Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I want to tell you a story.

In the days before fire fell from the sky, there stood in the mountains a shining monument to that world. Many looked upon it, and they coveted its glory. Finding it was no trouble—in those days, it did not hide behind poison and greed. In those days, it had not succumbed to itself, unable to do the very thing it offered to the world. I know this too well, and soon you shall also, should you dare to seek what you call “treasure”. I will not stop you, but I shall warn you.

When a person enters into the Sierra Madre, the Sierra Madre enters into them.

The Tetons stood over Jackson Valley like protective guardians, shielding the plains below from all comers. Nuclear holocaust seemed of no concern to the rocky peaks, earthquakes from the nearest detonation 60 miles away in Yellowstone breaking against the mountains with as much impact as pond ripples. Caravans wound their way along the decayed highways, mercenaries gazing in awe at the Tetons, just as tourists once did centuries ago.

Below the perpetually snowcapped peaks, the rolling hills of the National Elk Reserve stretched away to the east, and to the south, the Snake River wound its way between the mountains in its long route to the Pacific. The valley was as picturesque as it had been 200 years ago, wind creating waves through the long grasses, where elk and bison still grazed under a bluebell sky, albeit with a few more parts than their pre-War ancestors.

Slightly south of the Tetons near the banks of the Snake, a log cabin stood as though having sprung from the rolling green of its own accord, a wisp of smoke curling from the chimney. The dwelling was so small that the chicken coop which stood nearby nearly rivaled it in size. From the dim of the coop, a low, rasping voice could be heard singing softly, punctuated every so often by the indignant squawks of chickens shooed from their nests.

"Avir harim tsalul k'yayin
Vereiyach oranim
Nissah beru'ach ha'arbayim
Im kol pa'amonim."

Though the voice scoured by radiation stripped away much of its loveliness, the song spoke of a time long ago, forgotten by the earth, but which the sky and the heavens beyond remembered.

“Jo, can you come tell your goblin-spawn to stop bothering Brutus? She won’t listen to me, and I’m afraid she’s going to lose a few fingers.”

At the call, the song ceased with an exasperated sigh. A ghoul ducked from the chicken coop into the sunlight, green eyes squinted against the brightness. With one scarred hand she held her apron full of eggs, and with the other she pushed from her ruined face one of the few strands of red hair still clinging to her scalp.

Before her on the grass, a horse and cart sat. Or rather, what might have passed for a horse and cart, provided the observer didn’t look too closely. The horse had jagged fangs protruding from its naked, lipless jaws, and sawed-off antlers between its ears. A third set of dwarfed legs dangled uselessly from its chest, all six hooves cloven like the radstag elk that roamed the plains. The ghoulish rider mirrored his steed in unattractiveness, perched on the cart and scowling down at a place on the grass.

“Chamaniya, what are you doing to Brutus?” The female ghoul called. “Rob knows that animal better than you do, so listen to him.”

A spindle-legged girl with blonde hair as wild as the prairie grass appeared from behind the beast, putting small hands on her narrow hips. “I wasn’t doing anything, Gran!” she defended herself indignantly, “I was scratching him under his hanglegs! He likes that!”

“Yep, he sure does,” Rob agreed from his perch on the cart, “so much that if you do it too much, he’ll lay down. And when Brutus lays down, Brutus only gets up when Brutus wants to get up, and then the snow is falling before we ever get to town.”

Here he paused, hoping Jo hadn’t noticed his slip, but she did, and arched an eyebrow. “Who’s we?”

“I, uh—I thought I’d take Felina into town with me,” the ghoul said, making a valiant attempt to sound nonchalant. “It’s mail day, and you know how she likes to look at all the return addresses and ask where they are.”

Jo put her free hand on her hip, unimpressed. “And by taking her into town, you really mean dropping her off at the saloon while you run your errands, yes?”

“Aw, come on, all the boys know her,” Rob reasoned, the picture of indignant innocence. “She wouldn’t be safer if she was chucked into a Vault!”

“I don’t doubt that,” Jo agreed, “but they get bored, and what better fun than teaching the cute little smoothskin whatever new drinking or flirting song the caravans brought down from Yellowstone, right?”

Rob opened his mouth to protest, then reconsidered, and shut it again.

“Please, Gran, please?” Felina begged, bouncing up to the old ghoul and giving her the big brown eyes. “It’s been three whole weeks since I last went! I won’t repeat the songs anymore, I promise! Please, please?”

Jo stared down her charge for several long moments, but her wall of determination was slowly crumbling before those pleading eyes.

“Fine, you can go,” she relented, then shook a warning finger at Rob over Felina’s whoop. “You have her back by sundown now,” she ordered the other ghoul. “It’s Friday, and no child of mine is going to be a Sabbath-breaker thanks to the likes of you.”

Rob laughed, reaching down to grab Felina by the back of her dress and swinging her bodily up onto the cart. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”

The female ghoul turned back toward the house, and Rob leaned over to murmur to Felina, “Say, Felina, wouldn’t it be awful if we ‘got distracted’ just before leaving town?”  

It took Felina a moment to catch on, but when she did, a mischievous grin spread across her face. “Yeah, it sure would.”

“Brutus, dear?”

The ears of the mutated horse pricked at its name, and man and child froze at Jo’s voice. The female ghoul had turned back and was looking directly at the pair, even as she spoke to the animal. “Brutus, would you please lay down?”

“What? No!” Rob cried, “Brutus—Brutus, don’t!”

But the deer-horse needed no second bidding. With a creaking of leather and wood, its knobby knees hit the grass with a dull thud, hindquarters following with another thud. There it sat, hanglegs in a knobby pile before it, eyes half-closed in contentment.

“You’re unbelievable, woman!” Rob shouted over Felina’s cackles at Jo’s retreating figure, who was sashaying away with all the grace of her pre-War self. “Whatever happened to having her back by sundown?”

Jo halted in the doorway and turned back to them, a coy smile on her ruined face. “Well, I suppose you’ll have to avoid getting distracted now, won’t you?” She said pleasantly. “Shalom alechem!”

The Villa square was dim, lit only by the eerie glow of an orange sky roiling with toxic Cloud, and by the figure of a beautiful woman clothed in ebony, standing upon the fountain like a statue of a goddess. The light thrown from her flickering form illuminated a white, ill-fitting jumpsuit, and the blonde hair of the person crumpled like one dead on the ruined cobblestone. Distant, inhuman shrieks pierced the air like shards of glass, calling to one another in some unearthly tongue, but the square itself was as silent as a tomb.

From the shadows beyond the fountain’s light, two green orbs materialized, and the wheezing hiss of labored breathing could be heard. A humanoid figure dropped from an upper floor balcony like a spider, its emerald gaze fixed on the person slumped before the fountain. Cloud billowed from the creature’s gas mask, a crude spear gripped in gloved hands. Man or woman, it was impossible to tell, for the thing had lost all such distinctions centuries ago. Now only creature remained, prowling on silent feet towards the white-clad figure. It glared at the elegant woman with a mixture of caution and wonder, before lowering its spear to give the foreign being an experimental prod.

“Bah, there we go, finally!”

The creature hissed at the unexpected voice, recoiling back away from the fountain. The image of the woman vanished, replaced by a man who was far less lovely than she, gripping a wrench in one hand as though he had been tinkering with something. The gas-masked creature snarled, whipping about and vanishing back into the shadows with eye-blurring speed, leaving the object of its curiosity alone on the cobbles.

“Now, let’s see what unfortunate bastard got dragged in this time,” the man grumbled to himself, squinting down through watery eyes at the crumpled figure. “Good, looks like the beast fitted the collar alright…damn lucky too, my last one…”

He studied the figure for several seconds before growing impatient, and though he seemed to possess a perpetual scowl, this deepened upon his weathered features. His voice echoing about the square, he barked out, “Wake up, dammit!”

Felina jolted awake from dreams of childhood. Disoriented, she tried to force her limbs to move, her Pip-Boy clunking awkwardly on the stone. Her ribs ached, and a tightness encircled her neck, preventing her from fully lowering her head. For several seconds, she could only stare into the shadows beyond the square, her mind trying to process what was happening. Then slowly, shakily, she planted her palms on the rough stone, pushing herself up to stare at the scowling image of the man before her.

“Awake now?” He asked, one bushy eyebrow arching over a gaze only partially dimmed by age. “Good. My name is Elijah, and let me make one thing clear from the outset: I say jump, you say ‘how high.’ Play dumb, play clever, say ‘no’ even once, and that collar detonates, and takes that empty blonde head of yours with it. Am I clear?”

Felina stared back at him, wide-eyed, her hands going to the band of metal encircling her neck, its pressure combined with fear choking all words from her.

“I wouldn’t paw at it too much if I were you,” Elijah remarked, noticing her movement. “They’re sometimes finicky when it comes to being jostled. Do what I say, and it won’t go off. You aren’t leaving until I let you go. Best to come to grips with that now and save us both some trouble.”

Standing on shaky feet, Felina looked down at the filthy, ill-fitting jumpsuit she wore. A small corner of her brain wondered who had changed her clothes. “What do you want me to do?” She croaked out, trying to keep her voice from shaking and deciding that compliance was the best route for now.

“I need you to pick the lock on the Sierra Madre,” the man replied. “But I’m sure you know how that’s easier said than done. Hundreds have broken their skulls against her gates over the years. But this heist is one for the centuries. You and your team will get inside the Sierra Madre and claim its secrets once and for all.”

“What are these secrets?” Felina inquired cautiously. “Some kind of treasure? Technology?”

“That is for me to know and to show you if I so choose,” came the terse reply. “Don’t get any ideas about trying to usurp me or your teammates either. All your collars are linked—one of you dies, you all die.”

A chill ran down Felina’s spine, but she forced down her fear and asked another question, keeping him talking while she tried to figure out what the hell was going on. “Where should I look for my team?”

“First, I’d go for the FEV reject,” Elijah instructed, seeming pleased by her cooperation. “Lost contact with him some time ago, but he should be in the Villa police station. Provided he’s not starving, he should be easy enough to command. If he did his job right, you should have a note telling you where to go next.”

Felina felt about the jumpsuit’s pockets and discovered a crumpled piece of paper scrawled with writing, stained with what looked suspiciously like blood.

“Once you’ve gathered your team, meet back here at the fountain and I’ll tell you what to do next,” Elijah ordered. “I’ll be observing your progress by radio. Oh, and that reminds me, if you hear beeping from your collar, you might want to run if you value your head. Damn shoddy radios getting in the way of my modifications.”

“What?” Felina demanded, but it was obvious Elijah was getting tired of talking over things he had clearly gone over a thousand times before with other victims.

“Find your team, get back to the fountain,” he repeated. “And don’t come bothering me with questions unless absolutely necessary, I have things to do as well. Watch out for ghosts, now.”

“Wait, hang on! Ghosts?” Felina cried, but the old man’s image flickered and disappeared, leaving only the figure of the elegant woman, and the looming casino like a waiting beast on the mountain beyond.

Chapter Text

Go for the FEV reject, he’d said. Was she supposed to team up with a super mutant?

Felina sat on the cobbles of the Villa square, inspecting the well-used energy rifle she’d found lying in the bottom of the fountain and trying to formulate some semblance of a plan. But who could plan for being plucked from the wastes and shackled with a bomb collar to ensure obedience to a megalomaniac?

Running her fingers along the contours of the collar, Felina shivered. Her thoughts flew back to her recent adventures in Zion, where the warlord Salt-Upon-Wounds had used a bomb collar to subdue the otherworldly Ghost of She to his whims. But as far as Felina could tell, She hadn’t even been aware of the collar until Joshua Graham had freed it, the creature having been lied to by Salt-Upon-Wounds. For the Courier, she could be nothing else than acutely conscious of the cold band of metal.

“You’ve got it easy up there,” Felina grumbled up at the image of the woman upon the fountain. If not for the almost-unnoticeable blue tint and the light cast from her, Felina could have almost been convinced she was real. “Just gotta sit there and look pretty. Swank would be so proud.”

The elegant woman gave no response, continuing to stare off into the distance with an alluring half-smile on her ruby lips. Her brunette hair was piled atop her head in the hottest style of 2070s fashion, held down by a hairpin shaped like a delicate rose. A similar flower adorned the fastening of her starlet dress, shifting slightly with the fabric whenever she moved. The loop of the hologram was so seamless that had Felina not been staring at it for the last half-hour, she would have never noticed the faint flicker signaling a new cycle.

“Well, guess sitting on my bum never accomplished anything,” Felina muttered to herself, taking stock of her meager inventory, which consisted only of her rifle. “Better get moving, or Old Bastard—sorry, Elijah—might start getting impatient.”

Here she glared down at her Pip-Boy and spun the dial to cycle through the static-filled radio frequencies. “I hope you’re listening.”

Before heaving herself upright, she looked up at the eerie orange sky roiling with toxic Cloud, and offered up a swift prayer. “Yeshua, guide my way.”

Following the direction of a sagging sign marked Villa police station, Felina hefted her rifle and struck out into the ruined streets. Distant cries muffled by Cloud emanated at odd intervals, and she remembered Elijah’s warning of ghosts. Were they more creatures like the Ghost of She?

Dread settled like lead in her stomach at this thought. Whatever was out there in the Villa, there was clearly more than one of them. Facing down one Ghost of She was impossible enough, but multiples? Felina thought she would rather die of fear.

Stucco walls that had once been white seemed to go on forever. Balconies and crumbling archways passed overhead, low-hanging patches of Cloud roiling in side streets like ghostly phantoms screaming for release. Heavy sounds like deep, deep breathing echoed all around Felina, sending her heartrate skyrocketing, and casting glances over her shoulder every other step. At one point, she pressed herself against the wall beneath a balcony, her heart in her throat, as something skittered with an unnatural number of footsteps across the rotted wood above, sending splinters raining upon her head. Felina did not move until long after it had leapt onto an adjacent rooftop, sending a loose tile crashing to the cobbles in its wake, and vanished into the Cloud.

After what seemed an eternity of twists and turns, a square opened up before her. Several paths split off deeper into the Villa, one up a flight of stairs, two more away into the shadows. A rotted tree stump sat in the middle of the square, and against one wall was what had likely once been a small fountain. Felina wedged herself into the shadowed corner of a covered walkway to regroup, cursing the white jumpsuit she wore making her stick out like a sore thumb against the dim of the Villa. Couldn’t Elijah invest in anything a bit stealthier?

Keeping her weapon ready, the Courier scanned the empty square. From the moment she left the main fountain, she had sensed movement all around her, but had not directly encountered anything…yet. But a large open square to cross left her feeling decidedly uneasy. Even if her presence had gone unnoticed thus far, it was difficult to shake the nagging feeling that her activity was being closely monitored, and not by Elijah.

Squinting across the square, Felina’s eye was drawn by writing etched into the wall beside the stairs, where another broken sign read Villa police station, with an arrow pointing up the stairs. The writing on the wall said FEED THE BEAST in jagged, sometimes backward letters. A fittingly eerie message, Felina thought. Well, no use delaying—Elijah had mentioned a beast, so she supposed she had better go find it.

The Courier was a third of the way across the square when a harsh wheeze emanated from the Clouded street to her right, louder and nearer than any she had heard so far. Felina froze like a deer in headlights, completely exposed in the open square.

From the alley, two green dots appeared in the shadows, bobbing an ungainly lope. A humanoid figure emerged from the toxin, trailing Cloud in its wake, breath rattling like death through a corroded gas mask. Its gait was uneven, as though the suit it wore impeded its movement and made every step a colossal effort. In gloved hands it gripped a spear, which it used at intervals as a walking stick.

Felina stood paralyzed, her eyes the size of saucers, every hair on her neck standing straight up. The creature lurched a few paces into the square like some walking corpse fighting the effects of rigor mortis. It cleared the reach of the Cloud it had come from, then sank stiffly to one knee as though resting, using its spear as support.

Perhaps it wasn’t hostile, a tiny segment of Felina’s brain argued hopefully. She was impossible to miss, dressed in white in the middle of the square, and there was no way it hadn’t noticed her. Perhaps it was content to simply ignore her. At least, those glowing green eyepieces hadn’t fixed on her yet.

Cloud puffing from its ventilator with every labored breath, the creature pulled itself upright. Even from this distance, Felina heard the grotesque, visceral cracking of…its joints? As it rose to a standing position once more. Still, it seemed to take no notice of her, beginning a loping path across the square towards the street Felina had come from.

When Felina could no longer crane her neck to follow its progress behind her, she made a break for it, sprinting across the square towards the stairs and away from the creature as fast as her legs could carry her.

An ear-splitting shriek shattered the air behind her. Throwing a swift glance over her shoulder, Felina screamed.

The creature was pursuing her with a speed that belied its previous unsteady gait. Spear slung across its back, the thing propelled itself across the cobbles on all fours, bright emerald orbs fixed on its prey. Cloud poured from its ventilator along with a snarl unlike any human, mutant or animal Felina had ever heard.

Taking the stairs three at a time, Felina reached the top and whirled, firing a blast from her rifle. The hastily-aimed shot hit the thing in the shoulder, knocking it off-balance midway up the stairs. A second blast hit it squarely in the chest, sending it tumbling back down the stairs in a manner that would have broken the neck of any normal person, but which Felina somehow doubted would keep it down for long. Not risking a third shot, she spun around and kept running.

DOG IS HUNGRY, warned graffiti etched on the wall, but which Felina scarcely noticed as she raced past. Her sights were set on the first Old World light she had seen since her arrival, flickering above a door, and a sign above it reading Police. The shrieks of the creature rebounded through the streets behind her, and in the distance, other cries joined it in spine-chilling harmony. The hunter was calling its brethren.

Gasping, Felina skidded to a halt before the entrance. A flash of horrible realization shot through her mind—what if it was locked?

But the knob turned, and Felina yanked open the door, darting into the dark interior. Glancing back, she just glimpsed her pursuer hefting its spear for a throw some twenty paces behind her. She slammed the door shut just as the wood shook under the impact. Sliding the bolt securely into place, Felina still kept her back pressed against the door until the pounding ceased, and the screams of disappointment faded into the distance.

She sighed then, sagging against the worn wood and forcing herself to loosen sweat-slicked palms from her rifle, weak from adrenaline.

Her Pip-Boy crackled to life, the sudden noise in the otherwise silent station startling Felina into an undignified yelp.

“I see you met one of the locals,” came Elijah’s amused rasp.

“Yeah, I did,” Felina replied, still trying to catch her breath and allow her heartrate to return to normal. “Are those the ghosts you warned me about?”

“Indeed. Have you tried killing one yet? If not, don’t bother—they are very persistent that way. The only way to get them to stay dead that I’ve figured out is dismemberment. Decapitate them, tear them in half, that sort of thing. Anything else they either shrug off, or consumes too much energy to be worth it.”

“Oh, great.” Felina let her head thump back against the door. “Unkillable spear-throwing monsters, toxic Cloud, exploding collars, anything else you’d like to warn me about?”

“I hope that’s not sass I’m hearing, girl,” came Elijah’s warning growl. “But since you asked, that police station you’re in has some of those radios I mentioned earlier. Most of them have probably been turned off or destroyed by now, but there may still be one or two left. When your collar starts beeping, that means you’ve got exactly ten seconds to get out of range before those walls get painted by more than just Cloud. Now get moving.”

“But what about—” Felina began, but the frequency changed back to static, leaving her alone in the station.

“Crusty old bastard,” she grumbled. He reminded her of a certain other curmudgeonly old man she knew, one wrapped entirely in bandages. Only Elijah lacked any sort of compassion, sympathy, or really any sort of redeeming qualities whatsoever.

From her position leaning against the door, Felina surveyed the dimly-lit police station. Dim orange light seeped in through cracks in the boarded-up windows, with one or two fluorescent lights casting their flickering, artificial glow across the filthy tile floors. How any sort of working electricity remained in the Villa after two centuries was beyond Felina. Nuclear power was a hell of an energy source.

Heaving herself upright on shaky legs, Felina decided to explore the station in search of desperately-needed supplies. A police station probably had weapons, maybe even something she could use for armor, provided it hadn’t all decayed or been looted already.

She had not taken five paces before a loud beep sounded from her collar, startling her in the silence. Then another. And another.

Felina leaped back with a panicked cry, stumbling over debris and nearly falling. The beeping stopped.

Every muscle tensed, Felina edged forward as far as she could until the beeping started again, then quickly backed up. She repeated the experiment until she had pinpointed the approximate range of the intruding signal, and placed herself just outside it. Dismal realization hit her that such a strategy was likely to become all too common, not just in the police station but throughout the entire Villa.

Ruined desks sat scattered about the station, perfect for ghost people to hide under or behind, Felina thought. But she pushed down this fear, scanning the desktops until she spotted a ham radio just in front of a large holding cell. That had to be the source of the signal.

Chewing her lip anxiously, Felina formulated a swift plan. She would give herself six seconds to run up and find the off switch, and if she couldn’t in the allotted time, she would have four seconds to back up out of range before trying again. Cutting it awfully close, but she supposed she would have to get used to that here.

Felina switched on her Pip-Boy light and darted for the radio. As expected, her collar issued its shrill warning, but she ignored it and scanned the mess of dials and buttons, most labeled with numbers or radio symbols. Where was the off switch?

Seconds ticked by, and the collar’s beeping grew faster, matching Felina’s heartrate. Fumbling in her haste, she lifted the radio from its mess of wires, and yelped aloud at the button labeled power revealed from hiding. The beeping of the collar was almost fast enough to be one continuous tone as Felina punched the button, dropped the radio, and flung herself backwards away from it.

The beeping stopped. Felina picked herself up and edged a wary step forward. Silence.

A breath of relief escaped her. Her hands fumbled with the Pip-Boy light, shaky from stress. One radio down. At least she knew where the switch was now, so any future encounters would be easier. Another option was simply to shoot the device, but Felina wanted to conserve precious ammunition wherever possible.

Then, from the holding cell behind the radio desk, something shifted. Felina froze. A few rays of light filtered in from a partially-obscured skylight, illuminating part of the cell, but the back remained mostly in shadow. From that shadow, a darker, shapeless mass sat that Felina had not noticed before. Twin points of light stared at her, blinking once.

“H…hello?” Felina squeaked out, hefting her rifle and edging a step forward. Whatever it was, it was caged, she tried to assure herself. The door was locked. Probably. “I’m Felina. Are…are you the super mutant I’m supposed to find?”

A low voice replied, gruff and animal. “Noises make my stomach hurt.”

Felina paused, not having expected such an odd comment. “I…I turned off the radio,” she told it. “Are you alright? Why are you in there?”

“Makes Dog hurt self,” came the muttered reply, edged with fear. The points of light vanished, and the mass shifted as whatever it was rolled over to put its back to Felina. “Get away while you can, before he comes back.”

“Before who comes back?” Felina lowered her weapon, feeling a tinge of pity for the obviously terrified creature, whatever it was. She moved to the side of the cell nearest the thing and knelt at the bars. “Who shut you in here?”

“Puts Dog in the cage, hiding downstairs,” mumbled the thing. “He’s watching, waiting for you to try and let me go.”

This remark put Felina on alert once more. Was Elijah hiding downstairs? If so, perhaps she could get some answers, maybe even liberate herself if she was quick enough.

“Okay, well, I’m going to go downstairs and look,” she told the creature. Now that her eyes were beginning to adjust to the dark, she could see that it was in fact a nightkin lying on the floor of the cell, the toughest breed of Mariposa super mutant. A dangerous enemy, but as an ally, invaluable. “You stay here, alright? I’m going to get you out of there.”

“So hungry,” was the only whimpered reply.

Felina stood and set about her previous objective of exploring the station, keeping a wary eye on the figure of the nightkin, but it seemed to have forgotten her existence the moment conversation had ceased. She located another radio that set her collar to beeping, but this one proved less trouble than the first, and she was able to switch off without difficulty.

Keeping her rifle ready in case of other encounters, the Courier discovered a number of useful items in her exploration of the time-tattered offices. Pulling open a locker with a shrieking of hinges, Felina discovered with a surge of delight a worn bulletproof vest, with a patch labeled SMPD on the shoulder.

“Eat your heart out, Joshua Graham,” Felina muttered, shaking the dust from the tough vest and sliding it on. It hung loosely on her slim figure, but if she pulled the straps to the tightest they would go, it fit just snugly enough.

Another discovery lay in the form of a briefcase stuffed behind a broken toilet. Felina might have missed it had a handprint of phosphorescent blue paint not marked the wall above the place, like a beacon in the dim light. Inside the case was a 9mm pistol and a handful of ammunition, which Felina added to her arsenal with a silent prayer of thanks. Energy weapons were never her specialty, but the familiar grip of the pistol made her feel just a little bit better.

Stuffing her pockets with the rest of the meager supplies, Felina continued on with bolstered confidence until she stood at the top of the basement stairs. Throwing another glance back at the unmoving figure of the caged nightkin, she hefted her pistol and descended into the bowels of the police station.

Her footsteps clanked on the metal stairs, echoing far too loudly for Felina’s comfort. She proceeded slowly, checking around every corner for Elijah, traps, anything, feeling as though she was walking into a tomb. Switching off the odd radio and racing past those located out of reach, her ears rang with the beeping of her collar rebounding against the metal walls. Ruinous clutter lay scattered about the lifeless control rooms, overturned filing cabinets and shattered terminals, broken pencils and scrap metal. The smell of dust, metal, and rotting paper was thick in the air, all remnants of an extinct civilization.

Finally, she reached a dead end. Switching off yet another tabletop radio, Felina turned about and surveyed the tiny room. A defunct generator and several metal shelves were the only objects besides the radio. No Elijah. No one at all, as far as Felina could tell.

Leaning back against the table, her hand knocked something off the surface and sent it clattering to the floor. Stooping to pick it up, she discovered a dusty holodisk.

“Odd,” she murmured to herself. “Are you Old World, or more recent?”

Wiping it off with the cleanest part of her sleeve she could find, she opened her Pip-Boy and inserted the disk, then hit play.

“Dog,” a gravelly, commanding voice growled, “back in the cage!”

Dog, Felina thought. Hadn’t the nightkin upstairs referred to himself as Dog? The voice on the tape sounded almost exactly like his…almost. At least, it certainly wasn’t Elijah.

Replaying the short recording a couple more times and getting no further answers, Felina decided to take it upstairs and show it to the nightkin. Perhaps he knew something about it.

“Hey, Dog, that’s your name, right?” she called once back in the main room, keeping her voice low as she approached the cage.

The nightkin raised his head a couple inches off the floor, his eyes still twin points in the dim light. “Dog is Dog’s name,” he replied, his tone just as dull as when Felina had left him.

“So, uh, I found this tape in the basement,” Felina explained, crouching before the cell. “Do you know what it means?”

She played the recording, and the rasping voice grated out once more, “Dog, back in the cage.”

A particularly loud shriek from outside incited Felina to glance towards the door with a frown, but the cry sounded again, this time more distant, indicating the ghost person was only passing by.

“Anyway, it didn’t make any sense to me,” she went on, “because you’re kind of already in a ca—"

She turned back to the cell and broke off. The nightkin was sitting bolt upright now, staring straight at her. Felina realized with a shiver that his eyes no longer reflected the dim light.

“Who are you?” He rasped out, his voice exactly the same tone as on the disk, as though he had taken it for himself.

Felina’s brow furrowed. “We were just talking a minute ago.”

“That wasn’t me,” the nightkin stated matter-of-factly, then repeated, his voice grating, “who are you.”

“Uh—I’m Felina,” the Courier replied, feeling increasingly uneasy with every passing second under that calculating stare. “You’re…not Dog anymore, are you?”

“Never was, never will be,” the nightkin growled. “He was in this cage because I put him here. He disobeyed me.”

Felina thought she was beginning to understand now. “So if you’re not Dog, what’s your name?”

“My name is God,” came the assertive reply. “I am God, and besides me, there is no other.”

Now that contention was just patently untrue, Felina thought, but refrained from saying so aloud.

“You aren’t who I was expecting,” God went on, “was expecting the Old Man, and got a pretty little doll instead, a doll with a silk ribbon on her neck and around her wrist.”

Felina looked down at her Pip-Boy, and the super mutant laughed, like a saw scraping across wood.

“Why, with our collars and manacles, we may as well be kin,” God sneered, leaning forward slightly, but still in shadow. “Nightkin, as it were. So, little Pip-Boy, now that you’ve got me, what does the Old Man require of us?”

Still trying to process the change in demeanor, Felina narrowed her eyes. “Come into the light.”

Seeming amused by this request, the nightkin slowly rose to his full colossal height, well over eight feet even with the hunched posture endemic to all super mutants. He stepped forward, into the weak light filtering down from the skylight.

Like most nightkin, his skin was a sallow grayish-violet from prolonged use of Stealth Boys, with no hair to speak of, and a face twisted into a permanent snarl. A bear trap encased his left forearm, metal teeth digging into muscles like knotted ropes. His arms alone were nearly as thick as Felina’s torso, with meaty hands that looked like they could crush rocks. What caught Felina’s attention though was the word DOG carved into the flesh of his barrel-like chest, the sight inciting her to take a step back.

“Did you bring me here?” She demanded, a shiver going down her spine. “Were you the one who put on this collar and changed my clothes?”

God laughed again, but it was half a snarl of irritation. “Not me, Dog. Don’t worry—he’s too stupid to figure out how to do anything to you other than what the Old Man demands of him. Though I’m sure your old clothes are in a sorry state now. It’s only part of the price your greed exacts.”

Despite not feeling particularly assured by this statement, Felina put the matter aside before it got too uncomfortable and got down to business. “Elijah wanted me to find another person wearing a collar. Where’s yours?”

The nightkin snarled, but his anger was for the most part not at her. “Every good dog needs a collar, just like in the Old World,” he growled. “Dog took care of that alright, just like the Old Man wanted. Only Dog did it a little too well, got a little too hungry.”

Felina stared at him, dumbfounded, and God barked a mocking laugh. “Don’t worry, little Pip-Boy, my collar is close, and very much alive. All the better for the Old Man; we’re trapped here until it isn’t.”

“Alright then, help me break into the Sierra Madre and take on the Old Man,” Felina said, folding her arms. “I don’t like having a collar either. We can take him on together, and once he’s out of the way, we can both go free.”

God chuckled darkly at this remark. “Aren’t you cute? Putting a pretty face on doesn’t make your words any less false. Greed brought you here, and greed will drive you until the Madre sees to your death.”

“What are you talking about? I just followed the signal to see what all the fuss was about,” Felina defended herself, indignant at being lectured at by a nightkin of all people. “I didn’t give a damn about the treasure until someone strapped me to a bomb and said I’d be blown to kingdom come until I got it or died trying. You don’t know me, so you can take your accusations of greed and shove them up your ass.”

God stamped forward, and Felina startled back at the sudden movement. The nightkin smiled murderously down at her, his face inches from the metal bars. “Perhaps you don’t think that way now,” he admitted, “but you will. Once you see what the Madre can offer, you’ll start thinking you can have it all. And when that happens, anyone helping you becomes a loose end, a contingency. Greed will turn you blind, until letting go is simply impossible, and you’re no better than the Old Man.”

The nightkin crouched before the bars, about at eye level with Felina. “Now, tell me again how we’re going to take on the Old Man together?”

Felina glared back at him, her mind racing. She couldn’t simply convince him by virtue of her personality, so she would have to find another way. But too many variables remained. She had to keep him talking.

Finally, she said, “you locked yourself in there, didn’t you? You wouldn’t do that without some way to get yourself out. Even if you won’t follow me, I’m sure Dog would.”

“Yes, but Dog doesn’t have the key,” God growled, suddenly on the defensive at the possibility of being forced down again. “Even if he did, if he got out of this cell as hungry as he is, you wouldn’t last a second. He wouldn’t even care if it killed you both.”

Felina considered her next words carefully. He was right, but there was another variable, one she was beginning to piece together from their conversation. “Dog does what the Old Man says, right? You said so yourself. If he hears the Old Man tell him to do something, he’ll obey, no matter how hungry he is?”

“Of course, it’s the reason you’re still alive,” God replied, suspicious edging his tone. “…Why? Do you have some way of contacting the Old Man?”

Felina tapped her Pip-Boy. “Sure do,” she fibbed, hoping he wouldn’t realize that as far as she could tell, her and Elijah’s communications were one-way, and at his convenience only. “All I need to do is switch to the right frequency. He’d probably cuss me out for bothering him, but he’d be there.”

A low growl sounded deep in God’s throat. “Do it, and you’ll learn the color of your insides.”

Good, Felina thought, he valued being in control too much to call her bluff. “Calm down. If you come with me willingly, I won’t do it.”

“No, you won’t,” God agreed. “Because if you did, I’d break you like a toothpick, prop your broken body in view of the Sierra Madre, then keep walking until my collar goes cold.”

With each passing second, Felina was becoming more and more desperate to not get on the nightkin’s bad side, either of them. But she was running out of options.

“Look, if I wanted to, I could bring Dog out of his cage,” she said at last. “I’m going to prove it by not doing it.”

“No, you’re not,” God sneered back, and Felina’s heart sank. Then he continued, “You may regret this. Dog is far more suited to the Madre, to the ghosts that haunt it. When they fall, he will fall on them, and he is always hungry. With me in control of this shell, fighting will be more difficult.”

For a heartbeat, Felina hesitated. He was right again. But she would have to hold her ground if she wanted to stay on his good side. “Even if Dog is more useful, we’ll manage.”

For several seconds, God stared at her, and Felina thought she detected the tiniest sliver of respect in his bloodshot eyes. Then he chuckled. “We are not sure you belong here after all, Pip-Boy,” he said, rising from his crouch. “In fact, we are quite sure of that. But you’ve come this far, and I am not interested in remaining in this cell any longer.”

With this, the nightkin stretched up and felt about along the top of one of the rafters, pulling down a keyring along with a shower of dust. He stooped before the lock, the ring of metal tiny in his hand, and Felina stepped back, wondering if she’d made the right choice as the cell door groaned open. Bending down and turning slightly to fit his massive shoulders through the opening, God stepped from the confinement and stood before Felina, regarding her as though she had just hanged herself with her own rope.

Felina, her heart thundering in her chest, looked up at the nightkin and forced a level expression. Wondering if she had just signed her own death warrant, she nevertheless offered forth her right hand. “We go after the Old Man together. Deal?”

God stared down at her offered hand, seemingly amused by this Old World gesture. But he returned it, his massive hand nearly enveloping hers in a grip far too tight. “Deal. Lead on, Pip-Boy; the Sierra Madre awaits.”

Chapter Text

Cracking open the police station door, Felina cautiously surveyed the dim street by the flickering glow of the station light. Distant screeches rose from unknown corners of the Villa, but the immediate vicinity appeared to be deserted.

“Alright, Elijah said the trick to keeping the ghosts down is to cut off limbs,” she murmured back to the nightkin. “If you can’t do that, just beat them to as much of a pulp as you can.”

“Gladly,” God replied. “Be a good chance to practice for when we aren’t bound to each other anymore. Maybe I’ll tear that Pip-Boy off your arm, wear it on my neck.”

Felina did not dignify these remarks with a reply, trying not to let on how unnerving they were. She noticed with a chill that despite his bulk, the nightkin’s footsteps behind her were eerily soft, almost unnoticeable. Well, his kind were known for their stealth.

Proceeding slowly down the stairs into the square where Felina had encountered the ghost person, she halted at the bottom and surveyed the empty expanse cautiously.

“Stopping already?” God growled at her back, “We’ll need to move faster than this if we’re to outwit the Old Man.”

“I know, but I’m being careful!” Felina hissed back at him. “When I came through here earlier, I got chased by a ghost person and would have gotten skewered if I hadn’t found the station. Forgive me for being cautious.”

God grumbled, but said nothing more. The pair made their way across the square uneventfully, Felina keeping a wary eye on the Clouded street where the ghost person had come from, but the alley remained empty and silent.

The winding streets seemed to go on forever, a maze of side alleys and stairs stretching away in every direction beneath the roiling sky. But never out of sight for long was the shining casino on the mountain beyond the Villa, standing proud untouched by time.

“Yes, yes,” God muttered, casting a wary eye at the tiled roofs as ghosts called to one another in the distance, “I hear them too.”

Felina glanced back. “What’s that?”

“Not you,” the nightkin snapped back irately, “Dog’s frightened of the ghosts, the coward.”

Felina was checking her Pip-Boy for the umpteenth time to make sure they were going the right way when she felt her ponytail seized, bringing her to an abrupt halt.

“Hold it, Pip-Boy,” God growled, “we’ve got company.”

Felina drew her pistol, straining her ears for any sign of movement. A side street intersected their route ahead, a flight of stairs leading down to a lower level stretching away into parts unknown. From that street, labored breathing could be heard, growing nearer by the second.

“When it gets up here, I think we should stay still,” Felina murmured back to the nightkin. “The one I met earlier didn’t seem to notice me until I started moving.”

“’Stay still’?” God echoed incredulously, “’not notice’ you? You stick out like chalk on a blackboard.”

“Yes, but—” Felina was unable to defend herself further, for a hazmat-clad figure lurched into their path like a restless, roaming spirit. As before, it carried a crude spear, round green eyes like lamps in the dim street. Cloud puffed from its ventilator with each harsh breath.

“I’m taking it,” God growled, bracing himself to charge. “You shoot me, even by accident, and I’ll break your legs and hang you from the Madre’s gates.”

“God, wait!” Felina hissed, but the nightkin was already barreling past her, straight at the hooded figure of the ghost person.

The creature gave a scream that tore into Felina’s ears like shards of glass, dodging the charging super mutant with eye-blurring speed. It leapt up to cling onto a balcony like some great spider, its movements unnaturally fast and unbelievably agile. It hung from the balcony rail with one hand, and with the other leveled its spear for a throw at the nightkin.

Now that she had a clear shot, Felina fired twice at the thing. One bullet ricocheted off its gas mask with a metallic ping, but the other hit it in the arm it was using to suspend itself from the balcony. The creature lost its grip with a shriek of dismay, plummeting like a stone to land on the cobbles in a pile of gangly limbs. Before it could pick itself up, God seized it in massive hands.

Felina winced at the snap, then another, like dry branches breaking. The nightkin slammed the ghost’s head into the wall so hard the mortar cracked, then flung it to the ground and stamped upon its narrow chest with all his considerable weight behind the blow, a move that would have demolished the ribcage of any normal person. The creature fell limp upon the cobbles, spear sliding from gloved hands. Cloud, and a thick, dark fluid that was most certainly not blood oozed from the vents of its suit.

Mildly sickened by this display of violence, her ears still ringing from its harsh cries, Felina nevertheless kept her pistol leveled at the thing and edged forward. “Is it…is it dead?”

The nightkin wasn’t even breathing hard for his effort. He did not answer, but cocked his head to one side, listening intently. More screeches rose from the distant Villa like wails of cursed spirits, drawing nearer by the second. The commotion caused by the fight, however brief, had clearly not gone unnoticed.

As if in answer to Felina’s question, the ghost person upon the cobbles shuddered, its body undulating with a sickening cacophony of cracking and other, more grotesque sounds.

“We’d better not wait up for it,” God growled. “Let’s get moving before its friends get here and we have a real problem.”

Felina agreed wholeheartedly. Coughing from the sickly-sweet odor of Cloud, she stooped to grab the thing’s spear from the cobblestones, before she and the nightkin hurried into the dim streets, leaving the scene of the fight behind.

Finally, the main plaza opened up before them, with the ruined fountain and the image of the starlet atop it. She stood just as she had when Felina had left her, staring into the distance with a coy smile, as though she knew of some delicious secret she would only reveal at her leisure.

“Well, well,” God stepped into the fountain to pass one massive hand through the hologram’s leg, his voice dripping hatred. “If it isn’t the siren herself. If she were still alive, I’d snap her neck like a matchstick. All her fault the Old Man is even here in the first place.”

Looking up at the woman’s elegant figure, a sudden chilling thought occurred to Felina. The ghosts in the Villa had presumably once been people, some or all of them perhaps even being pre-War. What if this woman, whoever she was, who had lured so many after Old World promises…what if she was still alive? What if she had not perished in atomic fire, but instead lived on as one of the tormented, Cloud-twisted entities that now haunted the Sierra Madre, trapped by the very place she beckoned to?

She could contemplate this notion no further however, for the woman’s figure vanished, replaced by Elijah’s scowling face. God inhaled sharply and lurched back away from the hologram, nearly tripping over the edge of the fountain.

“Well, you’re more competent than I thought,” Elijah remarked to Felina, his voice crackling with static. “Was expecting you to be hardly more than a mouthful for that one, but it looks like you tamed him well enough. Are you being a good dog for her, beast?”

God only lowered his gaze and grunted. Felina glanced over at him, puzzled by this lack of response, but Elijah seemed to take no notice, for he continued to Felina, “Now that you’ve proven you’re not completely incompetent, I’d get the ghoul, Domino. He’s proven almost too difficult to be worth it, but I can’t get rid of him yet—been here longer than any of us, and he knows the Villa like the back of his hand. You’ll find him in the residential district.”

“Alright,” Felina replied, carefully tailoring her tone to give the impression of full compliance. After God, she wasn’t sure anyone could be more difficult than him. “Any hazards I should be aware of on the way?”

“Just that ghoul’s smart mouth,” Elijah growled with the vehemence of one still suffering the sting of several choice insults. “And the ghosts, of course. They flock more thickly on the east end of the Villa for some reason, so keep a sharp eye out. Now be off with you.”

The hologram shut off in the usual abrupt fashion Felina was growing to expect, and the figure of the woman reappeared.

Felina turned to the nightkin, her brow furrowed. “What was that about?” she asked him, “I was expecting you to threaten to tear off his arms or something.”

God glared at her, and Felina almost regretted saying anything. “The Old Man doesn’t know I exist,” he said, his voice low for fear of Elijah eavesdropping. “So far as he’s aware, Dog is the only one occupying this shell. Doesn’t know there’s another who is far less compliant to his whims, and who sees everything.”

Here he bared jagged teeth at Felina in warning. “And he won’t know I exist, if you know what’s good for you. If he does accidently bring Dog back out by giving him an order, you put him away immediately. Can’t have him making stupid choices and getting us all killed.”

Felina held up her hands, taking a wary step back. “Your secret’s safe with me,” she assured him. “Gotta admit, that’s actually a pretty clever strategy.”

Seeming pleased by the compliment, the nightkin settled on the tiled rim of the fountain, the glow of the starlet casting pale light over his sallow, leathery skin. “Haven’t met this ‘Domino,’” he mused, “Dog doesn’t remember him. Old Man must’ve collared that one himself, before he got stuck.”

“Stuck?” Felina asked, pausing in her inspection of the pilfered spear.

“Yes, stuck.” A wicked smile crept onto the nightkin’s face, reveling in his captor’s predicament. “This isn’t the first team he’s tried to assemble, you know. The last one he had very nearly succeeded—they got into the casino, into its very heart. But greed took them in the end, just like it takes everyone. They all perished at each other’s hands, leaving the Old Man trapped in the depths of the Sierra Madre. So close to seeing his dream realized, yet still so far away. If you hadn’t come along with your Pip-Boy, he would have stayed down there with no means of communicating to the outside, and eventually died of thirst.”

Here he gnashed his teeth in anger. “But Dog, the ever-obedient fool, kept going out to look for poor souls following the radio signal. He’d find them and collar them, but without the Old Man to tell them what to do, none of them lasted long. Until you came along, that is.

“That’s why, when this is over, you’re the first one I’m going to deal with after I’ve snapped the Old Man’s neck. You gave him one last hope, and prevented my collar from finally going cold.”

A chill ran down Felina’s spine, and she forced herself not to feel guilty. After all, she was only a victim of circumstance—it wasn’t her fault he was bitter about his other self.

After a brief rest, Felina checked her Pip-Boy map to see where the residential district was. To her dismay, it was much further away from the main plaza than the police station had been, with many more opportunities to get lost or wind up in the clutches of a ghost person. But she did not voice her concerns, putting on a confident air for the nightkin. “I’ll go get this Domino guy then,” she told him. “You stay here out of harm’s way.”

“Concerned for my safety, are you?” God’s amused smile was tinged with mockery. “How touching.”

“Yeah, well, if one of us dies, we’re all toast.” At this point, Felina was starting to become jaded to his attitude. She dug into her stuffed pockets, wrestling out a dented can of pork and beans she had found while scrounging and tossing it to the nightkin. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, so eat that if you get hungry…too hungry.”

God barked a laugh at her amendment to her words. “You’re beginning to catch on now, Pip-Boy,” he chuckled, his voice like gravel. “Keep it up, and perhaps when this is over, I’ll only break three of your limbs. Off you go, now—best not to keep the Old Man waiting.”

Gripping her spear and setting her face once more towards the shadowed streets, Felina contemplated for a moment just how much she didn’t want to go back in there. But she had no choice, so she set her jaw and struck out again into the ruined Villa.

The light from the fountain soon faded behind her, shadows pressing in on all sides. Not far in, Felina could hear that Elijah was right—the cries of ghosts were more frequent on this end of the Villa, echoing everything from thin wails to raucous shrieks like nails on a chalkboard.

Her progress was slow, checking every corner before she turned it, every side street before passing it, anxiously glancing up at darkened windows for green eyes peering down at her. As before, she could hear movement all around her, some of it uncomfortably close and sending her heart into her throat. But she met nothing for the time being.

Pausing at the third or fourth uneventful intersection, Felina squinted up at the roiling orange sky. Was she imagining things, or was it getting darker? The passage of time might as well have stopped the moment she arrived, for there was no sun, no shadows to discern the time of day. But it seemed night approached, nonetheless.

Felina was equal parts relieved and frightened by this realization. She was exhausted, the stress of the day and of her hypervigilance taking a heavy toll on her. But the last thing she wanted was to try sleeping while surrounded by those horrible ghosts, if her nerves would even permit such an action.

Chewing her lip, she looked up the road to where a staircase split off the main track, leading up to one of many archways over the street and a door set in the stucco walls. She had passed several such doors, but had ignored them for fear of getting sidetracked and finding herself lost, or the possibility of ghosts lurking within. But now it seemed she would have to take a chance. People had once lived here, after all—surely there was a place to rest somewhere.

Felina hefted her pistol and ascended the stairs. Casting wary glances over her shoulder and down to the street she had just come from, she stood in front of the door. No noise issued from behind its chipping paint. Cautiously, she tried the handle. It opened, casting weak light into the interior like a candle into the dark of a cave.

The room had likely once been quite nice, but Cloud and years of neglect had left it in a sorry state. A vanity sat on its face, its mirror in pieces scattered across the floor, and a dresser with three of its four drawers pulled out. But what caught Felina’s eye was the bed, its cast-iron frame sagging so that the threadbare mattress now rested on the floor. No sheets, no pillow, but to Felina, the Lucky 38 could not have been more luxurious

Her heart gladdened, Felina stepped into the room and began preparing a defensive strategy. The door she had entered in, as well as the second door leading out to the balcony, both opened inward. Good. The balcony door hung open, so Felina closed it before the view of the ghost person leaping across a distant rooftop could unnerve her too much. She pushed the vanity up against the door and wedged the room’s only chair beneath the knob of the one she had come through. A paltry defense, but at least it would give her some warning if ghosts came knocking. With both doors closed, the distant cries of the Villa’s inhabitants were rendered all but snuffed out, much to Felina’s relief.

The windowless room was now quite dim. Felina switched on her Pip-Boy light, illuminating dust motes kicked up wherever she made any sort of movement, and sat on the mattress. Its springs groaned their complaints whenever she moved, but aside from the dust, it was comfortable enough. Taking a meager meal of Dandy Boy Apples, Felina allowed herself some time to reflect on the current situation. What was she hoping to get from the Sierra Madre? Had she followed the signal to see what the big deal was, as she had said to God, or was he right that she had been drawn by greed?

And the casino itself, what was its history? Who was the woman upon the fountain? What had happened to her? What was the Cloud? Why was the Sierra Madre, a mere casino resort, so heavily fortified? Who would have built it that way, and why?

So many unanswered questions only served to make Felina more exhausted. Checking her blockades to make sure they were secure, she lay down on the mattress with her pistol within easy reach. She still had two team members to find, after all—her adventure in the Sierra Madre was only just beginning. Surely some of her questions would be answered in due time.

Exhaling a long breath of the dusty air, Felina closed her eyes and allowed a fitful sleep to claim her.

Chapter Text

“Eicha yavshu borot hamayim
Kikar hashuk reikah,
Ve'ein poked et har habayit
Ba'ir ha'atikah.

Uvame'arot asher basela
Meyalelot ruchot,
Ve'ein yored el yam hamelach
Bederech Yericho.”

Felina stared into the fireplace, watching the floating embers like fireflies drifting lazily upward. It was Saturday morning, Sabbath day, and so the house rested. Gran was content to read from her weathered scriptures the entire day, but Felina’s nine-year-old mind was far less entertained. She couldn’t go outside to play, she couldn’t doodle with charcoal, she couldn’t even mend the hole in her skirt. All she was permitted to do was read scripture and sit. And sit, and sit, and sit, all day long until chore time at sundown, and Sabbath was over.

“Gran, where’s the Temple Mount?”

The old ghoul glanced over at her charge, who had propped her chin on the arm of the rocking chair. “Far, far away from here, in a country called Israel,” she explained patiently. “At least, that’s what it was called before the war.”

“Do you think it was destroyed in the war?” Felina asked.

Here Gran paused, her expression sad, as though she had wondered this many times herself, but had never come up with an answer. “I don’t know, chamaniya,” she finally admitted. “It’s nice to imagine that it might have been preserved, but we can’t truly know for sure. All we can know, for all of this, is gam zeh ya’avor—this too shall pass. We’re only passing through this world, so we shouldn’t hold on to the things of it so tightly that we can’t let go.”

This answer did little to satisfy Felina, who was beginning to wonder how long she could go on before feigning a visit to the outhouse and escaping to Old Rob’s house for the day.

“Read the story with the big red dragon,” she finally said, hoping to relieve some of her boredom. “And the angels, the ones with all the animal faces and eyes all over them.”

Gran’s chuckle rasped like sandpaper over wood. She turned to the back of her scripture and began to read, “’And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him, and they were full of eyes within, and they rest not day or night, saying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come…’”

         This too shall pass.

Felina woke from restless dreams, the sight of the Tetons lingering in the back of her mind. Childhood memories were among the few not taken away by a bullet to the head, but even those were foggier than they might have been. Regardless, they were a comfort to her.

Blinking sleep from her eyes, Felina’s gaze darted to the two doors, but both were still closed and barricaded. It seemed she had been able to rest undisturbed. Cracking one open revealed the toxic orange sky was still dim, lit mostly by the glow of the Sierra Madre on the mountain above. The sun must not be up yet, Felina thought, not that it mattered much—the Cloud was so thick over the Villa that the place seemed in perpetual twilight.

Turning back inside, Felina froze. Her blood turned to ice in her veins, staring in horror at a place on the dusty floor. There, illuminated by the dim light from outside and surrounded by her own prints, was a single set of boot prints far larger than her own. They pointed straight at the bed, as though something had entered during the night and stood over her as she slept.

Felina thought she might faint. Both barricades had been undisturbed, and no noise had woken her up. No tracks other than her own led in or out. And yet there in front of her was undeniable proof that somehow, in some way, something had entered and left while she lay asleep.

Shivering from terror, Felina gathered up her supplies, not even pausing to take a small breakfast, and fled the room and the footprints as fast as she could. Perhaps the ghosts of the Villa were truly phantoms after all.

New fear accompanied the cries of the ghost people. However jaded Felina might have been becoming to their constant calling, this was now erased. Every sense was back on high alert, ears straining for movement too close for comfort, eyes darting to the rooftops and windows for signs of stalkers. Like a lost soul traversing the land of the dead, she wandered deeper and deeper into the Villa.

The twilit streets wound this way and that, stairs leading up and down and around, narrow alleys and covered archways providing perfect hiding places for enemies. Once, Felina jumped at a metallic clank beneath her foot, looking down to discover that she had stepped on the handle of a bear trap sitting nearly invisible against the cobbles. A few inches to the right and her foot would have gone directly on the pressure plate, and those jagged, rusty teeth would have snapped her tibia like a dead stick, leaving her easy prey for the next passing ghost person. Felina looked down as well as up after that.

After what might have been hours or years of wandering the dim streets, Felina pressed herself behind a shadowy pillar to take stock of her surroundings. According to her Pip-Boy, if she had followed the streets correctly, she was nearing the residential district. A plaza lay ahead of her, but this as always presented hazards in the form of at least three ghost people prowling the wide space. Shrieks knifed through the air as the creatures quarreled with one another in their own harsh language.

Not willing to risk taking them on without backup, Felina decided to go around. A set of stairs led up to the plaza’s left, but this had its own set of problems—Cloud hung heavy in the stairwell, its sickly-sweet odor clogging her nostrils even from this distance. She hadn’t yet been forced to directly interact with the toxin, and she worried about the effect it might have on her. Was it similar to radiation poisoning? Or was it something completely foreign? The latter seemed more likely. But she would have to risk it to avoid the ghosts.

Inhaling a deep breath and holding it, Felina braced herself and darted up the stairs.

Cloud tingled against her skin in a manner not unlike radiation, tiny floating particles smaller than sand tickling her arms. Her eyes burned and watered, but she was focused on getting up the stairs without stumbling. She could scarcely see in front of her; everything more than a couple feet ahead was shrouded in blood-red fog. Her lungs cried for air, but she dared not breathe in the toxin.

At last, Felina reached the top of the stairs, leaving the Cloud behind. Strands trailed in her wake like spiderweb silk, but these quickly dissipated. Taking refuge beneath a balcony, she sucked in clean air—well, as clean as the Sierra Madre could offer—and scrubbed at her watering eyes.

Then a questioning snarl rasped from directly above her. Felina froze, once again not daring to breathe. Until now, the ghost people has displayed little hearing ability, but whether this one had felt her air or simply heard her trying to recover herself, somehow its suspicions were aroused.

Drawing her pistol, Felina slowly edged backward away from the sound of the thing’s movement, back towards the stairwell. A loose tile shattered on the street next to where she had been standing.

The ghost must have been on the roof, Felina thought, and the creaking of wood above indicated it was climbing down to the balcony. She had to move before it descended to the street level. Perhaps she could catch it with its back to her and make a break for the stairs, losing it in the Cloud?

With this plan in mind, Felina turned around and screamed.

Twin green lamps cast their emerald glow upon her. Sickly-sweet Cloud billowed into her face as the ghost person hanging upside-down from the balcony matched her scream with its own.

Felina spun around and fled. Terror lent wings to her feet, driving her onward down the ruined street, the shrieks of her hunter echoing in her ears. She darted down a side street, desperate to lose her pursuer, leaping down a flight of stairs and sprinting up another, not caring that she was getting herself horribly lost. Still the cries persisted behind her, the sound of racing steps on the tiled roofs sending her heart into her throat.

Rounding a corner, her heart leapt—a door lay ahead of her. Recalling her experience at the police station, she raced for its protection. Glancing back, she saw the ghost leap from the roof straight down to the cobbles, landing in an ungainly heap. But it was up again in a heartbeat, and closing on her fast.

Felina darted into what appeared to be a ruined cafe and slammed the door. Its lock was significantly weaker than the police station, but she fastened it anyway and pressed her back against the cracked wood, bracing for impact.

Silence.

Confused, but still keeping her pistol ready, Felina turned her head to put her ear against the chipping paint.

And from the other side of the door, just at the level of Felina’s ear, there emanated deep, deep breathing.

Then a hand burst through the rotting wood with an explosion of splinters, snatching at Felina’s face. She screamed, leaping away from the door, leaving a chunk of blonde hair caught in the creature’s fingers. The ghost withdrew its arm and peered through the hole, one emerald eye casting its glow upon the dim interior. Felina fired twice at it, and though she couldn’t tell if she had hit it, it was enough for the thing to recoil with an indignant shriek.

But her victory was short-lived. The door shook under impact, either from the creature trying to kick it in or simply hurling itself bodily at the barricade. The lock rattled dangerously, so Felina did not wait for it, instead fleeing into the café. Dodging overturned tables, she vaulted over the filthy counter and ran into the kitchen. As she had hoped, there was a back entrance. She flung it open just as the front door shattered, and the scream of the ghost reverberated through the ruined building.

Back in the street, Felina’s mind raced, growing frantic with the need to escape. Down the street to her left, another ghost person was lurching down the cobbles with its back to her, but the commotion of its approaching kin would surely draw its attention. To her right, the street was clear. Felina sprinted that way, her breathing ragged.

As she had expected, her pursuer burst onto the back street with a rattling wail. Felina did not dare look back, but a second cry farther away confirmed her prediction. Now there were two of them, she was completely lost, and her stamina was starting to run low. She couldn’t keep running for much longer.

Well, she decided grimly, if they were going to take her, she’d give them enough hell that even they would remember her. Perhaps when she died, the explosion of her collar would be enough to take at least one of them with her.

This thought had just occurred to her when a new sound reached her ears, nearly drowned by the screams of the ghosts. A sound to foreign to such a hostile place that Felina thought she must surely be hallucinating from exhaustion. It was the sound of song.

“Moon over Miami,
Shine on my love and me
So we can stroll beside the roll
Of the rolling sea”

“What the hell?” Felina gasped out aloud, so confused that for an instant she forgot the terror of the chase. The ghosts behind her also seemed bewildered, judging by the momentary pause in their hunting cries. The voice continued, a flawless tenor floating through the Villa.

“Moon over Miami,
Shine on as we begin
A dream or two that may come true
When the tide comes in”

Perhaps it was a radio, Felina thought. It had been awhile since she had encountered one that hadn’t been destroyed long ago—perhaps one of the ruined apartments still had one that worked. But what signal could it be picking up? And so loud, so clear?

Like an entranced sailor pursuing a siren’s song, Felina chased the voice through the winding streets, up stairs and through ruined dwellings. The ghosts quickly got over their surprise, and their shrieks all but eclipsed the song.

Swinging around a corner, Felina skidded to a halt, her face inches from the string of grenades suspended from the arch overhead. Scarcely even pausing to register than she could have died had she gone a step farther, she dodged around them and kept running. If the traps were getting more lethal, she must be getting close.

Felina cleared another stairwell and jumped at the sound of a rapid series of explosions coming from behind her. The sound of shrapnel ricocheting off the walls like machine gun fire reached her ears, along with surprised shrieks from one or both ghost people.

“Yeah, suck on that, ya bastards,” she muttered in satisfaction. Whoever had set the trap, even if she had nearly fallen victim to it herself, she couldn’t really fault them—it had done its job. With luck, it would at least deter her pursuers, even if it did little harm to their Cloud-warped bodies.

At long last, Felina entered a deserted square and saw signs of life. Specifically, a string of colored lights decorating a second-story hole in the stucco wall. Standing beneath it, Felina strained her ears for movement, and was rewarded by the sound of footsteps—normal, human footsteps. The song had ceased, but it appeared she had followed it to its source.

Pistol ready, Felina ducked into the nearby stairwell, confident that she had lost the ghosts for the time being. Now, she mentally prepared her diplomacy skills. If her conversation with Dog and God had taught her anything, it was that her partners in crime were far from agreeable.

At the top of the stairs, Felina found herself before a closed door, waging a silent debate with herself. Was she supposed to knock, or just kick it in? Making too much noise could attract unwanted attention, and breaking down the door of a potential ally was unlikely to leave a good first impression.

Felina braced herself for anything. Then she lifted her hand and rapped four times upon the splintered wood.

For several heartbeats, there was silence. Then the knob turned, and the door swung open to reveal a well-dressed ghoul in a black tailcoat, his bowtie pushed out of the way by a collar identical to Felina’s. Dark glasses balanced perilously upon the bridge of the cavity where his nose had once been, which Felina found odd—why wear sunglasses in this perpetual twilight?

“My, my,” he drawled, sounding immensely pleased with himself, “so you’ve found me at last. Seems the dame isn’t the only siren the Sierra Madre has to offer, eh?”

For several seconds, Felina could only take in the ghoul before her in confusion. His speech was clipped with a curious accent she had never heard before—vastly different from the New Vegas sound she was used to. Like most ghouls, his skin was an irradiated patchwork of old burns, and scars where the flesh had long ago sloughed away and never properly healed.

Finally, Felina managed to stammer out, “Are you—are you Domino?”

“Why, the one and only,” the ghoul replied, baring yellow teeth in a wolfish grin. “Dean Domino, the King of Swing. Please, do come in—company is so sparse these days.”

He stepped aside, allowing Felina to enter. She did so, feeling decidedly uncomfortable, unnerved that she couldn’t see his eyes. His breath stank of a mixture of cigarette smoke and something else she couldn’t pinpoint, and she noticed a light dangling from his free hand.

“Do have a seat,” Dean said, sitting himself in one of two ragged easy chairs sitting before the hole in the wall Felina had noticed from the street. “You caused quite a stir on your way over here—escaping those fellows must have been positively exhausting.”

Suspicious as she was, Felina could not resist the offer, realizing just how worn out she was. Her legs shook, and she probably reeked of sweat, but amidst the smell of the Villa it made little difference. Trying to move with some modicum of grace, she seated herself to the ghoul’s left.

She had to admit, the view from the ‘window’ was quite impressive—the tile of the Villa rooftops stretching away into the Cloud, and above it all, a shining beacon on the mountain, the Sierra Madre casino in all her glory.

“Beauty, isn’t she?” Dean remarked, taking a moment to regard the monument like a long-lost lover before turning to Felina. “Well, I’ve introduced myself—is it still the custom to return the favor, or is that too old-fashioned these days?”

Felina replied, still cautious, “I’m Felina.”

Dean arched an eyebrow over the rim of his glasses. “Just Felina?”

“Felina de la Rosa,” she conceded after a moment’s pause. She rarely gave out her last name—it seemed pointless most of the time, and her Gran had given it to her, so she cherished it like a valuable treasure.

“That’s more like it.” Dean gave an approving nod. “Put ‘er there.”

He twisted in his seat to extend a hand to her. Felina did likewise, feeling a tiny bit less uneasy—perhaps he wouldn’t be so bad after all.

The instant her arm was outstretched, the ghoul’s other hand flashed out, seizing Felina’s wrist in a grip like steel and twisting her arm painfully backward. Felina swore and tried to go for her pistol, but it was holstered on her right side, forcing her to reach across herself, and she couldn’t free it from its position sandwiched between her leg and the chair arm.

“Now,” Dean purred, a dangerous smile on his face, “let’s keep this sweet and polite, and not get off on the wrong foot, shall we?”

Grimacing from the pain of her twisted shoulder, Felina gripped the worn felt of the chair arm with her free hand and glared at the ghoul. “What do you want?”

“Just to offer a suggestion.” Dean replied, his tone deceptively nonchalant. “If I were you, I wouldn’t try to stand, or make any sudden motions at all, no matter how uncomfortable that chair gets. The cushion’s just for show, you see.”

Felina tried to wrench her arm free, but this only yielded a tighter grip. “What are you talking about?”

“Might be a bit rude,” the ghoul admitted, though not sounding at all sorry, “but after my last guest, I can’t afford to take any chances. He’s not the only one who can play with explosives.”

Here he leaned towards her, and Felina could see her reflection in those dark glasses. “Get up without my permission,” he stated, “and I’ll blast that pretty ass of yours so far through your head, it’ll turn the moon cherry pie red. Do we understand each other?”

Chapter Text

Vera Keyes sat at her vanity, a frown pinching her fair features. She carefully inserted what seemed like the fiftieth hairpin into her intricately-constructed updo, mentally cursing herself for picking a favorite style that was both the most difficult to put together, and the easiest to fall apart if done wrong. Much like her life had been of late, she thought drily.

An observer would have scarcely noticed her pausing, hands falling to the marble vanity. Nor would they have noticed the flicker of pain that passed almost microscopic over her powdered face. But what they most certainly would have noticed was the syringe she drew from the back of the drawer, concealed behind a spare hairbrush.

Sliding the needle beneath her delicate skin, Vera injected herself with the ease of one who had performed such a task many times. Too many. But if she did not, the pain eventually became too great to bear, and then she might not be able to hide it anymore. Then someone might find out. Then Sinclair might find out.

Vera pressed a tissue to the tiny wound, gazing sadly down at the veins on her pale arm. The cancer was in her bones now, the doctor had said. She had three years at best, perhaps five if she submitted to treatment, but she could not bear the shame of what it would do to her career, her social life. People talking about her, pitying her, oh, that poor Vera, shame what happened to her…

And Fred worst of all. She knew how he looked at her, though he tried to hide it. If he found out, he would be crushed. And he was already so worried about politics, with the tense situation in Anchorage, everything, that Vera could not bear to tell even him. She just couldn’t do that to him.

But aren’t you already doing it to him?

From outside the dressing room and down the hall, there floated a golden voice, singing as though it had not a care in the world.

“Oh, life could be a dream
If only all my precious plans would come true
If you would let me spend my whole life lovin’ you
Life could be a dream, sweetheart”

Vera could not help but smile fondly at the approaching sound, thinking back to those long walks on Miami beach, before either of them cared so much. His American accent was getting better, she had to admit—it sounded less like he was doing a bad Humphrey Bogart impression based on the one movie he had watched.

The starlet leaned down to fetch another box of hairpins from a lower drawer. When she straightened again, she was greeted by another face hovering beside hers in the mirror, eyes obscured by dark shades.

“Boo,” he purred into her ear, which never failed to send a thrill down Vera’s spine. But she only smiled sweetly back at him in the mirror.

“Sorry, Dean; that only worked the first five times. Eventually even I have to catch on. Besides, I can hear you coming from a mile away, you big show-off.”

“Can't blame a lad for being talented, can you?" Dean laughed and straightened, his smile flashing white in the dark of his face. "Getting ready for the big night, are we?”

Vera knew he wasn’t talking about the grand opening of the Sierra Madre. But she pretended ignorance, if only to fool herself for a little while longer. “Oh, yes, Fred will want to be there at rehearsals tonight in the Tampico,” she replied. “All the staff and workers will be there to celebrate a job well done, and he’ll want to thank them all individually—you know how he is.”

“Mm, yes,” Dean did not sound at all enthusiastic at the prospect of conversation with the casino’s founder. Instead he leaned over the vanity and nudged aside the tissue concealing the carelessly hidden syringe. “Careful, now,” he chided, “wouldn’t want people discovering your dirty little secret, would we?”

“Shut up!” Vera hissed, snatching the syringe and stuffing it back into the drawer. “I know, alright? You don’t need to remind me—I think about it enough as it is.”

Even this small outburst left her feeling shaken, almost on the verge of tears. God, how close was she to falling apart completely?

Dean seemed to notice, for his brow furrowed above his glasses. He patted her shoulder, though even this gentle touch sent splinters of pain shooting through her bones. “Tomorrow’s the last night you need to worry about,” he assured her. “After that, all this nasty business will go away, and if you never want to see me again, you won’t have to. I swear it.”

Vera stared back at him in the mirror. It was almost as if he cared, the cynical part of her thought. But, of course he did…didn’t he?

“Alright, Dean,” she said at last, feeling as though she was leaping from a plane without a parachute. “See you tonight.”

Dean smiled. “That’s my girl.”

He leaned down to press a swift kiss to her cheek, then turned and strode his jaunty yet graceful stride from the dressing room, picking up his song where he had left off.

“Now every time I look at you
Something is on my mind
If you do what I want you to
Baby, we’d be so fine…”

“Dean,” Felina gritted out, trying desperately to keep a level tone, “the only reason I’m here is because Elijah needs us to get into the Sierra Madre.”

“Oh, of course he does,” Dean growled, his grip tightening on her arm. From the distaste in his voice, Felina could tell he and Elijah were already well acquainted. “But he can sit pretty for a little while longer—this was my Villa long before it was his. My Villa, my heist, my rules. So why don’t you hear my proposal first, before you start talking about what you need.”

Felina considered her answer carefully. Part of her wanted to refuse just to see his reaction—his tone stank of exactly the sort of egotistical, arrogant, self-important male she was forced to deal with constantly in New Vegas. But at the same time, whether her chair was truly rigged with explosives or not, she couldn’t risk calling his bluff.

“I’ll save my questions for the end,” she finally said, deciding to ease into the airheaded casino girl attitude his type knew well, and would consider less of a threat. “Please, do go on.”

Dean nodded slowly, hissing a stream of smoke from between his teeth. Felina couldn’t tell if he knew she was putting on an act. “And that’s what I’ve missed, a rapt audience,” he chuckled, releasing his grip on her arm. Then his tone turned serious once more. “Now, just because I work in entertainment doesn’t mean I’m a moron. Heard the beeping from the necktie that old bastard so kindly donated. I’m a part of this contract, and I want out.”

Here he leaned over the chair arm, his voice dropping to a menacing growl. “So whatever’s going on here, you, and anyone else involved, you’re taking orders from me.”

Felina thought a certain nightkin might object to that, but she refrained from saying so. “Alright, I’ll cooperate,” she replied, sitting primly in her chair as though she was just another pretty, ever-agreeable face.

The ghoul tilted his head, as though mildly amused by what he considered to be her pathetic attempt at playing another game. “Splendid,” he drawled, taking another drag from his cigarette.  “Now then, Rosie—”

“Rosa.”

“That’s what I said. Now, you want to live, I want what’s in the Madre. Real simple. How about we try not to stab each other in the back, and perhaps we can both get what we want. I might be a betting man, but I like when the odds are in our favor.”

“Sounds easy enough,” Felina replied, trying not to feel too overjoyed at what was looking to be a far less troublesome conversation than the one with Dog and God. Even if this Dean Domino was planning to stab her in the back, which was likely, he was an ally for the time being. “We get into the Sierra Madre together, and maybe while we’re at it get even with the asshole who set up this contract in the first place. Deal?”

She stuck out her hand, acutely aware of how the ghoul had taken advantage of the gesture not five minutes earlier. Dean knew this too, for he gave a laugh at her confidence, but nevertheless he clasped her hand, his ruined flesh rough against her palm. “All right, partner, let’s show the old girl an encore she’ll never forget, eh?”

Felina stood by while the ghoul rummaged beneath his sagging bed. “So, I understand Elijah collared you himself,” she remarked, trying to make conversation to drown out the distant, unnerving cries of ghosts. “How’d that go?”

“Oh, yes, that one was simply a delight to talk to,” Dean grumbled, pulling out a small sack of supplies he had obviously prepared well in advance. “Popped in here middle of the night, deliberately lured ghosts near so I couldn’t try putting a cap in him without both of us getting strangled with our own entrails. Bastard had the collar on before I was even properly awake; lucky I always sleep with a shank under the pillow. Managed to get in a stab before he backed off and gave me the terms of his ‘contract.’”

Judging by her brief interactions with Elijah, that sounded characteristic enough to Felina. “At least you left a mark for him to remember you by.”

Dean gave a humorless chuckle, buckling on his weathered pistol. “Only bright spot was watching the bastard try to leave and discover Stealth Boys don’t work against the ghosts. Runs pretty fast, for an old goat.”

Felina could not help but laugh at this image, even if the news about Stealth Boys was disappointing—though less for her than it would be for a certain nightkin. She went on, hoping to get some more information about her new partner. “Seems like you’ve been here a long time—you probably know all about the ghost people, right?”

Dean swelled his narrow chest proudly. “I should bloody well hope so! I’ve survived against those undying bastards for longer than that Elijah chap has been alive. You stick with me, partner, and I’ll make sure you don’t have to repeat that sorry spectacle you made earlier.”

The ghoul started to go for the door, then paused, patting his pockets. “Blimey,” he muttered, “almost forgot the most important thing. Must be getting old after all.”

Felina fully expected him to fetch another pack of cigarettes, and thus was surprised when he instead returned to the bedside and hoisted up a corner of the threadbare mattress. He pulled what appeared to be a holotape from beneath it and stuffed the item into his bag.

“What’s that for?” Felina asked him.

To this, Dean just flashed her a grin of yellow teeth. “Perhaps I’ll tell you once we’re in proper company.”

Felina arched an eyebrow—her new partner was shaping up to have far more history with the Madre than he was letting on. Just how far back did this ghoul and the casino go?

Or perhaps she was just reading too deeply, part of her argued. She would give him the benefit of the doubt for now.

Together the pair descended the stairs, leaving the ghoul’s safe haven behind and entering back into the twilit Villa. Felina noticed right off that her partner in crime did not keep his weapon drawn like she did. He had likely learned long ago that bullets left little impact on the Cloud-stiffened hazmat suits of the ghosts. His footfalls were also light as a feather, even softer than Felina’s, who considered herself fairly light on her feet.

Approaching the square Felina had gone around earlier, the pair sheltered beneath a shadowed archway, listening for signs of ghosts. A narrow stairwell led down into the open expanse.

“Had to go around this square earlier,” Felina murmured to the ghoul, “bunch of ghosts hanging out in it made it too risky to try and cross.”

Dean seemed unconcerned by this warning. “Suppose it would be for a greenhorn,” he remarked, beginning to descend the stairs. “But we should be alright, so long as we don’t run into—”

He froze at the bottom of the stairs so suddenly that Felina ran into him. “That.”

Felina followed his gaze across the square, and her stomach dropped straight down into her boots. The square was empty, all except for the street they had to go down, which was blocked by a single ghost person. But this one was looking directly at them, emerald stare piercing through the eyepieces of a gas mask different from those worn by others of its kind. This one appeared to be military-grade, Cloud puffing from its ventilator tinged green by the light of its eyes. In gloved hands, it gripped a spear. It glared at the two as though daring them to try and pass.

“Dean,” Felina squeaked out, staring in horror at the figure standing crooked in their path, “who is that?”

“That,” the ghoul replied, not taking his eyes from the ghost, “is the fastest, toughest, most brutal son of a bitch in the whole bloody Villa. Been here almost as long as I have, and if the ghosts recognize any sort of top dog, you can bet your life it’s that fellow right there.”

He noticed Felina starting to lift her gun, and seized her wrist in an iron grip. “Don’t move!”

Felina froze, not just by command, but from the sounds of other creatures passing on the rooftops overhead. The ghost blocking their path snarled, dropping into a fighting stance and leveling its spear at the roof above them, clearly unhappy with others coming to take a share of its prey.

Her heart racing in her chest, Felina watched as three ghost people dropped from balconies and windowsills onto the cobbles. She noticed that two of their hazmat suits were peppered with shrapnel, shards of metal sticking from the tough material like thorns on a rose bush. They must have been the two she had fled from earlier, now back to claim their kill.

“Don’t…move…a muscle,” Dean warned, keeping his voice low. “On my mark, get to that alley just over there. Move when I say, not before.”

The three ghosts slowly approached the one with the spear, spreading out like wild dogs attempting to surround a lone bighorner. Part of Felina was relieved that she and Dean’s presence seemed to have been forgotten for the moment, but she worried they might be caught in the crossfire of this clash between monsters.

A snarl in its throat, the ghost with the military mask readied its spear. It lunged with lightning speed, impaling the middle ghost straight through the midriff as though its hazmat suit was made of tissue paper. Felina saw with a shock the speartip protruding out the thing’s back.

With a fierce shriek, the spear-wielding ghost lifted its victim bodily, suspended on the end of the weapon, and flung it into one of its comrades. Both tumbled to the cobbles in a tangle of limbs. The remaining ghost, unwilling to receive similar treatment, leaped back up to a balcony with catlike agility and there crouched like a waiting beast, preparing to pounce.

“Now!” Dean hissed. The pair raced for the alley he had indicated, ducking into its concealing shadows while the ghosts were occupied. Felina pressed herself back against the filthy stucco wall, her heart in her throat. Risking a peek from their hiding place, she immediately regretted it.

The ghost on the balcony lunged, and the one on the ground leaped up to meet it. They collided mid-air and fell to the street, their horrible screams rebounding through the square.

The creature with the military mask was first up. Seizing its foe by the back of its gas mask, it slammed the other ghost’s head down upon the cobbles with such force that Felina swore she heard the stone fracture. But the creature wasn’t through asserting its dominance.

Lifting its flailing victim by the scruff of its neck, the ghost latched its fingers beneath the edge of the gas mask that had long ago become fused to the thing’s head. With a screech like glass shattering, it tore the other ghost’s head from its body, gas mask and all.

The light extinguished from the mask’s eyes like a candle being snuffed out. Cloud mixed with that strange dark substance fountained from the creature’s neck to splatter on the cobbles.

Felina thought she might vomit. She clapped a hand over her mouth, but could not tear her gaze away from the sordid sight. Just how deep was this thing’s reservoir of strength?

The victorious ghost lifted its face to the roiling sky and shrieked long and loud, declaring its supremacy to the Villa. Then it turned and hurled the limp corpse of its foe at the remaining two ghosts, knocking both flat for the second time.

All their confidence gone at the sight of their beheaded comrade, the pair pressed themselves low like beaten dogs, their posture subservient, edging away from the dominate ghost and back towards the safety of a Clouded street. It watched them go in silence until their figures vanished into the twilit Villa, leaving it alone in the square.

Perhaps Felina had made a move. Perhaps she’d made a noise. Perhaps the creature had simply remembered their presence. Whatever the case, it whipped about and screamed directly at Felina and Dean’s hiding place, the dripping head still hanging from one gloved hand.

Felina recoiled back into the shadows, her heart racing. Dean pressed himself against the wall beside her, stiff as a board, and together the pair listened to the approaching footsteps.

“Don’t…move,” the ghoul reminded her, his voice barely audible. Felina prayed he was right. That heavy breathing grew nearer and nearer, and with it Felina’s heartrate skyrocketed.

Dean clapped a hand over her mouth an instant before green eyes peered around the corner. If he had not done so, Felina did not think she could have stifled the scream that bubbled up in her throat. For the ghost’s face hovered not six inches from her own, Cloud billowing its sickly-sweet odor with every exhalation.

A low, suspicious vibration rattled in the creature’s throat, its eyes casting an emerald glow sweeping across the alley, across the two figures before it. The severed head it still gripped in one hand was dripping onto Felina’s boot. For what seemed a hundred years, the creature scanned the dark street, its head moving in tiny, birdlike jerks.

Then it withdrew. Shadows once again enclosed Felina and Dean like a sheltering blanket. Casting aside its grisly trophy, the ghost retrieved its fallen spear in the now-empty square and slung the weapon across its back. In two eye-blurring motions, it cleared the rooftops and was gone.

Dean removed his hand from Felina’s mouth, and she breathed again. Her breath shuddered in her throat, adrenaline making her weak in the knees. The pair stepped cautiously back into the square, and the ghoul gave Felina an uncomfortable look.

“You’re not going to start blubbing, are you?” He asked her, “Christ, I hate when women do that…”

“No, I—I’m fine,” Felina gasped out, taking a moment to support herself on the wall and allow the adrenaline to fade. “Just…that thing…how is it so strong? Are they all like that?”

Dean nodded, lighting a cigarette and taking a drag. He was shaken himself, Felina could tell, though he was better than her at hiding it. “Started calling it the Ghost King,” he said, blowing a cloud of smoke towards the orange sky. “Don’t really know why—can’t even tell whether it used to be a broad or a bloke. But it rules the roost around here, that’s for certain.”

Felina could not help but agree, staring at the corpse of the headless ghost person, and the dark pool slowly spreading across the cobblestones. Then her attention was drawn by a familiar scent tinging the ghoul’s puffs of smoke.

“Are you—” she hesitated, hardly able to believe what her nose was telling her, “are you smoking Cloud?”

Dean grinned at her. “Lad’s gotta do what a lad’s gotta do, eh? Isn’t as if I had enough to last two hundred years, so I improvised. Rather ingenious, if I do say so myself.”

“Oh, my god, you’re unbelievable.” Felina was beginning to wonder if perhaps they were all going to die after all. Her teammates were a psychologically disturbed nightkin with the most literal definition of a god complex, and a ghoul who fed his addiction by making cigarettes out of Cloud. At this rate, they were utterly doomed.

Chapter Text

“What’s that braid you’ve got there for? Looks positively hideous.”

Felina swatted Dean’s questing hand away from her hair. “A friend gave it to me,” she explained. “So if I ever met her son, he’d be able to read it.”

“’Read it?’” Dean echoed, incredulous, “What, you mean those ugly knots actually say something? How in the hell does that work?”

“I don’t know, but they do. And don’t ask me what they say, because I don’t know that either.”

The ghoul did not press the matter, only giving a muttered, “Blimey.”

The pair were approaching the square now, and Felina couldn’t be happier to be back to its relative safety. After their encounter with the Ghost King, they had not run into too much trouble, but the raw power displayed by the phantom creatures still left her unnerved.

But thanks to Dean, now she knew how to evade them, she reminded herself. However way their monstrous senses worked, it seemed they could only track prey while it was moving. So long as she stood still, she would be alright.

An undoubtedly shaky solution, she had to admit to herself. What if she was standing still and the ghost ran into her on accident? What then? Any number of things could go wrong, and then she would end up like the unfortunate that had picked a fight with the Ghost King and lost.

Felina shook these thoughts out of her head and tried to think positive. She had two teammates now, only one left to find. Nobody had been killed or even wounded yet. By all accounts, things were going well.

But how long until the other shoe drops?

Her train of thought was disrupted at a grumble from Dean, and she realized they were back at the square.

“Bloody hell,” Dean muttered, “where’d you get that one?”

Felina followed his gaze across the wide plaza to where the hulking figure of the nightkin was stamping from the shadows beneath a balcony.

“That’s God,” she told Dean. “He’s part of the contract too.”

“God, eh?” Now that they were back to safety, the ghoul pulled a cigarette from his pocket and prepared a light. “Can’t say he looks too different from how I imagined the old boy.”

The three met at the fountain, the light of the starlet casting her radiant glow upon them, and God gave Dean a critical once-over. He inhaled a sniff of the ghoul’s scent, and his expression turned dark.

“You stayed here by choice,” the nightkin said, his voice an accusing growl. “Scent of Cloud’s so thick on you, but it doesn’t harm you, does it? You could have left at any time, but your greed kept you here, like a damned fool.”

Dean arched an eyebrow, uncomfortable with being analyzed within seconds of meeting. But he did not comment as to the accuracy of these assertions, only grinning yellow teeth up at his fellow mutant. “Aw, is someone mad he placed his hand in a bear trap and now can’t get it out?” he mocked the nightkin, “Don’t play innocent with me. Perhaps the old goat’s contract is keeping you here now, but you’re here by choice just like the rest of us. So watch your mouth—you don’t scare me.”

God stepped forward, baring jagged teeth in a snarl. “Why, you insolent—"

“Boys, please,” Felina intervened, hoping to defuse the situation before tensions got too high. “Doesn’t matter how we got here, we’re here now, and we’re stuck together until we get inside the casino. We can’t go fighting each other when we know who the real enemy is.”

God growled deep in his throat, a sound so low and powerful Felina could feel it in her chest. But at last he turned away from the ghoul with a snort of derision. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll be fighting each other before the end of this anyway.”

Dean stood on the rim of the fountain, gazing at the figure of the starlet. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” he remarked, taking a wistful drag off his cigarette. “’The Second Marianne,’ they called her, with a voice like a silver bell.”

Here the ghoul’s voice grew quieter, almost sad. “Shame she took after Faithfull in other ways, as well.”

“You knew her?” Felina asked, sitting on the tiled rim to rest her weary feet.

“Oh, we were passing friends,” Dean waved dismissively. “She and the chap who built this place were practically star-crossed. Vera Keyes and Frederick Sinclair, oh, the celebrity rags would have loved them.”

So Vera was her name, Felina thought, looking up at the elegant figure. Curiosity gnawed in her, Dean’s remarks answering some questions and raising a whole host of new ones.

Vera’s hologram flickered, replaced by the now-familiar weathered features of Elijah. Felina stood, tensing, and noticed God nearby assuming his posture of subservience. Dean Domino however remained standing on the rim of the fountain, smiling up at the old man.

“Why, if it isn’t our financier,” he drawled out. “How’s that limp healing up, old fellow?”

Elijah’s eyes narrowed. “You, ghoul, are damn lucky I didn’t slit your throat while you slept,” he snarled, jabbing a finger at the well-dressed figure before him. “You pull any stunts like that again, and I’ll do what I should have done a long time ago and blast you straight to hell.”

Dean seemed unimpressed by this threat, exhaling a stream of smoke. “As charming as ever, I see. By the way, you haven’t found that missing tape yet, have you?”

Elijah hesitated, loathe to admit his error. “No, I haven’t,” he growled reluctantly. “Don’t bother waving that one you’ve got in my face—I’ve known about that for some time.”

Felina raised an eyebrow. Now they were talking about things she had no knowledge of. She held her silence and listened intently.

“One is in the casino proper where the last idiot dropped it,” Elijah went on, “but the third is still missing. I don’t care if you need to go over the Villa with a fine-tooth comb; you get that tape. That goes for the rest of you as well.”

Dean shrugged amicably, enjoying every second of Elijah’s distress. “Oh, very well. No promises though. Least you’ve provided me a bird to keep me amused until the real party starts.”

Felina resented the ghoul’s comment, not just for its crass implications, but because it drew Elijah’s attention to her.

“Alright, girl, your next team member is in the medical district,” their captor instructed her, eager to shift focus from his blunder. “Don’t know what the hell she’s been up to, but her signal hasn’t moved from the clinic for the past two weeks.”

Thank you, Yeshua, Felina rejoiced internally at his use of pronouns. Another female on the team, and she might actually survive this ordeal after all.

Then Elijah went on, “Get moving, girl. And Dog, you make sure that ghoul doesn’t get up to any trouble.”

His image vanished just as Felina, startled, looked over at the nightkin.

Unlike before when Elijah had departed, the mutant did not raise his head immediately. He blinked, his head tilting slightly, as though unsure where he was.

Felina spoke up, tense, wary. Surely that wasn’t all it took, was it? “Uh…Dog?”

The nightkin looked up at her and grunted. “Dog hears you,” he mumbled. “Master puts voice away…but now he is angry.”

So God was no longer the dominate personality, Felina thought. She instantly recalled back to what he had said earlier—that if Elijah brought out Dog on accident, she was to put him away. If she didn’t, God would be mad, but if she did, then Dog might get mad. Dog might have been more feral, but God had threatened her with painful death enough times for her to take him seriously.

Felina lifted her hand, ready to hit play on the tape still in her Pip-Boy, but part of her hesitated. God had been out for a long time—didn’t his other self deserve some time as well?

Dog noticed her hand hovering over the Pip-Boy and lurched forward. “Don’t put Dog away!” he whined, stretching out massive hands toward her. “Dog is obedient, Dog will be good, but please do not bring out the other voice again!”

His pitiable pleas almost brought a lump to Felina’s throat. He was so pathetic, so tormented. He deserved some time on top too, didn’t he? Sure, God would be mad, but he was always mad at something. He’d get over it…probably.

“Alright, Dog,” she relented. “You can stay out for now.”

“You are good human,” the nightkin said, enveloping her slim hands in his massive ones. “Dog will be good for good human, he promises.”

“Yeah, uh, great.” Felina pulled her hands from his grasp, feeling awkward. “Look, I need to go get our last team member once I’ve rested up. You can do some ghost hunting if you need to, but don’t stray too far from the square, alright?”

“Do not go far. Dog understands.”

Felina watched him lumber away towards the shadowed streets. What a strange, tortured creature, even by super mutant standards.

Dean seemed to be thinking the same, for he remarked, “Odd chap, isn’t he?”

“Trust me, he only gets stranger the more you get to know him.” Felina pulled a tin of Cram from her pocket and began scooping out processed meat with her fingers. “I’ll let God back out once I get back from the clinic. He’ll be pissed, but that’s just too bad.”

“You’re quite the self-confident dame, aren’t you?” Dean puffed a cloud of smoke towards the roiling orange sky, Vera’s glow casting pale light over his ruined flesh. “What with your deciding which of him gets to stay on top and all.”

“Hey, he got himself into this mess,” Felina defended herself, trying to hide how uncomfortable the ghoul’s words made her. He wasn’t wrong. “God gave me permission to put Dog away, but that doesn’t mean I have to do it whenever he says so. Dog is a person too, so I’m going to treat them both as equally as I can.”

Dean arched an eyebrow, and Felina knew he was picking out all the glaring flaws with this line of reasoning. But he said nothing more, only taking another drag from his cigarette.

“So, what’s the deal with these tapes?” Felina asked, shifting the subject. “Do we need them to get in somewhere?”

The ghoul nodded. “Sinclair spared no expenses. Bastard had the vault sealed with a special lock, which will only open when those three tapes are played together.”

“Why three?” Felina pressed, eager for any details. “Why not just put the entire thing on one?”

Dean shrugged. “Hell if I know. If the old goat knows, he hasn’t disclosed it to me.”

Again, Felina got the distinct impression that he knew more than he was letting on. Not just about the tapes, but about the casino, Vera, and Sinclair. The amount of oddly specific details he seemed to know about the place were piling up.

But so what? He’d been here a long time, the rational part of her argued. By his own admission he had dwelt here longer than Elijah had been alive—sixty years, perhaps? Seventy? A long time to her, but not for a ghoul. Certainly, he was obsessed with the elusive treasure of the Sierra Madre, but perhaps he knew from pre-War sources what it actually was, rather than the vague notions provided by Elijah and the radio signal that had lured her and countless others.

Dean exhaled a puff of smoke. “You’re staring at me like I just grew a second head. Was it something I said?”

Felina blinked, processing what he was saying, then blushed. “Shut up. I was just thinking.”

The ghoul’s cackle rasped like a rusty sawblade. “A dangerous pastime, that. Go on then, go fetch our d’Artagnan, and let’s strike up the band.”

Chapter Text

Felina peeked cautiously into the clinic, weapon at the ready. The trip through the winding streets had been uneventful—well, as uneventful as the Sierra Madre could offer—but she was bracing for that to change at any moment.

The ancient lobby mirrored the rest of the Villa—debris scattered everywhere, blown-out windows covered with boards, and motes of dust drifting between rays of weak, artificial light. To the left of the entrance, a staircase led up to the second floor. The place was a lonely ruin, a remnant of a long-ago age now slowly being eroded away by the sands of time.

Felina’s Pip-Boy crackled to life, and Elijah’s voice rasped through the static. “Picking up an emitter signal. Watch for security holograms—dangerous.”

Of course, Felina thought with a twinge of irritation, it just wouldn’t be the Villa without some new danger lurking around every corner.

“Don’t bother shooting them,” Elijah went on, “attacking them is useless.”

Felina spotted a glowing handprint behind the receptionist counter and made a beeline for it. “Any weaknesses you know of?” she asked, wrestling a beaten suitcase from beneath the counter.

“The holograms don’t see the way you’d expect,” Elijah explained. “They’re not robots. They can’t see, hear, or feel you, but they do have a line of sight where they can detect motion.”

Within the suitcase, Felina discovered a few stimpaks, a handful of bullets, and two tins of Cram. “Stay out of their line of sight. Got it.”

“The holograms are bound to their emitters,” Elijah went on. “Destroy the emitter, destroy the hologram. Now get to work.”

The signal went dead in its usual abrupt fashion. Felina could tell he was quite tired of explaining over the Villa’s dangers, but at the same time he could not afford to let his captives fend for themselves completely.

Also behind the counter was a working terminal, one of the first Felina had found during her stay in the Sierra Madre. On it she found notes on the holograms left by their programmer centuries before. However mundane the contents of the terminal were, Felina always found such things a little eerie. Whoever had written them was long dead, gone and forgotten. Only their entries remained, a time capsule for the ages.

Forgoing the stairs for the time being, Felina instead chose to explore down the hallway to the right of the entrance. She discovered the patient ward, where a number of cast-iron hospital beds sat, some of which had been overturned. The bedsheets were threadbare and filthy, but Felina made a mental note to return here if darkness fell before she left.

Peeking cautiously into the next room down, Felina felt the blood drain from her face. Surgical tables sat in a neat row along the wall, and upon them lay numerous headless corpses clad in the same jumpsuits she was wearing. The collar seemed to close a little tighter around her neck at the sight, a stark warning that Elijah’s threats were the furthest thing from idle.

Felina swallowed back her bile, forcing herself not to focus on the grisly remains and check the rest of the room. Tossed carelessly upon a table lay the tattered remnants of what appeared to have been some sort of stealth gear. Beside it lay the same sort of knife Felina had seen scattered about the Villa and on the spears of the ghost people. Clearly, the light armor had been an inconvenience to someone at an unknown point in time.

Beside the armor lay a set of dogtags. Felina picked them up and squinted at the tiny print. Christine Royce, read the engraving.

Was that the name of the third team member? Felina wondered. And on top of that, why hadn’t she heard any signs of life since entering the clinic? Elijah had said the collar’s signal was here, so where was the person it was attached to?

Escaping the room and the corpses back into the hall, Felina continued her exploration. Proceeding down a hall lined with Auto-Doc wards, a loud beep from her collar in the otherwise silent clinic startled her into an ungracious yelp.

She leaped back on instinct. The beeping stopped. It had been so long since she had encountered this danger that she had nearly forgotten its existence. But there at the end of the hall was a speaker, a red light blinking on and off like some rhythmic eye. It had to be the source.

Standing just outside the range of the signal, Felina aimed her pistol at the device, but did not fire just yet. Despite the relatively short distance, the speaker was small, and she couldn’t afford to waste ammunition on missed shots. If the speaker was working, then whatever controlled it had to also be working. She would try and deal with it another way before attempting brute force.

Felina was just about to turn away when a faint noise caught her ear, coming from the restricted end of the hall. It was so soft that at first she thought she had imagined it. She stood, straining her ears for another whisper of sound.

And there it came again—a faint, dull thump. Felina could not pinpoint its source without getting closer to the deadly speaker, but it sounded as though it came from one of the two unexplored rooms at the end of the hall.

“Hello?” she called, “Someone there?”

She hefted her weapon, bracing for a ghost person to come screeching from hiding, but only silence echoed back her words. Silence, broken only by another faint thump.

“If you’re the person I’m looking for,” Felina ventured at length, “I can’t get to you right now, but I’ll be back, okay?”

No response.

Returning to the lobby, Felina elected to try the second floor. Creeping up the stairs, she set each foot down carefully to avoid slipping on debris.

At the top of the stairs, she peered down the hallway. Deserted. Stepping from the stairwell, she proceeded with cautious towards a mechanism fixed on the wall, casting a blue light like a beacon in the dim hall.

“What are you for?” Felina murmured, squinting to read the tiny logo inscribed National Electric on the metal plating.

As if in answer to her question, movement in her peripheral incited her to whirl towards it, weapon drawn. A man stood at the end of the hall, clad in tough riot gear. He began walking towards her, his feet making no sound upon the tile floors.

“Who the hell are you?” Felina demanded, keeping her pistol leveled at his masked face.

The man gave no response, only halting perhaps ten feet away from her. He drew a pistol from his hip and aimed it straight at her.

Felina swore and dove into a nearby office, but not fast enough to stop a bolt of energy searing her right hand. Hissing expletives, she crouched behind a weathered desk and prepared for a standoff.

But it never came. After several tense seconds, the man’s figure passed the open doorway without a glance for her, continuing down the hall towards the stairs as though their encounter had never happened.

Felina watched, bewildered, until his return pass. This time, she saw when he passed into the shadow of a broken ceiling light that he emitted his own glow. He was a hologram.

“Son of a—” Felina cursed herself for an idiot. Of course it was a security hologram. So focused was she on the source of the noise from the Auto-Doc wing that she had completely forgotten Elijah’s warning. And now the back of her hand was turning a handsome shade of red for her stupidity.

Flexing the fingers of her burned hand, she darted to the door and shut it. The hologram was clearly following a fixed path, but better to be safe than sorry.

Determined not to slip up again and nursing a grudge against the technological opponent, Felina began exploring the office. Her hand tingled from where it had been burned, the flesh already starting to turn puffy. But she elected not to waste a stimpak on it, deciding that if Joshua Graham could deal with it, so could she.

Upon the office desk sat a working terminal. Its screen cast a faint green glow upon Felina’s face as she slowly searched for the correct keys to hit on the keyboard. Skimming through the records left by the clinic’s former head physician, a familiar name jumped out at her, inciting her to read more carefully.

Ms. Keyes arrived today, the terminal read, escorted by Mr. Domino. He explained that she had developed a throat infection, but that neither wished to ‘bother’ Sinclair.

Felina kept reading, one eyebrow slowly creeping up the further along she went. The physician had apparently noticed symptoms of excess medication by Vera, and went on to remark on his dislike for one Dean Domino. Well, that was not too unexpected—Felina was not especially fond of him herself.

But Vera…

Felina knew she was jumping to conclusions, but her experience in the wastes had honed her instinct for detecting such things. Was Vera Keyes a chem addict?

 But she was wasting time, and she still had not found the last team member. Backing out of the records, she went instead for the entry titled Network.

This time, she found what she was looking for. A number of system controls, most of which were nonfunctioning, but one, music speakers, was still active. Felina switched it off, grateful for the small victory. To her disappointment, there was no control for the holograms—she would just have to be quick when exiting.

Jogging back down the stairs, curiosity egged her on at a quicker rate now. With the danger of the speaker out of the way, she could find out who was making the noise, and whether or not it was the person she was looking for. It had better be—she was running out of unexplored areas.

Back in the Auto-Doc wing, Felina forced herself to remain cautious, edging down the hall until she was certain her collar would remain silent.

Peeking into the last room on the right, the first thing that assaulted her nostrils was the stench of blood. The room was identical to the rest of the wing, with its Auto-Doc and supply cabinet, but from under the Auto-Doc door, there seeped a pool of dark red blood. Some was old and dried, but more of it was fresh, caked on the metal frame of the machine.

The Auto-Doc itself was a departure from the others. Where the rest of the wing seemed to be idling smoothly, this one was not only in use, but malfunctioning, emitting metallic complaints at irregular intervals.

Felina took all this in at a glance before darting to the control pad, trying not to gag on the stench. But no matter how many keys she pressed the machine refused to shut down.

Finally, Felina swore and stepped back from the controls. Drawing her pistol, she aimed it at the computer and fired once.

The solution did the trick. The Auto-Doc powered down, blue lights flickering out.

Felina ran to the chamber door, her boots sticking in the blood on the tiles. Bracing herself, she pulled on the door as hard as she could. It resisted, the metal run clogged by dried blood, but Felina gritted her teeth and kept pulling until it at last slid open with a screech of protest.

Puffing from exertion, Felina returned to the front of the Auto-Doc and suddenly forgot her exhaustion.

A young woman staggered from the restraining metal claws of the machine. Her head was completely devoid of hair, ugly surgical scars tracing lines along her bare scalp. Across her pale throat and almost obscured by the collar she wore was a jagged gash, its edges bristly with the remains of countless stitches that had been sewn only to be sliced open again. The tatters of the ruined hospital gown she wore covered so little that Felina was glad she had refrained from bringing Dean or Dog along.

“Woah—woah, hey!” Felina started forward too late to stop the woman’s bare foot from catching on the edge of the door, sending her stumbling forward and tearing the IV of Med-X from her arm. Delirious from overdose, she staggered into Felina and nearly sent them both to the floor.

Felina supported her as best she could, a thousand questions spinning in her head. But she shook these aside and began half-carrying, half-dragging the semi-conscious woman towards the patient ward.

The stranger made not a sound as she collapsed onto a musty mattress, limp as a ragdoll. Felina ran to the nearest medicine cabinet and began throwing aside bottles of pills with long names until she found some bottled water, likely intended for IV bags or cleaning medical tools. Returning to the bedside, she supported the strange woman’s head, allowing her a few sips of the purified liquid.

Laying her back down, Felina seated herself on the adjacent bed, running a frazzled hand through her hair. “How the hell did you get in there?”

The woman blinked blearily, as though having difficulty focusing on Felina’s face. Her scarred lips moved, as though trying to form a reply, but no sound issued forth.

Felina rubbed her face with her hands, realizing this stranger was in no condition to be answering questions. “God, sorry—I shouldn’t be overwhelming you with questions yet,” she mumbled. “I think we both need some sleep. When you wake up, we can get you cleaned up and see about introductions.”

The bald woman made no answer, only another listless blink. With an effort, she rolled onto her side and exhaled deeply, blue-gray eyes fluttering shut.

Following her example, Felina lay upon the threadbare mattress, and allowed the stress of the day to catch up to her. Within moments, she fell into a slumber as fitful and troubled as only the Sierra Madre could bestow. In her dreams, she saw Grand Teton, and the long road leading home again.

Chapter Text

“Right, this’ll be take twenty-seven thousand…”

Music floated through the Tampico, the dulcet tones of a trumpet in the style of old Harry James. Spotlights shone down on the stage, where the tall, lanky figure of Dean Domino stood preparing a sound check.

Vera slipped into the busy theater unnoticed, dodging stage workers bustling about performing last-minute touch-ups and preparations for tomorrow’s Gala. All the performers invited to the Sierra Madre’s grand opening, as well as all the construction workers, had been invited to celebrate a job well done before the big night. The casino was filled with talk, laughter, and more wine than Vera had ever seen in her life—and that was saying something.

The starlet positioned herself in an out-of-the-way corner where she could observe the proceedings. Dean was engaged in a back-and-forth with one of the sound crew—the King of Swing was clearly anxious to show off his vocal ability and irked by the minor delay. At least he deserved it, Vera thought, allowing herself a moment of smugness.

“Vera, love! How are you doing this evening?”

Vera’s heart fluttered at the voice. She turned to see Sinclair approaching, clad in his favorite purple suit and crimson waistcoat. He was smiling, as he always was, but Vera could not help but feel as though it was always genuine when directed at her.

“Lovely to see you, as always,” Sinclair said, taking her hand and pressing his lips to her knuckles, never taking his eyes off her face.

“Oh, Fred, you’re so old-fashioned,” Vera gave an airy laugh, though a blush prettied her cheeks in defiance of her nonchalant facade. “I just came in to see if Dean was doing that song I requested.”

At last, orchestral music struck up, strings accompanying the trumpet filling the Tampico in lyric rhythm. Dean swayed to the opening melody, spotlights reflecting in the dark of his shades.

“He is a good singer,” Sinclair remarked, “even if he can be an absolute jackass at times.”

Vera laughed before she could stop herself. He had no idea how right he was.

After a few moment’s consideration, Sinclair turned to her and offered her his hand. “May I have this dance, Miss Keyes?”

For an instant, Vera thought her heart had stopped beating. She had to have misheard him. Or he was kidding. Surely he wouldn’t—and with Dean right there—

Sinclair quirked an eyebrow at her lack of response. “Trying to think of a polite way to turn me down?” he teased her.

“Oh! No, of course not—I, I just—” Vera stammered, acutely aware of how red her face was becoming. “Just, I wasn’t expecting…”

Rather than continue to make a fool of herself, she stopped talking and took his offered hand, certain she must be dreaming as he escorted her to the open floor before the stage.

Sinclair drew her close to himself, his touch gentle, never insisting. Together they swayed to the music, as though they were just an elderly couple in a kitchen late at night, dancing to the slow tune of an old vinyl record.

A thousand thoughts swarmed like bees in Vera’s mind. Dean hadn’t stopped singing, but she could feel him looking at her. She knew he would be worried—not for jealousy; their flame had dimmed long ago—but he would be concerned that she was getting cold feet.

The reminder of what she was about to do almost sent tears stinging her eyes. What kind of monster was she? Sharing a dance with the man she was about to take everything from, pretending she loved him…

Oh…but was it pretend?

Vera knew had absolutely no right to dare feel anything towards him. And yet the warmth of Sinclair’s breath upon her hair stirred in her things that Dean never could. For Sinclair didn’t want anything from her. He didn’t want her social status, her connections, her wealth—all that he had himself. Even her body seemed secondary to him. He just wanted to love her, and to give her the best in life. How could she not feel drawn to such a thing?

Putting away her worries, Vera allowed the song to take her. She rested her brow upon Sinclair’s, their noses almost brushing. He was so close, so warm, so gentle. For just this moment, nothing else mattered. They were together.

The song finished far sooner than she would have liked, the last notes drifting through the Tampico. Vera gazed up through her lashes at Sinclair, smiling a little shyly. “That was nice.”

“It was,” Sinclair agreed, his breath tickling her cheeks. “Same time tomorrow?”

For an instant, Vera’s heart thrilled at this prospect. Then she remembered Dean. The plan. Her betrayal.

Sinclair must have noticed her change in expression, for she felt the furrow of his brow still resting upon hers. But before he could comment, another voice sounded, breaking into their cocoon.

“Bloody hell, you lovebirds are ready to jump at any opportunity, aren’t you?” Dean remarked, approaching to give Sinclair a hearty clap on the back. “Though I can’t say I blame you—I am a damn fine singer after all.”

Sinclair laughed, and Vera reluctantly unwound her arms from around his neck. Together the three made their way over to the bar, and Vera noticed stage workers emerging from where they had quietly vacated during their dance. No doubt gossip was already spreading.

“Seems I owe you a thanks, Domino,” Sinclair said, pouring the other man a glass of wine. “Once again you’ve given me opportunity with a beautiful woman.”

Vera blushed, and Dean laughed, lifting his glass in a toast. “I am rather good at that, aren’t I?”

The starlet lifted an eyebrow at this statement, but Dean’s keen gaze caught her attempt to hide her smile. “Does the lady take disagreement?” he inquired.

Vera smirked. “You might have been too trashed to remember,” she told him, “but I recall perfectly well when you and Fred got into a fight over some nonsense at that bar in Los Angeles. Fred, you remember that?”

Sinclair scratched the back of his head sheepishly. “Ah…I don’t remember the event per say,” he admitted, “I just know I still have the scar from it, see?”

Here he pointed to a small scar next to his right eye that looked suspiciously like it had come from the business end of a broken bottle.

“Oh, my god, that’s where that came from?” Vera squinted at the place with a laugh of disbelief. “Damn, Fred, next time you’ll have to get even.”

The Tampico doors opened, and a woman in a red sequined dress entered along with a stream of chatter from outside. Green-eyed and fiery-haired, she called over to the trio, “Vera, hurry up! The movie’s about to start!”

“Alright, coming!” Vera replied, then turned back to the two men and smiled prettily at them, once more a starlet. “You boys think you’ll be alright without adult supervision?”

“I can’t promise anything,” Sinclair said at the same time as Dean’s “Don’t hold your breath on that.”

Vera gave a bright laugh, standing on her toes to give the both of them a kiss on the cheek. Then she hurried after the other woman, calling after her, “Jo, wait up!”

Sinclair gazed at the starlet’s retreating figure, and his smile turned a little sadder, as though he was watching a tragedy unfold before his eyes and was helpless to prevent it.

“War is coming, Dean,” he murmured at length. “It’s inevitable now. When it does happen…I want her to be safe.”

The other man took a sip of his drink, skillfully concealing how much less enthusiastic about conversation he was now that it was just the two of them. “If the world does burn,” he ventured, “even if you survive, what would you have left to live for?”

“I’d have her,” Sinclair insisted. “All this wealth, fame, influence…they’re nice things, but if it was between that and her, I’d let it all go in a second.”

“Sounds…awfully devoted.”

Sinclair huffed in amusement, before throwing a cautious glance in the direction Vera had gone and turning his back. “You know, if you can keep a secret…”

He reached into his coat pocket and drew forth a tiny box coated in velvet. With another glance back to make sure Vera wasn’t returning, he lifted the lid to reveal a cluster of diamonds, a rose formed of stars sparkling a thousand colors in the light.

Dean almost spilled wine on his spotless white waistcoat. “Christ alive, lad,” he hissed, setting his glass down carefully, “Give a chap some warning before you pop a thing like that!”

Sinclair laughed, but his expression quickly turned serious once more. “Tomorrow night during the Gala, I’m going to ask her,” he said, keeping his voice low and stowing the ring once more in his coat pocket.

Dean smoothed his ruffled feathers, the dark of his glasses making it difficult to ascertain his expression. “Yes, well…good luck, and all that. I’m sure you’ll be…very happy together.”

Sinclair reached out and clasped the other man’s shoulder. “I owe it all to you, Dean,” he said with all sincerity. “Without you, I’d never have met her. Thank you.”

Chapter Text

Green text scrolled across the terminal screen in endless lines. Felina stared at the blocky letters, devouring every word, every Old World remnant she could get her hands on. The stranger was still asleep when she had awoken, and had remained so while Felina scavenged the clinic for any supplies. Now, having exhausted the building’s resources and stuffed a shoulder bag full of food and medicine, she sat at a terminal in the patient ward where she could keep an eye on the woman while alleviating her boredom with Old World records.

Sinclair, she discovered, had been quite invested in the casino’s construction, overseeing many operations personally and checking in often on the health of the workers. She also uncovered notes on problematic hazmat suits, issues with the ventilation, and other such “shortcuts” taken by one Big Mountain Research Company that Sinclair seemed unaware of. Felina had never heard of Big Mountain, but she supposed even a man as upstanding as Sinclair couldn’t have perfect judgement all the time.

Movement flickered in her peripheral. Felina looked over and saw the bald woman slowly but doggedly trying to push herself upright.

“Hey, hey, take it easy,” Felina exclaimed, abandoning the terminal and darting back to the bedside. “That Med-X got you good. Here, have some water.”

The woman supported herself on one shaky arm, taking the offered cup. Her eyes still had some of the glassy appearance of one affected by heavy medication, but she downed a few sips of water without difficulty. Still, she had made not a sound.

“If you can stomach it yet, I found some hospital food,” Felina said, pulling a package of dried meat from the supply bag. “No accounting for taste, but it should fill you up at least.”

Again, the woman’s lips moved, as though trying to form a reply, but no words issued forth. Another attempt yielded the same, and another.

Her brow furrowed. She set aside the cup, pushing her fingers beneath the collar she wore to probe at the ugly gash on her pale throat, and its thorny borders of torn stitching.

“What’s wrong?” Felina asked, concerned by the look of alarm building in the stranger’s eyes. “Can you not talk?”

The woman pawed at her wound, pulling thread from the mess of caked blood at an increasingly panicked rate. Her mouth opened as though trying to cry out, to scream, but only air escaped.

“Whoa, hey, you’re reopening it!” Felina grabbed the woman’s wrists, pulling her hands away from where blood was starting to ooze afresh from her neck. She struggled, this sudden restraint only serving to make her more frightened.

“Relax!” Felina insisted, releasing the other woman and holding up her hands to show she meant no harm. “I’m not trying to hurt you, I’m trying to stop you from hurting yourself!”

At last the stranger began to calm, though she still stared at Felina with wide, mistrustful eyes. Her breathing was erratic, but steadying. Felina realized she was likely beginning to wonder if she was the one who had trapped her in the Auto-Doc.

“Look,” Felina said, trying to reassure her, “my name is Felina, and I’m a prisoner just like you. I followed a radio signal, and now I’m stuck here along with you and some others under a man named Elijah. If you’re wearing a collar like me, surely you know who he is?”

The woman nodded, her gaze hardening. Clearly, she and the old man were already acquainted.

“Alright,” Felina went on, realizing that she would have to use mostly yes or no questions if she was to get anywhere with the mute stranger. At least she appeared to be calmer the longer Felina talked and distracted her attention from her condition. “Now, when I was exploring, I found these dogtags. Are they yours?”

Here she pulled out the metal tags labeled Christine Royce and presented them to the woman. She took them, nodding vigorously.

“You’re Christine Royce?”

Another nod.

“Good, now we’re getting somewhere.” Felina ran a hand through her hair, trying to determine what the next step was. “At least we’re in this together. I think we should—”

She broke off, noticing the other woman shaking her head. “Huh?”

Christine lifted her hands, then paused, as though figuring out how to express what her voice could not. After a moment’s consideration, she pointed at Felina, then in the general direction of the Sierra Madre, then pointed at herself, and shook her head. She stared intently at Felina, no doubt wishing she could telepathically express to the other woman her meaning.

“Are you…” Felina hesitated, uncertain. “Are you saying that I want to get into the Sierra Madre, but that’s not what you’re after?”

Christine nodded, enthused by this comprehension. She made several more hand gestures, most of which Felina could not follow, but one of which caught her attention—that of a motion like wings flapping. The gesture brought back a vague memory of the bunker she had entered what now seemed an eternity ago.

“Hang on, are you—are you Brotherhood of Steel?” Felina ventured.

Christine nodded vigorously, mouthing out yes, yes!

She continued her motions, moving two fingers in a walking gesture, pointing at the floor, then made as though shooting a gun.

“So you traveled—traveled here, to…” Felina scratched her head, her mind working on overdrive to decipher these gestures. “To shoot something?”

Christine nodded, then shook her head and pointed at the woman before her.

“Someone?”

Again, an affirmative.

“So you’re a Brotherhood of Steel soldier,” Felina surmised, “who didn’t come to the Sierra Madre after the treasure, but instead to shoot someone. An assassination mission?”

Christine nodded once more, her expression grim.

“Well, there’s only one person in this hellhole worth that kind of effort,” Felina guessed, “and that’s Elijah. Did you come here for him?”

The bald woman’s expression hardened, giving a final nod.

“At least we’re on the same page in that regard.” Felina ran her hands through the tangles of her hair, frustrated by the circumstances, but grateful she had gotten a few answers. Despite this, she knew most of her questions would have to go unanswered for the time being. “I know you’ve got a different agenda, but we’re going to have to work together if we’re going to get through this alive, much less take down Elijah.”

Here she put out her hand for the third and final time. “We get into the Sierra Madre together, and once we’re there, I won’t stand in the way of whatever justice you see fit to deliver. Deal?”

Christine still seemed dissatisfied with this arrangement, but her expression at last shifted to that of one resigning to and accepting the current circumstances, however inconvenient they might be. She reached out and clasped Felina’s hand in a firm, marksman’s grip.

While the silent woman ate and changed into some proper clothing her rescuer had found while scavenging, Felina briefed her on the current state of things. Unsure how much Christine knew of the ghosts, Elijah’s plan, and the Sierra Madre in general, and with no way to tell, Felina elected to treat her as though she had arrived at the Villa the moment she stumbled from the Auto-Doc.

“Before we set out, you’ll need this.” Felina handed the other woman the knife she had found beside the ruined stealth set. “Once we get back to the fountain you can use the rifle Elijah donated, but for now that’s all I’ve got.”

Christine took the blade, studying its precise, Old World craftsmanship. With a decisive nod, she sheathed the weapon in her boot.

 After dedicating a few minutes to cleaning the wound on her throat—and refusing Felina’s offered help with a mistrustful scowl—she stood and pointed to the door. Ready.

“Right, so the key to getting past the ghosts is standing still when they’re around,” Felina reminded her, peering from a crack in the clinic door into the ruined street. “If you’re not moving, they can’t see you.”

Together the two struck out into the twilit Villa. The most straightforward route back to the town square was blocked by a caved-in archway, forcing a roundabout route. Felina led the way, retracing her steps with the help of her Pip-Boy.

Time seemed not to flow in the ancient streets. Endless stucco walls and uneven cobbles poised to trip the unwary, pockets of low-hanging Cloud waiting to suffocate any who strayed within their vaporous clutches. Everywhere there were signs of former life—broken walls revealing decaying living spaces, splintered benches, dry fountains with Sierra Madre casino chips scattered in their bases, and even a few old bones here and there.

Ducking into yet another covered archway, Felina pressed onward through the shadows with Christine in tow. A small square cast its expanse ahead of the pair, with a single rotted tree and a street sign in its midst. Squinting to see the lettering past the top of the archway, Felina stopped dead in her tracks.

Perched atop the signpost like some grotesque gargoyle was a hazmat-clad figure. It sat upon the sign pointing to the town square, a slat of wood no broader than Felina’s index finger that should have been far too narrow to balance upon. Emerald lamps set in a military gas mask swept back and forth like a lighthouse beam. It was the Ghost King.

Felina pushed Christine back into the shadows of the archway, and together the two pressed themselves back against the wall. The ghost seemed to be resting crouched atop the post, oblivious to the intruders, Cloud exuding from its ventilator in crimson puffs. For what seemed an eternity it sat perfectly balanced, head moving in small, precise motions like those of a bird, while the two women below it tried desperately to stay still. At one point, Felina was certain the thing turned its baleful eyes directly on her, and she forced down the scream pushed up by her wildly beating heart.

But finally, one of the distant cries ever rising from the far streets seemed to catch the creature’s attention. The Ghost King answered the call with a wail like a dying thing that sent terror crawling down Felina’s spine. It shot from the signpost onto a balcony overhang so fast that Felina could scarcely track its movement. In another lightning-swift bound, it took to the rooftops and vanished like a wraith on the wind.

Felina breathed again, relaxing her death-grip on the hilt of her pistol. “That’s the Ghost King,” she told Christine, keeping her voice lowered. “It’s the boss around here.”

Christine needed no further explanation, her lips pressed into a thin line, eyes wide. But she requested no reprise, so the pair continued into the shadowed avenues stretching ever onward.

At last, pale light illuminated ahead, and the fountain with the elegant form of Vera Keyes came into view. Sitting on the rim was a massive, hunched figure, and behind the fountain stood a slim, tuxedoed form gazing up at the casino on the mountain, and exuding puffs of smoke at regular intervals.

“Let me do the talking,” Felina murmured back to Christine. Then she remembered the circumstances, and her face reddened. “Well, you know what I mean.”

“Why, if it isn’t Orpheus returning from the underworld,” Dean drawled, sidling over to the pair as they approached. “Find yourself a wife down there, Rosie?”

“Dean, this is Christine,” Felina said, ignoring his sass and gesturing to the bald woman. “She doesn’t do much talking.”

“Silent lady, eh?” The ghoul went to take Christine’s hand as though to kiss her knuckles, but she pulled back with a scowl. Dean gave an airy shrug, nonplussed by this rejection. “The stuff of fairy tales. Suppose as long as she’s got a working pair of hands, she’ll be useful enough.”

Felina studied the hunched figure of Dog, who had glanced up at their arrival, but otherwise seemed uninterested. The huge fist attached to the arm encased by the bear trap was clenching and unclenching before him, and she could see his gaze darting up nervously at every distant, phantasmal cry.

God had said he was suited to the Madre, Felina recalled. Despite this, she could not help but disagree, at least somewhat. His feral side was better for combatting the ghosts, yes, but behind that he was terrified. Terrified of the ghosts, of his other self ever striving for control, and above it all, he was so, so hungry. A monster he was, but one to be pitied.

Recalling her promise to let God back out, Felina lifted her hand toward her Pip-Boy. A twinge of guilt nagged at her conscience, but she pushed it down. Best to do it quick, without warning and without resistance.

“Dog,” the tape rasped, “back in the cage!”

A sharp pain drove into the back of Felina’s head. A weight like an anvil pressed upon her chest, the tumultuous sky blotted out by massive shoulders and a snarling maw. Uneven cobbles dug into her back, grit agitating the burned part of her hand.

“Are your ears malfunctioning?” God snarled, spittle raining upon Felina’s brow. His breath was the rancid odor of ghost blood and Cloud. “I said, if Dog comes out, you put him away immediately. Not a minute later, not an hour later, and certainly not an entire day later!”

For several seconds, Felina could not reply. Her head was spinning from how fast the nightkin had lunged at her and knocked her flat on her back, one massive hand crushing the air from her lungs. He was right—she had heard him, and had ignored him.

“No answer?” God sneered above her. “Good. You shouldn’t have one. Now, how many of your bones do you suppose can I break without killing you?”

Despite the gravity of the situation, Felina felt a flash of defiance. “You won’t,” she challenged the mutant, her voice strained for the pressure of his hand crushing her ribs. “Dog wouldn’t, so if you do, Elijah will know something’s up with his beast.”

God’s eyes narrowed, infuriated at his threat being proved empty. His fist closed upon the front of Felina’s police vest, and he stood upright, hauling her bodily up with him until her feet dangled almost two feet off the ground.

“Maybe I’ll just kill you after all,” he growled into her face. “Send us all to hell and hit two birds with one stone. Old Man starves to death, and the howling finally stops.”

His free hand came up, closing vicelike on Felina’s pale throat, ready to snap her neck by sheer crushing force. “Any last words, Pip-Boy?”

Felina stared back into those wild crimson eyes, the sudden terror of imminent death robbing her of speech. Her heart thundered in her chest, but she set her jaw, determined not to grovel.

“You are rather bad at this, aren’t you?”

The heads of nightkin and human turned at the clipped, accented voice. Dean stood beside the mutant, his posture as relaxed and easy as it had ever been. Only now, his 9mm was aimed point-blank at God’s malformed skull.

God sneered down at the other mutant. “You won’t do it,” he taunted the ghoul. “Your greed won’t let you pull the trigger.”

Dean cocked the weapon, a thin, dangerous smile creasing his ruined face below the black pits created by his glasses. When he spoke, his voice was stone-cold, every syllable of his challenge deliberately enunciated. “Bet your life?”

“What’s all this, then?”

Felina’s racing heart almost stopped at Elijah’s voice echoing through the square. Craning her neck, she saw his scowling face hovering above the fountain, glaring down at his captives.

“Am I missing something?” he inquired, his voice the deceptively level tone of one disguising mounting fury. “Or, perhaps are you pack of blithering fools forgetting something?”

Dean seemed the least worried of the trio locked in standoff. Without looking at the Old Man and keeping his pistol leveled at God’s head, he gave a nonchalant reply. “Oh, we’re just sorting out a disagreement. Nothing to concern your wizened conscience about.”

“Is that so?” Elijah’s eyes narrowed. “Well, allow me to sort it out for you. Beast, drop the broad.”

God immediately released his hold on Felina, who fell to the cobbles. The nightkin had lowered his gaze the moment he had become aware of Elijah’s presence, but Felina could tell there was no change in personality. The specific circumstances required for the shift never ceased to amaze her—the Old Man had Dog decidedly under his thumb.

“Now that we’ve cleared that up,” Elijah went on, calmed—if only by a minute amount—now that he was reassured of his command of the situation, “Did you get the fourth one?”

Christine stood from where she had been crouched behind the tiled rim partway around the fountain, startled by the sudden confrontation between Felina and the nightkin. Coming to stand in front of the hologram, she glared up at Elijah with her head held high.

“Excellent.” The way the pair looked at one another, Felina could tell they had history, and none of it good. Elijah’s expression did not change, but there was a certain smug, satisfied gleam in his eye, as though they had been warring against one another for some time, and he had finally come out on top.

“Now, I don’t give one sweet damn about whatever quarrels you lot have with each other,” he went on to the group. “You can sort them out once I’m through with you. For now, you do as I say. Disappoint me, and I’ll just have to rely on the next team now, won’t I?”

Here the Old Man’s gaze hardened, directing a particularly frosty eye down at a certain tuxedoed figure. “Am I clear, Mr. Domino?”

Dean had holstered his pistol and now stood with one hand in his pants pocket, the other holding a cigarette as though the threatening image before him was a mere annoyance. He exhaled a cloud of smoke and returned Elijah’s icy stare with a wolfish grin. “As mud.”

The Old Man glared at the ghoul for several moments longer, but finally turned his attention to Felina. “Alright girl, listen up. Now that the team is assembled, it’s time for the real work to begin.”

Felina’s heart dropped. Unable to stop herself, she burst out with an indignant, “’The real work?’ What the hell was all that then, a warm-up?”

Beside her, Dean gave a cackle, but Elijah was less than amused.

“I’ve just saved your sorry ass, girl, so I’ll have none of your attitude,” he growled. “Maybe you think this is a mere robbery, a cheap casino heist. It’s not. We’re plundering history itself, taking the secrets of the Old World from its alive and resisting clutches. The Sierra Madre won’t relinquish her secrets without a fight.”

Felina bit back a sardonic, you got that right. Despite this, part of her felt intrigued by his words, even if his suggestions of we were wholly disingenuous—it was all too clear he meant to dispose of his captives once their usefulness was exhausted.

But the casino…did it truly hold such great treasure? The circumstances surrounding it seemed to suggest so. If nothing of value lay within, then surely it would not be so heavily guarded. Images came to Felina’s mind of stories she had heard as a child, of pirate caches and dragon hoards. Casinos were where wealth was gambled away, and that wealth had to go somewhere.

“I’m sending coordinates to your Pip-Boy,” Elijah went on. “The FEV reject goes to the Puesta del Sol to switch the power on—he’s done that before, so it shouldn’t be a problem. The bald broad goes near there to the switching station, and the ghoul goes to the Salida del Sol to connect the circuits.”

Here the elderly man tilted his head, as though listening to the distant cries of ghosts floating from beyond the square. “You’ll have to navigate the locals, of course,” he said, though not sounding the least bit sympathetic. “And the Cloud, it’s heavier on the outskirts of the Villa where you’ll be going. Now get to work—the Gala awaits.”

Vera’s form reappeared, and Felina felt like sitting down on the cobbles and never getting back up. All the terror and exhaustion she had endured to get her teammates, and there was still so much more to be done. But she refused to give up yet—the Sierra Madre still beckoned her onwards.

“Hah! What’s this you’ve brought us, Pip-Boy?” God barked an incredulous laugh, the nightkin apparently having taken a good look at the newest member of the team for the first time, now that the danger of Elijah was gone. One massive hand came up as though to take Christine’s face, but he did not touch her. “What did they do to you, little doll? Tore out your yarn hair, cracked your china throat.”

Christine shied away from the mutant, eyes wide. Felina guessed that if she remembered the nightkin at all after her ordeal, any memories were likely unpleasant.

 “God, this is Christine,” Felina intervened, pulling the holorifle from its storage place in the bottom of the dry fountain and passing it to the other woman. “Christine, this is God, or sometimes Dog.”

The silent woman gave a look of bewilderment at this, but she only stepped into the fountain and took up a spot beneath Vera’s pedestal to rest and inspect the rifle. God wandered away from the group to brood by himself beneath a balcony, and Felina joined Dean sitting on the tiled rim of the fountain, gazing up at the Sierra Madre’s dazzling silhouette.

Felina stared down at her hands, feeling somewhat awkward. “Thank you,” she murmured to the ghoul at length. “For sticking up for me like that.”

For several seconds, Dean made no reply, and Felina got the impression that he had not been genuinely thanked for something in an exceedingly long time. But at last, he lifted a scarred hand and took a drag off his smoke.

“Don’t get used to it,” he replied, his voice just as gruff and dismissive as Felina had predicted it would be. “Wasn’t so much saving your ass as it was saving mine. I don’t trust a single one of you so far as I can throw you, and especially not that Dog and God. Feels like the bastard’s reading me every time he looks at me.”

Felina touched the back of her head where it had hit the cobbles and gave silent agreement at the smear of blood on her fingertips. She had expected such a reply from the ghoul, but it still warmed her a little that he was willing to stick out his neck the way he had, even if his interests were entirely self-serving.

“I found some records at the clinic that mentioned you,” she remarked, changing the subject. Part of her wondered how he would react to these discovered remnants of his Old World presence.

“That so?” Dean’s response was casual, but to Felina’s surprise, she thought she detected the tiniest shift in his demeanor. Was he…tense?

“Yeah, the head doctor didn’t like you.” On an instinct whose origin she could not quite pinpoint, she decided to leave out what she had read on his visits with Vera Keyes. “He thought you were a jackass.”

Dean took a last puff off his cigarette and tossed it to the cobbles. His posture lost the edge of tension, and Felina wondered if she had merely imagined the change. “Well, the feeling was mutual.”

The Sierra Madre loomed above them, Clouded sky hanging like a heavy blanket over the ruined resort. Ghosts shrieked on all sides of the square, some near, some far, and it seemed the Villa was pressing in around the lone treasure-seekers, waiting patiently for its chance to swallow them up.

Chapter Text

“So, what’s this Gala event do anyway?”

God turned at Felina’s voice, and she could tell from the heat of his stare that he was still nursing a grudge over their confrontation earlier. But she also sensed he was biding his time, however uncomfortable this reality made her.

“The Gala is when the Madre’s jaws finally part,” the nightkin replied, casting a hateful yet longing look towards the monument above. “It’s the only time when the casino—and the Old Man, so he fancies—will unlock the doors and allow passage. I’m sure even you have already guessed that the structure is blast-proof. No Gala, no entry.”

Here the mutant gave a dark chuckle. “The question remains, can we trust one another to do this? I suppose we’ll find out in good time.”

Much as Felina hated to admit it, he was right, as per usual. Would it be possible for the four of them to cooperate long enough without taking knives to one another’s backs?

After studying the map Elijah had provided on her Pip-Boy, Felina formulated a rough plan. “God, Christine, since the two of you are on the same end of the Villa, I was thinking all three of us go together. Safety in numbers, and it saves time trekking through ghost territory.”

The nightkin’s glare exposed his discontent at being told what to do, but he knew, as did Felina, that her Pip-Boy’s connection to Elijah made her the de facto leader of the little group.

“If we go there,” he finally said, “I am staying in control. Bring Dog out, and this time there will be no Old Man to save you. The little doll will just have to drag you the rest of the way after I’ve broken your legs.”

Felina saw the clenching of his massive fists, and knew he was itching for a reason—any reason—to follow through with his threat.

“I won’t bring Dog out if I don’t have to,” she replied, deciding to subtly fight fire with fire. After all, she reminded herself, she did have the power to put him away, and keep him away for as long as she so pleased. If he was determined to be disagreeable, he could be replaced with someone far more pliable.

For a heartbeat, her conscience nagged at her. Such thoughts sounded a great deal like something Elijah would say. Was the Madre getting to her, just as the nightkin had predicted?

But in the end, she shook the self-reprimand away. She wasn’t Elijah, and she knew what she was doing, didn’t she?

“Dean, you wait here until I get God and Christine to their posts,” she went on, hoping to distract herself from these uncomfortable thoughts.

To this, the ghoul arched an eyebrow. “Somehow, I feel like I don’t have much of a choice in the matter,” he remarked drily.

“Will you be okay?” Felina pressed.

Dean gave a shrug, then flashed a mischievous smile, glancing up at Vera’s ghostly form upon the fountain. “Oh, I suppose I’ll get along alright. Just a warning, though—I’ve a rather poor record when it comes to being left unsupervised with a beautiful dame.”

Felina resisted a smile at this. Beneath the crusty, rightfully mistrustful exterior, he was not so far removed from her Chairman friends back in New Vegas, even with his funny accent. “I’m confident you can contain yourself,” she assured him.

After briefing the nightkin on how to handle the ghost people, and many assurances that it would be far more effective than simply breaking as many limbs as possible, Felina struck out once more into the Villa with Christine and God in tow.

Moving at a swifter, more confident pace now, the little group made good time through the ruined streets. Felina still exercised caution though, particularly when all three were forced to cram into an alley to avoid two quarreling ghost people flashing from gable to balcony in pursuit of one another, their feet never once alighting on the cobblestone road. Once the shrieks of their chase had faded down the street, the wanderers continued.

At last, the trio approached a dead-end alleyway. Enclosed on three sides by high, windowless walls, a small number of heavy, rusted levers sat embedded in the stucco. Scrawled on the wall above them, jagged letters formed a cold demand: WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW?

“Right, this is the place,” Felina said, checking her Pip-Boy before squinting at the faded lettering of the diagram beside the levers. “God, you know how to work these things?”

The nightkin snorted, glancing to the eves high above them at a particularly close cry from a ghost. “Haven’t worked them personally, per say,” he admitted, “but the diagram will tell me what I need to know. Might have lost most of my Old World skills, but unlike Dog, I can read.”

“Good.” Felina braced herself for his response to her next statement, the one she had been least looking forward to. “If you know what to do, then I need you to trust the rest of us to get through this.”

God gave a humorless laugh that grated like a sawblade. “Trust is such a harsh word, little Pip-Boy. I prefer mutual need. It’s far more honest.”

Then he went on, “I’ll do it, but we need to ensure that Dog won’t surface before that happens.”

“I said I wouldn’t bring him out,” Felina reminded him.

The nightkin sneered at this. “So you say. But that wasn’t what I was talking about. Dog needs food if he’s to stay in the cage.”

Felina thought she knew where this was going. “I guess I could do a little scrounging—”

“Not Old World,” God cut her off. “Dog can’t stand that slop, and neither can I. No, he prefers flesh.”

Here the mutant chuckled, casting a glance at Christine, who was lingering by the gate looking as though she wished she was anyplace else. “The little doll would make a fine, tender morsel; shame she has prior arrangements. Dog will just have to get by on ghost flesh.”

“Ghost flesh?” Felina echoed, incredulous. “You mean, like killing one of those things and digging out whatever the hell is under those hazmat suits?”

“Precisely.” God gave her slim frame a once-over and barked a laugh, as though imagining the likes of her trying to accomplish such a task. “They’re not easy to kill, as you well know, but you’ve defied my expectations before. And if you can’t, well then, I suppose we can all wait for the Old Man together in the ninth circle.”

Felina rubbed her face in grimy hands, wondering for the umpteenth time how she had gotten herself into this mess. “Alright then, Christine, I’ll need your knife. It’s the only weapon I’ve seen that can leave a mark on those things.”

The silent woman pulled the blade from her boot and passed it to Felina, then lifted a questioning eyebrow, wondering what her role in this was.

“You stay here and keep God company,” Felina told her. “Or at least…if a ghost comes along, you can back each other up. Alright?”

Christine cast a wary eye upon the nightkin’s massive shoulders hunched over the diagram on the wall. Clearly, the last thing she wanted was to be left alone with the one who had just remarked on how good a meal she would make, but she also knew that her presence with Felina would only be a hinderance.

With a scowl and a nod, she moved to the opposite end of the space from the mutant and leaned against the wall, keeping ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice.

Sending up a silent prayer, Felina hefted her blade and turned from the alley, striking out once more into the realm of ghosts.

Christine watched, her scarred lips set into a disquieted line, until the pale of the other woman’s jumpsuit was swallowed up into the Clouded streets.

“I know the feeling.”

The bald woman looked over at God, who had finished reading the diagram and now squatted before the rusted levers, becoming as part of the Villa for how still he sat. Even crouched, he was nearly as tall as she was.

“You want to trust her,” the nightkin said, baring yellow teeth in the direction Felina had gone. “You want to trust her so badly, but you just can’t make yourself do it. Not here, not like this.”

Christine’s folded arms tightened on themselves. She looked back out into the street where Cloud drifting like restless phantasms, as though to pretend she did not hear the mutant.

“You’ve seen her kind before, haven’t you?” God went on, his voice assertive even as he phrased a question, for he already knew the answer. “You know her look, just like I can smell the miles on her. You encountered another like her, and now you’re wondering how alike they are. Or, perhaps how different.”

The bald woman looked over at him, her eyes wide and startled. The nightkin gave a harsh laugh.

“Don’t worry, little doll, I can’t read your thoughts,” he chuckled, his perpetual snarl twisting into a mocking smile. “Perhaps I’m all wrong. Or perhaps I’m not. Almost wish you could reply, but that might ruin the fun.”

Turning his gaze once more to the shadowed street, his massive hand came up to paw idly at the bear trap weighing down his forearm. His tone shifted ever so slightly, but the degree to which it became troubled was almost imperceptible. “Still, I know what it’s like to want to trust.”

Silence fell upon the pair, heavy and uneasy, broken only by the cries of ghosts rising all around them.

Chapter Text

Cloud roiled in the sky like a tossing sea, its rusty color turned orange by the light of the Sierra Madre sitting as an ancient, glittering beacon on the mountain above. The casino gazed down its nose—or, perhaps glared over bared teeth—at the Villa below, and the many tiny beings scurrying to and fro beneath its shadowed gables.

No sun could penetrate the blanket of Cloud, making it difficult to tell how much time passed before Felina at last came staggering into view of the two by the wall of levers. In one arm, she gripped two large, dripping chunks of what could only be ghost flesh.

God exclaimed a harsh laugh at her approach. “Well, well,” he said, grinning jagged teeth at her bedraggled figure, “You look like the Villa chewed you up and spit you out. Though I hate to admit it, we are quite impressed you survived at all.”

Shivering from revulsion, Felina handed her dripping burden to the nightkin without a word. Her jumpsuit looked as though it had been dragged through the mud, stained dark from ghost blood and in places smudged pink from Cloud residue. But other than a cut on her cheek and a number of impressive bruises, she seemed unharmed.

When she finally spoke, her voice was ragged from exertion. “Dog had better be happy with that; I’m not getting any more.”

The nightkin only gave another laugh at her disheveled appearance before tearing into his grisly offering, apparently satisfied.

Felina joined Christine on the other side of the alley, trying—though with little success—to wipe the visceral remnants from her hands. The other woman cast her a sympathetic look as she wiped her palms on the stucco wall, leaving smeared trails of ghost blood on the already filthy surface. Felina was grateful her stomach was already mostly empty.

She could still hear the unearthly shrieks the ghost had made as she stabbed it again and again, still hear the awful sound of it choking on its own blood. Its death had been violent, even by Villa standards. When she had watched the Ghost King, its kill had been sudden, with little resistance. But for her, she was forced to watch the thing’s dying convulsions upon the ancient cobbles, watch the emerald light of its eyes flicker for what seemed an age, before finally being extinguished for good. Her only small comfort was that she had freed whatever unfortunate person had been trapped in the suit those centuries ago from its continued tormented existence.

“Hmph,” God grumbled, breaking Felina from her trance. She looked over to see he had made short work of the ghost flesh and was licking the last traces of blood from his blunt fingertips. “Dog’s stopped howling…for now,” he muttered. “Stopped howling, now he’s just whining, the wretch. Least he’s not trying to break out anymore.”

Felina took a breath, trying to compose herself and find satisfaction in this small step forward. Keep it together, Courier; there’s still work to be done, decisions to make, unpleasant personalities to placate.

“Good,” she told the nightkin, “I don’t know how far away I’ll be when the Gala triggers, so you might need to be the one to get Christine and bring her back to the square. She doesn’t know the Villa, and I don’t want either of you traveling alone for longer than you have to.”

Christine’s eyes widened at this prospect, and the nightkin responded with a sneering smile. “Certainly,” he replied, grinning bloodstained teeth at the bald woman. “Never fear, little doll; you can’t speak, so you’re far less likely to piss me off as much as Pip-Boy there. You shoot me by accident though, and I’ll do the same to you as I’d do to her.”

Christine gripped her rifle a little tighter and looked to Felina, silently begging her to get away from the mutant. Felina forced herself not to respond and regretted for the umpteenth time she had ever followed the radio signal.

With a few final preparations, the two women struck out together into the Villa, leaving God at his post.

“Thank goodness he’s out of the way for now,” Felina murmured once they were well out of earshot. “I know I shouldn’t go pissing him off, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t make that as hard as possible. Almost like he wants it, just so he can have an excuse to lash out.”

Christine, as always, gave no response, but some of the tension visibly left her the farther away from the nightkin they got.

Deeper into the Villa they pressed. Low-hanging pockets of Cloud became more frequent the farther they went, slowing progress by forcing alternate routes to avoid them. Felina thought she was beginning to identify the heavy, sickly-sweet odor of the crimson substance. There was the acrid smell of rust, and chemicals she had not the knowledge to put names to, but intertwined with these was something else. The thread of scent reminded Felina of roses, heavy and cloying, like some ancient perfume still lingering amidst the ruins of luxuries gone by.

Ghosts raised their ethereal cries on all sides, and the haunting sounds combined with the scent of rotting roses returned Felina’s mind to Vera Keyes. Again, she wondered of the starlet’s story, and what had become of her. It was unlikely she had died of exposure or starvation, as the casino was clearly still functioning even after the bombs fell. Had she perished to a desperate refugee, or perhaps become caught in the poisoned rain and succumbed to radiation? Or had she escaped the mountain to become lost in the wastes?

A bone-jarring shriek tore the air above the two women, snapping Felina from her internal musings. Together she and Christine pressed against the wall in the shadows beneath a balcony, not daring to breathe as light footsteps skittered across the roof above them. When not vocalizing, the silence with which the ghosts could move was terrible, and Felina wondered how easy it would be for one of the creatures to tail them unnoticed, tracking their movement and waiting for the perfect time to strike.

Above them, a hazmat-suited figure hurtled across the street in a single lunge, the ghost person nearly missing the eaves and being forced to perform an undignified scramble to gain the rooftop. Briefly it turned the spectral lamps of its eyes back to screech some parting insult to an unseen pursuer before it vanished into the Cloud like a dissolving mirage.

Of course, Felina reminded herself as the two women pressed on, her theories on Vera’s death were assuming she had died at all.

At last, the pair approached an out-of-the-way door set far back into the Cloud-smeared wall. Felina tried the handle and was grateful to find it unlocked. The two women ducked into the ruined interior and away from the wails of ghosts, the scent of Cloud replaced by mold and dust.

Glancing sideways at Christine, Felina noticed her hesitate for an instant. The bald woman’s gaze darted about at the peeling wallpaper, her breath quickening. Puzzled, but unable to come up with an explanation, Felina said nothing and returned to scoping out the ancient switching station.

The entry room was in disrepair, lifeless control panels and shattered terminals lining the walls. To the right of the entrance, a sealed door offered its steel challenge to their progress. But to the left, a breaker box still spat out a few sparks, and beside it on the wall was scratched a scarcely-legible message: LISTEN BEFORE YOU LOSE YOUR HEAD.

“Dammit,” Felina muttered, pulling aside the rust-scarred panel and staring at the mess of cords, switches and receivers before her. “Looks like someone busted it on purpose. My tech skills aren’t the best, but let me see if I can get it to work.”

She cracked her knuckles and was preparing for the sting of electrical sparks when she felt a hand on her arm. Looking over, she saw Christine shaking her head and pointing to herself.

“Oh, you want to try it?” Secretly grateful for the intervention, Felina stepped back and allowed the silent woman access to the circuit breaker. If she truly was Brotherhood of Steel as she had indicated, then her technological skills were certain to far surpass Felina’s.

Sure enough, not five minutes of tinkering and the grind of revived machinery echoed through the building, the hum of electricity filling the room and alleviating the eerie silence.

“Damn, girl,” Felina marveled as lights flickered a hundred colored pinpoints on the wall panels, “You really got it.”

Christine looked pleased with herself, even if her previous unease had not entirely disappeared from her posture. Together the two approached the steel door, which now shrieked open with the power restored, and pressed deeper into the bowels of the switching station.

Winding metal halls seemed to go on forever. The pair met no one, but were stopped several times by speakers activating both their collars. Christine made short work of them each time however, and Felina marveled at her pinpoint accuracy with the holorifle.

“Woah, woah!” Felina braced herself on the sides of the metal doorframe to stop her forward momentum. Before them opened a room much larger than any they had previously encountered, stretching down at least two stories into the dark below them. Cloud swirled in the depths like a blood fog, reacting to the movement of air previously stagnant.

“So much Cloud,” Felina murmured in morbid awe, taking a cautious look over the catwalk railing into the crimson depths. The sickly-sweet odor was overpowering, the fog moving like a living thing in the dark below. “Could this be where it’s all coming from?”

Christine wrinkled her nose at the smell and gripped her rifle a little tighter. The pair proceeded with care across the narrow catwalk, keeping one hand on the rail and testing each new step. Felina’s hyperactive imagination was doing her no favors, and she kept on tense alert despite the looming silence, half expecting the Cloud to come roiling up from the deep to seize these intruders to its territory.

Once across, Felina closed the metal door behind them, shutting out the ominous pit. Christine exhaled, but Felina wondered if she hadn’t been more comfortable in the open space than closed in the metal hallway.

“Looks like this is the place,” Felina said, gazing about at what appeared to have once been an office. A rusted desk with a terminal sat against one wall, scattered filing cabinets, and an elevator that looked to be still clinging to life were the only other objects of interest.

Glancing over at Christine, Felina’s brow furrowed. The signs of discomfort she had been exhibiting since the moment they had set foot in the building had only seemed to increase as they got deeper. Now, the silent woman looked moments away from bolting. To be so visibly distressed even with her soldier’s background, she must have been under an enormous amount of pressure.

“Are you alright?” Felina ventured. A redundant question, and one the other woman could not answer anyway, but one she felt had to be asked.

Christine met Felina’s gaze. Her scarred lips were pressed into a thin line, her knuckles white upon the grip of her rifle. Her wide eyes screamed a silent answer: I am not alright.

“Okay, um…” Felina ran a hand through the tangled strands of her hair, trying desperately to think of the best solution to an unwinnable situation. “Check out that terminal, and I’ll see what’s down this elevator.”

Christine seemed relieved to have something else to focus on, for she sat in the rolling chair so hard that a puff of dust clouded from the worn cushion. Felina breathed a mental sigh of relief and made for the elevator.

The rough metal ground against the sides of the shaft as Felina descended, the car giving several jolts along the way as ancient cables struggled to retain their function. With each unsteady movement, Felina prayed the car would not stop outright and leave her to the horror of being stranded in the mechanical depths.

At last the lift halted, and the door struggled open with a shriek of complaint. Felina found herself face to face with a room scarcely big enough to turn around in, packed from floor to ceiling with circuit boards, computers, and a plethora of colored buttons. The space was stuffy and hot from the heat of any number of processors, and a persistent hum buzzed in Felina’s head like a beehive…or a saw.

“…listening to me?”

“Huh? What?” Felina yelped, holding the Pip-Boy up to her ear to be able to hear the irate rasp crackling through. “I can’t hear you!”

“I said,” Elijah repeated, “what’s your plan for the bald broad?”

“Dunno,” Felina said, running her fingertips across the mechanisms, searching for any sort of controls. The heat was almost stifling, and she could already feel sweat forming on her brow.

“You’re going to have to do better than that, girl.” Elijah’s tone was cross, but Felina was used to it by now. “Judging by the noise, you’re in that godawful switching station. You’ll have to get her to stay down there if you’re to reroute the power and get the gates open.”

Felina paused. “Down here?”

“You heard me,” Elijah grated out.

With a frown, Felina looked about at the mess of processors. She thought back to Christine, and the panic that seemed to stalk her whenever she was in an enclosed space. To cram her away into this stuffy, noisy, sardine can of a room for an indefinite amount of time…but what other choice was there?

“Alright,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The signal returned to static. Felina cast another concerned look about the tiny room before returning to the elevator to plan her words.

“Any luck?” Felina asked once above, grateful to have her feet be on solid floor and not a perilously suspended box on a cable.

Christine shook her head. Felina had expected this, but was still disappointed. Nevertheless she put on a confident face—she would need it to convince the silent woman of what she needed to do.

“If the terminal isn’t working, there’s a control room down there where you can operate the power,” she began, then paused. She bit her tongue, trying to decide if her next words were wise. “It’s a little cramped, but I think you’ll be okay.”

Immediately she regretted saying this, for Christine’s eyes darted to the elevator door. The bald woman wrapped her arms around herself, and shook her head.

Felina, for her part, was growing increasingly annoying with the other woman’s hesitance. She was a Brotherhood of Steel sniper for goodness sake—Felina had few warm feelings for the Brotherhood, but they were certainly made of tougher stuff than this. Couldn’t she just suck it up for a little while? Christine had it easy—a sheltered place where she could do exactly what she needed to do. Felina had to deal with all the hard work of ferrying her unpleasant companions to and fro, and catering to Elijah’s every whim.

“Christine, I’m sorry, but you have to go down there,” she said at last. It came out harsher than she meant, but Felina’s patience was stretching thin. Christine was scared? Tough. So was she. “I’ll hurry with Dean, and you’ll be down there for a couple hours, tops. The elevator goes up to the surface too, so you can get out the second the gates are open.”

The sniper was visibly shaking at this point, though she tried to hide it. She shook her head again, her eyes wild. Was she truly so scared?

Felina’s hand twitched toward her weapon, but she stopped herself. Threatening Christine would only end badly. Impatience clawed at her, begging her to just get this over with. But Felina did not want to be making more enemies in a place where even the radios were against her.

Taking a shuddering breath to calm herself, Felina tried again. “Christine, I know you’re scared,” she said, keeping her voice calmer this time. “I am too. If I could, I’d have bolted from this place the second I woke up. You’ve got more guts than me for even staying here to accomplish your mission.”

Christine did not react, knowing what was coming.

“I know being in that Auto-Doc sucked majorly, and I don’t even know all the ways it probably affected you,” Felina went on. “But the only way any of us are getting out of here is if all of us cooperate just long enough to put a cap in Elijah’s crusty ass.”

A tiny smile ghosted across Christine’s face at this prospect, encouraging Felina. S he was making progress.

“You won’t be trapped down there,” she went on, “I’ll have my Pip-Boy adjusted to the radio frequency so you can contact me whenever you need to. Do, like, one tap for yes, two taps for no or something. Like I said before, I’ll get Dean to his place as soon as I can and get the Gala started, then me or God will pick you up on the way back to the plaza.”

Having the plan tied up in a neat little box was risky, Felina knew. But Christine was nearly convinced.

“And take this,” Felina offered, shrugging off her police vest and handing it to the other woman. “It’s a little big, but it’ll protect you in a pinch.”

Christine donned the tough garment, hugging it about her like a security blanket. But even with this added protection, Felina noticed her hands shaking.

“Christine,” she said, stepping forward and taking the sniper’s hands in her own. They were slim, like hers, but rough with callouses from years of gripping a rifle and crisscrossed with old scars. “I need you to trust me on this. We won’t leave you. God knows I don’t want to be stuck alone with all those men for the rest of the trip.”

The corner of Christine’s mouth twitched at this remark, but she looked back at Felina with pain in her eyes. This gesture of kindness had touched her, yet Felina knew she still was not agreeing out of trust, but necessity.

Finally the sniper nodded, pulling her hands from Felina’s grasp and taking up her rifle, marching to the elevator door before she could change her mind.

“Ready, soldier?” Felina asked, to which Christine stood straight and held a clenched fist to her chest in the Brotherhood salute as the elevator door groaned shut.

Once she was gone, Felina exhaled a sigh of relief, taking a moment to compose herself. Now to tackle the most enigmatic of her companions: Dean Domino.

Chapter Text

“Bloody hell, could you get any more filthy?”

Felina could not muster a retort as she slumped down on the fountain rim, her bones aching with weariness. She was glad of a momentary respite before they must push on into the Cloud once more. Dean stood, smoking as always, the light of the fountain hologram casting a pale hue upon his sallow frame as though he too were one of those ghostly afterimages.

“Christine and God are both in place,” Felina informed the ghoul between sips of metallic-tasting water gleaned from the corpse of some adventurer long gone. “Once you’re set and the Gala is triggered, the plan is to meet back here and regroup before we head up the hill.”

“Nice and simple with a bow on top,” drawled Dean. “I’m sure nothing at all can go horribly wrong, especially in the hands of a blonde.”

He gave a cackle at Felina’s withering look. “Of course, with a stunning personality such as mine, I’m sure you’ll make every effort not to so much as singe the tail of my coat.”

His smile faded, and his stare burned into Felina through the dark of his shades. “And I’m sure you aren’t counting on any happy accidents that might prevent me from making it back here before the gates close again.”

Felina swallowed. Despite his sass and seemingly jovial attitude, she had to remind herself that Dean Domino was far from the least dangerous member of the party. Their alliance was an uneasy one at best.

“Of course not,” she managed to squeak out. “It’s in my interest to make sure no harm comes to you.”

Dean took a long, thoughtful drag from his cigarette as he contemplated this reply. He almost seemed to enjoy drawing out the suspense.

“I suppose that’ll do,” he said at last. “Workplace relationships—always the same, eh?”

Felina exhaled a mental sigh of relief. Much as he got on her nerves, she found herself genuinely wanting to keep on his good side, not just for the sake of staying alive, but because he reminded her so much of her friends in New Vegas. Perhaps after this was over, they could develop a promising friendship.

“You can lead,” she said, standing and hoisting her pack. She felt exposed without her police vest, but Christine would put it to good use.

Dean arched an eyebrow at her. “Of course. Was there ever another option?”

Felina bit her tongue to stop a sarcastic reply. Or perhaps after this was over, she would shoot him in the leg.

Despite these misgivings, Felina was glad to let someone else take the helm for the moment, and almost felt more confident than if she herself had been leading. Dean Domino knew the Villa better than anyone after all. His steps were light, and Felina knew his movements came from a dancer’s background. She hated to admit it, but he was far more graceful even than her.

Progress was swift into the dim streets. Ghosts wailed all around them, but their cries did not elicit so much fear as before. The pair avoided the creatures easier now that there was not a hulking nightkin with a taste for ghost flesh accompanying them.

Nevertheless, there was no shortage of near-misses, particularly when the ghosts forced engagement. Once only a can of rations in Felina’s pocket kept her from taking a spear to the hip, and Dean narrowly avoided the grasping hands reaching from a darkened window. Even the ghoul’s experience did not remove the need of great caution to avoid being snared in a lamplike gaze.

After a brief pause to regroup following a close call with a bear trap, Felina peered around a cracked stucco wall at the worn cobblestones winding away into the Cloud. “Looks like the coast is clear,” she whispered back to the ghoul.

She was about to step out when movement caught her eye. Above them, folded into the frame of a shattered window, a ghost person sat peering out. The moment Felina’s eyes saw it however, the creature flashed back into the darkness. Felina could not help feeling as though it had been watching them.

“Dean!” she hissed, “did you see that?”

The ghoul replied without looking up from his inspection of his pistol. “It’s the Ghost King. Been following us for a few blocks now. Of course, if you hadn’t forgotten who’s leading this operation, you might not have popped your head out in prime position to get skewered.”

His tone was nonchalant. But Felina was beginning to know when he was hiding fear. She ducked back into the alley they were cloistered in, too rattled even to take offense at his insult.

“Why hasn’t it attacked?” she whispered, not daring to move lest those lamplike eyes were still observing from places unseen.

“Go and ask it, if you so fancy,” Dean sniffed. “Keep moving. We’re nearly there, and I don’t want to spend any more time in this wretched place than I have to.”

Felina did not want to move yet, but Dean gave her little choice in the matter. They continued into the dark.

After several more twists and turns, they entered one of the moldering buildings, and after ascending a staircase that had seen better days, emerged onto a second-story patio. The place looked much the same as the rest of the decayed Villa, save for the length of electrical wiring which ran across the stucco floor to disappear among the gabled rooftops. Following the snakelike strands, Felina could not withhold a cry of dismay.

“It’s snapped clean in two!” she exclaimed. For indeed, the black cables were severed neatly—deliberately—and lay tossing useless sparks upon the stucco.

Dean crouched, lifting one of the severed ends to inspect it. “I’m no electrician, but I’d wager these were part of the sound system,” he mused. “Blimey. The old goat really has it out for me.”

Felina kicked the wiring in frustration, only to recoil with a yelp as it zapped her toe. Instead she turned her ire to the nearest piece of trash and stamped it flat. “What are we supposed to do now?” she demanded.

Dean drew breath to respond, only to freeze in his tracks. His gaze was fixed on the rooftop above them. “Rosie, watch out!”

Felina did not even have time to turn before she was bowled over by a brown-clad blur and deafened by a shriek like death itself. Half-stunned, she saw through blurred vision Dean grappling with a faceless figure which poured Cloud from a ventilator with each rattling snarl.

“Dean!” she cried, scrambling to her feet. The Ghost King did not even look at her from its position atop the ghoul, all its attention focused on keeping the wildly-struggling Dean from reaching his pistol while attempting to get gloved hands around his throat.

Felina looked around wildly. She could not risk firing shots at the thing with Dean right there. The only resources available to her were a couple piles of trash, and the door they had some through which hung half-destroyed on one rusted hinge.

But there on the ground, kicked out of the way long ago, were a couple lengths of splintered wood.

Without thinking, Felina seized one of the pieces and held it like a bat. Splinters dug deep into her palms, and she almost dropped the crude weapon. But she held on.

“Hey, Casper!” she shouted, “eat this!”

She swung just as the Ghost King turned to her with an irate snarl. The flimsy wood shattered on impact with the metal gas mask, sending splinters flying in all directions. The Ghost King recoiled more out of surprise than injury, shaking woodchips from its hood. Felina knew at once that her assault had only momentarily halted the creature.

But it was enough for Dean. He drew his pistol, and when the phantom again turned to him, fired point-blank at one of the glowing eyepieces.

The shot rang out deafening in the silent streets. The Ghost King reared back, its scream rising high into painful registers and sending its lesser kin scurrying for hiding. For a terrible heartbeat, Felina thought the thing’s mask had been fully shattered, but she glimpsed as it turned that the eyepiece was only cracked.

Using Dean’s sternum as a springboard, the monstrous phantasm bounded onto the rooftop, and was gone as suddenly as it had appeared.

Felina breathed again. She felt her knees would buckle under her, and sank to the ground. Dean, winded after the encounter, rolled onto his stomach with a groan and a string of curses, which Felina took to mean he was unharmed as he pulled himself into a sitting position.

Then she saw his glasses lying on the stucco.

For a moment, comprehension did not strike her. It only came as the ghoul turned toward her, and she sucked in a sharp breath. For his eyes were exposed to her for the first time.

Dean Domino’s left eye was much like any other ghoul—blackened by radiation, with only a few traces of the former brown remaining in the iris. But his right eye was a milky-white marble, stark against the rest of his ruined face. Blind.

The ghoul saw Felina staring and swiftly covered the eye with one hand. His posture was tight with wounded pride as he turned away from her. “I’d rather you hadn’t seen that,” he said gruffly.

Felina had half-expected him to lash out at her in defense of his vanity, and was surprised when he did not. She wanted to speak, to reassure him, but something in her warned against it. His fragile ego had taken the brunt of the injury in their encounter with the Ghost King.

Without thinking, she took the glasses from where they had been flung. They seemed unharmed—at least, Felina could not tell if there were any new scratches on the dark lenses. Slowly, she reached out and offered them back to the ghoul.

Keeping his ruined eye covered, Dean hesitated a moment. Then he reached and took the dark glasses from her almost gently. Felina hid her surprise—she had thought he would rush to snatch them from her. Again turning his face away, the ghoul donned the battered shades, hiding his eyes once more behind a shield of opaque blackness.

He stood then, and the spell was broken. “Right,” he grated out, “if I’m going to stay up here after that, I’m going to need some assurances.”

Felina was longing to ask him about his bad eye, but the King of Swing seemed all too eager to sweep the embarrassment of its exposure to her under the rug. Even so, exhaustion gnawed at her, and she found herself loathing the prospect of having to set off on yet another quest to appease her irritable companions.

“But with the Ghost King driven off, won’t you be safe up here?” she implored him. “It’s fairly sheltered, and you know the way back to the plaza. I’m sure you’ll be alright until the Gala is activated.”

To her dismay, Dean gave her a look that could have wilted daisies. So much for making friends with him. “Listen, greenhorn, perhaps you can wheedle your way into the good graces of those other two idiots, but where my hide is concerned, you’ll do what I say and you’ll do it sharpish. Got it?”

Felina almost suggested, what if I toss you off this rooftop? but restrained herself. His cooperation was crucial, both for getting into the Sierra Madre and for eventually escaping this vale of misery for good. It seemed the only option was to submit to whatever demands he required of her.

“Alright, Dean,” she replied, swallowing her pride and forcing her irritation down. “You’re the boss. What’s the plan?”

Dean gave a nod, pleased with being back in control of the situation. Then he led her to the overlook and pointed to several speakers mounted around the plaza below. “See those? The moment the Gala begins, they’ll start blasting music like a bloody circus. And let me tell you, the ghosts aren’t going to appreciate the racket. They’ll be swarming this place before you could blink. I’ll be trapped up here.”

“And?” Felina pressed, keeping an eye on one of the offending spirits vaulting across a nearby rooftop. “Any strategies?”

The ghoul redirected her attention down to the square where a ruined fountain sat, a smaller, less ornate cousin of the one that occupied the main plaza. “Atop that fountain, there’s a hologram activator. But unlike some of the others, it’s hidden, not supposed to be activated under normal circumstances—only if there’s a security breach. I want you to turn it on if I’m to be camping here. With any luck, it’ll keep them at bay long enough for me to make a quick exit.”

Felina hoped the circuits weren’t too ruined—her electrical skills were basic at best, mostly learned from Raul on old cars around Freeside. “Do you even know what you’re supposed to do for the Gala?” she asked him.

Dean gave the severed cables a scowl. “Oh, I’d imagine I just pick up those two ends, clap them together like cymbals and hope it isn’t quite a shocking experience, eh?”

He grinned yellow teeth at his own pun, then pulled a light from his seemingly never-ending stash. “Well, what are you still standing there for? Hop to it.”

Chapter Text

By sheer good fortune, Felina discovered in one of the surrounding buildings a terminal with access to nearby holograms. It was cloistered in an out-of-the-way utility room, and Felina wondered if anyone had ever found it without Dean’s help.

The ghosts were, for a blessed period, avoiding the area after their alpha had been so unceremoniously disgraced, but Felina knew it would not last long. Quickly she activated all nearby holograms—taking the liberty to turn off any speakers that might have still been functioning—and made her way back through the winding streets to where Dean was posted.

The ghoul arched an eyebrow at her return, as though he had not expected her to return alive. Felina gestured proudly down to the fountain where the figure of an armored soldier emitted its own light from above the defunct water feature.

“Your assurances,” she said, not even caring if she sounded smug. At this point, sheer spite was the only thing keeping her knees from buckling under her.

Dean gazed down at the hologram, then up to the rooftops his expression unreadable behind his glasses. For a heartbeat, Felina worried he would tack on something else just to help mend his still-wounded pride .

At last he said, “I suppose that’s the best you’ve got to offer, then.”

Felina barely managed to restrain herself from a barrage of insults. He wasn’t the one having to creep blindly around the villa in search of terminals and supply caches, avoiding traps and ghosts and whatever else this graveyard of treasure-seekers could throw at her. Couldn’t he be a little more gracious toward her efforts?

Simmering, she took stock of her dwindling supplies to distract herself. Part of it was the exhaustion talking, she reasoned with herself. She was on-edge constantly, wired from hyper-vigilance and countless scuffles with the villa’s phantasms. Perhaps once the Gala was triggered, they could rest and actually sleep for a little before making for the Sierra Madre itself.

Felina shouldered her supplies and squared her shoulders. Just one more hurdle left to clear—that of the Gala activation, whose location sat as a blinking light on her Pip-Boy map.

After many assurances that he would be safe, Felina bade Dean farewell until they would meet back in the main square. To her surprise, he offered her a gruff, “Be careful,” before ignoring her to gaze out over the rooftops and take a puff from his smoke. Felina gave him a wondering look, but did not say anything, instead turning to strike out into the Cloud once more.

Her next destination was not far. However it was located near the edge of the Villa, and pockets of Cloud hung low more frequently, forcing her to go far around, or, if there was no alternate route, hold her breath to make a mad dash through and hope she reached the end before her lungs gave out. These bursts of energy were becoming more and more difficult as Felina’s strength reserves ran low. She would need to rest and sleep soon, but the expectations of her waiting companions drove her onward. The longer she took, the more danger they were exposed to alone in the Villa.

Now that she was traveling alone again, Felina found that anxiety nipped at her heels more frequently, and she cursed herself for becoming too dependent on her companions. She was a courier—the solitary life was her home turf. Fighting battles alone was nothing she did not know.

But then, the wild wastes were mere child’s play compared to the Sierra Madre. An unknown but awesome treasure for which the casino itself was the dragon which jealously guarded it. Felina wondered how much Frederick Sinclair would have changed things, had he known what misery his casino would inflict long after he was gone.

The dim streets seemed to have no end. Felina turned corner after corner, sometimes cutting through ruined buildings. Ghost people prowled all around her, and at times she thought the things would be able to detect her from how loudly her heart pounded as she stood stock still when one drew too near for comfort. Once, a hazmat-clad figure lurched by on unsteady feet so close to her that Felina could smell the Cloud it emitted with each ragged breath. Only after it had vanished down a side street did she loosen white knuckles from her pistol.

After what seemed a thousand years had passed, the lone traveler passed under an archway decorated with ornate iron grating like fangs waiting to snap down on any who passed. Before Felina stretched a courtyard, and on the other side, a belltower rose up high into the rust-smeared sky. That had to be her destination.

Felina took a step into the courtyard and immediately regretted it. In her excitement generated by the sight of her goal, she had forgotten to scan the circling balconies above. A harsh wheeze grated above her, followed by footsteps approaching her position. Ghosts.

Taking a chance, Felina kept beneath the balcony and darted to the left, moving as stealthy but as swiftly as she could until she reached the nearest doorway. She ducked inside and down a short set of stairs just as a brown-clad figure dropped from the balcony.

A wine cellar spread before her, scattered with barrels of varying sizes, and racks, some of which still had a few dusty bottles in them. Felina took in all this at a glance before darting behind an enormous barrel and crouching down. Her heart thundered in her chest, and her hands shook from exhaustion and fear, but she tried to remain calm.

Two ghosts seemed to slither into the cellar. One had a spear, the other was unarmed. Together they descended the stairs, low, suspicious gurgles permeating the dim cellar. Dust stirred from both the ghosts and Felina swirled in the dim light, and she fought the urge to sneeze. She had to get out quickly, but how?

Then she spotted another doorway on the far end of the room, almost obscures by barrels. If she could just make it over there—

Dust wafted down on her head. Felina looked up, and saw one of the ghost people had vaulted onto the row of barrels on silent feet, and now stood directly above her, so close that she could have reached out and grabbed its ankle.

Her heart in her throat, Felina stared with eyes the size of dinner plates. She could not have moved even if she had wanted to—fear rooted her to the spot. The creature turned its emerald gaze this way and that, at one point seeming to look straight at the white-clad woman below it.

Then it leaped to the next barrel down, apparently satisfied. Felina did not dare sigh with relief, but instead slowly turned towards the door. The other ghost person was obscured by a row of hogsheads, but its footsteps indicated that it would be out of her line of sight should she make for the door.

Forcing her wobbly knees to functionality, Felina half-crawled slowly towards her destination. She flinched and held still at every small noise, every rattle emitted by the two phantoms, expecting every second for a shriek of alarm to pierce the dim cellar.

She was almost to the steps, only one more row to go when a hiss sounded dangerously close to her. Felina froze. Lurching down the aisle was the spear-wielding ghost.

Ducking behind a wine rack, Felina cursed her bad luck. Escape was almost within her grasp. She would just have to wait until the ghost staggered past.

But it did not. The spect er loitered at the bottom of the steps, leaning heavily on its weapon, glowing gaze flicking this way and that.

Taking great care to move slowly, Felina turned her head towards the unarmed ghost person. It had broken off leaping atop barrels and now prowled the aisles at the end of the cellar she had come from, illuminated in a cloud of dust motes by the dim ray of daylight seeping in through the open door. Moving an inch at a time, she felt about the bottom of the wine rack until she found the smooth contours of a bottle.

The ghosts came alert at the sound of glass on stone. With a screech, two gas masks snapped towards the flicker of movement disappearing behind a stack of barrels. Like twin predators they flashed in pursuit , their cries rebounding in the enclosed space. And in their haste, they did not notice the white figure darting up the stairs behind them to vanish through a darkened doorway.

Felina’s hands shook with relief as the cries faded behind her. A wine bottle rolled across the floor might be a poor diversion to most, but for creatures who depended on their prey’s movement to see, it would do in a pinch. Now, she could press on.

After winding her way through several destroyed apartments, Felina found herself facing a maintenance ladder leading up into a trapdoor set in the ceiling. Her stomach swarmed with butterflies at the prospect of ascending a ladder of dubious stability, but there was no other option, so she began her ascent, testing each rung before setting her full weight upon it.

Felina gripped the ladder so hard her knuckles turned white. Passing through the trapdoor, she climbed higher and higher into the belltower. Small windows on either side of her provided weak light, dust motes drifting in the glow of the orange colored sky beyond. Finally she reached yet another trapdoor, and, acutely aware of the yawning void below, Felina pushed it open with a groan of rusted hinges that was far too loud for comfort.

Clamoring into the open, Felina lay flat on the wooden floor for a moment, her palms damp with sweat, grateful to be on a solid surface. Perhaps she was more afraid of height than she had previously thought.

She sat up then, allowing the adrenaline to fade as she took stock of her surroundings. The belltower looked much the same as the rest of the Villa—stucco walls, wide arched windows lined with tile that had once been beautiful, but no longer. Above the high windows, Felina could just glimpse several bells of varying sizes suspended in the darkness. She was amazed they were still attached after so long, and tried not to imagine one of them dislodging and dropping on her head. It was also decidedly quieter up here, with the cries of ghosts far less noticeable, a welcome respite.

Then Felina looked out the window and gasped. The Sierra Madre Casino stood in all her glory on the mountain above , rows of windows like eyes gazing out at the Villa below. The rust-hued sky turned to a brighter shade at such high altitudes, and Felina wondered if perhaps the oppressive Cloud was thinner up there.

Taking an involuntary step forward, her foot knocked against something with a clink of glass. T urning her gaze down, she saw that the small belfry was a hodgepodge of assorted junk. Like some jackdaw’s nest, the space was littered with empty wine bottles, colored shards from broken stained glass windows, a chipped porcelain bowl full of ornate beads whose connecting thread had long ago disintegrated, and other assorted oddities from around the Villa. In one corner, a narrow, flattened mattress lay, with the first actual pillow Felina had seen during her stay, albeit in a sorry shape. The place looked...lived in.

A horrible realization set upon her, and her stomach twisted. All this junk hadn’t brought itself up here. She was trespassing in something’s lair.

Without warning, her Pip-Boy crackled to life, the sudden noise startling her such that she nearly fell back down the trapdoor she had emerged from.

“Can you hear me?” Elijah’s voice grated through the tinny speakers. “Blasted transceivers—I’ve nearly got the collars linked to the tower. There, that should do it. Can everyone hear?”

“I hear you from the tower,” Felina managed to squeak out, grateful to have some source of distraction. Scanning the edges of the belfry, she found a breaker box containing a control panel tucked in the back corner near the ladder, where it could be easily accessed without obstructing the view. “Team?”

A series of taps sounded. They were rapid, but not panicked. Christine was holding up alright in the confined console room.

“Good,” Felina replied. “We’re almost ready, Christine. Just keep breathing.”

Next was the unmistakable gravelly tone of the nightkin. “ Dog is ready .”

Felina knew it wasn’t Dog doing the talking, and thanked good fortune she hadn’t accidentally called him by name. Elijah was still listening. God’s reply was simple, but she imagined his actual response, had he spoken it aloud, would have resembled more: Hurry along now, Pip-Boy, and open the gates before we open your ribcage all over the ground.

Next came Dean, warbling with echo. Perhaps he was standing too close to another transceiver somewhere nearby. “What are you waiting for? Dramatic effect? Strike up the band!”

Felina smiled at his pre-War diction. She could not help replying in kind. “Alright, everyone, prepare yourselves—the real show is about to begin.”

“At last,” came Elijah’s voice, unable to disguise his eagerness. “Now, the gates will open, and so will the skies. You in the tower, follow my instructions to the letter.”

Felina did so without grumbling this time, caught up in the thrill of the moment. She opened the control panel and began flicking levers and pressing buttons in time with Elijah’s direction.

At the last press of a button, a siren burst forth over the Villa, causing Felina to jump. It sounded eerily like an air raid siren. A loud boom did nothing to alleviate this notion until a crackle and hiss reached her ears. Fireworks.

Rushing to the window, Felina gazed out in wonder. Spotlights illuminated the Sierra Madre, shining like an ancient jewel, and above her flashed bursts of color. Alas the clouds hid much of the spectacle, leaving only muted explosions of red, green, blue and purple light. Felina thought that the sight as it had been intended to be seen would have been quite beautiful.

But she could not waste time watching the show. Felina turned, ready to descend the ladder. From below in the Villa, a haunting wail reached her ears, that of countless enraged ghost people. Getting back would not be easy.

Then a harsh growl rasped from directly outside the tower window.

Felina sucked in a sharp breath. Ducking down, she squeezed herself into the corner by the control panel, and watched in horror as a gangly arm reached into the left window, grasping with long fingers. Another arm followed , then a metal gas mask bearing a shining gaze, and two long legs like a spider’s that unfolded and touched the floor without a sound.

The Ghost King stood looking about the space. Its emerald gaze swept unseeing across the petrified, white-clad intruder. Felina saw the cracked eyepiece still marred its military gas mask. The lord of ghosts had returned to its lair.

Then the creature slung its spear off its back. Felina’s heart jumped into her throat, but the thing only leaned the weapon against the wall. The phantasm leapt nimbly up onto the narrow railing and there crouched, gazing out at the fireworks still bursting in myriad colors illuminating its crooked silhouette in green, blue and purple flashes. The sight of something so monstrous framed by such beauty could have almost been seen as poetic, had not all of Felina’s instincts been fixated on escaping the tower as fast as humanly possible.

Slowly, Felina unfolded her legs. The creature’s back was to her, and the ladder directly in front of her. The cacophony of sound created by the Gala would provide ample cover. If she was quick and quiet, perhaps she could escape the phantom’s line of sight before—

The Ghost King turned, and Felina froze like a deer in the headlights, her legs dangling through the trapdoor. T he creature leaned down from its perch to rummage among the assorted treasures of its collection. It drew forth a c racked wineglass and lifted it so that it caught the light from the fireworks, using it as a sort of mirror to run gloved fingertips across the cracked eyepiece.

Despite her fear, Felina was almost fascinated by its behavior, like observing some strange animal. Though doubtless unintentional, it almost looked as though the creature was raising a toast to the Sierra Madre Gala, as countless workers had never gotten the chance to. For as every terminal entry she had read indicated, on the night of the Gala, the world as they knew it had ended.

Continuing to inch herself over the edge of the trapdoor, Felina’s hand fell on something. Glancing down as much as she could without moving her head, she felt with her fingers the contours of a holotape. Without thinking, she slipped it into the pocket of her jumpsuit. She could examine it when she reached safety.

Felina gripped the ladder with sweat-slicked palms. She could see the last few rockets popping and spiraling in the sky behind the Ghost King’s head. It was now or never.

Taking one last look at the back of the creature’s hooded head, Felina lowered herself fully through the trapdoor. She did not dare try to shut it with its rusty hinges. She could only descend, step by silent, nerve-wracking step.

She was a third of the way down the ladder when she found herself awash in a green glow. Her foot froze mid-air. She hung suspended, her arms trembling, not daring to move. In the dingy screen of her Pip-Boy, she could see the reflection of two glowing eyes peering through the opening above her. Rasping breaths echoed around the dingy belltower walls.

Felina’s heart beat like a trapped bird . Her arms shook with the effort of gripping the rusty ladder rungs. She did not know if ghost people still knew how to climb ladders, but she did not want to find out.

Then a screech and a loud bang almost caused her to lose her grip on the ladder. She looked up before she could stop herself, but saw only darkness. The Ghost King had pushed the trapdoor shut. Felina supposed even a ghost would not appreciate a sudden hole appearing in the floor of its house.

Shaking from head to toe, Felina descended the remainder of the ladder. Her stomach felt like it was twisted in knots. Reaching the bottom, she crumpled to the ground, leaning against the wall as tears of sheer terror and stress streaked down her grime-covered face.

“Yeshua,” she whispered a hoarse plea, “I can’t keep going like this, I can’t! I wish I’d never followed that signal, I wish none of this had ever happened! I don’t care about the treasure! I just want to go home!”

But deep in her heart, she knew that last statement was untrue. She did care about the treasure. She wanted it, needed it, because without it, this whole nightmare was all for nothing.

The wall was rough under her palms as she braced against it. With a colossal effort, she pushed herself to her feet. She wasn’t beat yet. The Sierra Madre awaited.

Back at street level, Felina became acutely aware of how much louder the cries of the ghost people were becoming. Every functional speaker was blaring celebratory music, just as Dean had said, and she was forced to dodge them as her collar beeped out its warning.

She jumped as a banging sound emitted from the street beside her. Looking down, she saw a manhole cover that had long-ago become fused with the surrounding street. Another bang rang out , and looking through the small hole in the metal, she saw a glowing green eye.

The ghosts were in the sewers too, she realized with a rush of horror. Who knew how many were down there; perhaps hundreds. But now, with the Gala, the enraged phantoms would swarm from their hive like wasps seeking vengeance.

This thought lent new vigor to Felina’s desire to reunite with the group, but her body was less than enthusiastic. She felt herself trembling all over from exhaustion, and she could not tell if it was merely wafting Cloud that caused the distortions in her vision. Swallowing, she focused swimming eyes on her Pip-Boy map. She just had to make it back to the square. Then she could take a respite.

Each step felt like she was dragging cinderblocks. Felina’s body moved of its own accord when ghosts prowled near, ducking into the nearest alley and trying to halt the shivering of her limbs lest the phantoms take notice. She was making good progress...until she wasn’t.

The street ahead of her took a fork. Down the left path, the way was obscured by low-hanging Cloud. To the right, two ghost people quarreled among themselves, but Felina knew their dispute would be quickly forgotten if they spotted her. There was no other way—she had to risk the Cloud.

Sucking in a breath, Felina plunged into the rust-hued fog. Her eyes watered and burned under the toxic haze. There seemed to be no end, no matter how far she pushed, no matter how many side streets she turned down. She was lost.

At last she could hold her breath no longer. The air burst from her lungs in a gasp, and Cloud rushed in. Her eyes burned, her chest felt like it was being filled with sand. Her Pip-Boy swam before her eyes—was she close to Dean’s outpost? Or was it a trick of her addled mind?

“Dean!” she cried in desperation, her voice sounding small and useless in the dim streets. “Dean, are you there? I need help! I...I need…”

But her voice trailed off, muted, swallowed by the cloying scent of rotting roses . The cobblestone street tilted one way, then the other. Then the shattered stones rushed up toward her .

Felina lay where she fell, unable to move, and the merciless Cloud closed in around her. Darkness took her, and she knew no more.

“Darling, it’s happening, it’s finally, finally happening!”

Vera stood from her vanity as Dean lurched into her dressing room, a wineglass in one hand, his face wreathed in smiles. She felt a flash of disgust; it was barely sunset and he was already well on the way to becoming completely trashed, drunk on both wine and his imminent victory. He didn’t even bother to ask why she wasn’t out joining the festivities. Of course, not that his inebriation level would have made any difference.

“At long last, it’s finally time,” Dean laughed again, and Vera could smell the wine on his breath from across the room. Before she could stop him, he closed the distance between them and crashed his lips to hers in a passionate kiss.

“Dean,” the starlet mumbled, fighting the feelings his lips awoke in her. Pinned against the vanity, she pushed his hands away as they fumbled for the straps of her dress. “Dean, stop.”

The lounge singer drew back. His brow furrowed above the dark lenses of his glasses. “What’s the matter, darling? It’s all coming to fruition. Aren’t you happy?”

His expression turned a little colder, a little more mocking. “Aren’t you happy you’ll soon be rid of me?”

Vera forced herself to look into those black lenses, like pits swallowing anyone who dared get too close. “Don’t put words in my mouth,” she hissed.

“Then what is it?” Dean pressed. “We’re nearly there. You sing like a lark, pop the safe, and we’re as through as through can be. What’s not to be glad about?”

Averting her eyes, Vera felt shame burning with more agony than the cancer in her bones. “Dean, I just...about tonight, I...I don’t know.”

“’You don’t know?’” Dean echoed, incredulous. “I ask one little favor of you, and you tell me ‘no?’”

“I didn’t say ‘no,’” Vera shot back. Revulsion filled her at his words—a little favor was all he thought of what they were about to do? But she couldn’t make herself tell him what she really thought. “I just said...I don’t think…”

“You’re right, you don’t think,” Dean interrupted her. “I don’t need you—I could have gotten any leggy dame out of Hollywood to come out here and play Sinclair’s heartstrings. Imagine what he’d say if he found out the love of his life is nothing but a strung-out chem addict. He’ll drop you like a bad habit, and then you’ll be worse off than you were before. Do you know why?”

He leaned forward, his voice a spiteful hiss. “Because you’ll have seen the Sierra Madre, and had to let it all go.”

Vera turned her face away, a huge lump in her throat threatening to choke her. Dean knew how to play her, and she hated herself for it. It was her fault, after all—she had gotten herself hooked on meds, without any help from him .

The last thing she wanted was for him to see her weakness. But she could not stop a hiccup from escaping. Seeing her distress, Dean’s expression softened a fraction.

“Aw, shhh, don’t cry,” he crooned, drawing the starlet into his arms. “I’m not trying to hurt you, darling. Just one last job; it’ll be easy. He trusts you.”

He did, Vera thought. Fred’s trust had let her walk right into his heart—and soon, into his vault—and right back out. His trust would be his downfall, and she, the monster, would take him for all he was worth.

Reaching up, Vera carefully grasped the frames of Dean’s glasses and slid them from his face, tucking them into his breast pocket. Perhaps if she saw his eyes, she could convince herself that every word from his mouth wasn’t a bold-faced lie. He had beautiful eyes; a rich, copper brown that complimented his dark skin.

“After this,” she whispered, “the other holotapes...they’ll go away?”

Dean blinked, his face the picture of loving concern. “I swear it.”

He took her face in gentle hands, then bent his head and kissed her brow, as he used to before...everything.

Vera could not watch as he departed on only slightly unsteady feet. She looked down instead at the empty wineglass he had left forgotten on the vanity. It was knocked over, and a deep crack split the perfect form. Just like her.

Pulling open the vanity drawer, she fished around among the bobby pins and empty syringes. Then she hit the button on the small tape deck to cease recording.