Morning

It was still dark when Ellen and her father and Dogmeat emerged from the depths of Smith Casey's garage. A faint glow stained the very edge of the eastern skies, barely enough to even notice. Ellen shook her head. "I didn't think we'd spent that long in there," she murmured.

"One loses track of time in circumstances such as those," James said. "How's your Pip-Boy's light holding up?"

For answer, Ellen switched it on, bathing the area in front of them with enough light to navigate by. There was a wordless agreement between the two of them: dark as it was, dangerous as it might be, neither of them wanted to be anywhere near that Vault's entrance so much as a moment longer than they had to. And if nothing else, at least the sun was coming up. They picked their way in silence along southward and then east along the scabrous grey rock that was all that remained of an ancient road. As the eastern skies began to fade from black to blue, Ellen heard a gurgling noise. She glanced curiously at her father, whose expression was mildly tinged by embarrassment. "Did you want to stop?" she asked.

"I didn't think I was going to need to eat so soon after those pods," James murmured. "You haven't got anything extra in that pack of yours, have you?"

"Actually, yes," Ellen said with a suppressed smile. "I only found out about this garage from a trader I ran into, Doc Hoff- I topped up my supplies with him just in case. Find somewhere to sit, I'll see if I can get a fire going."

"You seem to have adapted pretty well to life on the surface," James observed once Ellen's fire was well under way. "Who taught you about burning Brahmin chips?"

"Nobody, exactly," Ellen admitted, shifting her weight. Sitting on the road in the armor wasn't particularly easy. "There's enough people in Megaton who do it that I picked up the idea on my own."

"Megaton. You're living there now?" James lifted one eyebrow, a feat Ellen had never been very good at.

Ellen nodded, and added a few more chips to the fire; it would be a while before there was enough sun to warm the Wasteland air.

"Did you really disarm that bomb?" James asked. When Ellen looked up, wide-eyed, he pointed to his Pip-Boy. "You're not the only one to get Three Dog's signal, you know."

"Oh- well-" Ellen ducked her head, embarrassed. "I had to study up for days first, but-"

"Ellen, that's nothing short of incredible," James said. With a shake of his head and just a hint of a smile he added, "Your mother would be so proud of you."

Ellen thought back to the great looming shape of the Failsafe Terminal in the moments before she activated the Chinese invasion program. "I- I don't know, Dad-"

"Well, you should." James pointed at her. "I heard what Braun wanted you to do, you know. He would never have stopped with just making you make the Nussbaum boy cry."

"I had a feeling," Ellen admitted. "But-"

"Hmm?"

She looked down and drew a deep, deep breath. "Even if... what I did in there. Even if that was the right thing... Dad, there's been so much else..."

"I thought there might be," James murmured. "And we'll talk about it. All of it. But first I really would like to get something a little more solid than pod nutrient solution into me."

"Whoops. Sorry," Ellen said, and dug out the cans of Cram she'd bought from Doc Hoff and the bottles of water she'd been carrying since Megaton. "Will this be all right?"

"Definitely." James smiled. "I believe I've got my knife around here somewhere..."

The Cram cooked up rather nicely once cut into thin enough slices, and made for a reasonably palatable breakfast. Ellen set part of it aside for Dogmeat- the last thing she needed was for him to run off after a molerat in search of his own meal. "Where'd he come from?" James inquired around a mouthful of Cram. "I don't recall any like him in Megaton."

"No, I got him from farther north," Ellen said. "I'd taken a message from Lucy West up to her family in Arefu, only there was a problem..."

He gestured to her to go on, and she did, first about Arefu and then about the Family, and then about Dogmeat and the Scrapyard and a dozen other things that had happened. The fire had all but burnt out and the remaining Cram had long since gone cold when he finally shook his head. "Ellen, that's incredible. For you to have come so far, through so much trouble, and still have the core of the young woman I remember-"

( "So, you're worried he won't recognise you?" )

She couldn't quite speak. She just swallowed, and did her best to smile.

"The Wasteland's not a good place, Ellen. Not unless people make it so," said her father a little more seriously. "And I think we both know how easy it is not to do that. The fact that you've kept at it in spite of everything- yes, including Andale- well. That takes a very special kind of person."

"I-"

But she never finished the sentence. Dogmeat leaped abruptly to his feet, growling. A ragged, worn-looking group of figures was stumbling their way. "Oh, God," said their leader, a man of dull brown hair and dark tan skin. An odd, heavy-looking collar encircled his neck. "Please- you've got to help us- I don't know how long we've got before these collars go off!"

James' expression hardened. "Slave collars," he translated, for Ellen's sake. "Paradise Falls uses them to control their captives. If they try to escape- boom."

The man and his companions all nodded. "Can you help us? We'll do anything-"

"I can try," Ellen said. "I have a little experience. Hold very, very still."

It was touchy work, but not much more so than the landmines Moira had taught her to defuse, and Ellen had grown used to working quickly under awful circumstances. As she started on the third collar her father said, "I'm surprised you got this far south."

"We're not coming from Paradise Falls," said the second man, leathery-skinned and blond from too much sun. "Those slaver bastards bought us up months ago, south of here, past the old car tunnel. When they stopped to clear out a bunch of ghouls west of here we got away. We'd be goners by now if they'd noticed we were missing."

The third collar came away from the man's neck with a click. Ellen looked down at the things with some distaste, then turned and flung them, one at a time, as far southward as she could. If they were going to explode, let them explode somewhere that would only harm the landscape.

"Thank you," said the third man. "Oh, thank you. We owe you our lives."

"Will you be going back now?" said James. "Where's home for you three?"

"Nowhere," said the first man. "There's nothing left. First came the mutants, then the slavers- I don't wanna know what's living there now."

"So what happens to you, then?" Ellen asked. Mentally she ran a finger down the list of places she knew that might take in three strangers; it wasn't a long list.

"Well-" The third man fidgeted. "Some of the other slaves were talking about a place far to the north, past ... Canterbury Commons? I'm not sure where that is-"

"I am," Ellen murmured. "Go on."

"A- all right- anyway, they said it was a place where slaves were made into free men. Where we'd find sanctuary. We were going to try and find it..."

Ellen cast an eye over the ragged figures. There was no way they'd last on their own, she was sure of it; if they had so much as a single weapon among them, she didn't want to know where they'd hidden it. They looked underfed, dehydrated, and- not to put too fine a point on it- sick in more than a few ways. They didn't even know where Canterbury was. If she just sent them on their way as was it would be nothing short of murder. She bit her lip, then half-turned. "Dad?"

"I can reach Rivet City on my own," was his surprisingly gentle response.

She blinked, and turned the rest of the way. "How did you-"

"Ellen," said her father, "I think, after everything that's happened, that I know at least a little bit about what I can expect from you. Go on. You know you want to."

.... he was right. Ellen nodded, and turned back to the ragged men. "Like I said before," she said, "I know where Canterbury is. And we can probably find this Temple of yours without too much trouble between the lot of us. Would you three gentlemen like an escort?"

Temple of the Union

Ellen made a mental note to swing by Canterbury Commons and buy as many stimpaks as she could carry when she headed back south. The blond man, Perlie Garner, had been stung by a radscorpion before Ellen could kill it and she'd had to use up most of her own supply to save him. As it was, well- up ahead there was a ruin that might've been an office building once, and that was the only relatively-intact building standing anywhere in sight. If it wasn't the Temple that they'd been looking for, it would at least be a place to rest.

As they approached the building, someone inside darted past one of the gaping holes in the wall where windows had been. "What's your business, stranger?" a woman's voice called out.

"We're slaves," called Enrique, the tanned man. "Escaped slaves, trying to find the Temple of the Union. Please, we've been on the run so long-"

"Fine, fine- what about her, though?" The speaker peered out a little longer now, her face pale and weathered, her eyes distrustful. "Runaways don't wind up with that kind of gear."

"I've been escorting these gentlemen," said Ellen in answer. "For safety's sake."

The woman wrinkled her nose. "Hnf. All right. Hannibal says I gotta let folks like you in along with folks like them, but that don't mean I have to like it," she grumbled. "Keep your hands in sight and don't make any sudden moves. I'm coming down to open the gate."

She disappeared. Ellen glanced at the three men, but their attention was on the gate like Dogmeat's on a half-open can of Cram. Ellen couldn't really blame them; she turned back in time to catch a muttered 'Out of my way' and the sound of a lock squeaking open. "Okay," said the woman. "Hannibal's upstairs somewhere. You three go on up and see him first, and then he wants to talk to you." She nodded to Ellen as she locked the door. "Don't try anything."

"I wasn't planning on it," Ellen said mildly.

The woman grunted and leaned back against a nearby wall, her eyes on Ellen and her rifle in her hands. Ellen did her best to ignore the angry glare, instead looking around. There was no roof on the building, and the upper floors were so battered and broken that sunshine reached the ground floor in places. A scrawny but otherwise healthy-looking dog, who had something of Dogmeat's look to him, was sprawled in one of the sunnier patches. Off to one side, a dark-skinned, muscular man in leathers and pre-war goggles was at work on some slab of stone with a hammer and a chisel. There was a Brahmin about somewhere, too- Ellen couldn't see it, but she could certainly smell it. Possibly it was outside, or behind one of the closed doors- the building had been fairly large once and for all she knew the back room might've been converted into an impromptu stable...

"Send her up," came a man's voice from overhead.

"You heard the man." The woman gestured with her rifle. "Go on, get going."

Ellen clucked once to Dogmeat and started up the stairs. Enrique and the last of the three escapees were seated at a crudely-propped up table, eating; Perlie was being led towards a closed door towards the back of the building. Towards the front of the building, for no reason that Ellen could discern, was a sizable stone head of Abraham Lincoln. There were several other people there that she didn't recognize, and one of them, a skinny man several shades darker than Sheriff Simms in a suit of bodged-together combat armor, was coming her way. "Ah," he said, "our visitor. Welcome to the Temple of the Union. I am Hannibal Hamlin. I'm not going to ask who you are. For the moment, I don't care. We are all escaped slaves here, and I need your solemn promise not to betray us to Paradise Falls or the slavers. Until I get that, you cannot leave here. So, do I have your word?"

She glanced over at Enrique and Somersett, and then back at the man speaking to her. It seemed a pointless thing to ask in the light of evidence, but- "All right," she said. "I promise."

The dark man nodded, smiled. "Welcome, sister, to the Temple of the Union. Our home is your home. Your past is your own affair, so long as you serve our common good. As a symbol of our trust, here is a key to the gate."

Ellen blinked; she hadn't expected that. "Thanks," she said as Hannibal deposited the key in her upturned palm. "Um. What's the deal with the head, there?"

"That's Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator," said Hannibal. "We don't know how it came to be here, but it's fitting, don't you think?"

"About the only better option would be Harriet Tubman," said Ellen, who'd paid attention in her American History classes. "So you were-"

"For twenty-three years I was a slave, ever since I was fourteen," Hannibal said. "Six years ago I managed to escape from my master, a coastal trader named Tobar. He's been hunting me ever since. When I found the head of Lincoln here, I knew it was a sign for me to help other slaves to escape. I founded the Temple of the Union as a safe haven for runaway slaves everywhere."

Ellen nodded, glancing around at the other people on their floor. "It looks like you're off to a good start," she murmured, not knowing what else to say. That sort of thing was well outside her experience.

"Maybe," Hamlin demurred. "We want to create a haven for all runaway slaves. We give food and supplies to any that find us, and help them on their way. If we had the room, or the water, we would let them stay, but- well, look around you. It's not much more than a waypoint, at best." His expression brightened, growing more intense as he added, "I have a plan, though. A plan to take over a place that will be a shining beacon of hope for all slaves."

"Um," said Ellen. "'Take over'?"

"Not like that, I assure you," Hamlin said. "I want to move all my people to the Memorial site for the great Abraham Lincoln, but I need to know if it's safe. I've heard rumors of supermutants infesting the area, you see. We've been debating who to send to investigate for a while now."

Well, Ellen had to go into the DC ruins anyway, and Mr. Mills had taken her to his world's Memorial. If she could get into the Metro system again she could come up close enough to the Washington Monument that the Memorial would be in sight, and then from there a tunnel trip to Rivet City would be simple enough. "I think," she said, "that I could help you with that."

"I was hoping you would help us," Hamlin admitted. "Do you know the ruins at all?"

"I've been in and out a few times."

"Good," said Hamlin. The Memorial lies at the western end of the National Mall, beyond the Washington Monument. It should be easy enough to find. One other thing- talk to Caleb Smith, downstairs, before you set out. He'll need your help. We can't leave unless he's ready, too."

Ellen cocked her head curiously. "What does he need?"

"He was a stonemason. It will fall to him to restore the Memorial as best he can. He's been pestering me for weeks now to get him some things he needs. I don't have time to deal with him right now."

Ellen's eyebrows went up, but she nodded. "I'd better get busy, then."

Hamlin bowed his head. "May the spirit of the great Lincoln protect you."

Caleb, Ellen guessed, was the dark man working on the stone downstairs. As she approached she saw that it was an ancient marble slab, that there had been words carved in it once. Only a few letters were even remotely readable now. Caleb was busily working away at some of the letters, stone dust hanging in the air around him. At Ellen's approach he said, "You're new. I'm Caleb. If you're going to be staying a while, I could use some help."

"Actually," Ellen said, "Hannibal tells me you need something?"

Caleb straightened up, wiping his forehead on the back of one arm. "Hannibal told you about Lincoln's Memorial?" he said curiously. When Ellen nodded, he went on. "Well, he doesn't just want to live there. He also wants to restore it. Make it so people tell stories about it and the word can get to the slaves. But I can't restore something if I don't know what it looked like. I need a drawing or a photograph of it when it was in its prime."

Ellen thought for a moment of Milliways, but just said, "And I bet you know where I can find one."

"Yes." Caleb gestured southward with his chisel. "There might be one in the Museum of History. Alejandra says there was an exhibit going on about Lincoln when the bombs fell. If you could bring it back for me-"

"I'll see what I can do," Ellen promised. There were ruins enough along the route south, she was sure. At least one would ahve a door she could try. "I'd better get going."

"Thanks," said Caleb, and flashed a dazzling smile. "Take care out there."