Abner ignored the chair pulled out for him, opting to stand by the door as usual. Here, even as himself, he was starting to fall back into the guard dog’s familiar patterns. Hands behind his back and eyes fixed straight ahead. This time, though, digging his fingernails into his wrists until they bled, keeping himself anchored the only way he knew how. He had a job to do, one that the guard dog couldn’t.

Not that it was much of a job at the moment. He could barely process what the stranger was talking about, only that his voice was as unfamiliar as his name and uniform. A mercenary. That would explain it. Not a true human after all. The thought was comforting—a suspect he didn’t have to obey. Although it didn’t seem like this man was a suspect in the first place.

He kept his mouth shut as usual, but there was a nagging, resentful thought setting in. If the Enclave were hiring, it meant the other mercenary—Van Cleef?—would be his superior. A wastelander. It went against his programming, and more importantly, his mission. He’d been told the only outsiders allowed in the Enclave were the ones like him. The recruits, the assets, a subclass below a subclass. He clenched his teeth on a particularly disobedient comment, and silently hoped that the intruders had engineered Agent DePleur’s death so he’d have an excuse to kill them. It was what they deserved.