Dreaming through the noise.

#03 Urban Legend from This Table.

When Faith had taken Caesar up on his invitation to Fortification Hill (taken up, like she’d had much of a choice), when she’d been in the center of hundreds of men who would see her strung up on a cross or her body broken beneath the weight of slave packs or stretched across any one of their beds, she’d been on edge. That was putting it lightly. She’d been more vigilant than she thought even Charon had ever had cause to be.

And she’d heard the whispers among the small pockets of slaves she had passed, even as they turned their faces away from her, away from prowling legionaries. The Burned Man. The Ghost of the Grand Canyon. Caesar’s Bane. Survivor of unspeakable torment. Unkillable. Who’d disappeared into the wilderness to lay his plans for Caesar’s demise.

She’d put it out of her head until later.

Only after she’d ventured into the bowels of Mr. House’s bunker beneath the Fort, upgraded the securitrons, then encrypted the mainframe so no one would be able to enter the bunker and left the monitor flashing “signal destroyed” across its surface.

Only after Caesar had given her the gift of fighting Benny in the Arena. “A boast few free women can make,” he’d said, the guards around him had sneered at the word “free” as if it were just another term for profligate whore.

Only when she sat in Siri’s sad medical tent with its supply of harvested Xander Flower and Broc Root, jugs of water, mortar and pestle for mixing herbs into paste and a various array of pre prepared poultices, bandages, gauze and jars of mystery liquids labeled in a shaky hand, as if the author had forgotten how to hold a pen, did she remember.

Siri brushed her fingertips over her elbow, asking after the burn. Faith uttered something asinine and turned their conversation to the urban legend lurking around the camp.

“Don’t let the legionaries hear you say that name,” Siri said, her voice dropping low but the tone behind it belying the fear. Fear of the name or fear of what the Legion would do to one who said it, Faith wondered.

Then, in a voice meant for telling tales around the campfire, Siri told her. About Caesar’s first legate. About the swathe of destruction the Legion had cut across the east, led by blood drenched second in command. The tithe of flesh and blood the soldiers who failed under his leadership paid. His failure at the first battle of Hoover Dam, a battle that had happened while Faith had been smoking out remnants of the Enclave, being a gopher for the scientists as they worked out the first hiccups of Project Purity’s official launch.

“I saw him once.” Siri’s voice shrank small enough that Faith had to lean in to hear her. “He was tall, strong. Maybe handsome...if you didn’t know what he was. And his eyes. I’ve never seen anyone with eyes like that. Sharp as a raptor. Pale as the desert sky. And when he looked at you, it was like he could pull the thoughts out of you. Everything you’d been thinking, ugly or not, would be laid bare.”

Weeks later, in Zion, after everyone in her caravan was dead, at the urging of the man who’d saved her from the same fate, Faith walked into the darkness of the Angel Cave.

There she found the ghost story himself looking down on her from his perch behind a weathered worktable filled with munitions.

She remembered Siri’s words.

When Joshua Graham’s eyes landed on her. The raptor sharp gaze pinned her where she stood and as she lifted her helmet, she arranged her face into an expression of polite curiosity and tried not to think.