"That was a dirty trick!" Celia started.
"Can it, Landis," Calhoun said. She glared at him. "It was, I agree, but look at our situation! We've been in Grayling for two weeks and nothing has come of it. We need to get out of here and into our own home. Any advantage is useful."
"How can you take advantage of someone, like that? Banking on basic human decency to compel someone?"
Calhoun smiled at her. "I had to convince Officer Pesaro to let you back in the Vault by appealing to his decency," he said.
She huffed. She didn't like treating people like that; she'd been the local "idiot" for too long at the Vault, to not take offense. But she wasn't dumb, and even if Lionel seemed like a simple person, he certainly didn't deserve that sort of rough consideration. He might not help them, if he realized Calhoun was playing him for a fool.
Calhoun shrugged, and continued, "The... ghoul isn't very friendly, anyway. All we can do is try."
"You wouldn't be very friendly if people kept taking advantage of you!" she said. Which, from what she'd inferred, was common. Lionel wasn't good with money, according to Dr. Jen, and frequently got taken in by the townsfolk. He was too stubborn to listen to advice, the doctor said.
"Behave, Celia," Calhoun said, and steepled his fingers. "I'll need your help, too."
She left the room before he could start in on her, too. She saw Lionel at the gate of the town, leaving for his shack. She ran to catch up, but the gate closed before she could get there. "Wait!" she yelled. "Let me out, too!"
The guard shook his head at her, from the post above the wall. "No way," he said. "It's getting dark and you haven't got a weapon. You'd get killed."
Celia snorted in anger, then climbed up to the guard post. "Hey! You can't―" he said, before she dropped over the edge of the wall. The corrugated metal scraped at her hands and she lost her grip, falling ten feet to the ground. She landed on her back, in a patch of something thorny and painful. It took her a minute to catch her breath, and a few more minutes to wiggle out of the bushes.
"Don't be stupid!" the guard called. "Come back!"
She waved a hand at him. Too late, she thought, and got her feet under her. Slowly, she caught up to the ghoul. He wasn't very tall, maybe a few inches on her, but he walked quickly when he wanted to. She was slightly out of breath when she managed to come up behind him. "I need to talk to you," she said.
Lionel just kept his eyes forward and continued onward, pressing his mouth together. Celia sighed, brushed briars out of her shirt, and followed him in silence. Their feet crunched on the dry ground, rocks and dead brush underneath.
It felt lonely, to be out in the open with no one to talk to. He clearly wasn't interested, and kept moving away from her in short bursts of speed. She watched the sky come down like a sliding door, and suddenly the world was amazing again. She gasped, looking up at the millions of stars. It had never been this clear, since she exited the Vault for the first time.
So many stars. The sight caused her to stumble into a bush and lose pace.
A briar was trapped inside her boot from the fall, digging into her leg. She ignored it as best she could, trying to keep up with Lionel. Eventually her pace slowed, and she started dropping behind him, and lost him entirely at one point. By the time she reached the ledge and had moved into the rock tunnel leading to his little hideaway, she was dog-tired.
He was crouched by the entrance to the opening, his revolver in his hand. He motioned for her to stop with a flat hand. Something was up.
She flattened herself against the rocks. He was staring intently at something, and she peered around the edge of the rocks to see. The radio played faintly from the shack, and a light was on inside, leaking out little rays through the holes in the metal siding. Celia pushed herself back against wall again, and patted it, indicating she would not move.
Lionel crept through the bushes, doing a much better job of being stealthy than she had before, disappearing after a moment. She heard a crunching noise, then the door to the shack banging off the outside of the wall, and a shout.
Loud voices carried through the rocks, bouncing off the walls of the entryway. "Over three goddamn months!" Lionel yelled.
A vaguely female ghoul-like voice answered him, "Don't yell at me, Lionel. You can't treat me like that!" A crash echoed out into the rocks, bouncing around to Celia's ears.
The voices lowered, the door to the shack was pulled shut, and Celia sat back onto her butt on the rocky ledge. She picked the briar out of her sock, flicking it off into the darkness of the wastes.
After a moment of silence, she moved away from the opening and perched at the edge of the clump of trees hiding the opening. Looking up at the stars she could see through the spidery limbs, she wondered. A faint chitter caught her ear, and she stood, looking downward over the edge. Must be out on the dry lake bed.
Lionel wasn't very friendly, Calhoun was right about that. Didn't mean she should give up on him, though. He fascinated her. Not just because of his appearance but because he had spent so many years in the wasteland, and she was certain that he could help the Vault dwellers if given proper respect. She was determined to try to crack that shell and pry out the Pre-War tales that she knew he could tell her, too. What was it like to live in that world, before the bombs, that she'd only imagined in her head with the help of holotapes and comics?
What was it like to have lived through... whatever horror the bombs had created, when they fell?
She hoped he wouldn't think her curiosity was stupid, like most of the Vault dwellers. She'd never met anyone so brusque and stubborn like he was. She couldn't hold a candle to that, even in her toughest moments. She'd had her moments, she knew.
Celia sat out by the rock for so long, she started falling asleep. She stood, stretched, and decided to try to make it back to Grayling, by herself. I'm stubborn, she told herself, and I can do it.