Rector wanted to believe him. It’d been a long time since he’d had a plate of hot food in front of him, and it’d be a shame to waste it. He scooped up a bite, held it under his nose, and shoveled it into his mouth. Chewing slowly, he tasted something sharp and salty—and something green, a vegetable he didn’t recognize. The second bite had more of the same, plus at least two other unfamiliar sources of crunchiness, and by the third bite he didn’t care anymore. He just ate.

Houjin ate more slowly (he could eat faster, Rector thought, if he’d put down those stupid sticks), and continued to grill Angeline about the sasquatch. “What will we do if we find it? Should we bring guns? Should we bring one of the men from the Vaults, or someone from Chinatown?”

Rector thought Huey might’ve been contemplating a suggestion Angeline wouldn’t have liked—that is, bring in someone from the Station—but he didn’t say so, and the princess shook her head, anyway. “No, we shouldn’t bring no guns. We don’t want to hurt this thing.”

“We don’t?” Rector paused mid-bite, his mouth hanging open. “Because I tell you what, it definitely wanted to hurt me.”

“Did it?” she asked. “Or was it confused, and sick, and scared? It followed you, and that’s all we can say for sure,” she said stubbornly. “Fellows, the sasquatch are few and far between. We can’t kill one. We have to try and save it.”

It was Houjin’s turn to be appalled. “Save it? We can’t save anything that breathes the Blight.”

“Why not? Just because no people have ever survived it, that don’t mean nothing else can recover.”

Zeke smiled optimistically at the princess. “Like that fox? You think we could save the other things that get inside, too?”

“Maybe,” she told him. “I sure would like to think so.”

Rector had concerns. He finished his next big mouthful and said, “I thought that if you get bitten by anything that’s Blight-sick, you have to cut off whatever it was they chomped on. Even if we had some way to save the sasquatch, and even if we let it loose … wouldn’t it go running ’round the woods biting other sasquatches?”

Angeline shrugged and looked down at her plate. “I don’t have any idea, but I’d like to give it a chance. We know the rotters can’t be saved or fixed, but we also know the crows do just fine, and the foxes and raccoons get mean, but they don’t die. We should try to catch something small; a rat, or even a fox like the one you saw. We could put it in one of the empty rooms in the Vaults. Give it some clean air and clean food. See if it gets any better.”