Cooper Howard stopped the tape. Two hundred and fourteen odd years ago…meant that it had been about five years since Lana Hunter and Janey left the vault. "Hope she's right about how good she is at stayin' alive." he muttered. And more than that, that she kept Janey alive too, and that she loved Janey as much as she said.

If he found them and Janey was alive and well, there weren't enough caps in New California to repay what he owed Lana Hunter.

Lucy popped her head out of a door. "Hey, you're going to want to come see this," she gestured for him to come to her.

It was the room Lana and Janey used as their bedroom. On the walls was a whole gallery worth of pictures and even a few Robco Fun 60-Sec-Snaps—there must have been a 60-Sec camera and film somewhere in the vault. Most of the pictures were in a familiar childish style that often graced the refrigerator of their old home, but a few were the work of an adult with some talent in drawing. He was more interested in those Janey drew, of course.

Drawn in pen, pencil and whatever markers were on hand, including highlighters, the ones at the beginning looked like bruises—lots of black and blue, accented with red, heavy, scribbled lines. Except, of course, for the lurid yellow and orange mushroom clouds that loomed threateningly in the background of many of them. There was one of their family before, with Janey trying to hold on to both him and Barb, doing her best to keep them together.

The ones that broke his heart were those of Janey in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors who looked more like sinister aliens doing medical experiments on her while she cried, her face bandaged like a mummy. One of Janey reaching for Roosevelt. Not that they were extremely detailed—his daughter was only seven, and the pictures showed it.

He paused when he saw the first finely drawn portrait of Janey, signed Lana. It showed Janey sitting at a desk with a half-finished picture in front of her. Janey herself looked sad but still, somehow, impossibly, adorable with big, dark eyes, a tiny little snubbed looking nose, and a mouth that turned down at the corners. What did she remind him of?

Then he remembered going to the zoo and seeing blue-faced snub-nosed monkeys. (he was also aware of the problem with thinking of his mixed race child in connection with monkeys, but that was what she looked like in that picture.) As he went along, though, the bruised looking pictures started to lighten, becoming less dark and more colorful, much like an actual bruise in the process of healing. Lana herself started showing up in the pictures, a dark haired woman with blue eyes. He could tell it was her because the pictures were labeled.

The pictures were dated, and it looked like Janey did one every day. There were a few gaps in the gallery—favorite pictures Janey chose to take with her?

"Art therapy," Lucy said as she looked over the pictures with him. "It's a good way of dealing with emotional trauma."

Then he saw the first photograph. It was of Janey alone, and it showed her wearing a child's version of a vault suit, with a balaclava hat that covered her face except for her eyes and her mouth. It looked to be hand-made, as it was either knitted or crocheted, and it looked like a calico kitten face. Janey was smiling widely. The next was of both of them wearing matching hats, cheek to cheek so they would both fit in the picture.

They both looked happy, a mama cat and her baby kitten.

Not enough caps in New California to repay Lana Hunter? There weren't caps enough in the world.

He turned to Lucy. "Can you see if there's a database or something, files, maybe? I want to know how and why Miss Hunter wound up here." And if she were an axe murderer or child trafficker.

He went down the line, looking at more drawings. There was Lana Hunter teaching Janey at a desk, there they were reading together, having a meal…. In this one, they were out at a market together, both in their hats. So they had left the vault more than once?

That made sense. How else could Lana get information about Lake Tahoe? And she found a way to include Janey without his daughter having to show her face and get ostracized for being a ghoul.

"This is gonna complicate matters," he said to himself.

In the last one, another photograph of the two of them together, he got a shock. This time, they weren't wearing masks.

By pre-War standards, Lana was about a Hollywood six, which was an eight in the real world. In the Wasteland? A twelve. He couldn't tell exactly how old she was—thirties, perhaps? That was without taking into consideration one important fact.
Lana Hunter had a large scar on her left cheek. It looked pitted and cratered like the surface of the moon. He had seen just such a scar on a wanted poster the day they left Vegas with the caravan.

"Jael," he said. "Goddamnit."

He raised his voice so Lucy could hear him. "I got good news and bad news."

"So do I. Who goes first?" she called back.

"I do. First thing, though, let me tell ya about another rule. Kind of a law, actually. Have you ever heard of Chekov's Law?" he asked her.

"Mmm—no."

"This comes from the theater. Ya see, Chekov was a writer. He said, if you show a gun in Act 1, it's gotta go off in Act 3. If there's anything about this world I've learned, it's that it thrives on drama. It's all about the foreshadowing, see? Introducing the gun in Act 3 don't work as well. Ya gotta let the anticipation build up first."

"I'll take your word for it," she said. "I'm not sure what it has to do with this, though."

"Hang in there, it'll come to you eventually. Anyhow," he went on. "The good news is, as of a few weeks ago anyway, Lana Hunter, and I'm assuming Janey, are alive. Plus, Miss Hunter has, or had, a lucrative career."

"That's good, right? What's the bad news?" Lucy asked, appearing in the doorway.

"Ceasar wants her head for killing several of his men and skinning at least one of them."

"What? How do you know—wait, why does that sound so familiar?" Lucy's brow creased.

"Remember a few weeks back, in the market where I bought my new duds?" he asked.

"Yes. Oh_OH! Jael! The leatherworker. How do you know?"

"Because I saw the bounty poster. The scar is right there in those photos. Plus that vendor said she had a kid and that was why she went Mama Deathclaw on their asses."

"Good for her," Lucy said. "Considering what I've learned about her, I'm not surprised."

"What did you find out?" he asked.

"She wasn't lying about being good at shooting things and not getting killed. In fact she has a lot of training in it. You might even say she was born for it." Lucy reported.

"That's the good news, is it?" he asked.

"Yes. The bad news is, there was no 'Lana Hunter' in the records. However, there was a J-L4N4, designation Hunter, prototype Courser. She's a synth, a human being grown in a lab. I read the notes. They made her to be faster, stronger and smarter than regular synths—able to function independently and make decisions on her own. She was supposed to go out and catch escaped synths to bring them back to the Institute—which is in Massachusetts, by the way.

"The problem was, after she brought back some escapees a few times, she refused to do it anymore. So they wiped her memory, or tried to, and installed a brain scan from a woman who was a forest ranger. They chose her brain scan because she was antisocial— not because she did bad things, but because she just didn't like people. However, her original personality sort of bled through, so now they had a prototype who was even less attached to the Institute.

"So they gave up the idea of a different breed of synth and decided to choose from among the ordinary synths who were obedient and met their profile in other ways, then train them and give them physical upgrades. That way they'd be less likely to go rogue."

"So how did she wind up in a vault?"

"Well," Lucy shrugged. "She was too expensive to liquidate and too troublesome to keep in service. They reassigned her to this vault."

"Huh," he thought about it, and looked again at the room, and at the pictures. Janey looked happy in the last photograph. Her later pictures were more open, using brighter colors, showing more positive themes. "A synth? Hell, I don't care what she is. If she's taken good care of Janey, even if she really were a mama deathclaw, I wouldn't bat an eye. Does it say anything about the scar?"

"Something laid eggs in her face." Lucy said. "They hatched."

"And they didn't bother to treat it," he asked, knowing the answer. "Because she was a slave."

"Well, um…I mean, they made her, but they made her with human DNA. Apparently you can't tell the difference except through an autopsy. I think that makes her human." Lucy concluded. "I mean, she's human enough to care for your daughter. These pictures are evidence of that."

"Uh-huh. Alright. More good news is that the road from Sac-Town to New Reno goes right by the southern tip of Lake Tahoe, and the Happy Trails Caravan Company does too. It's a lot shorter than the road from Vegas to Sac-Town, but it's also more up-hill…"