Coyote Tail Ridge jutted from the cliffs overlooking Bitter Springs, a rocky promontory that offered views on both the settlement and the canyon path leading up to the NCR outpost.

Six could see why First Recon had chosen to position themselves here to stake out the Khans, although when Boone had told her the story, she'd initially imagined something much more dramatic – the snipers ranged on either side of the canyon and the Khans threading along the path below, far away and unknowing. In a way, it'd been easier to envision it happening like that, to pretend that the soldiers had never seen their victims' faces. Standing on Coyote Tail Ridge, Six had realized how differently it must have played out.

For one thing, the shooters hadn't been as distant or as high up as she'd believed. Boone had climbed the ridge before her and she'd looked up at him from the path, surprised to find that she could still distinguish his features; she also knew, that, with his sniper's vision, he could make her out as clear as day even without the use of a scope. He'd lifted his hand in greeting as she'd picked her way along the narrow trail and it'd given Six a pang to know that he could see her, just as he'd seen the first of the Khans on that evening, three years ago, when he and the rest of First Recon had opened fire.

Six had brushed it off then, that uncanny feeling, but when she settled in to rest, it'd started to trouble her. She'd hoped to get some sleep, but she was all-too-conscious that Boone was awake, crouched at the edge of the ridge and staring expectantly into the darkness.

Boone wasn't just on the look-out for trouble, as he'd been for so many nights before. She could tell it was more than that. This was a vigil.

He was watching for his punishment. It was hard to know whether he awaited it with hope or with dread.

For a while, they'd talked, if only to pretend that he wasn't waiting and that she wasn't trying to sleep and failing at it. They'd talked about simple things mostly, food being a favoured topic. Six had asked him a lot of questions about California, too, and he'd told her a few stories about living with his aunt and uncle when they were still sharecropping out there, before the Brahmin Barons bought up all the lands for pasture. Six still didn't remember much about the place and wasn't sure it'd do her any good to try, but it sounded alright there. She liked the idea of the ocean, anyway.

Lulled by the sound of his voice, she fell into a light doze, waking, maybe an hour later, at what sounded like a kicked pebble clattering over the ground. In most places, that wouldn't have been enough to rouse her but on the ridge, sounds carried and echoed through the nearby canyon.

She raised her head, figuring it was just Boone re-adjusting his position, but from the way he started moving, she could tell it was something else.

He stooped down and set her pack beside her with a soft thud. "Get up. It's time for you to go."

Six squinted at him, sleep still crusting the corners of her eyes. "What? No. Now can you please inform me what in the hell's going on?"

"It's not your fight," he said. "I want you to go. Take your stuff and head northeast. There's a station up there where you can wait things out."

When Six didn't move, he tore open her bedroll and dragged her to her feet, shoving the pack into her hands. He pointed to the desert. "Go. Now. Six, this is no fucking joke."

She scowled at him, holding the bag stiffly in front of her. He had one hell of a nerve dismissing her like that. To add insult to injury, she wasn't wearing any pants, clothed in only a camisole and a pair of embarrassingly threadbare underwear. If she had her way, she sure as hell wasn't fleeing into the wilderness dressed only in her skivvies.

"Let me get dressed first, will you?"

A gun fired behind them and Boone didn't have time to growl a response. Legionaries swarmed out from behind the hills, some firing on them from the trail, while others raced towards Bitter Springs, intent on raiding the settlement.

Boone dropped to his stomach, pulling her down with him. Six's knees scraped the ground and she hit the dirt hard, gasping for breath.

She wanted to twist around and deck him, even as the bullets whistled overhead, as the shadows started to close in around them. He had no right to treat her like a civilian, to push her away so he could go charging towards death. Goddamn, but she wanted to kiss him too, an urgent, angry kiss, the kind that might've hit as hard as a fist and bruised his lips, sucked the air from his mouth, made him recoil in wounded surprise. She didn't indulge either instinct, just slid out from under his arm, bristling away him.

"I warned you," he said. "Didn't want it to come to this."

"Come to what?" she retorted. "I love killing Legion."

"This isn't an ordinary raid. This is how it's gonna end, Six."

He crept forward, towards the brink of the ridge, propping his rifle up against a nearby rock.

She scoffed at him. "And you've been waiting for it. All this time."

Working her way over to the rock where she'd stashed her clothes, Six rolled onto her back and wriggled into her pants. At least now she'd have more than a little scrap of cotton covering her ass. One had to be glad for small mercies.

Boone's rifle cracked off a shot, although she couldn't see if he'd hit anything.

"I didn't know for certain," he said. "I just...had a feeling. You don't want to be here, there's still time to run."

Six pulled on her leather jacket, dusty and soft as a second skin. She gripped her gun and the metal warmed under her fingers.

"And that's what makes me crazy, Boone. That you actually think I'd do that. After everything we've been through together."

They fought on the ridge, gunfire sparking the night. Everything dissolved into a rush of adrenalin, a drum pounding in Six's ears. She fired on a pair of glowing eyes and heard a mongrel howl as it fell. Glimpsing a pale face illuminated by the flash of the gun, a machete slicing through the darkness, she spun around to confront another enemy, to make another kill. She didn't know mercy anymore. Not with Legion men.

When they'd taken down the first wave of legionaries, they edged down into the settlement below. Legionaries had busted in the doors of the rusted-out trailers, hauling frightened sleepers into the settlement square. When Six arrived, some settlers already lay dead on the ground. By the time she and Boone were done, there were plenty of legionaries sprawled beside them, machetes still clutched in their stiffening fingers.

A steady stream of NCR troops showed up to help, but soon the outpost had no defenders to spare. Shots rang out from inside the canyon and the soldiers charged back to their posts, abandoning the settlement and its wounded civilians.

"Stay here," Boone said. "They could use you."

He was being too pushy for Six's liking, but he was right. She was one of the few people around competent to treat the wounds some of the townspeople had sustained and any NCR surgeons who might be stationed at the outpost had other priorities at the moment.

She gave him a warning look. "Don't you do anything stupid up there."

Boone drew her jacket closed, zipping it up. For a moment, his hands bracketed her shoulders and she realized how safe she felt in his presence, even when everything was blood and chaos. "What happens, happens. Take care of yourself, Six."

He turned, striding away and as much as she would have liked to linger there and watch his figure recede into the darkness, Six knew she was needed in other places. There were wounds to be tended. There was work to be done.

It was well after dawn when Boone limped back to the settlement, inexplicably alive. Didn't make any sense to him. He'd been so sure he'd come to the end of the line. It'd given him a certain peace, thinking he was going to eat lead in that canyon, where the Khans were buried. Coming out alive and one piece – well, he wasn't sure if he was relieved or disappointed. Maybe a little from Column A, a little from Column B. As it stood, he didn't really know what to do with himself.

Six was still working on patients when he came back. She'd set up a makeshift hospital in one of the less damaged trailers.

When Boone barged in, she was doing a surgery. Her hair was tied back and covered in cloth and she had piece of fabric wrapped around her mouth. Her gloved hands were covered in blood.

She'd recruited one of the settlers to be her assistant and he was dressed in a similar get-up. The guy barred his way, shooing him out the door. "You can't be in here."

"Just let her know I'm around," Boone said.

He sat down on the ground out front of the trailer, chugged some water from his flask and lit himself a cigarette while he waited. That'd always been a soldier's life – hurry up and wait. Wait for orders. Wait for back-up. Wait for the target to shift forward a couple of inches, into his sights. Back in the day, he'd been good at being patient, but that was when he'd been at peace with his thoughts.

Took a little while, but at last, the trailer door creaked open and Six came down the concrete stairs, looking exhausted. It was strange, but Boone felt anxious at the sight of her, jittery, with the warm, queasy feeling at the pit of his gut that came from caring too much.

He got up, dusting himself off, and shambled over to her.

"Hey."

"Glad you're back in one piece," she said.

"Something I had to do. Needed to see if it was time. Figured it was. Guess I figured wrong."

"Boone, you really think everything that's happened to you is punishment? For what happened here?"

"There's no other way to explain it. Just wish the punishment would be done with me, so I could be done with it. With all of it."

Her mouth dropped open as if she was going to challenge him on that, but instead she just sighed. "Maybe the punishment now is just living with what you did. And trying to do better."

His throat went dry. It was hard to muster up an answer.

"You think so?"

"Yes. I do. If you want to see all this as a sign, then I think the only way to read it is that the world isn't done with you yet."

To do better - to kill more Legion, to take down more fucking slavers, to be the soldier he should have been instead of the one he'd become. If that was his mission, he'd take it and the pain that went with it. He'd swallow his guilt and his shame and the knowledge of his cowardice, how he'd hoped to die because it would've been easier than bearing up under all the weight of the things he'd done.

A few months ago, the sentence would have felt like too much to endure, but now it felt almost...manageable. As if there was still reason to hope.

"You know, when you showed up in Novac, I had this feeling that I was supposed to go with you. Figured you were the punishment come knocking on my door. Never thought that we'd come this far or that I'd start to -"

Six looked at him expectantly and Boone knew that she'd already filled in the blanks. He was grateful for that. He'd never been good saying that kind of stuff aloud, not even to Carla after they'd married. Words had never been his thing.

She took him in her arms then and he folded her against his chest, his hand stroking the back of her head.

He hadn't trusted anyone like this before. Not his best friend. Not his wife. Manny had been too tough for that kind of honesty and Carla had been too fragile. And he - well, he had been another person back then, a man whose happiness had been built on forgetting, on little omissions and denials, on keeping up illusions, his own, his wife's, his friend's. With Six, he remembered all he was and all he'd been and if that knowledge hurt, it was the kind of pain that reminded him that he still had blood pumping through veins, that he still might have a shred of conscience to cling to.

"Come on. Let's get some shut-eye," she said. "I think we've earned it."

As they trudged back up along the Ridge, he caught her hand and held it. She glanced at him in surprise, but she didn't say a word, just let him walk her to their camp like they were sweethearts coming back from a dance.

He didn't care if it looked funny. He liked the way her fingers laced through his and how every so often, she'd give his hand a little squeeze as if to remind him that she wasn't letting go.

They shared his bedroll, although neither of them was in the mood for anything but sleep. Still, it was comforting to feel her warmth beside him and to know that there was nothing left to hide. He'd told her all of it and yet she didn't despise him for a murderer, didn't condemn him for having for taking part in an act as horrific as anything the Legion had committed.

If once she'd seemed like a part of his punishment, now her presence was the one quiet mercy that might carry him through this life sentence of regret, of atonement for his wrongs. He held her close, thankful for undeserved blessings.

After the attack on Bitter Springs, Legion assassination squads became almost a way of life for Six, and when it wasn't parties of them swooping down on her camp at night, it was spies lurking around Gomorrah with hold-out weapons and whatever else they could smuggle through the door. In the month before the battle of Hoover Dam, as she worked to consolidate the NCR's forces, there were more than a dozen attempts on Six's life. Her room at Gomorrah often felt like her only refuge and even then, she knew she was never entirely safe, even with Boone sleeping beside her and Rex guarding the door.

The highest bounty was on Six, but Vulpes hadn't stopped there. He'd put out prices on her friends' heads as well and circulated the news throughout the Mojave, so that even mercs, Powder Gangers and Freeside thugs came after them to collect.

The fact that Six had taken down House and engineered the fall of the Fort should have given the would-be assassins pause, but it never deterred the most desperate. No matter how many fell before them, there were always more waiting in the wings, lured on by the promise of denarius and Legion favour.

Six knew that, if this kept up, one day she or one of her friends would falter; already the barrage was wearing them down. Arcade had a broken leg thanks to an ambush near RepConn headquarters and he was still hobbling around Gomorrah on crutches. Veronica had suffered electrical burns from the wreck of her last power-fist, the skin on her right hand and wrist mottled red and pink. Six couldn't even count the number of times Lily and Boone had been cut, punched, gouged, stabbed or knocked flat on their asses, but it was a wonder of modern science that they weren't slowly bleeding to death from the insides.

And then there was Cass.

Cass was drinking at the bar, her boots kicked up on a nearby stool, when Six sidled up to the taps and poured herself a beer. This was part of the new security policy that Boone had instated – everybody on staff was supposed to fix their own drinks and prepare their own food. No exceptions.

Taking another gulp of her drink, Cass eyeballed the crowd of gamblers gathered around the roulette tables. "Sooo...see any fellas worth looking at around this joint?"

Six smiled and shook her head. In fact, she'd seen a couple of men that looked like Cass' type, but she didn't want to egg her friend on in the idea of taking a handsome stranger to bed - at least not when that stranger could be a Legion assassin.

Cass nodded towards a lanky guy wearing a fedora and a crooked grin. "What do you think about him?"

Six shrugged, working to sound blasé although usually she liked her friend's ballsy ways, how she never turned down a drink or a chance at a good time.

"He's alright."

Cass eyed the man hungrily, gunning down the rest of her whiskey.

"He's better than alright. 'Though I guess you only got eyes for Army since the two o' you shacked up. You don't remember what it's like getting lonesome."

It was hard to picture Cass being lonely. She'd never admitted to that kind of vulnerability before, at least not in front of Six.

"Want to tell me about it? We can drown our sorrows?"

That prompted a loud snort from Cass. "Thanks, but no thanks. Right now, talk is just about the last thing I'm looking for."

She tapped the lacquered wood counter of the bar and one of the bartenders set another whiskey down behind her.

Six frowned. "Cass, you're supposed to watch your drinks."

"Aw, hell. Dontcha think that's paranoid? I mean, we know all the folks around here. I can't trust ol' Langley back there to pour me a whiskey, who am I gonna trust?"

Cass might've known all the bartenders by name, but Six didn't. She turned around and looked at "Langley", a burly guy with a handlebar moustache. He grinned and gave her a sarcastic wave, apparently unfazed that the big boss had caught him breaking the rules.

"It's not a good idea," Six said. "Even if you trust the bartenders around here, there's no reason to take the risk. You aren't even keeping an eye on your glass. Somebody could dose it with poison and you wouldn't even know."

Cass gave her a defiant stare, tipped back her hat and took a long chug of her drink.

"See? Didn't knock me down dead. Nothing to worry about. I know the Legion got you running scared, Six, but if you hole up in this joint, all eaten up with suspicion, well then, the bastards have stopped you from living without even a damn bullet. Now, you'll have to excuse me, but I got to inform a certain lucky son-of-a-bitch that he's gonna be putting his boots under my bed tonight."

Drink in hand, she swung her feet down from the stool and swaggered off towards the roulette tables.

Cass didn't show up in the kitchen the next morning for breakfast and nobody saw her in the courtyard or downstairs, on the casino floor. At first, Six figured she was probably just sleeping off last night's booze. In the afternoon, she went to her friend's room to wake her up. When she didn't answer the door, Six opened the suite with the spare key but Cass wasn't there. The sight of her friend's untouched bed made Six concerned, although in a less dangerous time, it hadn't been out-of-the-ordinary for the woman to disappear for a little while, even a couple days sometimes, when she found a saloon or a man to her liking.

"They've probably just got her locked up over in the NCR drunk tank," Boone said. "You'll see. The worst she'll have to do is pay a fine and sleep off her hang-over."

"Or hey, she might've gone out to the sharecropper farms," Veronica suggested. "She does that sometimes when she's drinking whiskey. She likes sleeping it off in the corn fields – says it reminds her of home."

They went out to look for her on the Strip. When they reached Vault 21, there was a perimeter of yellow tape set up around the front of the hotel and a couple of NCR guards standing watch by the gift shop doors.

"What's happened here?" Six asked one of them.

The soldier straightened up, seeming to recognize her.

Since the destruction of the Fort, many of the NCR troops had gone out of their way to show her and her friends respect for what they'd done against the Legion. When she and Boone had visited Camp Golf, they'd practically been mobbed by recruits wanting to congratulate them and shake their hands. Boone had disliked the adulation, finding it embarrassing, but Six still got a kick out of it. When half the Mojave was gunning for her head, it was nice to have a few fans here and there.

"This is an official investigation, ma'am," the guard told her. "Two people died here last night, one of them a staff member from our embassy."

That didn't sound good. Still, people died all the time. On the Strip, in the Wasteland, from murder, from accidents or real peaceful, in their sleep. It didn't mean Cass was involved. It didn't mean... She tried to push the thought out of her head.

"I want names," she said.

"Can't do that, ma'am. I'm sorry."

"Can't or won't?"

"I...nothing's official yet. All I can say is – there's a possibility of foul play."

It took some finagling, but she managed to get into the Embassy to talk to Ambassador Crocker. He confirmed her suspicions.

Cass and the man she'd picked up at Gomorrah had been murdered in a room in the Vault, when the room's air filtration systems had been tampered with, carbon monoxide killing them in their sleep. Cass' date had been a low-level diplomat with the NCR and Crocker had initially thought that he had been the killer's main target. When Six showed him the list of Legion bounties that Vulpes had signed off on, the ambassador had been quick to change his mind. NCR investigators were interviewing Sarah, the hotel manager, and other guests in the Vault but as of yet, they had no leads in the crime.

Knowing the slow machinations of NCR bureaucracy, Six suspected the trail would go cold before they'd managed to latch onto a suspect. If she was going to avenge Cass, she'd be better off exacting justice against Vulpes and the Frumentarii, the ones who'd ordered the hit.

It took another two days before Six was able to persuade the coroner to release Cass' body. They put her in a wooden box, with her shotgun and her rattan hat, and bought a little patch of land out by the sharecropper farms to bury her.

The funeral service consisted mostly of tears and toasts to Cass' memory, washed down by whiskey straight from the bottle. The stuff seared the back of Six's throat and burned the pit of her gut, a pain that seemed fitting and necessary. When they were good and drunk, they set up a line of their empty bottles along the fences and took pot-shots in Cass' honour until one of the farmers came charging out and hollered at them for making too much noise.

From then on, there was always an empty chair in the kitchen, an unused stool along the bar, a room that nobody ever visited. The Legion bounty lists had one less name on them. Everyone felt her absence and the warning that came with it. All of them were vulnerable. Any one of them could make a mistake, get a little stir-crazy and forget precautions and the assassins would strike without warning, without mercy. There was nowhere left to hide.