There is never a shortage of cases to close.
Even with her hangover—she'd had one glass, one—Kaelyn is eager to get going when Ellie gives them the details of someone who radioed the agency for help. They have little information to go by, but one detail sticks out.
It's a missing person case.
Too-bright sunlight pours into the market square, curling around Kaelyn's patrolman glasses to poke the corners of her eyes. Vadim had offered her a guaranteed hangover cure and she'd been about to down it when Yefim informed her it was alcoholic.
At the city gates, Valentine says, "It'll be a long walk. That's how the hardest cases always start."
She isn't dissuaded.
Following Valentine is the safest option. His methods are above board—even if he sometimes serves as judge, jury and executioner—and his care for his clients shows in his thorough work, as Kaelyn would know. He can keep her above board. If she's going to kill, it may as well be for whatever cause he deems worthy. Kellogg won't get the last laugh.
It's by Valentine's suggestion that they find shelter for the night in Salem, long after the sun has set. Kaelyn only agrees because protesting would bring undue attention, even if she can't sleep for fear of the dreams. When she abandons the pretense, sitting up and stretching the knots in her back, Valentine hands her a steaming mug. She holds it close and curls around it for warmth, but tea can't chase the taste of rust from her throat. Her hands are still sore, despite the bandages coming off days ago.
Kaelyn feels like he should be able to take one look at her and know. Cops sometimes developed a sense for the smell of guilt. When she can't take it any more, she asks, "Valentine?"
"Something you need?"
"You've seen a lot of cases in your time. Is the only punishment out here death?"
"Diamond City's got a lockup, but it's up to city security and the mayor's discretion who ends up staring at the bars. For the most part, thieves and murderers don't come quietly these days."
She nods as if this is a purely hypothetical discussion. "Without courts or judges, who decides what's justice and what isn't?"
Valentine considers, tapping his fingers against the screwdriver in his grasp. He'd been in the middle of a tune up when she'd 'woken'. "I've gotta makes that call, for starters. And so do you. Too many folks out here don't care about doing what's right. That's why we have to."
Justice is a far-flung thing, divorced from the orderly courthouse she once served in. "Is more violence the answer? Or are there other ways someone can make up for what they've done?"
That earns her a pointed yellow stare. "If this is about the Institute, I know you did everything you could. The people of the Commonwealth don't have to fear what's lurking in the shadows because you had the guts to press the button."
She presses her forehead into her knees as something in her chest cracks. The Institute.
Shaun.
So many bodies.
"Nick? You said people were worried about me." At his hum of agreement, Kaelyn doesn't ask who. Instead, she wonders, "Why didn't you follow me?" Her only surprise is that it took Deacon so long to find her.
Valentine nods thoughtfully, his eyes stuck on the horizon like golden pins. "I'll be honest with you. Another week and I woulda gone looking. I know you needed time and space to process it all—still do, frankly—but I was worried for ya."
She nods, keeping her gaze on her knees.
"Never got the chance to tell you I'm sorry about your boy."
It's several moments before she can speak around the lump in her throat. "Let's go."
It doesn't matter that it is arguably still night. Judging by her pip-boy's map, they can follow the road straight out of Salem to the northern beach where the Nakanos live, trekking through sandy loam. The deep not-quite morning is gunmetal gray, and it's impossible to tell whether the skies are clear or filled by clouds smoothed to the consistency of milk. It's cold either way, with the incessant coastal breeze skipping inland to sting her lips and eyelashes with salty kisses.
Two centuries of encroaching ocean have eroded the coastline to a mess of wind stricken grasses clinging to hills of damp sand. Bleached tree bones, warn smooth by salt, jut out of the ground like claws, and there's even a rusted car sunk bumper-deep into the mud flats. With every step Kaelyn's boots break the salty crust of the earth and sink an inch, leaving a clear trail from the road.
Dawn is a quiet affair until the sun peeks above the ocean, rimming the horizon with a fierce, burning gold that lightens the eastern sky to cream. They follow the beach, hugging the cliff face in places where the tides suck at their heels, passing jetties that wait like broken limbs splayed in welcome for boats that will never arrive. The freeway overpass, hunched low over the rocky hills, strikes north through the border of the Commonwealth.
They sight the Nakano residence, or what Valentine thinks is the Nakano residence: a lonely two-story house of algae-stained wood and red paint that perches a little too close to a cove. Kaelyn has a sneaking suspicion that whoever built the house did not plan on this kind of beach side view.
A man's voice carries through the window, laden with the desperate fear Kaelyn knows too well. "I know you're listening! Where is my daughter, damn you?"
Kaelyn and Valentine trade a look.
Valentine takes the lead, giving a quick knock on the front door before entering. The Nakanos stand around a dining table, glancing up at their visitors, and surprise gives way to relief at the sight of their detective, who says, "I hope you don't mind. We let ourselves in."
Kenji Nakano, a man teetering between middle age and his twilight years, straightens at once. There's a frantic gleam in his eye. "Nick! There you are! You have to get to work right away! She could be hurt or lost or—"
Valentine doesn't share his panic. As steady as ever, he says, "Woah, slow down there. Tell me and my partner here what happened."
Kenji waves a hand at an orange radio on the table, his lip curling with disgust. "It's because of this old thing!"
Valentine looks between him and his wife, Rei Nakano. "all right, lay it all on the table. Give us everything you know."
Under Valentine's careful probing, Kenji and Rei give all the details they can: eight days ago, they awoke in the early hours of the morning to the sound of a boat's motor. By the time Kenji reached the docks and prepped another boat, their teenage daughter Kasumi was gone with no trail to follow. For the past few months, she had been repairing the radio that now sits on the dining table, stubbornly silent.
Valentine nods. "If you don't mind, we'll take a look around, see if there's any clues to where she went. You sit tight while we get to the bottom of this." Back in the tight foyer, Valentine says to Kaelyn, "If you'll search her room, I'll see if there's anything more Kenji and Rei can tell us. But don't disturb anything you don't have to. I don't think I need to tell you to stay out of any underwear drawers."
Not a ghost of a smile at his joke. "On it."
Leaving Valentine to his work, Kaelyn takes the stairs. The Nakano residence must have once been a manse belonging to someone of affluence; the vine-patterned wallpaper, while discolored and bubbled from the salt, has hardly peeled in the intervening years.
Kasumi's room is through the last door on the right, greeting Kaelyn with paintings of cats, pre-war posters, and all manner of mechanical gizmos. There's a pegboard for storing tools beside a large workbench lovingly cluttered with half-completed projects. An open crate at the foot of her bed is filled with scavenged appliances in various states of disrepair. At the top of her dresser sits a Nuka-Cola bottle with a tiny angel inside, painstakingly assembled from tiny screws and wires and cogs.
"Talented kid." As Kaelyn peers down for a closer look, she notices the nearby globe is poised at the east coast of the United States, with a red pin marking the approximation of the Nakano residence and a half-dozen pins in other colors dotted nearby.
Locations Kasumi hopes to visit? Only, with a closer inspection, Kaelyn notices some of the pins are in the ocean. Perhaps they mark good fishing spots—as a fisherman's daughter, she would know such things.
Kaelyn marks the coordinates in her pip-boy all the same. On the workbench is a holotape labeled Project Log: Radio. Kaelyn listens, trying to memorize the bubbly voice as best she can.
"Project log: radio. When I get this thing working—fingers crossed!—I'm finally going to get some news outside the house! I'll need a handle. How about… Ohm's Law? That should confuse the creeps, any anyone who actually gets the reference, then we'll have circuitry in common."
Clever. In the tradition of families everywhere, Kasumi is evidently more savvy than her parents, or at least her father, give her credit for. The holotape chronicles her efforts to repair the radio that Kaelyn skims, culminating in a burst of white noise, a soft tune from Diamond City Radio, and a cheer.
Valentine seeks her out when she descends the stairs. "You find anything useful?"
"I found a holotape that recorded her repairing the radio. From her comments, I'd say she was aware that someone might prey on her and took steps to minimize the risk. That and a globe marked with locations around the Commonwealth and beyond. I can't make sense of them, but I wrote the co-ordinates down."
"Good work. At this point, we can't rule anything out. Our young Miss Kasumi is quite the mechanic, by the sounds of it. She's the one who repairs the boats, amongst other things. Her parents don't agree on why Kasumi's gone. Kenji's convinced she was nabbed, while Rei thinks she took off on her own and doesn't want to be found. That sure wouldn't be unheard of, 'specially with young folk. Rei mentioned a grandfather who passed away recently, and that Kasumi worked in his boathouse for hours. Let's take a peek at what she was up to, shall we?"
The boathouse is a mechanic's haven: a labyrinth of shelves and workbenches and filing cabinets. Someone went to great lengths to patch holes in the walls and waterproof the ceiling with tarp and duct tape. Several consoles press against the walls—nautical equipment, possibly—to make space for the boat someone has been grafting navigational devices onto.
Valentine's initial assessment, out of earshot of the Nakanos, is, "On a case like this, with no clear sign of kidnappers, we need to look for clues on why Kasumi might have left on her own. Either someone encouraged her, or she packed up and high tailed it herself. If she wasn't certain her parents would have let her leave, it could explain why she sneaked out. But don't let yourself become boxed into one line of thinking. Got all that?"
"Find a motive for her leaving; don't make assumptions."
He smiles. "We'll make a proper detective out of you yet, partner."
Maybe it's the angled shaft of sunlight she stands in, but for a moment she almost feels warm.
They search the boathouse from one end to the other, but there's nothing amiss among the boxes of scavenged scrap, sorted on the shelves in an arrangement that only makes sense to whoever organized them. A small picture frame with a painting of a lighthouse sits on the desk.
Valentine grunts and looks closer. "See that? Frame's clean while the desk is dusty. Someone picked it up recently." But his cursory inspection reveals nothing, so they continue their search—and notice a safe sitting below the stranded boat.
Kaelyn looks to Valentine. "Should we...?"
After a moment of thought he nods. "Don't think it could hurt at this point."
A second search of the boathouse yields no key. Crouching down, Kaelyn withdraws her screwdriver and a bobby pin. With some finagling she has the satisfaction of hearing the lock click and she spins the dial.
"Aptly done."
Again with that almost-warmth. But no time to ponder it as the thick door swings outward. The safe is empty but for two rolls of duct tape and a holotape.
Kaelyn turns it over but there's no label. Even though the weather can't decide if it wants to be cloudy or sunny, a promise of fresh air lures them out to the jetty, where they lean side by side against the railing. Kaelyn slots the tape into her pip-boy.
"Project log: um... myself. I never really thought about who or what I am, but—" A tinny sigh, then: "Where do I start? The radio. I managed to get a signal from up north. There's a group of people up there. They say they're all synths. Synthetic people. Made by the Institute."
Kaelyn and Valentine look to each other. The same mix of surprise and skepticism coats their faces.
"They're trying to build a place for their kind. Where they can be themselves and be accepted for what they are. It sounds wonderful, but then they started asking about me. And some of those questions… I don't have answers to. I mean, I've always felt off, like I don't belong here, but I can't remember parts of my childhood. And then there are the dreams..." Silence for a beat, then two. "I... I'm going to go. To meet these synths. To find answers. If I sail north to a town called Far Harbor, I can meet with them from there."
Valentine lets out one long breath. "Isn't every day that we get a lead as neat as that. So the daughter takes off by boat to Far Harbor. And these synths broadcasting their location. That's another thing you don't see every day."
Kaelyn stares out at the water. A colony of synths and a girl who thinks she's one of them. "Could she be an Institute replacement?"
"Anything's possible, especially where the Institute's concerned. Don't need to tell you that."
And yet something about that explanation doesn't click—all the replacements Kaelyn has seen were self-aware infiltrators. "Maybe she's a synth the Railroad processed and they took her in as their daughter. If you knew Kenji from that case you worked with him, do you remember anything about a child? Or was it before she was born?"
Valentine is quiet as he thinks, but she can't help but notice the cigarette pinched so tightly between his steel fingers it has bent in half. "The old memory banks are a bit foggy today, gotta admit. Can barely remember the case with Kenji, let alone his family." Another pensive silence. While he isn't always chatty, Kaelyn senses something amiss this time. She waits him out until he continues, "I don't suppose our lantern-lighting friends wouldn't keep those kinds of records lying around."
She snuggles further into her jacket, fisting her hands in her pockets as a fresh gale tears at her hair. "The Institute's— well, I guess it doesn't really matter anymore if she is or she isn't a synth."
Valentine eyes her sidelong. "Not to you, perhaps."
She has to concede to that.
Valentine grabs his fedora as another blast of wind attempts to lift it off his head. "We need to get to this Far Harbor. Kenji knows these waters better than anyone. Hope you don't get seasick, partner."
When Valentine relays their gathered information to the Nakanos, they are adamant Kasumi is human.
"What?" Rei gasps. "We raised her! I— I gave birth to her! She's flesh and blood, not a synth!"
"That's— that's crazy!" Kenji snaps. "Not only does someone lure my daughter away, but they convince her she isn't even human?"
Kaelyn says, "It doesn't matter if Kasumi is a synth. She's still someone who needs help."
Her words have less than desired effect, as Kenji and Rei bequeath her with incredulous looks, so Valentine steps in. "This Far Harbor is to the north, you say? It'll be a long trip. We'll need to gather some supplies, then if you could take us there, Kenji, we'll do the rest."
When they stand on the front steps, Kaelyn lets out a breath. Not quite a sigh. "Do you think they're taken aback because they believe she's human or nervous because they sheltered a synth?"
"This place is awful isolated," Valentine says. "Perfect spot for a family to stay off the grid. Hard to say either way, and I can't blame 'em if they are protecting her." Halfway up the sandy drive, he asks, "Are you up for it, partner? If you need to sit this one out, go home and clear your head, I'll understand."
She whispers, "I need to get out of here, Nick."
He looks her over. Whatever he sees, he's not sure if he likes it. But still he nods. "Well all right then. I'll be glad for the company. We'll grab the gear we'll need and be off."
The correct version is that she'll need supplies. There are advantages to not requiring food, water or radaway.
Hurried by Kenji's urging and Rei's worried stare, it only takes them two days to collect everything they need and return to the Nakano jetty. Kaelyn leaves Dogmeat in Codsworth and Preston's care, no matter what puppy eyes he throws at her. By the time they return to the northern beach, Kenji has prepared one of his boats for them.
He spends the morning showing them the basics of navigation. "Even with my father's guidance system, I would feel remiss not to show you how to steer the boat," he says.
When Kenji deems them adequate sailors, the sun is almost at its zenith. Sweat and salt string Kaelyn's hair into fine clumps; both she and Valentine have put their hats away lest the wind steal them to gorge the ocean on more pollution. Their supplies—four bags worth of all the food, medicines and ammo they could fit without bursting the seams—go in the boat.
The Nakanos wave them off on the docks.
"Good luck," Rei says. "When you find Kasumi, tell her we love her. She's clever enough to make it on her own."
"My daughter is in danger. I can feel it. Please hurry." Kenji says.
"We'll find her," Kaelyn says, "I swear."
She would be lying if she promised to bring Kasumi home, however. Holding onto hope only to have them dashed on the rocks of cruel reality? It isn't something she can ever wish on another parent.
When the motor rumbles and the boat steers away from the jetty to open seas, Kaelyn closes her eyes. She wants to leave her pain stranded on the mud-swirled shores of her broken home. It should hurt more, she thinks, to run, but there is nothing to feel anymore, every last drop wrung out as if a thirsty wretch squeezed out a wet cloth. She only remembers the fear. Sometimes gnawing, sometimes cutting, always overwhelming.
She flees the craters—and the ghosts that linger.
One ghost in particular.
As the boat veers north, Valentine leans on the railing beside her, eyes on the horizon. He hums low in his throat, the burr pushing the limits of his vocalizer. "The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, the furrow followed free. We were the first that ever burst into that silent sea."
It takes Kaelyn several long moments to place the reference, cycling through high school memories that have since become obsolete. Then she snorts. "You don't think that's a bad omen?"
"If you spot an albatross, don't shoot it. That's the moral of the story, right?"
Kaelyn snorts again.
The difference between her and Kellogg is that he never had a Valentine to coax him back from the edge.