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The first flowers that came to the Lucky 38 were lilies. Mel was smiling when Victor brought the delivery up to her -- until she opened the accompanying card. Then she went ashen and threw both card and bouquet down the incinerator chute.
"I guess they weren't from Boone, huh?" said Arcade. He hadn't seriously thought they were; she and the sniper were still stuck at the surreptitious-lingering-stares stage of romance. When no one else was around, Arcade sometimes gently teased her about it, and usually she just laughed and told him he should ask Boone out himself instead of trying to live through her.
But this time she didn't smile, or even blush a little at his reference to Boone. "No," was all she said. This was serious.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"God, no." Firm and final. When she wanted to, she could be just as close-mouthed as Boone. What a pair they'd make.
The next day she filled a vase by the door with yellow silk carnations; this, too, went unexplained. He inquired about the flowers again a few days later, but Mel refused to say anything more. Still, she was gracious enough not to press him when he gave away more than he wanted to discuss, so he thought it was only fair to return the favor.
The day after that, Victor rang up to the presidential suite to report "another fella with flowers at the door." This time, Mel picked up her combat knife and went to the door herself with a stony face. When she saw it was only a fellow courier, she sighed, accepted the pink roses, and gave him a fistful of caps -- "for you" -- and one of the yellow carnations -- "for the sender." She flicked the card open, read it in a quick glance, and then it and the roses also rode the chute to a fiery death.
The gifts came twice a week after that, sometimes real flowers, sometimes silk, sometimes leaves or fruits, sometimes just a picture. Each time, Mel grimly sent back a single yellow carnation and silently burned the delivery without allowing anyone to see the accompanying card.
Then one day, after a delivery that had her obviously choking back bile, she replied with something different: a picture of spiky burdock flowers.
Arcade was pleased with himself for recognizing them -- all that plant-related research comes in handy at last, -- but more than that, he was uneasy. There was some kind of coded conversation taking place here, and it made him very nervous.
He didn't want to suspect her. Arcade liked Mel quite a bit. He reviewed what he'd observed about her: She was honest, hardworking, and prudent, as well as kind, fair, and conscientious. Despite being well-read and perceptive, she knew next to nothing about computers or weapons more complex than a knife, but was at least humble enough to admit it. Julie adored her for all the generosity she'd shown the Followers; he'd overheard Mel telling her that the Followers had helped her after she was burned in a house fire that killed her husband and infant son and that this was the least she could do to repay them.
He thought highly enough of her and her goals for the Mojave that he'd even considered disclosing his past to her. It was dangerous to conflate like with trust, however, and he hadn't lived this long without a healthy dose of paranoia. If she was dealing covertly, he definitely wanted to know with whom. He was fairly sure he could rule out the Legion, given the hard look and sharp questions she'd turned on him when he first lapsed into Latin in her presence, and House, who simply summoned her to the penthouse when he had orders for her, but that still left the NCR and parties unknown. He started logging the deliveries, analyzing the list, looking for patterns.
Weeks passed, and he was no closer to understanding the mysterious exchanges than before. Then Mel received a collection of silk yellow carnations, quite possibly the ones she herself had been sending. She put them back in the vase and burned the card as usual, but sent nothing in reply and disappeared upstairs.
A few hours later, Arcade found her asleep on a couch in the cocktail lounge, an open book and a quarter-full bottle of whiskey on the coffee table pulled up next to her. He cast an eye over the page, considered his options, then woke her gently, had her drink a glass of water, and walked her upstairs to bed. Then he retrieved his list and returned to the lounge to investigate the book she'd been reading: The Language of Flowers. This was the key, or at least part of the key, to the code. He sat down and started deciphering.
He'd been expecting the meanings to create some kind of acrostic when assembled, or at least something to test his rudimentary knowledge of cryptography. What they revealed was simpler than that -- the flower meanings were, themselves, the messages, -- yet far more complicated.
The sender, apparently Mel's secret admirer, had begun with the lilies, which meant beauty. Given how long this had gone on, Arcade also wondered if the admirer had deliberately chosen a perennial for the first delivery to indicate persistence. Then came more compliments -- admiration, hardiness, intellect, modesty, fascination -- but each time she'd replied only with the yellow carnations: No.
The silk Spanish jasmine -- sensuality -- had been the one to change her response for the first time, to the burdock: Touch me not.
Then the messages took a dark turn:
He -- it was a terrible reflection on his gender, but Arcade was pretty sure Mel's 'admirer' was a man -- sent buttercups. Ingratitude.
She sent basil. Hatred.
He sent white roses (I am worthy of you), jonquil (I desire a return of affection), and Jacob's ladder (Come down to me), all of which were met with more yellow-carnation rejections.
His purple pansies said You occupy my thoughts.
More basil. She still hated him.
Snowball honeysuckle. Bound.
Pulsatilla. You have no claims.
Ivy. Marriage. Was he saying he wanted her to marry him, or that they were married already? Either was creepy, but Arcade had thought Mel had only ever been married to the man that died in the house fire. Maybe they were just married in this guy's head.
Butterfly weed. Let me go.
And then he'd sent back all the yellow carnations at once: An emphatic no.
Arcade felt cold all over. Mel's admirer -- no, stalker was the only word for him at this point -- was not going away. Maybe she should instead, at least for a while. He decided to tell her about his family; the idea hadn't seemed any worse in the time since he'd first entertained it, and meeting all of the Remnants would be a decently long road trip. And on the off-chance she did react badly to learning his history, then they'd have a lot more to worry about than these menacing messages.
---
For once in Arcade's life, something worked out exactly as he'd envisioned it. Mel listened to his story with sympathetic interest, asked a few judicious questions, and then said, "I'm in. Let's do this."
They made the rounds, agreed to meet everyone at the bunker in a few days, and as they returned to Vegas, Arcade felt incredibly hopeful about the future. His heritage felt far less heavy now that he was leveraging it to help fight the Legion, and especially since Mel had made it clear that anyone who wanted to arrest him had to deal with her first. She, too, seemed lighter and looser than she had when they left; she hummed as they walked and even responded with something approaching amusement when the world's most foolhardy Freeside thugs tried to jump them.
As the Strip's gate closed behind them, he noticed her rubbing her left shoulder. "You okay? That last one didn't get in a lucky hit, did he?"
"No, no, just the burn's tightening up again. I've been using stims, but I don't know if that's actually doing any good. Might have to go back to the clinic."
"I've been meaning to ask you about that shoulder, because I must be misremembering how it happened. I thought you said some debris hit you when you were running from the house fire, but that doesn't seem consistent with the depth of that burn."
"Huh. Well, --"
"Excuse me, but have you been able to bug Mr. House's network yet?" It was Emily Ortal, who proceeded to ignore Arcade completely. Mel brushed him off, too, in an obvious bid to avoid answering his question. Arcade went inside to give them space to talk, and certainly not to sulk.
"Howdy, pardner!" said Victor the moment he stepped inside, handing him a cluster of pink carnations that Arcade now knew meant I will never forget you. "Miss Mel got some more flowers while y'all were away. Give 'em to her for me, will ya?" He wheeled away, leaving Arcade with the flowers, the card, and an opportunity.
Arcade knew it was wrong to pry, but the card had no envelope to make him second-guess his curiosity. He flipped it open; to his astonishment, the note inside was written in Latin. Arcade's heart sank as he read:
Corva -
I will not sell you.
- Vulpes
The first thing he thought was that now the burn made sense to him: Mel had done it to herself. The Legion branded their slaves on the left shoulder, and what better way to cover a burn than with more burns?
Then the full horror set in. She'd been a slave. That terrible man's slave. He thought of the fate of Nipton and the ivy's reference to marriage and felt sick at the implications, mind reeling from what he'd just discovered about his friend.
His friend who was now standing right in front of him, reading on his face all that he'd learned. Shit.
She reached up and closed his gaping mouth with far more gentleness than he deserved. "You're not the only one with a past you'd like to get very far away from," she said quietly. "You trusted me. Now I'm trusting you."
"Who else knows?"
"Just Cass. She was with me when he gave me the Mark."
"Not Boone?"
"No. Cass asked me that, too."
"When are you going to tell him?" He chose not to insult her by pretending it was an if question.
She swallowed hard. "I don't know. I know I have to, but ... the Legion killed Craig's wife. I'm not looking forward to seeing his face when he finds out I spent four years spreading for one of their officers."
Arcade winced at the harsh way she'd put it. "He can't possibly blame you. You were hardly consenting, and actus me invito factus --"
"-- non est meus actus." She finished the phrase with perfect pronunciation and a rueful smile. "You know, I said that to him once. Bled for it, too, but it was worth it."
She took the card and read it, the weight of the previous weeks resettling onto her shoulders as she did so. "I have to deal with him. Otherwise he'll just keep coming back."
The doorbell rang then, startling them both, and Victor called out, "Well, shoot a rabbit with a pop gun, if it ain't our friend from the Mojave Express."
This time he brought Mel a single red flower that looked like a hand. Warning, Arcade mentally translated, then read the card over her shoulder: Return to me, Corva, or die.
Mel sighed, squared her shoulders, and asked Arcade, a little too casually, if he knew where she could find any hemlock. He shuddered, recalling its meaning: You will be my death.