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She is blurred on the horizon, and Boone spots her long before he’s sure.
The heat ripples over the bluffs, stretching sand and scrub into indistinct swathes of colour, sharp where the sun hits, where the shadows crawl desperate from the glare. Blinding-bright, the city sways in the far distance, silver spires reflecting sun, and Boone angles the scope a millimetre southward, content to keep his eyes from the glare.
She wavers, and it could be the haze, but she falls every hundred yards or so, her outline pitching through the blur just to reappear, staggering closer through the heat. At two hundred yards, Boone is certain.
She’d wandered, as was her wont, fingers too restless to ever stay still, back bowed beneath the weight of something far too heavy that she couldn’t seem to put down. Following the trail, she said, and said no more, and packed her rucksack full of energy cells, hauling the Q-35 to nestle at her neck, the barrel bathing her skin in sickly green.
Gannon squints, but Boone sets his jaw. It’s her.
She traipses into Novac like a walking corpse. One of her shoulders hangs awkwardly forward, much slacker than a shoulder should rightly be, and she hobbles, as though there is no skin left on the soles of her feet. Her boots are spattered, black and oozing. It extends up her leg like tar, dried in the fibres of a fabric that once was white, eating at the rips over her knees, the tear at her hip. Between the black is crusted red, dark like ruby port, days old and reeking, a monochrome patchwork of viscera and blood, and only most of it hers. Her cheek is torn. It creeps toward her ear across the bone, foul with infection, hardens and cracks and turns to barbed wire, a crown of thorns around the swell of her skull. Stitches.
Boone sets his rifle down. Gannon is already upon her, bundling her towards him with stone in his eyes, and Six’s body seems to finally give way, miles and miles of sand and dust and filth erupting into the doctor’s panicked arms. She pitches and roils like an unsettled sea, ancient Med-X syringes still clinging to the dough of her arms, and Boone realises.
She is bald.
Oh .
Six’s hair was fine like spider thread, naturally the colour of wet straw. She pinned it around 12 gauge shotgun slugs, every morning if she could, and it fell in spirals like spun yarn, curling short and tight until the heat pulled it loose, bleached to the colour of bone. In the cruellest days, she wore a headscarf, a ripped shirt sleeve or rag, tied too carefully for something so crude. The neon had inked her pink and turquoise in Vegas, and Boone remembered when she had washed for the first time in weeks of walking, and her hair was pinned like in the Old pictures, and she had beamed like the world was new.
Her head lolls as Gannon plays nursemaid, and the pink of her scalp is clearly visible beneath a layer of fair dander, thicker in patches, bare in others. The stitches split her head in half, black and puckered, and Gannon is yelling for stimpaks before Boone can see anything but the teeth that must have pierced her skin, the saw, the scalpel that dissected her, that took her hair and kept it in an Empty tank while it withered and died.
Six lifts her crooked head at the sight of him, doesn’t meet his eyes, clenches her jaw. Her good shoulder jerks and she presses the bend of her wrist to her face to stem the tide.
Boone catches her, and she is tall enough that the prickle of her head scrapes against his cheek, the rip in her head close enough to smell. What happened Six , he says, lips on the broken mess of her scalp. What happened, who did this to you . Who did this to you?
Six slumps against his chest, and cries and cries.