Donovan O'Niel's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Donovan crouched at the edge of the cracked parking lot, sketching one last frequency note before the junkyard ate his signal for good. The G.E.C.K. was waiting under all that rust, and he meant to carry it out himself. Then a shout pulled his head up. A man was stumbling past Zelda's clinic tent, knees folding under him on the broken cement. The stranger went down hard between patches of dead grass and broken glass. One hand stayed clenched around a roll of scorched paper. Zelda came out fast, already calling for her kit. Donovan reached him first and pried the paper loose. It was a Vault-Tec map, edges burned black, the center still readable. Frequency markings ran along the margins in a tight, careful hand. Donovan went cold. He knew that pattern. It matched the interference grid he'd spent weeks mapping around the junkyard. "He's crashing," Zelda said, pressing a wand to the man's chest. The stranger's eyes found Donovan's. His lips moved once. No sound came. Then his head rolled sideways and his hand opened, empty. A boot scraped behind Donovan. Kira Dallas stood there, glasses fogged from the run, pack still on her shoulders. "Kevin sent me," she said. "Said you needed verified backup." Her eyes dropped to the map, then the body, then the burned edges. "Look. That paper came out of the place you're trying to get into. That tells me everything about how they think." Donovan folded the map into his jacket. The stranger was gone. Whoever had drawn those frequencies had been inside, and someone had burned him out. The job was no longer his alone, and the thing in the junkyard already knew his name.