A/N: In FO3, of course, the regular Metro cannot be accessed through Northwest Seneca, nor is there an accessible restroom in Cornucopia Grocery. This is because in the actual game, nobody can blow up or dig through piles of dirt and rubble (despite the prevalence of all kinds of things that blow up).

16

It was six hours before the nightmare woke her this time. Her eyes snapped open to find her arms curled around her head, protecting her eyes from the knife which had just cut one of them free. The dead Raider, a laser hole still between his eyes, had been about to swallow it. Blinding light still stabbed through her closed eyelids even as the vision vanished.

"Xen," said Changeling's cool and changeless voice. "You have dislodged your goggles. Do not open your eyes."

With one hand, she fumbled the goggles back up. The pain vanished as if by magic. Xen sat up slowly. She had to leave her inner lids closed. The direction of the beam of light had changed so that it now shone into the mouth of the ticket booth and onto the horrible mattress where she slept. (The roof above the platform was too far away for comfort.) She had chosen to lie on top of the blanket instead of under it.

"It's still day out there?" Xen sat up, then staggered upright and out of the booth, instinctively combing her fingers through her hair.

"Affirmative," said Changeling. "It is now late afternoon. We have traveled in the evening for the most part."

"I want to put my other clothes on," said Xen. She felt damp and sticky with sweat, which made her think longingly of the little shower in the Lab. "Can you wash these with what's available here?"

"Affirmative."

"Right." Xen staggered upright and off toward the restroom. Charon stood beside the edge of the parapet, looking down. She couldn't tell if he had slept at all or not. He always seemed to look the same.

The next day, it was four Feral Ghouls. Xen heard Charon suddenly say, "Be cautious," and when she turned to look he had vanished around a bend in the tunnel. By the time she reached him, all four were dead, their bodies so emaciated and necrotic that only the heat signatures said they hadn't been dead for weeks. And the blood, of course. Always the blood.

Two days after that, he vanished down a side tunnel while she was eating dinner in a generator enclosure. She heard the shotgun go off twice before he came jogging back. She didn't ask. The nightmares hadn't gone away, and she was sleeping less and less. Charon obeyed her orders instantly, politely and without complaint, yet she was torn between gratitude toward him and hatred of him. He belonged to this world of painful lights and creeping nightmares. Everything from which he protected her brought one more horror for her to carry with her like a sodden weight.

As they came closer to Northwest Seneca station, the mounds of debris grew higher. There were places where she and Charon might have scrambled over on hands and knees, but the packbot's inflexible teacup chassis would never fit. When that happened, Changeling would blast a way through with her laser, which was time-consuming and raised the dust. Xen had another allergy attack and had to have another shot of epinephrine on one of these. She walked faster than usual for the rest of the day, then slept for seven hours before she woke up again.

Xen had never failed at anything she really wanted to accomplish. She could learn to build anything, fix anything, solve any problem that came her way. It had never before been brought to her attention that she was small, weak, and basically incapable of defending herself. In her mind that had always been a clear responsibility of robots, not people. To see another organic being in that role shocked and humbled her, neither an experience she was used to having. She spent enough time observing her own thought processes to realize this, but it didn't change the way she felt. And that made it worse as well.

If I were a robot, I could just delete the subroutine, she thought miserably, and missed Bunni and Tori more than before. She was even missing Stacy and Michelle. I'll pretend I'm one of them, she told herself. It worked when I was little. Maybe it will work again.

Her communication with the others grew briefer and less frequent. She stopped asking questions about things she saw, processing everything dully as they slogged on through the Metro.

I have an objective, she told herself. My primary directive is to find it. Nothing else matters.

She ate less, slept less, and walked longer. Even so, it seemed like months before they came to Northwest Seneca Station. The high, dusty space quickly proved empty of life. The reason for this became clear as they mounted the platform: the entrance to the station proper was choked with rubble. Any surface creature wishing to live here would have to dig through from the other side. It was probably easier to just find another entrance.

Irrelevant, Xen thought. She surveyed the mount of dirt and concrete slabs and rebar with cold and bleary eyes. It had been two days since she'd slept. At least, she thought it was two days. It wasn't really important.

"Changeling," she said. "Burn through it."

"It is possible there is nothing behind it," said Changeling. "If the entire station has collapsed, we will not find a way to the surface."

Xen did not repeat herself. After a moment, she heard the hum of the laser charging to full power.

"Firing," said Changeling. The top of the mound slowly began to disintegrate. Dust filled the air. Xen coughed, but her goggles protected her eyes. Beside her, Charon squinted narrowly at the mess. After five minutes, the space between the mound and the ceiling was large enough that Xen could have crawled through it. She became distantly aware that someone was shouting from the other side.

"I have two heat signatures," said Changeling. "Consistent with adult male humans or Ghouls."

Xen couldn't see them. Her world had been shrinking steadily for several days now, vision and hearing drawing in together. The shouting stopped after a minute or so. Then someone said,

"Who the Hell is that?" it was a male voice. Xen guessed, without much interest, that it was probably a Ghoul.

"We're coming through," she said.

"I can damn well see that," said the voice. "You just about killed Barrett. Why?"

"We're going to the surface," Xen said. "Changeling, resume."

In another five minutes, there was room enough for Charon or Changeling to pass. "Charon," said Xen. "Go first. Tell me when it's secure." He climbed up the pile and disappeared on the other side. A moment later she heard him say,

"Secure."

Xen climbed up after him. Something stung her left hand slightly, but she ignored it. It was irrelevant. A moment later she slid down the other side and into the station proper. Charon stood there looking at two other Ghouls. Both had weapons in their hands, but Charon had not drawn his shotgun.

"What, you think you can just - " said one of them, but Xen was already on her way past him. The palm of her left hand was wet. She shook it absentmindedly as she rounded the corner toward the ticket gates. She heard Changeling scrape the bottom of the supply net as she topped the mound of debris behind them. Xen noted that there was no sound of violence. Apparently Charon hadn't had to kill anyone. She pulled open the chainlink gate with more difficulty than she had expected. There was a black mark where her left hand touched it. She stared at this in puzzlement for a second before she went up into daylight.

Xen looked around as she heard the other two mount the stairs behind her. The sun was in the sky, but it seemed darker than she remembered. There were little sparks of light in the corners of her eyes, vanishing if she turned her head. Perhaps if she took the goggles off, everything would be clearer. Xen reached up to pull them down around her neck. She opened her inside eyelids.

The light was blinding, and then the darkness was complete.

She woke up lying on her back on something hard. Her clothes were damp with sweat. Every recent memory was a chilly, exhausted blur. I've lost data? Xen felt for her goggles, though her arm felt heavy and weak. They were around her neck.

"You will not need them here," said Changeling's voice.

Xen lowered her hand gratefully and opened her eyes. It was beautifully, painlessly dark, enough that she could see the grungy ceiling perfectly. She turned her head to one side. Changeling hovered in front of her, sensor light blinking as she scanned. Xen looked past her, searching for Charon.

She apparently lay on the front counter of a small store. A couple of broken coolers stood nearby. There was a long divider with counters and shelves in front of her, so that she could see down the length of each side. Food boxes and cans lay scattered over parts of it. Some of the shelves were torn off. A brief visual survey confirmed they had been used to cover the windows. Charon stood in front of a pair of boarded-up double doors. He was watching her. The metal ring on the front of his armor was nearly black, and there was dust on his leathers. She wondered if she just hadn't noticed before, or if he'd lost skin since the last time she looked at him. His face and the arm she could see were raw, nearly naked of tissue over the red muscle. He had no nasal cartilage left. With a flashlight she could have identified every bone in his sinuses. As she looked at him, his temperature profile shifted upward, glowing brighter. This seemed important, but she couldn't recall just why.

"I seem to," she swallowed against a dry throat as she looked back at Changeling. "I seem to have some corrupt memory. What happened?"

"You were on the point of collapsing from exhaustion and malnutrition," said Changeling. "Then you removed your goggles in direct sunlight for reasons which are not clear to me. I had not understood you to be suicidal."

"I'm not," Xen said. "At least, not that I know of. I don't really remember why I did it."

"You had a convulsive seizure which went on for several minutes," said Changeling. "Charon was eventually able to put the goggles back on, and it ceased shortly thereafter. I located this building and he carried you here."

"What happened to Charon?" Xen asked, lowering her voice. This was not hard. It was speaking audibly that was difficult. "Was there something in here when you got here?"

"A small number of radroaches," said Changeling. "I was able to dispose of them quickly. I believe his current tissue loss may be related to stress. I have filed this information for further analysis, since he has few external markers for emotional states."

"Interesting," Xen said sleepily. "Make sure he eats something t'day. Don' rem'ber las' time..."

"Acknowledged," said Changeling. It was the last thing Xen heard for a while. There were no nightmares. There was nothing at all.

Eventually, she opened her eyes again. This time her limbs felt all right, just a little sore. Xen sat up slowly, holding the edges of the counter top. The same old prewar blanket, still olive drab green, shifted slightly underneath her. She thought she remembered something to do with her left hand bleeding. When she looked at it, there was a thin line of gel down the palm. So that part was real, anyway. She looked around. Charon lay on his side, curled up with his back to the boarded front doors. Xen stared for a moment. She'd never seen him asleep. His right shoulder rose and fell irregularly, as if occasionally he forgot to breathe. He had gained a little skin back on his cheeks and his closed eyelids.

So I slept longer than I thought. In total darkness, with her eyes fully opened, he had a faint aura of gamma contamination as well. Very little. His last employer before Ahzrukhal must have been a smoothskin.

She didn't see Changeling, but she did see a heat bloom of the right size to be from her exhaust ports. It was on the other side of a wall behind the counter. There was a door in the corner.

She must be in the back room.

Xen swung her legs around to the back of the counter and slid off. She was unsteady for just a second, but it passed quickly. Back here there was a cash register and a computer terminal. A few bottle caps lay scattered across the dusty surface. A safe with a glowing blue light was built into the wall, on eye level for someone several inches taller than she was. Xen looked at it thoughtfully. She didn't know how to pick locks.

But I bet that terminal has an override for it. It's too fancy a safe to have no computer controls.

Something rustled off to her right. She twitched involuntarily to see Charon on the other side of the counter. He looked down at her with much the same expression as always. There was no visible change in his temperature. Maybe she had imagined it yesterday.

Was it yesterday?

"Oh," she said stupidly. "You're awake. Can you see me?"

"Yes," he said. "My eyes have had time to adjust." Charon set a plastic water bottle on top of the counter and nudged it across with a yellow fingernail. Xen took it gratefully and drank, satisfying a thirst she hadn't noticed before.

"Thank you," she said. "Do you know how long I slept?"

"I would guess it has been nearly fifteen hours," Charon said. "Changeling informs me dat dis is not unusual after a seizure compounded by fatigue."

"Changeling did?" Xen said. "You must've succeeded in changing her mind about you. What's she doing?"

"Reorganizing our supplies," said Charon. "Dere were several useful items here."

"Is there a bathroom?" Xen asked. Her clothes were stiff with dried sweat, her goggles were dusty, and she knew she must stink horribly.

Well, with any luck, he can't smell much of anything.

"She excavated a small employee restroom in t'hallway," said Charon.

"Excellent," said Xen, and went to find it.