"I can take you to Long Beach, I'm headed up to New Asbury anyway" the boatman had told us. "Barnegat's just across the bridge there."

"That'll do," I'd nodded in acknowledgement. The boatman – whose name is Ken, I think – had eyed Kenji behind me suspiciously, as if the mutant's jaw would unhinge like a snake's and eat him whole, before hijacking his boat, filling it flush with explosives and driving it straight into the Atlantic City boardwalk.

But in the end, he'd let Kenji on. We'd had to pay double the price, but neither of us were about to risk our passage.

No, what Kenji had been most upset about was that Kaiser couldn't come on board. "I told you, no cats," the boatman had said, his frustration clearly mounting.

"Fine," I'd said, looking at Kenji with a glance that told him it'd be okay.

So we'd left Kaiser there, with a stockpile of food, and a reminder to the neighbours to check on him on occasion. He'd be able to take care of himself. He'd done it before.

"We should have just gone by the Parkway," Kenji had grumbled.

"And risk the bridge to Pleasantville? Come on, you know what they do to super mutants there."

So it is late that evening that I find myself here, having passed the outer wall of Atlantic City, and now leaning over the edge of the boat, staring at a billboard of that Vault-Tec boy plastered on the side of derelict hotel in whatever abandoned town this is. The boy is ubiquitous from the hundred thousand advertisements lining the Parkway. In this one, he's dressed in a top hat and a monocle, and pointing with a tilted cane at the words PASS GO IN VAULT 98!

"Come now," Kenji interjects from beside me, wearing a broad smile, trying in vain to cheer me up. "When was the last time we left Atlantic City? It'll be an adventure!"

"I don't want an adventure," I grumble. "I didn't even want this job." Besides, I'd had enough "adventure" for one life in my childhood.

In my childhood…

My mind takes me back to seven years ago.

I'm wet, panting in the rain, my mud-stained clothes clinging to my skin. A radroach comes from nowhere and takes a nibble at the pack of my ankle, but at this stage, I'm dead anyway if I can't find a settlement before nightfall. I know this road leads to a village – I think this road leads to a village.

Through the howling of the wind, I hear the raspy crackling of fires behind me. Shit, my twelve-year-old mind realises, they're burning the pines to try to smoke me out, or choke me to death – they don't care. Maybe I'd be better off turning back, returning to the Manor, returning to my old life.

But no, turning back just isn't an option. I remember what Nicole had told me, in frantic, confused words, with pleading eyes.

I've found something terrible…I think we're – the Knights, I mean – we're planning to do something...so horrible, I can't talk about it here. I'm afraid.

At first, I thought little of it, but the next morning, the Knights broke in and forcibly dragged her from our room. They claimed she was a Brotherhood spy in a "trial" that lasted less than two hours, before half a dozen of them took her out back and shot her – my partner in training – before my very eyes. I suppose they were trying to use her as an example for me. It doesn't really matter now, anyway.

By the very training the Scarlet Knights had been giving me the past four years of my life, trying to groom me and eleven others my age into the perfect guardians, the six Knights died, all of multiple gunshot wounds. I know all six of their names. Dansby. Janezich. Rodgers. Harris. Michaelson. Wilkes. I look at the nametag crumpled and grasped in my hand – NICOLE JACKSON – and I regret none of it.

Knowing they'd soon be after me, I packed what little belongings I had, and left the Manor behind for good, never finding out what exactly it was Nicole had learned.

Here, in the midst of the Pine Barrens, I hide behind a large tree trunk. The ground is springy, moist, and quickly turning to slush, and a slush I'm half-sure isn't radioactive.

I can't sit down, because as soon as I try, just to catch my breath, I hear a chorus of loud crunching noises around me, and I almost want to reflexively vomit in panic. I, too, have heard the tales of the Jersey Devil and the other strange creatures – deathclaws ten times normal size, strange human-plant monstrosities, the trees themselves growing tendrils and eating humans alive –

Something circles my ankle, and I feel everything give way under me. The ground itself shakes, and out the corner of my eye, I see

Suddenly, I hear a roar, and all goes black.

My eyelids snap open, and I gasp.

"Ah, you're not dead," a voice chuckles. "That's always nice."

"Are they gone?" I manage, between shallow breaths. I'm in a daylight-filled room, an unspinning fan on the ceiling, the walls covered with a somewhat grimy floral pattern. "Where am I?"

"I hope so. You're in Mays Landing."

I tilt my head slightly – it's a broadly grinning, youthful man, no older than maybe twenty-five. He is in what I recognise from the Knights' lessons is a medic's uniform, the shoulder emblazoned with the yellow-and-green outline of New Jersey, the seal of the Atlantic Republic.

"Someone found you unconscious and hypothermic out in the Barrens, about a mile south of town," the medic continues. "Hell of a ruckus, that was, when he showed up. Half the town came and tried to shoot him up." He chuckles. "You really should have been there. What's your name, by the way? We found this, curled up in your hand, but you can imagine…t." He shows me the crumpled namepatch: NICOLE JACKSON.

That is the question: what is my name? My old name…the Knights had given it to me. It wouldn't do, not if I wanted a life for my own.

Someone has to remember Nicole.

"Jackson," I say. "My name's Jackson. Zoe. Zoe Jackson." Nicole had told me about a Zoe a lot, an imaginary companion she'd had. "Nicole was my sister," I finish explaining, "but…I…lost her."

He nods. "Sorry for probing. Whoever that was…fuck. We could still see the fires to the south three days later. Thank Atom that the Scarlet Knights are here for these people, even when we have to go back east."

I sigh.

If only he knew.

There's a loud, crackling knock at the door, and the medic goes to answer it. He opens it, then turns back at me. "Oh, here's the…per – er, the one who found you," he says.

The medic steps aside, a little nervously, to make way for a hulking Super Mutant, barely fitting through the jagged doorframe. I want to just dissolve into the bed, cease to exist, anything but to die at the hands of a mutant. I'd just come out of the frying pan – into this –

My fears dissolve when he extends an open hand, with a little, curt smile.

"My name's Kenji," he says, in perhaps the gentlest voice I've ever heard.

"Zoe?" Kenji calls out to me.

My mind snaps back into the now. It's the next morning now, and the boat is pulling into the dockside of what seems to be a quaint seaside town.

Without thinking, I race up to him and embrace him. "I'm sorry," I tell him.

"For what?" he asks, gently hugging me back.

"For what happened in the Vent, for everything - just, everything."

"Ah," he smiles, "don't worry about it."

I follow him onto the dockside, away from the eyes of a quite bemused boatman.

This is Long Beach, the northernmost and the smallest of the Republic's great cities – and I have to give credit to the town for maintaining itself quite nicely. Inside the walls, it is almost as if the War had never happened here. Looking at it for the first time, the thought occurs to me that, despite all the corruption and all the politics, compared to some of what might lie out there, the Republic's not a terribly awful place to live.

Long Beach is the territory of the Truex family, which also happens to be the weakest of the five families. From what I hear, they try to keep to themselves, stay out of the cesspool of Atlantic City. Probably for their own benefit.

We're not going to be here for long – maybe just a little stopover for a drink. Barnegat, where we are supposed to look for Charlotte, is not far – just a crossing of the bridge and a little further.

So we duck into a little tavern, about a block inland. The Pharmacy, they call this place, judging by the quite ornate wooden sign with a painted red cross hanging outside. Inside. Kenji gets a few odd looks, but most of the others seem caught up in their own business. I suppose that, this far from Philadephia, the mutant war didn't affect people's fears all that much.

"What does the letter say?" Kenji asks, after we've found a table in a secluded corner and I've started working at a pint. It's alright, imported from New Babylon. The stuff from the Federation is better, but for whatever reason you can't find it here.

"Oh," I pull it out of my satchel and unfold the paper. "Yeah, it's not actually that helpful. It just says she was last sighted – er, yeah, six days ago now, at the Barnegat town hall, by a Republic soldier. She was with an older man, who had been wearing a, quote, 'a tattered brown jacket and a fedora.' It doesn't tell us who Charlotte is or why they care about her so much." I tuck the letter away and sigh. "Yeah, this whole shit is completely off."

"What, a Super Mutant in a tavern?" Kenji laughs, mostly to himself.

"Well – yes, but not that." I pause. "If this queen is so powerful, then why does she need us?"

Kenji had no answer, and neither did I.