iii. still in the dark
in which you find yourself in need of a shovel

There's a newcomer in the Villa. You come across it on your morning patrol, sprawled dead across the cobbles of the Puesta del Sol: a huge mutant vulture, the extra legs sprouting from its chest giving it the look of a mangy griffin.

Where did it come from? Nothing lives here except a few radroaches; there are the ghost people, but you can't truly say they're alive. More like preserved, pickled by the Cloud like the rest of the resort. But this thing – this is a real live animal, or at least it was before the Cloud got to it. Not one you've ever seen before, but still. Right now, you're the closest you've been to something living since Elijah's other victims left.

It must have come here by mistake. No bird sees the bloody fog blanketing the Sierra Madre and decides to fly in for a closer look. Maybe the winds blew it in. Maybe it's tame and it was following its master, though you feel sure you would have noticed if the Madre had any new guests; you know every inch of this place now, maybe better even than Dean did, and you'd recognise the marks of another person in an instant.

Without quite knowing why, you kneel at the vulture's side and put a hand on its shoulder. The feathers are rougher than they look, but if you work your fingers through them you can feel softer ones underneath.

Blood and phlegm crusted on its beak. Eyes bulging half out of its little skull. It died alone in here, lost and afraid in a toxic mist of airborne pollutants. Without even the ghosts for company.

You haven't cried in years – weren't sure you still could – but somehow this one dead bird makes your eyes sting in a way that has nothing to do with the Cloud.

This place is going to kill you. It's just a question of how long.

Won't be the ghost people, you're sure of that now. They're smarter than you first gave them credit for, and for the most part they've learned that crossing you is as close to a death sentence as their undying asses are capable of. Sometimes the brave ones test the membrane, come at you with their spears and bombs, but none push through.

No: it's going to be the air. Every second you're outside – and most of those you're indoors, too – you feel it clawing at you like a mouthful of cazadores. If you don't wrap up your arms and face before you sleep, you wake with lesions in your skin and blood under your fingernails from where you've scratched them raw in your sleep. What the Cloud is doing to your lungs, you have no idea, but you've developed a cough that keeps you up at night and you know it can't lead anywhere good.

It's okay. It's not okay, it's going to kill you, but it's okay. People like you were never built to last.

You put the bird over your shoulder, light as a lover's breath on your cheek, and press on through the Villa. You're not sure yet where you're going, but you know better than to stand still in the Sierra Madre. Keep moving, cautiously and unceasingly, and only stop when you get to one of your boltholes: the top floor of the casino, the ruined café, the old apartment you fortified with holograms. The ghosts fear you, but if you hesitate, if they realise that you're not some prowling force of nature but a tiny woman with unresolved cranial trauma and a body rotting from the inside out, they will turn on you in an instant.

Down silent streets, dim and red and mostly featureless, all the Art Deco flourishes barely visible through the Cloud. Tripwires and bear traps hidden around corners and behind pillars, but the trick is just to take it steady, to test each step before you take it.

Breathe slowly. Keep your mouth covered, pointless as it is. Stay clear of the cloudiest streets. The same trip you've made a thousand times before, but this time with the bird on your shoulder, hard and bony underneath its thick coat of feathers. You could take it to the Campanas del Sol. There's a mortuary there – tools, chemicals, ready access to the underground. Seems like as good a starting place as any. You'll figure things out from there.

A tell-tale flash of green behind a window: ghost person, goggles pulsing with light. You raise the holorifle and see it duck down again with a hiss and a long, rattling groan.

You let yourself smile. You may have burned your last chance to be loved, but at least you can be feared.

This place collects memories like the Brotherhood collect lasers. They shape your rounds as you pace the Villa, moving from clinic to police station to maintenance office to casino: here is where Dog saved your life, pulling a ghost trapper out of your face and breaking its arm off with a twist of his massive hand; here is where the four of you rested in an old apartment, utterly exhausted, while Wild Card cobbled together a meal from vending machine food and leaned on Dean till he made everyone something mind-altering that passed for martinis.

Here's the spot you return to most: the ruined café in the southern part of the Puesta del Sol, where the doors have held together just enough to keep the worst of the Cloud at bay. You cut through it, cradling the bird in your arms, and instantly you're coming back through the balcony doors with Wild Card, fresh from persuading Dean to stay in place for the launch of the Gala event.

"Get the," she begins, but you've already shut the door. You'd try to barricade it too, if you weren't concerned about how Dean might get down afterwards. One of you dies, the bombs chained to your necks will ensure the rest of you go down with them, and you are not going to let Elijah claim another victim, even a creep like Dean. (The irony is, you're going to kill him yourself tomorrow. But you don't know that yet.) "Thanks."

She sags against the wall, eyes closed. You have to wonder how she came here, and why; she's proved herself to be tough as a deathclaw matriarch, but she looks about two decades too old to have spent the last twenty-eight hours running and gunning. The lines of her face, the grey of her hair, all seem to have deepened since she first sprung you from your prison in the Villa clinic.

"Mind if we take a quick break?" she asks, half opening an eye to see your response. "Not long. Just gotta get my breath back."

You nod, and she smiles in thanks.

"All right," she says, and staggers downstairs to the café proper, leaning heavily on the railing. You stalk after her lightly, quickly, ready to turn and fire at the slightest sound of approaching ghosts. None materialise, and the two of you sink gratefully into seats at the least rotten table.

"Ah," sighs Wild Card, propping her bundle of scavenged spears against the wall. "Sorry about this, sweetheart. Guess I'm gettin' a little old for all this murder."

You smile, but her eyes are already closed again. You think about it for a second, then carry on smiling anyway. Wild Card's all right. You're not sure you can trust her yet, but she's all right.

A moment passes. The collar chafes at your wounded throat. And then, of all things, Wild Card starts to sing – a slow, sad song that sounds as tired as she is.

Across the wastes and in the canyons,
I make my livin' by my art
While I wander, lost and lonesome,
Searchin' for my broken heart …

It nails you to your seat like one of her spears. Music. The Madre is full of song, endless fucking Vera Keyes screeching from the speakers about beginning again and letting go – but nothing real, nothing that you could actually feel. Not like this.

Couldn't find her up in Goodsprings
In Nipton she gave me the slip
They said she just checked out in Novac
So I'm headin' for the Strip …

Wild Card keeps singing – wandering all over the Mojave, looking for her lost love in Boulder City, in Primm, even braving Searchlight and Cottonwood. It's a simple song. But in this hell, where the air is as thick and red as blood and the streets are thick with ghosts – Christ, it might just be the best gift you've ever received.

There's a thought. Which of you is this break really for?

"… on the walls at Hoover Dam."

She opens her eyes, smiles a lazy sort of smile that makes even your blackened heart flutter.

"Feel better already," she says. "How 'bout you?"

But all you can do is stare.

The ghost people are in the mortuary again. You put the bird down in the doorway and fire once, twice, clusters of blue pixels skittering from the barrel and eating holes in the ghosts' limbs. Won't stop them – even if you decapitate them, they keep breathing, and you suspect that after their friends drag them away they somehow reconstitute themselves – but they know from experience that if you keep firing, this gun will devour whole limbs, and they back off fast, hurling a spear or two for the sake of appearances and retreating deeper into the Villa buildings.

Wild Card would have hurled the spears back. Elijah left her the holorifle when she turned up, since she went through the front door and had her gear stripped off her by the security systems, but she passed it on as soon as she met you. You're Brotherhood, you have the energy weapons, she said. I'm fine with just a pointy stick.

You grimace. Sometimes you feel like all the holes the robots cut in your head have thinned the barrier between you and the world around you, opened up a path for all the memories in the Madre to bleed into your skull. The scribe in you says that's superstitious nonsense, but then, you aren't a scribe any more, and this is not a place that one can survive without some measure of faith.

Enough. You lay the bird gently on a table and start searching for a shovel. There's a patch of dirt in one of the nearby courtyards that might once have been a flowerbed, back before the war, but the earth is rock solid. If you want to put this poor creature underground, you're going to need tools.

You've buried a lot of things. When you were a kid, you buried your feelings, because good Brotherhood girls don't feel that way about other girls; when Veronica exhumed them, you welcomed them back with open arms, and then Elijah called you into his office and told you that you had a choice between letting Veronica go and tearing her life to pieces, and so you buried them all over again.

Drive the shovel into the dirt. Pull out the earth, set it aside. It's hard work, but you're its equal.

You buried Veronica too, leaving her in the bunker at Lost Hills while you were reassigned to the Circle of Steel. The people you met there were the hardest of hardliners, steadfast believers in the most rigid interpretation of the Brotherhood's Codex. You would not have survived your training if you hadn't buried a little more of yourself – your doubts, your questions, the rebellious fire that Veronica lit in your heart. You buried bullets in targets, knives in training dummies. You buried opponents in chokeholds in the sparring ring.

Again. Shovel in, dirt out. The hole grows deeper; the pile of dirt, taller.

You buried a high-ranking scribe who tried to defect to the Followers, tracking her down to the Boneyard and luring her into the sights of your rifle with a forged note and a couple of bribes. It was easy. She knew the Circle would send someone, but she just wasn't smart enough.

Again. The hole is about the right size now, but you want to make sure it's too deep for the ghosts to dig the bird up again. You don't know if they'd eat it, if they even can eat through those gas masks, or if their interest only goes as far as killing. You're sure you don't want to find out.

When they gave you the mission to kill Elijah, you buried everything you had left in your hate. There wasn't much to lose. He'd already buried you so deep, so far from Veronica, in a part of the Brotherhood from which there is no retirement but death. You buried your past when you set out, your gun at Little Yangtze, your armour and your literacy at Y-17, your voice in the Sierra Madre clinic. By the time Wild Card found you, there wasn't much of you left to free.

You put the bird in the hole and kneel there for a moment, trying to summon something – a feeling, maybe, a sense of occasion. This will probably be the last thing you ever bury. Wild Card already buried Elijah for you, locking him away in the vault beneath your feet; you would have liked to kill him, but you appreciate the vicious artistry of her revenge, of trapping him down there forever with all the secrets he spent his miserable life lusting after.

And of course, you've already buried yourself. Here in the Sierra Madre, all wrapped up in a blood-red funeral shroud.

You tell yourself that this is what the Brotherhood is all about, keeping watch over old world tech to prevent the apocalypse from ever happening again. And maybe you're right, maybe that's what this is.

But you don't really believe that, do you.

Blam―

What the fuck?

You're up in an instant, gun at the ready, and see a ghost person swaying behind you, a bear trap gauntlet slipping from its smashed hand―

Blam― and the left lens of the ghost's gas mask erupts in a spray of green fluid and broken glass. You waste no time, drive your elbow into its gut and pump holorifle blasts into its flailing body as it falls, two quick shots that burn a leg away in a wash of hungry photons and leave it twitching feebly on the stones.

That leaves you two more shots for whoever else is shooting. You scan the shadows around the courtyard, manoeuvring backwards into cover in the mortuary doorway, and you see …

It can't be.

"Christine," she breathes. So quietly you can't even hear her, but you know the movement of those lips, have spent long nights in your quarters at the Circle barracks tracing them with your mind's eye, and you don't need to hear to see your name upon them.

It is.

She looks so much older than you remember. In your mind, you still see a girl, hovering on the threshold of adulthood, but the person before you is definitely a woman. Her face is a little leaner; her eyes, a lot wiser.

She looks afraid, too. You wonder what Wild Card told her, though you suspect that nothing could have prepared her for seeing you here, like this, with a road map carved into your skull and weeping sores on your arms.

Wild Card. She's there as well, standing alongside her with a smoking gun in her hand and a serious expression on her face. You didn't really believe her when she said that she'd be back. Couldn't fathom why someone would do that to themself. But here she is, right back in the husk of your life.

This isn't fair. You were finally done: it was all settled, all finished, Elijah sealed away and your mission fulfilled. This was your way out. A quiet exit out here in the Madre, where no one would ever be fool enough to find you. But no, Wild Card decides to do the fucking impossible and come back with―

Veronica takes a step forward. Without even thinking, you raise your rifle; she freezes, her eyes wide with shock, and suddenly you realise what you're doing and it's all you can do not to throw the gun to the floor with the wounded ghost. You can't take it. You can't breathe. You are going to die here, one way or another, and Veronica has found you, and you are going to die here, and the bird suffocated alone, and you are going to die here, and Wild Card kept her promise, and you are going to die because you can't breathe and your chest is going to burst and now you're running somehow, somewhere, through the mortuary and down into the tunnels, running and running through the Möbius strip of the Sierra Madre, as far away as you can from the women outside and the unbearable promise that tomorrow the sun might rise again.

You crash through the door of your bolthole in the residential district with spent microfusion cells falling at your feet and a trail of horizontal ghost people behind you. Your body works without any input from your brain, closing the door and punching the button to turn on the holograms outside, and leaves you slumped in a chair for someone else to sort out.

The gunshots in your chest begin to slow. Your breaths feel a little less like tearing leather. And little by little, you feel yourself returning.

What kind of knight are you? You live in the Sierra Madre, fighting deathless ghosts, militarised holograms and the inevitable decay of your own body – and you run because, what, your friend kept her promise? Because you saw your old sweetheart again? Yeah, that sort of thing goes down so well in the Circle.

You breathe out, straighten up. It's fine. You're not a knight any more; your mission is complete. You can be a failure if that's what you have to be.

It's not what you want to be, though. When you had that conversation by the fountain, right before Wild Card walked out to collect her gear and go home, she told you that you had an obligation to Veronica. And she's right, really. You lied to her, you abandoned her, and then you turned down your chance at making it right: that's a hell of a debt you've run up.

And that's not even mentioning what you owe to Wild Card. She was kind to you, and you drank her kindness greedily, and then she offered you salvation and you slapped her hand away so hard you think you might have broken it.

You should go back out there. Find them. Apologise for pointing a gun at them, for running off, for their wasted journey. It would mean revealing your mutilated voice to Veronica, but you assume Wild Card already told her. You should explain yourself and finish burying your bird.

You don't do any of that. You sit right here in this tattered armchair, clutching your gun and staring at the flickering light of your makeshift lamp, and hope that all of this will be over soon.

If only it were that easy. You can tell what's coming long before it arrives; Wild Card's good, but not good enough to break into this apartment undetected, and you hear her moving over the roof for some time before her hand snakes down and raps on your window.

Trust her to find your emergency exit. It's the one flaw in your security: the ghost people don't climb well in their bulky hazmat suits, and you figured nobody else knew the Villa well enough to find their way up to the roof of this building. Or at least, nobody who would ever come back here again.

You'll have to do something. Ignore her and she'll invite herself in; shoot her and you'll have done something even she won't forgive.

You get up and put the holorifle down on the table. It takes a little effort to make yourself let go of it, but you manage it in the end. You stand up straight, like a real live human being, and you go over and open the shutters.

"Finally."

Wild Card lowers herself down from the edge of the roof and swings stiffly in through the window. It's kind of impressive really; she looks old enough to be your mother, and you can't imagine any of the Brotherhood elders clambering around with half her agility.

"Jesus," she says, settling onto her heels with a grunt. "Those holograms are just as mean as I remember."

You don't react. You really don't know how you would, if you even could.

At least it's her that came. If it had been Veronica, you'd never have made it out of your chair, let alone over to the window.

Wild Card looks at you for a moment, maybe expecting a response, maybe just tallying up all the ways in which you've changed since the two of you parted company. Then she sighs and pats you roughly on the shoulder.

"Let's sit down, eh?"

She shrugs off her duster, doffs her hat and slings both casually over the back of a chair as if she owns the place. It's strange to see her like this, dressed to wander the desert; in your mind's eye, she's still wearing that Yangtze jumpsuit, with the Madre security armour strapped over it and a day's stubble greying her jaw. You did think about what her normal life might look like, but you didn't really have much to go on, other than that she's part of some council working to unify the settlements of the Mojave.

"C'mon," she says, dropping onto the couch and patting the seat beside her. "Might as well play nice, 'cause I ain't goin' anywhere. 'S a physical impossibility. No way I'm draggin' my bony old ass back up the way I came."

You hesitate, then sit.

"That's it," she says, leaning back against the ratty cushions and looking around. "Nice place you got here. All mod cons, as they say on the Strip."

She waves a hand, taking in the workbench, stove, lights. The little comforts you wrested from the Madre's forbidding grip. It wasn't easy; after Y-17, you can't code any more, and you definitely can't hack the Villa terminals. But you can still build a circuit, and you had a lot of time to experiment.

"'S about what I expected. If Dean could figure it out, then I knew you could. The hologram bouncers are real impressive, though. You know me, I don't know shit about computers." She clicks her tongue. "Someone tried to give me a Pip-Boy once and I had to tell him, doc, I ain't even sure how to turn this thing on."

You keep your silence. Now that she's here, showing up your living death with her exuberant vitality, it's all too much, and your heart is firing blanks in your chest again. You wouldn't be surprised if you never managed another word for the rest of your life.

"Smoke?" You shake your head. "Mind if I do?" You shake it again; Wild Card smiles and lights up. "Ah," she says, taking a deep drag and blowing it conscientiously away from your face. "I know, I know, I really shouldn't, but I already gave up chems. Gotta have one vice left. Although if I'm bein' honest, I still got half a tin of mentats in my bag." She fires off a quick sidelong glance at you, mouth curling into a wry grin. "I won't tell Veronica if you don't."

You don't smile back. She raises an eyebrow and lets the grin fade.

"Okay," she says. "Enough scratchin' around. Did I ever tell you about this?"

She gestures at her tattoo sleeve. You've seen it before, of course: a pack of cards, beginning with a pair of sixes on her shoulder and tumbling down her left arm into the flames licking up from her wrist. You thought she just liked gambling – she kept using those card game metaphors – but maybe there's more to it.

Weird. But you'll give her the benefit of the doubt: you owe her that much, and more than that.

"I'll take that as a no," she says, which is a little awkward; you actually meant to reply this time, just got stuck in your thoughts by mistake. "Well, anyway, it's the story of my life." She taps the sixes: hearts and spades, like mirror images of each other. "These two are where I started – one for me, one for the man I could've been. This here, the king of diamonds – that's when I met Mr House. King of clubs is killin' Caesar, that's why it's torn in half." (Did she just say she killed …?) "Oh, and these …"

She turns her hand over to show you a set of cards that wasn't there before, fanned out on the inside of her wrist where the flames don't reach: black aces and eights, a queen of clubs.

"Dead man's hand," she says. "That's the Madre. And the Empty too, I guess."

You feel the weight of it in her voice, see it in the red Cloud stains tattooed on the cards. This is what binds the two of you: the holes in your heads, the memory of bomb collars around your necks. The wiring in your skulls. The clenching of your guts when you hear piped music and expect beeping from your throat.

The knowledge that Wild Card took on all of it willingly, just to get the chance to speak to you.

You raise your eyes to hers: dark, serious, full of pain. But only for a second, before whatever barrier she just lowered flicks back into place.

"Anyway, the one I wanted to talk about is this." Wild Card's hand moves up her arm, past the flames and scorched cards, and taps a joker on her bicep, near her elbow. A tattooed bullet hole punching out its face. "This unfortunate fella is Benny Gecko. He shot me in the head."

The scars. There are two that you knew couldn't be from the surgery, two ragged masses of tight flesh like pale stars against her dark forehead.

You're a little surprised, but honestly, you'd be more shocked if this Benny guy had actually managed to kill her.

"He also stole a package I was meant to be deliverin'," says Wild Card, exhaling another cloud of smoke. "I was a courier. Mojave Express. Neither snow nor rain nor giant fuck-off scorpions, though I gotta admit, not all of that was relevant in the desert. Once I'd recovered, got myself outta the grave Benny buried me in and back on my feet, I tracked him down. Primm, Nipton, Novac, Boulder City, Freeside, the Strip." Like the song she sang. Maybe it isn't about a lover after all. Or maybe a song can be about more than one thing at a time. "Took me months to find him, to cheat my way onto the Strip, into his casino. Solved a lot of problems along the way. Turned the Mojave into a puzzle box and shook it till Benny fell out."

She grins to herself. It's not a nice grin. It might be the least nice grin you have ever seen.

"I'm not very smart," she says. "Not all that tough, either. But I don't know how to give up, and I'm real good at talkin', so when I found him, I talked and I talked and I talked. Talked him into goin' up to his suite, into tellin' me his plan. Why he'd shot me, what he wanted with the package. Kept him talkin' for hours, pretendin' I was fool enough to think he might give me a job, like he wasn't gonna kill me all over again first chance he got. Then …" She makes a finger gun, fires it at your lamp with a click of her tongue. "I got close enough, and he got sloppy enough. I slipped the gun he'd shot me with outta his jacket and repaid the favour."

She seems to be somewhere very far away – back in that casino, maybe. But she pulls herself back to the Sierra Madre with startling ease.

"I think you know what happened next," she tells you. "For a long time, I'd been the courier who was gonna kill Benny and get my package back. And then suddenly I'd done that. And I just …" She shakes her head. "It was like I'd died," she says. "Everythin' I was, it ended when I pulled the trigger on that bastard. And all the pain I was holdin' back, the headaches and the taste of the grave in my mouth … well, I couldn't really laugh it off any more."

You can feel a chill seeping into your bones, even here in the sickly heat that builds up beneath the Cloud. Apparently you share more than you thought. More than what you found in the Big Empty and the Sierra Madre, anyway.

"I nearly didn't make it outta that suite," she says. "And I only chased Benny for a few months. You chased Elijah your whole life, near enough. No wonder you didn't make it outta the Madre." She sighs and bends to grind out her cigarette on the sole of her boot. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I shoulda said before, 'cause I could see it in you when we was gettin' ready to trap Elijah. The way you talked, like there was nothin' else left except your mission. Just like me."

A long, sharp look. That barrier is gone again: there's the darkness, the sorrow. Like looking in a mirror.

You weren't aware you had much of a heart left to break. And yet.

"The Madre got to me, I guess," says Wild Card. "I had to let go, like the poor dead lady said, or else I'd have died here. But I won't let that stand, Christine. 'Cause waitin' outside, there's a brilliant young woman who wants nothin' more than to know you again, and I promise you, sweetheart, that no matter what this misson's done to you, you still got a future." She reaches over and takes your hand. Just like she did when you parted ways before the Gala event and she swore she'd be back for you. "Even if we have to rip it right outta Elijah's wrinkly old hands."

You stare at her for ten whole endless seconds, but you can't see anything in her face at all but the fierce flame of her belief.

Could she be …?

A soft little noise breaks painfully from your throat. Something long-dead inside you wakes up and leans into it, throws its weight against it with all the fury of its desperation, and you cough, and in your ruined voice you say:

"You think so?"

It's the first you've spoken since she and Elijah's other victims left; you barely even sound like Vera Keyes any more, let alone yourself, your throat all Cloud-scorched and rusty from disuse. But Wild Card's only reaction is to grip your hand a little tighter.

"Ain't no use in thinkin' it," she says. "I know it, sweetheart."

There's so much you want to say, but you don't know what any of it is. You squeeze her hand back and feel a stinging in your eyes like when you saw the poor dead vulture and knew you were looking at your future.

"Aw, it's okay," she says kindly, sensing your intentions from the strength of your grip. "And you will be too. Promise."

She might be right. Look how strongly she believes. She rode that faith all the way across the wasteland to the Madre, to her showdown with Elijah and to this room here: isn't that something you could put your wounded trust in?

"Did you really kill Caesar?" you ask, hoping Wild Card knows what you mean, and she chuckles.

"Yeah," she says, her voice light again. "He had a broken howitzer, wanted a new firin' mechanism for it. I delivered it with a generous wad of plastic explosive inside. Hit the detonator on my way outta his camp and painted half the Fort a unique little colour I like to call fascist-guts red."

There's no way that's true. But that's not really the point, is it; the point is that your face is moving again like it hasn't done in ages, your lips trembling, your eyelids doing their best to hold back the titanic force slowly juddering into life behind them.

You won't cry. You don't even know how, no matter what your face has to say about it.

"What … happens now?" you ask weakly.

"Well," says Wild Card, "I was thinkin' we should clean and dress them sores, maybe get you a drink. Then I reckon I oughta make myself scarce and let you and Veronica have a chat. She's been real patient, waitin' out there, but I don't think we should leave her hangin' much longer. How does that sound?"

You push through the incipient tears, just about manage a smile.

"I think … I think that sounds good."

Wild Card's smile cuts through the red air like the beam of a lighthouse.

"My kinda girl," she says, pulling a bottle from her pack. "Now, this stuff's gonna sting like a motherfucker on your arms, so I hope you're feelin' brave."

You aren't. You were, once, but you wandered over the line into carelessness a long time ago.

You stretch out your arms anyway.

You're cleaner now. Arms bandaged, face washed of dirt and Cloud residue. Wild Card even lent you her razor so you could shave your head again, sort out the wild ragged mess your hair's grown into since you stopped bothering. This is about as ready as you could possibly be, and it still isn't anywhere near enough.

You can't sit down, can't stand still. She's out there. Wild Card is probably talking to her right now, telling her all about how she should be gentle and patient with you because you've been through a lot. And so at any moment, there's going to be a knock at the door and then she'll actually be―

Five knocks. Shave and a haircut, same as ever.

You hover for a moment, your hands trembling, and then you force yourself to open the door. And there she is: Veronica Santangelo, standing in the hallway in a dusty old coat and hood.

She smiles uncertainly at you.

"Hey," she says, with a little wave of her hand.

You stare. She's so much more beautiful than you remember; she was pretty as a girl, but she's grown into herself now, wears her face as a woman.

That makes one of you at least.

"Ronnie?" you murmur, digging deep and finding your voice, and hear Veronica's breath catch.

"Chris," she says, taking a step forward. "Chris, I …"

Her voice is too choked to continue, but by then it doesn't matter: you're already in each other's arms, the warmth of her so startlingly close that you feel it might burn you away to ash, and as you cling to her like a rope tossed over a cliff edge the pressure behind your face surges forward and finally, after thirteen long desolate years, you cry.

She's crying too, you think. There's so much to weep for: the years you've lost, the things that have been done to you and that you've done to yourselves. But there are so many more years yet to come, for Wild Card to make good on her promise, and strange as it may seem, some of these tears might just be tears of hope.

You thought it was over. That there could be no going back. That the two of you had clicked as rebellious teenagers and that the years since would have crunched you down into adults with nothing to say to one another.

You couldn't be more glad to be proven wrong.

Veronica doesn't ask a single thing about what happened to you, for which you are more grateful than you could ever possibly say; instead, she tells you about all the things she's done. How she went east with Elijah and helped found a new Brotherhood chapter, how that chapter burned and Elijah fled, leaving it rudderless and dying. How she and Wild Card solved all its problems but couldn't convince its members to change course, how she finally decided to leave, how they sent a hit squad after her because they thought she might defect to the Followers. (Your blood runs cold with the memory of the ex-scribe you killed in the Boneyard: that could have been Veronica whose skull you put a bullet in.) How now she really is a Follower, using her knowledge and training to help the communities of the Mojave, and the Brotherhood are much too afraid of Wild Card and her significant stockpile of EMP weaponry to dare come after her again.

You don't have any right to be, not any more, but you're so proud of her you think your heart is going to pop.

"You were right, you know," she says, a little sadness in her voice. "I should've left a long time ago."

You bow your head, crushed by the weight of the history you didn't share.

"We should both have left," you say. She's so good. Hasn't said a word about your new voice. "When we had the chance."

Maybe there's something wrong with how you said it. Veronica's brows knit and she reaches out to pull you over along the couch, settling your head against her shoulder. Part of you wants to withdraw, but you physically can't; the instant she put her arms around you in the doorway, you felt every muscle in your body give in simultaneously. Veronica could literally pick you up and carry you away and you wouldn't be able to do a thing about it.

"Yeah," she says, nestling her arm comfortably around your side. "But we're here now."

Yes. You're here. And who's to say that this will work if you transplant it anywhere else? Veronica isn't the girl you left behind: she's a grown adult, standing astride a life and career in which you don't feature at all. And you – you're definitely not the girl she left behind, either; you're a contract killer, a revenge murderer, a brain-damaged scribe who can't even write her own name. Who sees the burning white flashes of the electrodes every time she closes her eyes and her own blood on the pillow when she opens them again.

"We're not the same," you say. It's as close as you can get to the thoughts echoing off the walls of your skull like the screams in the Empty.

Veronica sighs and tilts her head forward, pressing her lips against the top of your head and instantly stopping your heart.

"No, we're not," she says, as you try to catch your breath. "We're gonna have to get to know each other all over again. But I'll give it a shot if you will."

And will you? You've been avoiding this question ever since you saw her across the courtyard. Will you? Can you? Dare you?

You breathe in, and out. You sit up, moving Veronica's arm from around your back. You take hold of her hand.

It's the hardest decision you've ever made, but you tell her the truth.

Elijah thought the Sierra Madre was the answer. Truth is, it's a question. Wild Card figured it out; that's why she left without you. God worked it out too, and Dog, and even Dean, though he didn't get long to enjoy it before you put him down.

Now, standing outside the mortuary again, you feel you may have an answer of your own.

"Want any help with that?" asks Wild Card, leaning against a nearby wall. Veronica calls her Sixes, but you don't think that's her real name; it's probably because of that tattoo.

You shake your head, and she nods in understanding.

"I getcha," she says. "Go on, then. I'll keep watch."

She draws her pistol – some kind of heavily modified 5.56mm, a far cry from the spears you're used to seeing in her hands – and turns her attention to the doorways and alleys. Veronica meets your eye for a moment, then nods and joins her, power fist hissing into life on her arm. It seems she still loves punching, even now. One thing at least that hasn't changed.

You look down at your vulture, still lying undisturbed in its grave. The ghost people haven't touched it, for which you are more grateful than you know how to explain. It's still here. Much like you.

Time to finish this. You undo your work, packing the dirt back into the grave, and handful by handful the bird disappears.

It kind of breaks your heart. But it's the first thing you've done in a long time that you're sure is the right thing to do.

On the last scoop of the shovel you freeze up, every muscle in your body collapsing to dust in an instant; you stand there for a long moment, helpless and hating yourself for it, until someone eases the shovel from your grip and you just manage to shift your head to one side enough to see Veronica next to you.

She puts a hand on your arm, eases you back a step, and pats the last shovelful of dirt into place.

It's done. It hurts about as much as it helps, but … it's done.

"Should we say a few words?" asks Wild Card, joining the two of you by the grave.

"Yeah." You pause. "I don't know. It's stu―"

"It ain't stupid. It's life." She clears her throat. "We're gathered here to bury …" Glance at you, but you shake your head; the bird has no name. "… this zopilote," she continues, smooth as ever. "It died here in the Sierra Madre, where no livin' thing should ever come. We mark its passin' 'cause no one else will, and 'cause there's nothin' so small that it ain't deservin' of respect."

She lowers her head. You do too, and Veronica next to you. It's risky – this is exactly how you got jumped earlier – but some things are worth taking chances for.

A long moment passes. The Villa creaks and breathes around you. When was the last time you stood shoulder to shoulder with people like this? Your first tour of this place, you guess. Maybe that moment at the fountain, when Wild Card brought you back to meet Dean and God. (You didn't meet Dog for a while afterwards; God fronted most of the time, unwilling to cede control except to hide himself from Elijah.) You stood there with them and stared at Elijah's face writ large in the glowing light of the hologram as he gave you your instructions, and then you stayed standing and staring as he disappeared and Wild Card took his place.

I know this seems insane, she said. And that's 'cause it is. Casinos like this, the house always has the advantage. But take a look around you. We got insider knowledge, a Brotherhood knight, a nightkin. That's a hell of a hand. We just gotta play it right.

I wonder where that leaves you, replied God suspiciously. What part do you play, human?

And she grinned like that was her favourite question in the world.

I'm your wild card, she said. And I promise you, fellas, I'm gonna get every last one of us out of here in one piece.

You remember the way she looked. Confident. Dazzling. Like a con artist at the moment her mark signs away his life savings.

You didn't trust her at all. But something about her made you think that maybe she could do it.

Breathe out, raise your head: the moment's past. She kept her word after all. And you've kept yours, too. The bird – the zopilote – has been laid to rest.

"All right," you say. "All right, I … it's done."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, Ronnie." The nickname tastes weird in your mouth, like you no longer have the right, but calling her Veronica seems like admitting defeat before you've even started. "It's buried."

You are going to have to dig it up later. And Elijah, and the scribe you shot, and every other thing you've buried, until you manage to exhume the girl you used to be. It's going to be slow; it's going to hurt like hell. But it's probably your only chance at finding the woman you might have been, and if you don't do that then the Madre will kill you even if you leave.

Veronica reaches for your hand. You hesitate, then let her take it.

"Let's go home, Chris," she says.

You meet her eyes, sharp and bright with something you once had a name for.

"Okay," you say, the tension finally leaving your jaw. "Let's go home."