Sam looked up from tinkering with the solar panel and her multimeter and greeted Rebecca cheerfully when she returned to the workbenches. "Hi cutie. Good chat with Allie?"

Rebecca felt a slight blush on her cheeks at Sam's initial tone. "Yeah, catching her up on yesterday's events, and thanking her for the welcome-home surprise. She seems to be feeling pretty good today."

"Nice. I'm glad to see she's up and around."

"And feeling pretty feisty too." Rebecca briefly unlatched the pins holding Felicia together to recheck her work one more time, then started cleaning up her work area, packing cleaning picks and brushes back into a plastic box and rolling up the mat she'd laid out. After setting all that in a tidy pile next to the rifle and SMG, she sidled over next to Sam. "So... we were so tired last night, we didn't get to talk a lot. How did your afternoon go, poking at the panels and all?"

Sam chuckled. "My arms are still pretty dead. But, it'll be nice to hook several of these babies into our grid and get an idea for how that all works out before doing it en masse with the rest of them. I think we got eight or ten into the truck? Epstein seemed pretty stoked about some of the parts and tools he scored while we were messing around up above. Here, tilt that edge up so it faces into the sun more? I want to see how much variance there is based on angle."

Rebecca obliged, tilting the new panel up to about a sixty degree tilt so it was facing the sun almost dead-on. "How was it up in the bucket truck anyway? It seemed like a pretty tight squeeze with both of you in it for a while there."

Sam grinned. "What, are you worried?"

"Not like that... I just wanted to make sure he wasn't, like, bothering you or being a creeper."

"Aww." Sam relented and stopped teasing her. "No, he was a perfect gentleman about things. Calls anyone he's not bossing around 'brother' or 'sister', made as much room for me as he could, kept his hands to himself. It was fine. How was your time up on the roof with Pat?"

"Pretty chill, though that's no surprise with him involved. We chatted a little, I asked about how he ended up in his little post apocalyptic career, some of the shit that he heard went down with people trying to get out of D.C. — he had a good point about how fear makes decent people into idiots and shitheads. Not quite his words. But... even on the way home we saw some of that. Did you notice the fenced-in camp with the guard towers?"

The way Sam paused her work while she replied with a sigh hinted at some significant dismay. "Ugh... yeah. Jesus. Crazy part is that I can actually see the logic behind the idea of forcible quarantine. Assuming you can actually find the right balance and not just lock more people in, guaranteeing they get sick too."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to spoil the mood."

Sam smiled sadly at her and glanced at Rufus, throwing the slobbery ball again for him before returning her attention to the power meter. "Eh. It's okay."

"See, you're not scolding me for apologizing..."

Instead, Sam elbowed her in the ribs and stuck her tongue out at her.

**

Sam thought there was something fitting about using the first few solar panels to charge the cordless drills and saws they needed to build scaffolding for the rest of the array. The next few days were filled with construction sounds echoing between the buildings — power tools, hammering, lumber clattering together. Cat and her people even stuck around to chip in — excited at the prospect of having somewhere to plug in an arc welder, apparently, though Sam had some opinions about them guzzling that much current without careful planning.

She spent a lot of time wiring the first full truckload of panels into the grid, taking the time to ensure they could be detached quickly and brought indoors on short notice whenever the next storm blew through. She was glad to have some competent hands to do the initial passes, but still felt a self-inflicted pressure to check everyone's work — especially after she found a few small mistakes that might have fried valuable components, even if a real fire was unlikely.

She and Rebecca didn't see much of each other during the day, and mostly spent those nights in a routine of eating, cleaning, and lots of sleeping... but the shared domesticity was enough time together to keep their spirits up. While Sam was busy, Rebecca got her wish, and got to spend an afternoon pacing the rooftop with Ronnie.

Rhonda chuckled when Rebecca told her she missed the old times a little. "You've come a long way, kiddo. You should be proud of yourself."

Rebecca half-turned her head away from the view to grin at Ronnie. "Not that far, technically. Several miles maybe, in a pretty convoluted set of loops."

The soft creaking sound of Rhonda's armor as she walked was comfortingly familiar. "You never used to sass me this much, for example. At least you don't do it in front of the troops, I appreciate that."

"I guess Sam is rubbing off on me. I'd apologize, but... like I said, she's rubbing off on me."

"I'm going to pass up the opportunity to make a crass comment there, but things are good?"

"Yeah." Rebecca caught herself smiling for a moment while they walked. "I think we're moving out of the shiny honeymoon stage, but settling into a solid, constructive relationship." She let out a long relieved sigh. "It seems to do us both a lot of good."

"Nice." They stopped as they reached one corner of the building, and Rhonda scanned the neighborhood through a pair of binoculars. "Listen, are you two still thinking of looking for your parents?"

"I guess so... we were pretty focused on my place, the armory, and the solar panels first. We've only thought about the family search in general terms." Rebecca's brow crinkled as she looked more intently at Ronnie, noticing she was staring off to the northeast once she lowered the binoculars, towards D.C. "Wait, why?"

"What you told me Sam said on the drive back... about all the bad things having happened already. She's right about the past being the past, but... the madness isn't over yet. I've been hearing reports about the lingering fallout in big cities. D.C., Baltimore, Philly, New York."

A worried frown settled on Rebecca's face. "What do you mean, fallout? Is the Dollar Flu back?"

Rhonda sighed. "No, not like it originally was. There's always the chance of another outbreak, but... if it happens, it's going to be because of fucked up people trying to make it come back. That's what I'm getting at. Asymptomatic carriers trying to infect other people. Nerve gas used on civilian settlements. Suicide bombers, lynchings, people being burned alive."

"Jesus, Ronnie. If you're trying to scare the shit out of me so we don't go, you're on the right track. You're making me think we aren't safe here either too..."

"Sorry, kiddo. It's not as bad out here in the smaller towns and suburbs. Sure, people are preying on each other, and there's lawlessness like we saw the other day, but it seems the overall devastation and amount of societal collapse is tied to population density. Plus we're digging in fast — Tierman is gonna take zero shit from anyone who rolls into town, especially once she and Zaman get their heads together on re-establishing some form of local government, providing backing and legitimacy."

Rebecca sat on a stack of sandbags for a moment and looked up at Ronnie. "Why are you telling me all this, why now, and so specifically?"

"You got me all wrong, kid. I'm not trying to scare you out of going. I think you need to go look for them. You said Sam's place was only a little outside of town, right?"

Rebecca nodded. "Yeah."

Ronnie folded her hands atop the buttstock of her rifle, slung in front of her chest. "Well, it's hard to know what you'll find there, but it's close enough to get to easily, especially if you tag along with a patrol, or one of Cat's runs." She lifted one finger and waggled it in Rebecca's general direction. "Your mom, if she was going to your uncle's out in the wilderness, early enough..." She shrugged. "As long as they had enough to get by all this time, she probably had a good chance. With the shit everyone's still doing to each other, if you have family out there, you need to go get them, bring them back to you, or let them know what's going on out here so know what they need in order to stay safe... or hell, even stay with them, if that's what's best."

Rebecca's mind reeled briefly. Sam's home wasn't that far away, but... people were gathering in settlements like this for a reason. It wasn't safe or sustainable to be on your own for most people. What if her parents made it somewhere else, would she want to follow them? What if her own mom wanted her to stay out in the backwoods? She'd started to get comfortable here again, and the notion of having to choose to stay or not rapidly became overwhelming. "I... I'll talk to Sam again, we'll think about it. Thanks for being supportive. But.. Jesus. All that stuff you've been hearing. Don't keep it bottled up, you know I'm already on the edge of worrying about you."

"I know kid. I promise if I start to come apart at the seams I'll let you know, but let's stop having that same conversation over and over again, okay?"

Rebecca looked down, contrite. "Okay, sorry. Just, you're one of the important foundations in my life."

"And you want to hold onto those and make sure they're solid, I get it. As long as we keep working to make our own little domain better, and safer, I'm good."

"Okay. I guess I better stop yapping and get back to keeping an eye out for badguys." Rebecca pushed off the sandbags and rose, glancing towards D.C. with a frown. A trace of it remained as they resumed their slow circuit of the roof, and she found herself studying the shadows more intently, even the familiar ones. She couldn't shake the feeling that the awful things Ronnie described might not be so far away.

**

Their shift ended while there was still sun in the sky, and Rebecca found Sam down at the same workbenches they'd shared a few days prior. It looked like she had three vehicle radios in front of her, all open, two in significantly more severe states of disassembly than the third. Rebecca saw Sam roughly shove a pair of safety glasses to the top of her head — she could read the frustration in her posture, and removed her gloves as she approached.

The sound of the Velcro wrist cinches opening caught Sam's attention, and she glanced back over her shoulder before returning a glare to the two large circuit boards in front of her. "Hey."

Rebecca sidled up behind her, lightly brushing her fingertips over Sam's shoulders, sliding them under her neck-length titian red hair. Quickly assessing what she found, she started slowly kneading the tense muscles between Sam's collarbones and shoulder blades, then worked upwards along the back of Sam's neck with her thumbs. "Hey, Rosie. Something being stupid?"

Sam gestured across the two boards in front of her. "Trying to make one working mobile unit out of two broken ones, and the third one there is for reference. Sometimes I miss working on things that I knew would get smashed up a bit afterwards, it made setting the frustration aside easier."

"Mmm." Rebecca looked down over Sam's shoulders, and could see several matching components had been desoldered from both boards. It looked like Sam was in the process of transplanting some from one radio to the other. "I would have thought you'd get more frustrated at something breaking that you'd just fixed for the third time."

Sam poked idly at a cylinder, perhaps half the size of a AAA battery... a capacitor, if Rebecca remembered correctly. "The fact it would wreck other things along the way helped with that." She sighed angrily, but her next breath hitched and released much slower as Rebecca's thumbs found one of her reliable trigger spots.

Rebecca knew that right where they attached to the base of her skull, Sam's upper trapezius, splenius, and suboccipital muscles were usually a mess — just from the way Sam slumped a fraction of an inch at her touch, Rebecca knew her eyes were closed. "Another reason you keep me around."

"Whatever you want to tell yourself, just keep going," Sam mumbled.

Rebecca chuckled and lightly kissed the back of Sam's head while she continued. A few minutes later, her hands were starting to tire, but she pushed on for a little longer before she slowed. "Okay, but that's all I've got for now." She glided her hands down Sam's neck in a tender sweeping motion out to her shoulders, then let go after an affectionate squeeze.

Sam took a deep breath and rolled her shoulders back. "You're a liar, but I love you. That was more than your hands wanted to do."

Rebecca pondered for a moment whether Sam was just predicting her behavior or could feel the difference. "Yeah, okay. Busted." She leaned against the table, careful not to jostle all the parts, and smiled at Sam as their eyes met. "But I do think there's enough left in them to offer you a third, or maybe even fourth hand if that would help you finish."

A further measure of relief crept onto Sam's face. "Now that would be lovely."

"And the little tune-up wasn't?" Rebecca feigned offense, mock-scoffing as she stepped around to the far side of the large table. After a few moments doting on Rufus where he lay nearby, she unslung Felicia, doffed her jacket and armor, and stacked them all at the free end of the workbench. Then, she braced herself on the table, supporting most of her upper body weight on her abdomen and torso using a bunch of posture tricks Ronnie had taught her over the first few months of her apprenticeship. Elbows wide, shoulders low. Only propping herself up on them enough that slow breathing wouldn't make her shift. She even cupped her left hand under her right, a modified version of how she might hold a pistol, to reduce hand tremble. Stabilized as she could manage, she nodded towards towards the bits and pieces on the table. between them. "Okay. Show me what to do."

Sam smiled appreciatively across at her, passing her a pair of forceps. "If you can help keep things still, it'll be much easier for me to hold both the solder and iron. But first..." Sam slid her pair of safety glasses back on and nodded towards Rebecca's gear. "Put your PPE back on before Ronnie chews me out, will ya?"