POV: Beckett
The bar looked almost the same. Same creaky rusted counter, same makeshift shelves stacked with salvaged bottles and dented mugs, same old lanterns swinging on their rusted chains. But this wasn't the old camp. Not exactly. Crater was only a half mile east now, close enough for me to hear the hum of the generators some days, or the occasional echo of Meg yelling orders from the scaffolding.
We had rebuilt here. After everything.
I was behind the bar polishing a glass with the edge of my shirt when the door opened.
She stepped out.
Leeann.
Still half-dreamy from sleep, her dark hair spilling loose around her shoulders, Pip-Boy catching the light.
But something was off.
She didn't look at me. Didn't wave. Didn't smile.
She just walked. Straight past the deck, down the dirt path toward the ridge north of camp. Her boots barely made a sound. Her arms hung stiff at her sides.
"Leeann?" I called out.
No answer.
I stepped out from behind the bar, my heartbeat hitching. "Lee? You good?"
Still nothing.
She was moving faster now.
I dropped the glass and jogged after her, wiping my hands on my pants, trying not to panic. The camp faded behind us, lantern light swallowed by the bleached bones of trees. The sound of the irradiated stream fell away.
She didn't stop until we were nearly to the edge of the ridge—a hundred yards from the treeline, just where the cracked soil gave way to rocks and fog.
I caught up, breath tight in my chest.
"Leeann, what—"
She didn't turn.
She was staring out over the trees, like she was seeing something I couldn't.
Then she spoke.
"This is the edge of the map."
Her voice was hollow. Like it had come from somewhere else.
I frowned. "What are you talking about?"
I reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder.
She turned.
And my breath left me.
It wasn't her.
Not my Leeann.
It was the other one.
The one I had seen in that flash of light, that impossible second when the lounger had shocked me, when her mind had jumped realities.
Her face was streaked with tears. Her eyes blank with sorrow.
She looked through me, opening her mouth to speak—
And I jolted upright in my bed, gasping.
Camp. Our camp.
The bar lights were dark. The wind outside was soft. The Ohio River whispered nearby.
Leeann lay beside me, asleep. Peaceful.
My Leeann.
I pressed a shaking hand to my face, heart still hammering.
It was a dream. Just a dream.
But it didn't feel like one.
It felt like a warning.
I didn't go back to sleep.
I just lay there for a while, watching her breathe.
The soft rise and fall of her chest. The way her hand curled lightly into the blanket. She looked so calm. So here.
But that dream still echoed in the hollow parts of me.
She shifted a little, mumbling something too quiet to catch, and I nearly lost it. It was the same voice. The same body. But it wasn't. Not completely.
I swallowed hard, lying back down beside her, careful not to wake her. The air was warm but I felt cold.
Some part of her had been lost out there. In some distant place I'd never reach.
And no matter how close we were now, I couldn't help but wonder—
It had been almost a year since we sent her consciousness back into her reality- or hopefully that's what happened. The guilt of not knowing ate me alive sometimes. We had built a strangely comfortable routine and life together. She never disappeared, never went away without telling me.
Occasionally there would be something that seemed to remind her of her old life, and she'd struggle to remember, before almost… glitching. Skipping a beat, and resetting. Like she forgot she'd started to remember.
It creeped me out, honestly.
But besides that eerie reminder of how I'd managed to keep her by my side, she was still, herself. Leeann. And we were still us.
I got up just before dawn.
The light outside hadn't changed yet, and Leeann was still asleep. I eased out from under the blanket, careful not to stir her, and padded quietly to the corner desk where I kept a few old notebooks and stubby pencils.
I flipped one open, found a blank page, and began to write.
It wasn't poetry. It wasn't even coherent at first. Just pieces. Images. The way her voice had sounded in the dream. The words she'd said.
This is the edge of the map.
I sketched the ridge. The outline of her figure. The way her face had looked when she turned—empty and aching and familiar. Like she knew me, and didn't know me, all at once.
I added notes in the margins. Thoughts about neural echo, memory bleed, residual tethering from the transfer. Stuff I barely understood, but Punk might. Stuff I didn't want to forget.
I didn't know what it meant.
Not yet.
But it meant something.
And I wasn't ready to tell her. Not until I could understand it myself. So I wrote.
And when the sun finally touched the tops of the trees outside, I closed the notebook gently and tucked it into the drawer.
Then I went to make us coffee.
The last year had been full of activity. When we'd first gotten back, we'd just fallen into each other. Over, and over again. I smiled slyly at the thought, remembering how we couldn't keep our hands off of one another. There had been relief in the freedom of knowing we wouldn't be apart again.
My hands moved mechanically, scooping coffee from the tin into now boiling water. I leaned against the counter next to the stove. The array of chemical equipment fading out of focus as I thought back.
She had been eager and determined to find anyone else that might have been stolen, and get them back home. She and Punk had communicated back and forth pretty regularly for a few months, chasing signals, and rooting through old Vault-Tec databases. Anything they could get their hands on.
We'd gone to Sutton for an entire week, so she could talk to her vault Overseer about what had happened, but the woman was just stunned to silence in the wake of our discoveries. She had had no idea. The old woman had, however, given Leeann access codes and keys, so if she did need to get anywhere, or into anything, she could do it with ease. Then she'd given Leeann a list. The names of everyone that had made it to her after leaving the vault. It was a better place than nowhere to start.
I poured coffee into two mugs, adding brahmin milk, and a little sugar to hers, just the way she liked it. "Light as khaki," she would say.
After our visit to the Overseer, the expeditions started. We would stock up and travel out for days at a time, searching abandoned towns, mine shafts, broken creaking towers, searching every inch of Appalachia that was reasonable. This is the edge of the map- the words sent a shiver down my spine.
Was there really, an… edge?
"Morning Beck," Leeann's voice broke softly into my thoughts, and I turned to see her standing at the bottom of the stairs, still in one of my shirts, her hair tousled and sleepy.
She looked like home.
"You're up early," she murmured, crossing to the bar.
"Yeah," I said, sliding her mug toward her. "Just couldn't sleep."
She took a sip, eyes closing briefly in appreciation. "You always remember the sugar."
I smiled. "How could I forget?"
She chuckled, then leaned against the counter, watching me a beat too long.
"You okay?" she asked finally.
I nodded, lying through my teeth. "Yeah. Just had a weird dream."
She didn't press. Just stepped close, kissing my cheek and settling against the counter next to me.
We stood there in the morning quiet, the scent of coffee and gun oil hanging between us, the world outside starting to wake.
And I held onto that moment. Something made me think that it might be the last peaceful one for a while.
It was late afternoon when I heard the gate swing.
I stood behind the bar restocking ammo boxes when a familiar pair of boots hit the porch.
"Punk?" I called.
He stepped into view, panting slightly, his eyes wide.
"You alone?"
My pulse kicked up. "Leeann's out gathering. Why?"
He clambered up to the bar, tossing a small pack onto the counter and lowering his voice. "I found something. Or… it found me."
"What the hell does that mean?"
Punk pulled out a terminal module, wires trailing from the base. "You remember those lounger logs? The way they recorded synaptic shadows after a consciousness transfer?"
I nodded slowly. "Uh-huh, sure."
"Well… someone—or something—piggybacked a secondary signal through yours."
My blood ran cold.
"Wait—through mine?"
Punk nodded. "Yeah. When the lounger shocked you, it must have made a neural imprint. Like a temporary bridge. It shouldn't've lasted—but I caught a spike three nights ago. Then again this morning. Same frequency. Same brainprint."
"Leeann?"
Punk swallowed hard. "Not the one we know."
The notebook flashed through my mind.
"She's reaching through," I whispered.
Punk shook his head. "Or bleeding through. Whatever happened… it left a crack in the door. And I think that crack leads, to you."
The world tilted slightly beneath my boots.
The real Leeann was in trouble.
I could feel it.