Bradley came to the town where the Vault dwellers had been, and consulted his prompt. The signal was still strong. Through the darkness, he marched out to the tower and followed the signal across the dry lake bed. Near the ant mounds, he found Wade's body.

Bradley did not look upon this with favor. The young man's face indicated he'd died violently, his neck crushed from brute force. He went through Wade's pockets and removed the Pip-Boy from his arm. The Pip-Boy showed that Wade had tracked the Landis girl across Lake Michigan, north into the wilds where Paramount was forbidden to go.

The journal also indicated that Wade had passively allowed himself to be captured―Bradley stiffened in disappointment―and upon his release, tracked the Landis girl back to a hideout near the ant mounds.

Bradley followed the directions in Wade's Pip-Boy. He walked up the rock ledge, into the face of the wall, and through a passageway. He broke through a blind, and came into a hole inside the rocks, open to the sky above.

Bradley drew his weapon―the laser pistol he'd taken to using for Wade's sake. He advanced to a well-maintained metal shack among the bushes, crunching a light bulb under his boots. He did not bother to hide his footsteps, nor did he announce himself. He set explosive charges on the door, and backed away.

With the press of a button, the front of the shack exploded. Bradley counted to ten before moving into the dust and chaos. The Landis girl was sprawled at the back of the shack, lying on top of a chair like a rag doll. His prompt sounded an alarm, and he looked to his right to see the ghoul Lionel beside him, raising a crowbar above his head. Bradley shot him through the shoulder, incapacitating him.

The crowbar dropped and the ghoul roared at him, lashing out with a leg. Bradley hit him in the face with his gun and shot him through both knees while he was recovering. The ghoul crumpled. Bradley didn't feel it was necessary to kill him.

"You'll live," he said, without emotion, and picked his way across the room to the girl. She stirred as he approached. "Get up, Landis," Bradley said.

Sluggishly, she rose to her knees. Covered in dust and with blood streaming down her face from a broken nose, she looked up at Bradley. "Wha?" she slurred, and pushed her hair out of her face.

"Get up, Landis," Bradley said, again, and aimed his pistol at the ghoul, who was trying to stand. "I don't know how you escaped the D2S orders. I will rectify that. Come with me."

She stared at him. The lamp on the table flickered on and off as the dust settled. "The metal piece," she said, her eyes unfocused.

"Yes," Bradley answered.

"Celia," the ghoul rasped.

Bradley shot him through the chest. The girl gasped and stood, trying to get past Bradley. He caught her with one hand and held her. "Get the piece, or he dies," he cautioned her.

She nodded, and pointed to the corner, her dusty face ashen. Bradley walked her to the corner. The ghoul reached out and tried to grab her ankle. She shot him a look, picked up the metal piece, and handed it to Bradley. He ignored this, and started to drag her off, stepping around the ghoul.

"Please," she said. "Take it and let me go!"

Bradley did not answer, but pulled her through the front of the shack, and toward the rock wall.

"Lionel!" she screamed, pulling on his grip. Bradley hit her with his pistol, put her over his shoulder, and carried her away.

He didn't know how long he laid there, trapped by his own busted body. He watched the sun rise over the rock wall, climb into the sky. His cheek was broken, a lung had collapsed, his arm and legs were too weak to hold his weight.

"I only had one day!" he yelled, uselessly, into the air.

The sun began to set, and he could hear a familiar gentle clicking noise from the passage. If he'd been able to, he'd be sweating buckets.

Lionel didn't know how he might have died. If he'd had to choose he'd rather have gone out less pathetically, but ignobly, like crashing a car into a divider, or getting crushed by a steel girder. After the the wastes made him virtually indestructible, he'd chosen willful suicide rather than be taken out. Not that he had the guts to ever try.

Not like this, though. Not helpless to the elements with those fucking ants crawling around, ready to drag him off to their mound and slowly dismantle him piece by piece.

And she was gone.

Goddammit.

Days later, Celia and Bradley arrived in Detroit. She watched the insurmountable black walls rise from the highway, saw the glittering lights of the towers like enormous gray mushroom clouds against the blackened sky. She heard the loud grating and banging of the city, bleeding out into the wasteland. It seemed to stretch on forever, in all directions. With a gag in her mouth, cuffed and attached by a lead to Bradley, all she could do was cry trails of terror down the dirt on her face.

The trip had been a forced march of starvation and corrective behavior. Bradley had gagged her when she wouldn't stop screaming into the wastes, attracting all manner of dangerous attention. She was so hungry that her legs had been going out from underneath her, stumbling over the broken asphalt. Bradley had attached the lead to her because of this, and her back was covered in tiny cuts from his dragging her through the shit on the wasteland floor.

They entered the city with nary a word, and she was forced into a disinfectant bath, stripped naked and clothed in a simple gray tunic that fell to her knees. Re-bound by Bradley, and cleaned, she was marched through the streets of Detroit.

Everything was blackened by the grime of the loud industrial complexes. Smoke covered the sky, and she felt her chest tighten with the lack of oxygen. Fires burned in barrels everywhere, lighting up the streets and the people, but they were still barely visible through the ever-present smog, milling in quiet throngs.

The other soldiers gave Bradley the odd little three-fingered salute as they walked past. Celia saw one soldier stomping on the stomach of a small child. She turned her head away, breathing faster.

She walked quickly, keeping up with Bradley. He dragged her through the slums, with the still-standing buildings coated in soot, and through a market that was depressingly quiet. They came to a building that was relatively clean compared to the rest of the city, but still ruined. Floodlights lit the courtyard, illuminating a set of train tracks, dead grass, and patrolling soldiers with growling dogs. Bradley strode to the enormous entry doors, and she squinted her eyes against the lights above them.

He pulled her inside, and she had to let her eyes adjust to the dim interior. The air was clear here, much more breathable than the outside, but still musty. She was led down a hallway and nearly thrown down onto a chair in a small room.

"If I remove your bindings," Bradley said to her, "and you start to scream again, I will flay the skin from your body, starting with your feet." She looked at him with wide, terrified eyes. "Do you understand?" he asked.

She nodded. He removed the gag and her cuffs. She breathed a little easier, but not by much. Bradley took a seat beside her and removed his helmet.

"You are going to meet the High Ferrule," he said, tonelessly. "You will behave, or I will compel you."

Celia closed her eyes and curled up on the chair, covering her face.

Bradley led her into a much bigger room. The ceiling was high, covered in a grid of metal, with floodlights set up every few feet. Children in gray robes knelt against the walls, chanting. Her eyes felt like they wanted to fly out of her head. A scaffold with grimy curtains was set into the middle of the room, more people in gray robes standing shoulder to shoulder around it, like a fence. Two of them parted for Bradley, and he pushed her through the curtains, following.

A ghoul in white robes sat before them on a stained glass throne, with a small girl to his right. The ghoul was terrible-looking, all his skin flaked away, muscles completely exposed and browned like cooked meat. He turned eyes onto her, completely obscured by cararacts, and when he smiled, her chest exploded in fear at the rotting teeth and atrophied tongue that lay within his mouth. Celia cried, forced to kneel by Bradley, her breath short and sharp.

Is that what Lionel will turn into? she asked herself.

"Bradley!" the ghoul said, his voice like radio static. "Who is our guest?"

Bradley jerked her arm up and held her so she was visible, but she flipped her hair over her face and looked down. He dropped her after a moment, and she fell to her knees again. "This is Celia Landis, sir," he said. "She was in possession of the ISD."

"You found it?" the ghoul asked, expectantly.

"Of course, sir," Bradley held out the metal beam.

The ghoul fluttered off the throne like a bird and swept up the beam, moving far quicker than his atrophied appearance would indicate. Celia watched him, fascinated, as he looked over it with the sightless eyes, turning it in his hand. "Yessss-" he hissed, then frowned, and made a high pitched growl. "No! No, no, NO!"

Bradley stood stock still as the ghoul cast aside the metal beam and clawed at his face. Celia edged away, glancing at the little girl. She stared at Celia with big green eyes and smiled sweetly.

"Look at the state this is in!" the ghoul growled, after discontinuing the assault. Bradley stared ahead, blankly, the scratches on his face bleeding slowly. "I can't use this! I'll have to build a new one―it will take MONTHS!" The ghoul slammed the metal beam down onto the throne and cracked the glass.

Celia swallowed her fear. This ghoul was so much more frightening than Lionel and Lilian, but he was still lucid. She wondered just how far a ghoul could go, before becoming completely feral. Oh, Lionel, she thought. Please, please don't come here. If you're alive... she didn't want to think about that. Bradley said he would live, and she expected the old soldier knew what he was talking about. But he'd been hurt so badly.

The ghoul immediately became more tractable, turning back to Bradley like a switch had been flipped. "What of Wade?" he asked, as if he'd never been upset.

"Dead, sir," Bradley said. He held out a Pip-Boy.

"What a shame," the ghoul said. "I was looking forward to executing him, personally." He looked over the Pip-Boy, feeling it with thin fingers. "Strange that he was so preoccupied with this girl."

"She seems determined to get in the way of Sigma, sir," Bradley said.

The ghoul turned to her. She didn't know if he could see her, but he looked directly at her face. "Is this true?"

She pushed herself back, sitting on her feet. "I―" she swallowed. The air was so hot in this place. "It is not," she said, in a small voice.

The ghoul laughed, and the little girl echoed his laughter. Celia was startled, looked at her with wide eyes. A brown hand came out and swiped across her face, and she cried out, fell forward. Her nose was broken again for the second time in a week. She knelt on her elbows, and tears fell to join the blood on the dry wood.

"Impertinence!" the ghoul snarled. "Interfering with Paramount operations is punishable by death."

"Shall I carry out the order, sir?" Bradley asked, drawing his weapon and aiming it at her head.

The ghoul sat down on the throne, on the broken glass, and considered for a moment. He ran his hands along the metal beam again, an ecstatic expression on his face. Celia looked at him through her hair, trying not to move. He placed a hand on his cheek and leaned onto his elbow, staring at the metal thing. "Bradley," he said, maliciously. "I don't think Phaeton has been fed, recently."

She jerked her head up. Phaeton? What is that?

"I will deliver her to the Sepulchre, sir," Bradley answered.

The ghoul waved them off, and held the metal beam in his hands, running his white eyes over it.