Eastbound

Date: 8.21.2224

Location: Downtown Houston

The doors of City Hall closed behind me with a sound heavier than they had any right to make.

Not because of the weight of the doors.

Because of what I had just read.

Knight-Captain Adrianne Voss had stood in this building and made a decision.

She had looked at the Brotherhood she served, recognized what it was becoming, and decided that obedience could not be allowed to replace purpose.

Then she went east.

Now I'm standing in the same city with the same direction in front of me.

I don't know if that means anything.

Coincidence.... 

Maybe?

Sometimes you don't know which one you're looking at until much later.

I adjusted my pack and started south before turning east along what remained of McKinney Street.

The terminal stayed with me.

Not physically.

I had already downloaded the records.

But information has a way of becoming heavier after you understand what it cost someone to leave it behind.

A Brotherhood struggling with the difference between protecting humanity and controlling it.

Then, eventually...

they left.

Not because Houston meant nothing.

Because it meant enough that they refused to stay and become something they no longer recognized.

That stayed with me as I walked.

Downtown Houston is strange when you're standing inside it.

From a distance, it looks abandoned.

Up close...

There's Life

Movement.

Careful movements.

Things watching other things.

The Wasteland has taught me that silence is rarely empty.

Usually, something is listening.

I slowed my pace.

Then I Took a Hard Left at Travis Street due to the flooding before me...

A low growl rolled between the buildings.

Another answered.

Then I saw them.

Super Mutants.

Their voices moved through the streets like thunder arguing with itself.

I stopped.

They weren't searching for me.

At least, I had no evidence that they were.

So, I stayed low and moved.

Abandoned vehicles became cover.

At least for a bit...

Distance became my advantage.

I wasn't armed for a fight.

I wasn't armored for a fight.

And I wasn't foolish enough to confuse courage with pretending those facts didn't matter.

They Spotted me

So, I Ran....

I considered the underground pedestrian tunnels.

Before the war, people used them to escape the Houston heat and move beneath the streets without crossing traffic.

Now the entrance looked like a mouth.

Darkness swallowed everything beyond the first few steps.

My Pip-Boy couldn't tell me what was inside.

I thought about the Brotherhood terminal.

All those years of reports.

Unknown incursions beneath Houston.

At that moment, it was a no from me, dawg...

 I stayed on the surface.

At least here, I could see the sky.

Danger is easier to negotiate when you can see it coming.

North of me, floodwater had reclaimed entire blocks.

The streets had become shallow lakes stained with algae, rust, and whatever else a century and a half had carried into the city.

That bothered me.

Still water tells fewer truths than running water.

South of me, the Super Mutants continued moving through the streets.

Then I realized something.

They weren't searching.

They were living.

That Hit me deeper than I expected.

Even monsters establish territory.

I continued east.

The road narrowed near what had once been the Red Rocket Arena.

The roof had collapsed inward decades ago.

Steel beams reached toward the sky like broken ribs.

Concrete had folded over itself until the arena looked less like a place where people gathered and more like a monument to gravity.

Whatever games had once been played there...

time had declared another winner.

Farther ahead stood the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Or enough of it to recognize.

The structure still dominated the skyline.

But the silence around it was different.

No birds.

No voices.

No smoke.

Only stagnant water pooled against its foundations, reflecting broken glass and gray sky without disturbing either.

Water remembers neglect.

Buildings do too.

For a moment, I wondered whether another Vault had been hidden beneath it.

Houston had always been a city built above as much as below.

The thought came.

Then I let it go.

Not every question deserves pursuit the moment it appears.

The Brotherhood records had already given me more questions than answers.

That was enough.

Curiosity is useful.

Undisciplined curiosity is just another way to get yourself killed.

I checked my supplies.

Water.

Food.

Medical equipment.

Pip-Boy.

Pocketknife.

That's it.

No rifle.

No pistol.

No army behind me.

Just me.

Against a Super Mutant, this knife might as well be a sharpened opinion.

I smiled at that thought.

Then kept walking.

The road doesn't care what I think I'm capable of.

It measures what I actually am.

The Vault taught me how systems preserve people.

The Brotherhood terminal taught me what happens when systems forget why they exist.

The Wasteland is teaching me something else.

Eventually, every system becomes a choice.

Every person decides what they will preserve.

What they will abandon.

What they will carry.

What they will plant.

Voss chose east.

I chose east.

That doesn't make our roads the same.

It only means we're moving beneath the same sunrise.

Maybe I'll find her.

Maybe I won't.

Maybe the Wyndham is already hundreds of miles away.

Maybe someday I'll hear the name Adrianne Voss again and understand why I found those records when I did.

Or maybe the terminal was simply a message left behind for whoever came next.

Either way,

I'm comfortable not knowing.

The Super Mutants remained behind me.

The Convention Center remained ahead.

The road was still dangerous.

My supplies were still limited.

But my direction hadn't changed.

Sometimes that's all a man gets.

Not an answer.

Not a guarantee.

A direction.

And today...

East was enough.

— Big Chief Mike Marcel