The dog days of summer weren't treating me well. Heat, not enough darkness, too many dreams. And now raiders holed up in the Federal Ration Stockpile building again, harassing a nearby settlement for "tribute." You'd have thought by now word would have gotten around that harassing certain settlements tended to end up with you and your band in tiny bloody chunks all over the floors and walls of the Federal Ration Stockpile building, but either some people never learn, or new people who've never learned keep coming along.

I was used to it, or should have been. Maybe that was the problem. The same places every time, the raiders or super mutants who always seemed to move back in just a few weeks or months after I cleared the last batch out, the junk I loaded up to carry home to my workbenches- there was a sameness about it. I zoned out sometimes in the middle of the shooting, and blinked myself back to full awareness surrounded by corpses, with some freshly stripped mutant hound meat leaking blood all over the extra ammo in my pack. Oh, time to head home. It was a good thing Hancock usually insisted on coming along; he'd talk to me, keep me focused.

I paused in the doorway at the top of the stairs, gun out.

"Anybody who wants to live through the next thirty minutes," I bellowed, "put your hands up!"

"Just once," said Hancock, as the raiders started shooting at us, "I wish we could try the stealth approach."

"I like to give them a chance, at least," I said, and picked off two of them with clean headshots. "It does work sometimes, you'll admit."

I thought it hadn't worked at all today- we'd killed about a dozen of them already- when we finally found one with his hands up.

"Don't shoot me," he said.

"Good move, chief," I said. "Let's talk about what happens next."

"You can take everything," he said. "Check out the locked room over there- the key's on the desk. You can take what's in there, you can use it, or sell it-"

"Sounds interesting," said Hancock, and unlocked the door. He took one look inside, then came back over, put his gun to the raider's forehead, and pulled the trigger.

"Jesus Christ, Hancock!" I said. "What the fuck?"

"Go look," he said grimly.

What was in the room was a girl, curled up naked on a dirty mattress. Her hair was auburn and raggedly short; I guessed it had been cut with a knife. I could see all of her ribs, standing out against the bruises and welts and scars on her skin.

"Oh," I said. "Fair enough."

"Here," said Hancock, and stripped off his coat- the original John Hancock's red frock coat, not too much the worse for four hundred years of preservation and the first and last few years of wear. "Put this on her. I'll wait out here."

I went in and got down on the floor next to her, on my knees on the cold concrete, which was starting to be something I noticed was uncomfortable, although it wasn't something I was likely to stop doing anytime soon, not with a world out there to scavenge for junk.

"Hey there," I said, but she didn't react. I touched her shoulder lightly. She twitched, but that was all.

"It's all right," I said. "You're going to be all right now. We're going to get you out of here."

When she still didn't look up, I put a hand on one thin, cold shoulder and pulled her, as gently as I could, over onto her back. Her face was puffy and bony both, with big black circles under the big blue eyes, and a bruise on her mouth. She looked eighteen or twenty or twenty-two- it's hard for me to tell any more; she looked young, too young to be here, the way soldiers used to in the pictures they flashed on television, the way so many people are starting to look to me now. She eyed me with an eerie kind of calm, as if she couldn't imagine anything worse happening right now than had already happened to her, so why bother being scared?

"Hey there," I said again. "I'm not going to hurt you, I promise. Can you sit up?"

She tried, and I tried to help without hurting her, and with a few winces and gasps we got her sitting up. I put Hancock's coat around her shoulders.

"Put your arms in the sleeves," I told her, and she did. I got it fastened in front, so that she was more or less decent, or would be, when- "Can you stand up?"

That was a little harder. She tried, but her legs were shaking, and she kept lurching against me, and finally collapsed to her knees, looking up at me plaintively, as if hoping I'd see she'd done her best.

"Hancock," I called, wanting some help lifting her, and he stepped into the room. She screamed, a full-throated, steam-engine scream, and flung her arms around my leg, clinging so tightly she almost dragged me off balance. He stepped back again, quickly, out of her line of sight.

"I guess she's not used to ghouls," I said, hoping Hancock wasn't too hurt by her obvious horror. "Hancock's not a feral, kid. He's a friend. He wouldn't hurt a hair on your head. That's his coat you're wearing."

She let go of my leg, slowly, and sat back on her heels, looking up at me. I sat back down next to her and took off my pack.

"What's your name?" I asked, pulling out a bottle, and she shook her head. "No? I'm Nora. That's Hancock. Here."

I offered her the bottle, but she looked at me as if she didn't understand. I took the cap off and held it out to her again, but she still didn't take it. Finally I held it to her lips, and she drank, like a baby.

Refreshing Beverage might have a stupid name- some scientist must have named it when she invented the recipe, which involves water and the contents of stimpaks and a couple of drugs and purified water and, weirdly enough, blood- but it fixes you right up. Not only do you feel better right away, but it heals radiation sickness and chem addiction. It isn't easy to make, or to find the ingredients, but I figured the girl's need was greater than mine was ever likely to be.

I tipped the bottle all the way up when it was almost empty, and spilled a little bit on her face. I reached to wipe it off, and she gasped and flinched.

"Easy, now," I said, wiping it off as carefully as I could with my sleeve. "Let's sit here a little while and see if you feel better, all right?"

"Thank you," she whispered.

"You're welcome," I said, relieved to confirm that she could at least speak English. "Once you feel like you can walk, we can get you home. Where is home?"

She looked up at me. I couldn't tell what that look meant- although, on reflection, I could guess. She'd obviously been here a long time, to be in such a state, and if nobody had rescued or ransomed her, it was likely that everyone who cared about her was already dead. And she didn't want to talk about it.

"Well, we can't leave you here," I said. "I guess I'll take you back to my own home for right now. Fair warning, though, there are a bunch of ghouls there. Not ferals- nobody will hurt you. They're good people. It's a good place."

Her eyes darted towards the door, and then back at me, the whites showing all around their edges.

"Are you going to keep me?" she asked hoarsely.

"What's that, hon?"

"Please don't sell me," she said. "Keep me for yourself. You won't regret it."

She put her hand on my thigh and squeezed it, a caressing, undulant pressure, clearly intended to be seductive, which didn't go well with the panic in her eyes.

I took her hand off my leg and held it between my hands. It was cold as ice, and her fingers gripped mine convulsively.

"It's not like that, kid," I said. "Nobody's going to be selling you, because nobody owns you. You're a free agent. As soon as you can walk, you can walk away from me anytime. But if you want my advice, I think you should stick with me for a bit, because it's not safe out here alone, and I can take you somewhere safe, where you can rest and eat and start figuring out what you want to do next. Does that sound like a plan?"

She looked at me like there were words written on my face that she couldn't quite decipher, but after a minute, she nodded.

"Good," I said. "Are you feeling better?"

She nodded again. I stood up and held out my hands, and she took them, and let me pull her to her feet and lead her out into the main room.

"I'd help carry her," said Hancock from a far wall where he'd retreated, "but, uh..."

"No need," I said. "She's feeling better now. You all right there, sweetheart? Don't be scared. It's all right now. It's going to be all right."

"Mom!"

As we approached the Slog, Shaun came running down the slope towards us. He flung his arms around my waist in a bear hug, then looked up curiously at the auburn-haired girl wearing Hancock's red coat.

"Hey, Shaun," I said. "Brought you that biometric scanner you wanted. It's in my pack."

"Neat!" he said. "I bet I can make something really good with that. Hi! I'm Shaun."

The girl looked down at him, and then at me, glancing back and forth a couple of times. Shaun looked at me, puzzled- I guessed- why she didn't introduce herself in return.

"Shaun is my son," I told her, in my role as Captain Obvious of the Helpful Patrol. "Shaun, this is a friend who's going to be staying with us for a little while. But she doesn't want to tell us her name yet, so we need something to call her. What do you think?"

"Ruby," he said promptly, and I laughed.

"After Grognak and the Ruby Ruins?" I asked, and he nodded enthusiastically.

"What do you think?" I asked her.

Something happened at the corners of her puffy mouth, something I was willing to fool myself into thinking was the beginnings of a smile.

"Ruby it is then," I said. "At least for now. Let's get you some clothes, all right? Hancock's going to want his coat back."

Most of the Slog residents slept in one big bunkhouse, but I'd built a few little shacks here and there for privacy if people wanted it. Mostly they didn't- there was a communal comfort to the bunkhouse. One shack I'd made into a clubhouse for Shaun, with his toys and comic books and disassembled junk and weapon mods in progress scattered everywhere, and one was officially mine and Hancock's, but the rest were just kind of there in case anybody ever felt the need. I took her to one of the unoccupied ones- I'd put a bed and a chair and a little dresser in each one- and brought her a few outfits from collective storage, and stood outside while she changed. She came out wearing a loose blue cotton dress and offering me the armload of other outfits. I took Hancock's coat and handed the rest of them back to her.

"Keep them," I said. "It's nice to have options. Put them in your dresser. You can stay here as long as you want. Nobody will bother you. I'm going to go get you some food, OK?"

I happened to have the ingredients on hand to make squirrel stew, which is one of my favorites and which I'd been looking forward to myself, but I hadn't been locked in a closet eating God knows what and getting raped all the time for God knows how long, so. When I came back with the bowl, she was kneeling on the floor by the bed, her hands clasped neatly in the folds of her skirt, like a little girl saying her prayers. Maybe she was praying. She looked up at me with that same almost-peaceful lack of expectation. Waiting.

"Do you want to eat down there, or do you want to sit in the chair?" I asked. "It's a nice chair. I built it myself."

She looked over at the chair, and then back at me, hesitating. I put the bowl down on the dresser and held out my hands to her, and after a second, she took them and let me pull her to her feet again. Watching me, she crossed to the chair and sat down. I slid the bowl across the dresser towards her, with the spoon sticking out of it. She didn't move to touch it.

"That's for you," I said. "When you're done eating, you can come out and meet everybody if you want, or if you're not feeling up for that just yet, you can get some sleep if you want to, or- just relax. It's completely up to you."

"Thank you, ma'am," she said softly.

"You don't need to call me ma'am," I said. "Unless you enlist with the Minutemen, which you're welcome to do once you get your strength back. Anything else I can get you right now?"

"No, thank you," she said.

"Come find me if there is," I said. "I'll be around, close by. If you don't see me, you can ask anybody. Nobody will hurt you or- do anything to you. All right?"

"Yes, ma'am," she said, and then drew in her breath sharply and looked up at me in obvious distress. "I'm sorry, I- I mean-"

"My name's Nora," I said. "But if ma'am is a habit, don't stress about it. You can call me Mistress of Mystery, or Grognak the Barbarian, if you want to. I mean, I'm going to be calling you Ruby Ruins, at least until you tell me your real name."

She didn't smile, or answer. She just watched me.

"Well," I said. "I'll let you eat."

After I'd closed the door behind me, I rang the bell to assemble the rest of the Slog, so I could give a little speech about not crowding her or startling her or expecting her to laugh at any jokes unless they were a lot funnier than mine.

"Everybody's jokes are funnier than yours, Nora," said Holly, and a couple of people chuckled.

"They are not," said Shaun indignantly. "Did you tell Ruby the one about the piece of string that walks into the bar?"

"I'll tell her that one tomorrow," I said. "Anybody have any questions, or have we moved on to the part of the evening where everyone mocks me except my generous-hearted child?"

"Is 'Ruby' going to do her fair share of work?" asked David, one of the non-ghouls who'd moved in and settled down once I started building up the Slog. "Because if she's not, then I don't think it's fair to expect us to feed her, when we barely have enough for ourselves."

"I'm sorry," I said, raising an eyebrow at him. "Do we have a food shortage?"

He frowned. "We- no, we don't have a shortage. But the caps we bring in selling the surplus, we need those for supplies. I'm just talking about basic fairness here. If you work, you eat. It's as-"

"Look," I said. "I hope eventually she'll be able to do some work, but don't act like supporting one extra person for a while is going to break the Slog. You know damn well I take care of you guys. I'll be responsible for the girl and whatever resources she needs, until she gets back on her feet. If you start running low on anything at all, let me know. Otherwise, quit your bitching."

There was a silence.

"You know we appreciate everything you do for us, Nora," said Deirdre after a minute.

"I appreciate all of you too," I said. "That's why I'm raising my kid here, and why I brought a stranger here to recover from a traumatic experience. I don't think I'll regret either decision. Right? Thanks, everybody. That was all."

After almost everyone had dispersed, Hancock, back in his coat and lingering next to me, said, "Not sure I've ever heard you lay down the law like that before."

I turned to look at him. "Too dictatorial for your tastes?"

"Nah," he said. "Not dictatorial. Mayoral, maybe. Nothing wrong with that." He winked at me. "Kind of a good look on you, actually."

I grinned. "Yeah?"

"Oh yeah," he said. "How about a little mayoral congress back at the state house?"

"John, that's the corniest line I've ever heard."

"Yeah, well," he said, taking my hand and starting for our cabin. "They can't all be winners. Let's see if I can make it up to you."

Afterwards, as we lay side by side on the bed, my smooth skin pressed against his gnarled, irradiated skin, he said, "We did good today, don't you think? Rescued a lady in distress. Blew some bastards' evil brains out."

"Yeah, we did all right," I said.

He brushed the hair back from my face. "Think you might sleep tonight?"

I reddened. "What do you mean? Of course. I sleep."

"Not that much," he said. "Not the last week or so. Don't get pissed, Nora. I ain't accusing you of being a synth. I'm just saying, I go to sleep when you're up, and I wake up and you're still up. Or you're up again."

"So?"

"So I thought you might be-" He hesitated. "Because it must've been about this time, last year. I remember how goddamn hot it was, when- everything happened. I thought you might be- remembering."

"I don't forget," I said. "Not for a second."

"Sure," he said. "I know that. I just- look, if you don't want to talk about it, that's fine."

"I don't," I said tightly.

"Fine."

He was right, of course. I hadn't been sleeping any more than I could help. If dreams don't have anything new to tell you, they should shut the fuck up.