Suspects

“Well,” said Ellen as she raised her head from the scope,“I’m not seeing any giant ants. That’s something, at least…”

“They’ve been pretty active lately,” Stockholm said. Even up here, on the highest walkway to run around the inside of Megaton’s walls, he wore goggles against the Wasteland dust. “Just the usual, though. Same patrols and scouting runs they’ve been doing ever since that Tanya woman got here.”

“But they haven’t been attacking people?”

Stockholm shrugged, his combat armor clattering faintly. “Raiders, yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen them dragging dead raiders back to the school. Regular people? No.”

That, also, was something. If the ants weren’t attacking ordinary people, Tanya probably wasn’t doing anything- unless the ants had dug enough tunnels under the Springvale ruins to make subterranean corpse runs. Then again, the ants tended to prefer their openings well away from buildings and other paved areas, so… probably not. “All right,” Ellen said, and handed the rifle back. “Thank you, Stockholm.”

“You’re welcome,” the sniper said gravely. “Now get out of here so I can get back to watching for raiders.”

That was one candidate down- no, Ellen corrected herself, not candidate. That was the wrong word. The word she wanted was suspect. Unless some hideous accident had befallen the caravans and the water in the Wasteland, and the note from the Apostles of Eternal Light was entirely coincidental, this was a crime. That meant that anyone who might have been involved was a-

She paused, one hand on the inside of the city wall. That name. There was something disturbingly familiar about it. It was like the last line of the note, twisting her mother's favorite Bible verse- close and yet so far, like something she'd heard but knew the speaker had gotten wrong. Where had she-

( "Come forth and drink the waters of the Glow, for this ancient weapon of war is our salvation, it is the very symbol of Atom's glory!" )

Oh, no. Oh, no no no no. Not Confessor Cromwell. Please, God, Ellen thought as she broke away from the city wall and ran for the walkway curving around the crater, don't let the Church of the Children of Atom have done this.

She'd made a point of staying away from the bomb at Megaton's center ever since Annabelle and Demyx had helped her disable it. The Children of Atom still made up something like a quarter to a third of Megaton's population, and if any of them ever realized she'd tampered with it, she'd probably have to put everything she owned on a Brahmin's back and make for the Citadel as fast as the cows could carry her. She still wasn't sure if any of them realized their holy object wasn't .... the.... same....

She came to a halt halfway down the path that led to the crater bottom. Confessor Cromwell couldn't have done this, she realized. If he'd brought water into town he'd be keeping it there, giving it out to his followers. If he was spreading the worship of Atom outside of town, he'd be using Atom's name, not some kind of nonsense about Eternal Light. And either way, there were enough of his followers in town that they wouldn't feel the need to hide what they were doing. This wasn't Cromwell's work; it couldn't be.

( I mean that each of you is saying, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” )

On the other hand, he was the leader of a religion that preached division as a holy act. If someone in his flock had taken that to heart and started rewriting Cromwell's teachings... well. That might explain a few things. More than a few things.

Ellen squared her shoulders and resumed her course at a much more sedate pace. She still wanted to talk to the Confessor, of course, but there was no need to panic about it now. Asking who hadn't showed up at church lately was a very different matter from accusing a man of water theft.

The Water-Beggar

As the gates of Megaton ground shut behind her, Ellen caught sight of a figure slumped against a nearby rock. On her very first day out of the Vault, she'd encountered a man begging for clean water near the city gates. From what she remembered, his name had been Micky. He'd been pretty sick at the time, and she hadn't seen much of him after that, but someone else had eventually taken his place- and someone else after that. She'd never found out what happened to the other water beggars. From the occasional bit of Megaton gossip she'd overheard at Gob's, they'd wound up begging because they were dying of radiation poisoning anyway, and couldn't hold themselves up enough long enough to work for water that wouldn't kill them faster.

Ellen's throat tightened. Water beggars weren't supposed to exist any more. What had her father's purifier been meant for in the first place, if not to save people from a fate like this?

She almost turned back towards the city gates, thinking to grab a bottle of water from her stores (or from Wadsworth if need be). A motion caught her eye, though- a dark-skinned woman in pale Brahmin-skin clothes, approaching the beggar from the direction of Springvale. "Please," Ellen heard the beggar weakly call out to the woman, "water? Do you have any to spare? I'm so thirsty."

"Oh, poor dear," the woman said, and unslung a bag from her shoulder. "Here, I've got some water I can spare."

The beggar's trembling hands clamped around the bottle she offered him; he stared at its contents. "All of this?" he said in a voice barely above a whisper. The woman nodded. "For me? Crystal clear water... oh, bless you, madam, bless you!"

He had some trouble uncapping the bottle, but after a few tries managed to bring it to his lips. Ellen had never seen anyone swallow so much water so quickly. She half expected his stomach to reject it, the way a starving man's stomach might reject too much food. But no; he only paused for a few gasping breaths, and then raised the bottle again, draining it dry before handing it back to the woman. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you so much. I don't think I've ever tasted water this pure."

"No, bless you," the woman said with a warm smile. "I'm glad to help."

"If I can someday-" The beggar's expression changed; his voice trailed off. "Urrrgh."

"What's wrong?" the woman said, alarmed. "Are you all right?"

"Oh,"" the man said, clutching at his stomach. "Oh God-"

He doubled over, shoulders heaving, and convulsively vomited. Ellen broke into a run, but it was too late; by the time she reached him and the woman, the beggar had collapsed. Ellen pressed two fingers against the groove of his neck, but found no pulse.

She bit her bottom lip a moment, then silently closed his eyes with one hand, and started to lay him straight. "What should I do?" the dark woman wailed, wringing her hands. "He- he asked for water! I thought I was helping him, not killing him?"

Be quiet and let me finish praying for this poor man, Ellen thought irritably, but aloud all she said was, "Slow down. What happened, exactly?"

"I just gave him some water I picked up on the way through Springvale," the woman said. "It tasted pure, and it looks clean- how was I supposed to know?"

"Just because it looks clean doesn't mean it's not harboring something," Ellen murmured. "You found the water in Springvale? Where?"

"I didn't find it- the man at the monastery in Springvale gave it to me," the woman said. "It's supposed to be holy water. The man said it was blessed!"

Ellen glanced up from the beggar's corpse. "The man?" she echoed.

"He gave me this pamphlet," the woman said, holding out a piece of tattered paper. Her hand was shaking almost as badly as the beggar's had. "Along with the water. Called himself Brother Gerard. He's on the road through Springvale... I don't know if it'll help but I don't know what else I can do! I never meant to kill him!"

"You can help me bury him, at least," Ellen said. "It won't-"

But the woman wasn't listening, only staring in horror at the corpse. "I can't stay here," she said. "Not after something like that." And before Ellen could say anything else, the woman spun on one heel and ran, the flailing run of someone who had no idea where they were going, only that it was somewhere other than here.

Brother Gerard

The usual procedure in Megaton for dealing with the dead was a burial outside the city walls. There weren't enough Brahmin chips or laser weapons in the town for cremation, and anyway, the local soil needed all the help it could get. The dead who left behind families were buried in the oldest, most tattered, least viable clothing the family owned. It was assumed the dead would understand that returning their possessions to the living was saying they left something behind worth keeping, a gesture of respect in itself. There were no shrouds. Wrapping a corpse in a Brahmin hide, whether tanned or not, was a ridiculously vulgar display of wealth that would be talked about for generations. As for coffins, no one could remember anyone having the time and inclination to waste good work and materials on a box that would only be used once and then taken away forever.

Raiders, for as long as anyone could remember, were left outside the gates to rot- or, rather, to be eaten. The creatures of the Wasteland were nothing if not opportunistic. As for others who died outside the walls who'd done the townsfolk no wrong, it was up to the people of the city whether they wanted to risk their lives to bury them. More often than not, they ended up ant food along with the raiders. Ellen had done her best, when she was in Megaton, to reclaim what corpses she could manage and bury them herself. The dead of Vault 101 were given funeral ceremonies before being broken down in the Promatorium, where the biomass was eventually added to the fluid used in the Vault's hydroponic farms. Burying corpses in and around the plot where the Oasis plants were doing their best to grow wasn't so different from that process, she figured- and anyway, it was a last gesture of respect for people who had none otherwise.

The beggar killed by the Springvale water, however, was another story. When the woman who'd given him that water fled, Ellen turned back to his corpse. Some glimmer of suspicion prompted her to switch her Pip-Boy's Geiger counter on. A suddden crackling stream of tcktcktcktck burst forth; she involuntarily stepped backwards, and the sound died down. Slowly, carefully, she stretched her left arm out towards the body again.

Tcktcktcktcktck-

It faded as she lowered her arm and backed up. She'd be back shortly, she decided, but she wanted to get some Rad-X down her throat first. The area around the man wasn't hot- just his corpse. He might've been sickened by any number of things, but it'd been the irradiated water that had killed him- and swiftly, at that. Someone in Springvale was playing a very dangerous game.

---

There was nothing in Springvale that even vaguely resembled Ellen's foggy mental images of a monastery when she arrived. On the other hand, there was no sign of radiation, either. That... was something, at least. Fawkes was off burying the beggar's body where it wouldn't pose a danger to the people of Megaton or their food supply, and Dogmeat was back at the house, so Ellen's only real defenses as she made her way into the Springvale ruins were some Rad-X, her plasma rifle, and General Chase's armored overcoat. Her full power armor would've made her feel safer, but if there was a whole monastery of people willing to distribute lethally tainted water here, it would only have made her a target. The coat just left her looking like a traveler who'd hit upon some interesting luck.

She was about halfway from the Megaton gates to Tanya and Silver's house when something moved in the ruins. It was a balding man, somewhat taller than her father had been, tanned and grimy and with a look of great purpose about him. The power fist he wore contrasted sharply with his weathered Brahmin-skin clothes. "Welcome, weary traveler!" he called out as she approached. "Welcome to the monastery of the Apostles of Eternal Light!"

For a monastery, Ellen thought, it sure looked like, oh... every other ruin in Springvale. But she said nothing.

"Oh, but you must be parched by your travels!" he continued. With a beatific smile, he turned to a nearby crate. "Please, accept this gift: holy water, blessed by our order. We must drink deep of the Water of Light, so that it may sanctify our tongues and render us purified for discourse!"

She stared at the bottle he held out- no, the bottles, plural; one of them was already halfway drained. "Sir?" she said. "I don't-"

He shook his head. "You must cleanse your tongue of unseemly speech by drinking deep of the holy water," he said. "Then we may speak."

"It's setting off my Geiger counter," Ellen felt obliged to point out. "You hear that? The clicking?"

"The song of Atom's Light," said the man. "Come, join me in partaking of it..."

Oh, hell.

It wasn't in Ellen's nature to be deceptive, but she felt she had something of a right to do so if it meant avoiding that kind of irradiation. She accepted the bottle the man offered her. He smiled, and raised his own. As he tipped his head back to drain most of the contents, Ellen took the opportunity to spill some of the stuff on the ground. She hastily stepped forward to hide the wet patch with one foot. "Will that do?" she said, ostentatiously wiping her mouth with one hand.

The man nodded. "I can see the glint of Atom's Light in your eyes," he said. "You have purified your tongue with the holy water, so now we may speak. I am Brother Gerard. How may this servant of the Eternal Light serve you?"

"I live in Megaton," Ellen said, pointing in the direction of the city walls. "I got a pamphlet that mentioned the Apostles of the Eternal Light. Is that just you?"

Brother Gerard shook his head. "No, no," he said. "Ours is a modest order, but our ranks are growing slowly, as others hear our words and are Enlightened."

Ellen didn't like the fact that she could hear the capital letters when this man talked.

"As our Luminescent Mother says, 'where others walk only in the dying waste, we offer the path of eternal light.' And to spread goodwill, we offer this holy water to any and all supplicants."

"Luminescent Mother?" Ellen repeated, the hairs on the back of her neck prickling. "Who would that be?"

"Mother Curie the Third, the founder of our order and our Luminescent Mother," said Gerard with another beatific smile. "She oversees the blessing of all our water. I fear she's far too busy to meet with outsiders."

"I... see," said Ellen slowly. There were only so many places in Springvale this woman could be hiding, but if she was the one 'blessing' the water it was going to be a dangerous hunt. She'd have to go and find Fawkes-

"However," said Brother Gerard, "if you are willing to be baptized in Atom's Holy Light, then perhaps I could allow you to enter and meet our leader."

"You mean irradiated," said Ellen.

"Yes, call it what you will," said Gerard. "We simply do not allow any to enter who do not bear the Light. Make your way to our Tabernacle, pilgrim. Pray to Atom to fill you with Holy Radiance. Bask in the Glow of Atom's Eternal Light."

He gestured towards the ruin behind him. Ellen caught sight of what looked like a pulpit and a bathtub, and one of the ancient blue-and-yellow fallout shelter signs that had previously hung on the Springvale School. There might have been a rusting, ancient oil drum in there, too, but she didn't see it properly; for a moment the whole place seemed to swim, overlaid with the image of the Project Purity control room. She shuddered violently, and found she was shivering despite the coat's weight and the day's warmth.
( This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. )
"It is, of course, up to you," she heard Brother Gerard say as he turned aside to scan the road for other 'pilgrims'. "May Atom's Light guide you..."

It was a short, short fight, and an ugly one. But Brother Gerard was alive at the end of it, if unconscious; and Ellen, for all that she'd heard cracking and seen stars when he'd punched her with that power fist, was still alive and on her feet. Thank God, she thought, for all that Voodoo and John-117 had taught her! "I'm- I'm sorry," she said hoarsely to the man's slumped, still form. "But I've seen your Atom up close already. I'm not- I'm not doing that again. Ever."

Brother Gerard, of course, made no reply. Ellen checked his pulse a second time, and then checked his pockets. There was a key, which turned out to fit the lock bolted to a nearby storm cellar's door. It was enough; she swallowed, drew as deep a breath as she could manage without passing out from the pain in her ribs, and made her way in.

Mother Curie

"Children of the Light, hear my words and feel Atom's warmth," came the woman's voice from down below. It spoke with a true believer's passion and fervor. "For too long, our world has been barren, and our people have become empty..."

Ellen shuddered, leaning against the concrete wall beside her; her Geiger counter was, for the moment, blessedly silent. The woman, alas, was anything but silent. Ellen grimaced as the sermon of Atom's unifying Glow went on and on. How many people must she have been speaking to? If Ellen interrupted now-

Well, she had to, didn't she? Before Brother Gerard woke up? ... good Lord that had been a stupid decision. Couldn't she have gone and found a door to Milliways and come back with reinforcements? Or sneaked around to pick the lock to the monastery? Or something that didn't leave her with broken ribs and an angry cultist liable to wake up at any given moment? ... Oh well. Too late now. One bad choice deserved another; Ellen pushed herself away from the wall and staggered the rest of the way down the stairs.

The basement beyond resembled a monastery about as much as the ruin above had, save that it looked structurally sound. The walls were drab gray pre-war cinderblock, the ceiling beams of pre-war steel. There were several pre-war park benches arranged to one side; two of the occupants looked to be ghouls, and the other... looked to be about halfway to that state himself. Aside from the brief glance one of them spared Ellen, their attention was riveted on the silver-haired woman at the front of the room, whose pulpit was backed by the yellow-and-black radiation trefoil.

The elderly preacher paused mid-sentence at the sight of Ellen, then turned to her flock. "Bow your heads, my friends," she said, "and meditate for a time on the wonder of Atom. I must greet our new arrival."

Eep! Ellen reflexively put up her hands. "I didn't mean to- I'm sorry, ma'am-"

"It's no trouble at all," said the woman, "although I must admit, I wasn't expecting a pilgrim to our shrine just now! We're hardly prepared for casual visitors, I'm afraid. You must have made quite an impression on Brother Gerard."

".... I think you could say that, yes," Ellen said, wincing inwardly.

The older woman nodded. "He's a lovely boy," she said, "but rather strident. I hope he wasn't a bother."

Ellen did her best to smile. The woman went on: "Oh, but where are my manners? I'm Mother Curie the Third, and I lead the Apostles of the Eternal Light. What can I do for you, my dear?"

"Luminescent Mother," Ellen began awkwardly, "I need to speak with you about your water-"

"Yes?" said Mother Curie. "If you wanted some, I'm sure that Brother Gerard would have gladly given you a bottle or two. We don't charge for charity, you know."

"I- had questions about it, actually," Ellen said. She clenched her teeth a moment; the pain in her ribs was getting worse. "Brother Gerard- shared some with me. How do you make it?"

The old woman's eyes brightened. "Oh, it was a gift, straight from Atom!" she said proudly. "I was meditating right here in Springvale- on the surface, of course- when four of His armored angels came to me."

.... oh no.

"When I said I was from Megaton," Curie went on, "they gave me barrels of 'Aqua Pura', and said I should share it with my people. They were very clear on that."

If it wouldn't have made her ribs hurt even worse, Ellen would have clapped a hand over her face.

"Naturally, I understood Atom's message," said Curie. "And so, I've been busy blessing this holy water and sharing it with the world!"

"Blessing," Ellen said, her head beginning to throb. "You mean contaminating. With radiation."

"Of course!" said Curie. "How else will we spread the word to the unenlightened? So many misunderstand Atom, and fear the Glow of His Light as a thing of destruction, rather than humanity's next step towards perfection. With this marvelous holy water, they drink without fear, and by the time the Glow consumes them, they have no need to fear ever again."

Ellen stared at the woman. Somewhere nearby, something growled. Slowly, carefully, Ellen turned towards the doorway that led to the other side of the basement. There were shapes there, in that darkness- two of them, almost human, save for their yellowish-green luminescence.

"Our Holy of Holies lies within," said Mother Curie as Ellen turned back. "That's where I sanctify the Aqua Pura of the armored angels. The Champion of Atom and the Sun of Atom guard it for us, a duty they've gladly and willingly taken on themselves from the beginning."

"I see," said Ellen, her mouth suddenly dry. "Thank you, Mother Curie, for... for sharing that with me."

"You are quite welcome, child. Is there anything else I can do for you this day? You look hurt-"

"No! No, no," Ellen said hastily. "It's- it's all right. I can take care of myself."

"If you're certain," said Mother Curie. "I hate to see a soul in pain."

"I'm a doctor's daughter," Ellen said. "I'll fix myself up before I return to you."

Mother Curie nodded. "Very well," she said. "Go in Atom's peace, my dear."

Ellen raised a hand in farewell, and made for the stairs as quickly as her ribs would let her.