have stimpaks in there? Maybe you can save him!"

"Might not be a good idea," said Tori.

"We still need groceries, don't we?" asked Xen.

"Yeah, we do," said Tori. "Okay. But you stay right here until I call you."

"I will," said Xen.

"And no sticking your head up this time."

"I won't," promised Xen, blushing.

"And if I call you, try to stop blushing first. It turns you gray instead of pink and he'll notice that."

"How do I stop that?" asked Xen, feeling the heated sensation in her face that meant she was now even darker than before.

"Think calm thoughts," said Tori.

"How am I supposed to do that now?"

"You've got a good imagination. Pretend you're a robot." Tori shot upward and away.

"A robot," Xen said, but quietly. She couldn't pretend to be Tori, who was obviously worried. Bunni would worry, too, even if her voice didn't show it. It was hard to tell with Tawnee. She bet Michelle and Stephanie would never worry about anything. I'm a sentry bot, Xen told herself. I have a cannon at the end of each arm and my whole body is covered with armor. My main sensor array is big and red and has a visor over it, like a knight. I'm not afraid of anything. I don't even know what "afraid" is, because it's not in my programming. I only think about monsters so I can decide where to shoot them first. Plain old humans with guns are nothing to scare me.

After a couple of minutes she started to feel a little calmer. She wanted to look up over the edge of the stairs again, but was fairly sure Tori would see her. She had long found this to be a disadvantage of her second guardian's 360-plus degree vision. Bunni would restrict her movements more than Tori, if she could; but Tori was harder to get around.

I'm going to have to figure out how to reprogram them, she thought, not for the first time. Otherwise they'll never let me leave the Lab without them. The thought of taking them with her was comforting, but only until she thought it through. The world outside the Lab was starting to look just as dangerous as Bunni had said it was. Tori and Bunni were the only permanent things she had known, and at ten years old she had already had enough experience of death to realize it could happen to anyone. She wanted them safe and sound in the Lab for her to come home to, not out here where there were evil men and exploding things. Just thinking about how risky it had been for Tori to come out here grocery shopping every month made her palms sweat again.

"Okay," said Tori's voice from not far off. "Come on up."

Xen ran up the stairs. Tori hovered near them, waiting. "Is he alive?" she asked.

"Yep," said Tori. "He took some damage, but I think I got him fixed up. He was lucky not to lose an arm or leg or anything. The other guy is kind of a mess, though. Try not to throw up."

"I won't throw up," said Xen, with all the scorn a scrawny ten-year-old could muster. "I'm not afraid of dead things."

"Good," said Tori. "It's the live things you need to worry about. Come on. And remember, don't tell Masterson your whole name."

"I won't," said Xen. She followed Tori back to the smoking hole in the front of the building, where there had previously been a boarded-up window and a door. Most of the force of the explosion must have spent itself upward and outward; there were scorch marks far up the building's front and a scorched corona on the pavement.

The remains of the unknown man weren't that hard to look at, mostly because there wasn't much to see. Xen was only able to tell the veneer of red glop painting the remaining walls of the shop was organic because it was dark enough inside to open her inner eyelids. The pattern of infrared given off by the organic parts of the patina was different from the carbonized remains of wood and plastic. The smell of burning almost covered the stench of human death, although there was enough of that to remind her uncomfortably of the first deaths she'd seen.

"There's not much left of him," said Xen.

"I'm pretty sure he opened the door when he heard the first fizz," said Tori. "He was right on top of it when it went off. Probably what saved Masterson here."

A lot of things had been thrown into the back of the building by the explosion. Xen identified parts of shelves, boxes, canned goods, and some other things she thought were probably ammunition for weapons. A man sat in a chair in a small clear area. He had a big belly under his bloody tee shirt, and a heavy brown beard under his bald head. His arms looked enormous to Xen. One of them was tattooed with a picture of a snake. He stank like blood and sweat. Xen stared curiously at him.

"So this is the kid?" said Masterson.

"I'm Xen," she said.

"Bob Masterson," he said. "Call me Bob. I'd shake your hand, but I'm real dirty right now. Be worse if your bot hadn't got me the stims, a'course." He nodded at Tori. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it," said Tori. "I just didn't want her to see any more dead people today. Otherwise I'd've left you under the boxes."

"That's probably not true," Xen told him. He laughed, a deep booming sound in the small room.

"So what d'you want today?" he asked. "I can probably dig it out. The prewar packaging is damn durable."

"Do you have any shoes I can wear, Bob?" asked Xen.

"Sorry, kid," said Masterson. "It's not so easy to get small stuff out here. Most of the apartments are picked over. I only have this much food for sale because it's not worth most people's while to dig it out of the ruins. Hell, even the ammo is easier to find." He squinted at her in the dim light. The movement showed up lines on his heavy face, and Xen wondered how old he was. "Those are nice goggles, kid. What're they for?"

"Her eyes are sensitive," said Tori. "Comes from living underground all the time."

"Yeah, I heard you can get that way," said Bob, who evidently accepted this explanation. "You want your usual grocery order?" He heaved himself up out of the chair. Xen guessed he was probably more than six feet tall. From her own height he seemed gigantic.

"Plus one more box of snack cakes," said Tori. "This is a big day for Xen. She deserves a little treat. Gimme the sack." Xen obediently handed it over.

"What will you do about your store, Bob?" Xen asked as Tori and Masterson dug for cans and boxes and stuck them into the bag.

"Move to a different building, probably," said Bob. "One with a less obvious entrance. My regulars will find me. You guys shouldn't have any trouble with the bot's infrared."

Xen opened her mouth to say I can see that, too, then shut it quickly. "I'm glad you're alive," she said. "You're the first person I've seen since I was four."

"How old are you now? Seven?" Bob asked.

"I'm ten," said Xen.

"Guess you're just kinda small, then. That's gonna be sixty caps, Tori. Same as always. You can have the treat gratis; ain't your fault those bastards had a bomb."

Xen frowned, but didn't say anything. She already knew about lying.