Fires were a bad idea. Even if the light wasn't visible, it was almost impossible to hide the smell of the smoke. Lots of things were attracted to the smell of smoke because it usually meant food. If animals were the only things attracted, then the problem stopped there, but smoke also attracted people because where there was food, there were other people, and where there were other people, there was loot.

However, being in the basement of a mostly collapsed building resolved most of issues regarding safety. The biggest risk was an attack from burrowing mole rats, and Blake and Charon had killed those as soon as they walked into the room. The cracks in the ceiling provided enough air to counter the carbon monoxide and what little smoke-smell escaped would most likely be concealed by the stench of rotting corpses outside.

Charon rummaged through their bags, looking for food. Blake had gotten a fire started, and then she hadn't moved since. He looked up with two cans of beans in his hands and saw her rocking slowly, staring into the flames with haunted eyes. He put the cans away and searched for something less…gooey. His hand landed on two containers of potato crisps and he walked over to her.

"You need to eat something," he told her.

Blake didn't respond, or even look at him. She just kept rocking silently.

Charon sighed roughly and knelt on a knee, holding a tin in front of her face. "Eat something," he said again, more insistently. He wasn't sure why he suddenly cared if she ate or not. If she died, he'd be at the mercy of whoever found his contract next.

She slowly took the tin and then just held onto it in both hands like she held her shotgun. "They just…ripped him apart," she whispered, seeing blood and gore, hearing the screams. "What…what were those things?"

Charon sat down and opened his own tin. "I don't know," he said. "I've heard some say that they used to be human, some part of an experiment a long time ago."

"What kind of experiment does that?" she asked softly.

He shrugged. "No idea. One Smoothskin said they came out of a Vault."

She gave him a quietly horrified look. "A Vault? This was a Vault experiment?"

He cocked his head a bit. "You don't sound surprised," he commented in mild confusion.

She glanced away, remembering. "I've found other Vaults that…did experiments," she said softly. "One… they made all these clones of this guy named Gary. I don't know how many they made, but there were dozens left in the Vault when I found it. They'd killed everyone else in the Vault. Another one had this…gas in it that makes you hallucinate. The people had killed each other, just like the White Noise experiment."

"What was that one?" he asked.

"They had all these musicians in a Vault," she said. "And they would play white noise-"

"What's that?"

She blinked a bit in surprise and he mentally braced for ridicule. "White noise…it's the sound that a radio makes if it can't find a station to play."

"Oh…" he said, nodding in understanding.

"But they had other things playing that… I guess the white noise hid it," she went on. "They were trying to turn these people into…soldiers, I guess. Try to change how they thought, make them obey orders without even thinking about them. Something went wrong and they… well, they all died."

"Seems to be a common result," he remarked dryly.

She almost laughed because it was so unfunny. "Yeah, seems so."

"Explains why you smelled like the Wastes," he said after a moment of silent, broken only by the crunching of stale chips.

She gave him a surprised look. "What?"

"When you showed up in Underworld and talked to Ahzrukhal, you smelled like the Wasteland," he said. "Most people that smell like that are Raiders."

"Smell like…what? The Wastes?" she shook her head in confusion.

"Like ruin," he said. "Death."

"Oh… I smell like death?" she asked, sounding slightly upset.

"Yes," he said simply. "But you smell like other things too. Almost like a trader, but without the stink of a Brahmin."

"Oh…" she said, poking her chips idly. "I… I guess that's a good thing, then?"

"Well, Raiders don't smell like that, so…" he shrugged.

She had to consider that for a moment. Coming out of Vault 101, the first thing she'd noticed, besides the sun blinding her, was the air, the smell of the Wasteland. At first, it just smelled empty, with an almost bitter tang that she'd guessed was left over from the nuclear fallout. Then, the longer she was outside, the more smells she'd noticed. For one, the air was fresh, not the ventilated air from the Vault that always smelled too much like metal and plastic. She'd never smelled dirt before, or wood. The first time it had rained, she'd stood outside and gotten soaked to the bone because even that had a smell and she couldn't find anything to compare it to. So, it made sense that those kinds of smells would cling to her, and of course, it made sense that Vaults filled with death and ruin had their own smell, too, that would linger on anyone diving into them.

"We need more ammo," she sighed, dusting the chip dust off her fingers. "And to get ammo, we need more caps." She started turning a knob on her PipBoy.

"What's that for?" Charon asked.

"It's a PipBoy," she said. "I got it for my birthday when I turned ten. It can pick up radio stations. I'm hoping Three Dog has heard something. Maybe we can do a job and get some caps."

The moment she tried to tune in, an SOS came through, people calling themselves Riley's Rangers. She listened intently until the message started to repeat.

"Do you know where that hospital is?" she asked.

Charon nodded.

"Let's go," she got to her feet.

"That place is gonna be crawling with Super Mutants," he told her.

Her eyes, instead of turning haunted and terrified, turned cold and hard. "I won't leave these people to die like that," she hissed angrily. "No one deserves to die like that."

Charon nodded slowly, and stood up. "Then let's get moving. We might actually make it in the dark."