Zelda Verada's Arc

Chapter 4 of 5

Morning brought Andy Cerberus to the clinic tent under guard. Marcus had let him out of the office on Zelda's word, with conditions. Andy carried a cardboard folder marked by a faded red cross, water rings staining the cover. He set it on the cot and pushed his glasses up his nose. "You wanted prewar paper. I've got prewar paper. Question is whether you've got the stomach for what's on it." Zelda cleared the cot and unfolded the sheets. The pages inside were brittle blueprints of the clinic buried under the yard, drawn in faded blue ink, with engineer's notes in the margins. She weighted the corners with a diagnostic wand and a tin cup. Donovan ducked under the flap, saw the paper, and stopped grinning. "Oh man," he said. "Those are originals. Where'd you keep those?" Andy didn't answer. He tapped a hallway near the bottom of the page. "Surgical wing here. Pharmacy here. Both worth the trip." Then he tapped a smaller square set deeper in the floorplan, unlabeled. "And this one. This one's why I kept the folder." Donovan crouched closer. He pulled a battered ring-bound folder from his pack and laid one of his own pages beside Andy's. The runner's blueprint matched Andy's at the corners but stopped short of the unlabeled room. Donovan traced the gap with one finger. "Your sheet shows what his sheet hid. That's not a supply closet. Look at the wall thickness." He measured it against the scale. "That's containment." Zelda kept her hands flat on the paper. "Containment for what." Donovan looked at her, then at Andy. "Before the war, Vault-Tec ran live trials. Pathogens. Compounds. They didn't put those rooms on the public floorplan. If this clinic had one, whatever's behind that door has been sitting there for two hundred years with nobody opening the seal." He didn't soften it. "Could be inert. Could be the reason the runner died with two men chasing him." Andy watched her decide. "I'm not asking you to skip it," he said. "I'm asking you to put me on the team that opens it. My keycard, my share. You go in blind, you waste what's down there. You go in with me, you come back up." Zelda pulled her ledger from behind the rolodex and opened to Donovan's page. She wrote in the second column: named the danger before I asked. She turned to a new page, wrote Andy's name, and under it: brought the plans, named his price, didn't lie about the room. She closed the book. "We move slow," she said. "Donovan maps the air and the seals before anyone touches that door. Andy walks us through every room he remembers. Nothing opens until we know what's behind it." Andy nodded once, satisfied. Donovan was already pulling a notebook out. Zelda rolled the blueprints carefully and slid them back into the folder. The plan had a shape now. So did what could kill them.