Jay Posey - Three

“It’s… I mean, is it safe for you to stay?” she asked.

“Safe enough, I would guess. It’s been OK so far.”

Three began rummaging through the scraps on one table, but called back over his shoulder.

“Not sure it’ll stay that way, kid. Might be safer if you move with us.”

“I can’t, Three. The Vault is home. Plus, you never know when some more travelers might come through, yeah? Be a shame if there wasn’t anyone here to let ’em in.”

“Did travelers come through before…?” Cass asked, but trailed off, not knowing how to finish the sentence without sounding callous.

“Before the attack? Yeah, every few weeks, here and there,” Jackson answered. He picked up a biochem battery off one of the tables, rolled it over in his hand absentmindedly. “The Vault’s out of the way and mostly out of view. It’s always been an OK spot to make a trade, and a good spot to rest.”

“To hide?”

He shrugged. “Nobody asked questions, too much, except Gev.” He went quiet for a moment, and Cass didn’t feel like she should respond. After a moment, Jackson set the battery down and continued. “Always had a good sense for people, you know? He kept this place pretty quiet and calm. Turned away the troublemakers, and kept an eye on the rest of us.”

“Not all the troublemakers, the way he’d tell it,” Three said from his corner. “Used to say you were a handful.”

Jackson cracked a sad smile, remembering.

“More like two.”

Three stopped his rummaging, turned to address Jackson.

“Hey.”

Jackson looked over to him.

“He thought a lot of you, you know. Always called you a good kid.” Jackson nodded, but dropped his gaze. Ashamed of something he’d done, maybe, or overwhelmed by Three’s words; Cass couldn’t tell. “And you said it yourself, Gev had a real good sense of people. You are a good kid, no matter what you may or may not have done.”

“It’s a nice thought, but you don’t know what I’ve done.”

Three returned to his rummaging, but wouldn’t let Jackson have the last word.

“Doing and being are two different things, Jackson.”

Jackson didn’t respond, but Cass saw his shoulders sag, like long-borne tension had suddenly released. He was quiet for a long while.

Cass found Wren sitting cross-legged on the floor, right next to her feet, rolling his new strobe from hand to hand, staring at it as if there were some swirling color and light within it. To her eyes, it was simply a clear ball, but she knew that Wren’s eyes often saw far more than hers.

“What are we looking for?” she finally called.

“Four days to Greenstone. Take what you need.”

They’d spent the better part of the afternoon scouring the Treasure Room for supplies for their trip, which Three organized now. Jackson had led them all to a long-unused apartment; sizeable, furnished with a large bed, a couple of chairs, and its own bathroom facilities, which pretty much made it the honeymoon suite of the Vault. Three’d laid all their supplies out across that bed. Warmer clothes, sturdier shoes, better backpacks, food that would travel well. And as requested, a few old blankets, and a pair of firebricks, though he wouldn’t be packing those. They’d have to start at first light and travel hard to make it to the next wayhouse, and he didn’t trust the others to pack their own bags.

He’d asked about ammunition, of course, but there’d been none he could use. Of course. A lot of inert shells, which he had plenty of already. A handful of small-time pocket protectors, 1-kJ jobs for back alleys and gamedives. Nothing for serious work. Jackson had offered an 18-kilojoule shell he’d been keeping with him in his “safe place”, but it was too small to fit the chamber on Three’s pistol and wasn’t worth cracking open for parts.

It hadn’t been all bad news, though. Jackson had managed to turn up a single jector of Trivex in an old trauma kit that had fallen down behind one of the tables nearest the wall. The jector’s flexiglass casing was frosted with ages-old dust, and without doubt the chems were past peak potency, but the dose was almost enough to cover the trip to Greenstone. In a stroke of actual good luck, the same kit had contained three minijectors worth of the syntranq Somalin. Three’d run the numbers four separate times to be sure. Full jector of Trivex tonight, let Cass’s system spin up on it while she slept. Mini of Somalin every 18 hours or so to slow the burn. If they kept up the pace, and didn’t have any major shocks along the way, it just might be enough. It was almost enough to make Three think they were getting a little bias from the System. Almost.

Cass had gone with Jackson and Wren back to the Commons to scrounge up some “real” food while Three took care of organizing their packs. Running solo, organizing had never been much of an issue. Wits, water, and weapons. The Essential Three of the open, in proper order. Everything else was fluff. As the saying went, if you’d survived out in the open long enough to get truly hungry, you’d already outlived your life expectancy. But traveling with those two, well… they had a lot of fluff. He loaded as much as he could in his own harness, knowing every extra kilogram he could grit out was one less for the woman and boy to wrestle with. He’d tried to keep everything they might need close at hand, but he realized he had no way to know what they might want close at hand. This wasn’t his way.

He shook his head. Kid’s dad is in Morningside, and the girl’s dying. Seemed like every answer he got just raised more questions. Who was Wren’s father, and how long had it been since she’d seen him? Did he know he had a son? What did Wren know about his dad? And what did Wren know about Three? He’d said something about Three being “just pretend”, which sounded too close to something Three didn’t want them to know. And then there was Cass… dying how? How soon? Of what?

We’re all dying, girl. All of us, all the time. What makes you special?

He heard the trio coming down the corridor, and busied himself with securing the packs and moving them to the floor. He rolled the blankets around the firebricks and placed those on top of his harness, out of the way.

“You can stay up here with us, you know,” Cass said, as they entered the room. “We really don’t mind.”

Jackson shook his head. “I appreciate it, Cass, but I just… I think I’ll sleep better down there.”

Cass flopped Wren up on to the bed, helped him pull his shoes off.

“They’re not trying to get in here anymore,” Three added. “I watched them myself.”

Wren scrambled up towards the top of the bed. Three noticed the boy still had the strobe in hand. Cass sat on the foot of the bed, mild observer to the conversation. She was exhausted, in pain, fading. And still her primary concern was her son. Something like admiration stirred in Three.

“Well, I dunno what it is. But I feel safe there, yeah? They didn’t find me when they were… that night. No reason to risk it.”

“Only thing different down there’s the water, kid.”

Jackson looked puzzled. So did Cass.

“The water’s different?”

“Your ‘safe place’. It’s under the central water exchange for the Vault.”

“Yeah…?”

Three shrugged. “Something about all the water, rushing through the pipes. Makes it hard for ’em to see. Impossible, sometimes.”

Obviously news to Jackson. But Three saw the wheels turning in Cass’s eyes. Thinking back to the storm water system, no doubt. If he wasn’t careful, she was going to learn all his tricks.

“But if they’re not coming in, they can’t see you anyway,” he continued. “So no need to sleep on a wet floor.”