Borderlands: Debt or Alive E-Book

Anthony Burch

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 403

Beschreibung

THE CONTINUING STORY OF TALES FROM THE BORDERLANDS® BY GEARBOX AND 2K GAMES Discover what awaited the thieving sister duo, Fiona and Sasha, after they opened the Vault of the Traveler in this new Borderlands® adventure. Dive into a new adventure with Fiona and Sasha, in this sequel to the critically acclaimed game Tales from the Borderlands®. Fiona and Sasha have struck gold. Better than gold: a limited-edition Typhon DeLeon Vaultander™ doll. This molded lump of plastic is worth more than some planets. All they've got to do is find a nerd with deep pockets and they'll be set for life. And they know just the nerd. Enter Eden-5, home to an equally bloodthirsty mix of billionaires and bandits. To survive long enough to offload the loot, Fiona and Sasha will have to use every trick in the book (plus other tricks not found in books). We're talking hijinks, lowjinks, every jinks. But just as the deal's about to go down, a certain Mechromancer crashes the party, looking to murder the collector. This is not the cushy retirement Fiona was promised.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1. Sasha

2. Fiona

3. Fiona

4. Fiona

5. Fiona

6. Fiona

7. Gaige

8. Sasha

9. Fiona

10. Fiona

11. Fiona

12. Gaige

13. Fiona

14. Fiona

15. Fiona

16. Sasha

17. Fiona

18. Sasha

19. Sasha

20. Sasha

21. Gaige

22. Sasha

23. Fiona

24. Fiona

25. Sasha

26. Fiona

27. Fiona

28. Gaige

29. Fiona,

30. Fiona

31. Sasha

32. Fiona

33. Deathtrap

34. Fiona

35. Fiona

36. Fiona

37. Gaige

38. Fiona

39. Fiona

40. Fiona

41. Gaige

42. Fiona

43. Fiona

44. Fiona

45. Fiona

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

LEAVE US A REVIEW

We hope you enjoy this book – if you did we would really appreciate it if you can write a short review. Your ratings really make a difference for the authors, helping the books you love reach more people.

You can rate this book, or leave a short review here:

Amazon.com,

Amazon.co.uk,

Goodreads,

Barnes & Noble,

Waterstones,

or your preferred retailer.

BORDERLANDS®: DEBT OR ALIVE

Print edition ISBN: 9781803363530

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803363639

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: June 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2024 Gearbox. Gearbox and Borderlands, and the Gearbox and Borderlands logos, are registered trademarks, and Gearbox Entertainment is a trademark, of Gearbox. Published and distributed by 2K. 2K, the 2K logo, and Take-Two Interactive are trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Dedicated to my spouse Lauren.

PROLOGUE

It was a bright sunny day on Pandora and Fiona was about to get her face blasted in.

“Hold on,” the young girl said into the rusted barrel of a Jakobs revolver. “You just had some lint. In your pants pocket.”

The man at the other end of the pistol squinted at her with his one remaining eye. The other, a cyber-prosthetic, whirred and extended toward her face in curiosity. His grip on the gun was solid and unwavering.

“And you decided to take my wallet with it?” he asked.

Fiona shrugged. “Big piece of lint.”

“How old are you?” he asked in an accent as smooth as Pandora was rough.

“How should I know? Leggo my wrist,” she complained, struggling against his viselike grip.

“You don’t know how old you are? So, no family, then.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

Fiona’s eyes flicked involuntarily over his shoulder to the pipsqueak perched on a nearby rooftop, awkwardly clutching a sniper rifle as big as her body.

Sasha thrust a thumb into the air. She had a shot. A single nod from Fiona and the One-Eyed Man would turn into (depending on Sasha’s aim) the No-Eyed Man, the Two-Eyed Man, or Still The One-Eyed Man But With A Sucking Chest Wound.

The man’s expression changed from mild amusement to genuine interest. He let go of Fiona’s wrist, grabbed her by the scruff of her shirt, and whirled, hauling her up into the air and directly into Sasha’s line of fire.

“Please tell your friend with the rifle to hold her trigger finger, unless she wishes to have one less…” He squinted at Fiona’s face, then at the shocked sniper on the rooftop behind her. The orange rays from the Pandoran sun glinted off her scope. Even at distance, and even bathed in the evening light, the familial resemblance was obvious. “…sister?” he ventured.

Fiona nodded, her feet dangling uselessly above the ground. “Good guess. So, what now? We stay like this until your arm gets tired?”

“Perhaps. Answer me this, though. There are many fine marks in this bazaar. Why rob me?”

Fiona tried to shrug casually—not an easy thing to do when being held aloft by your neck at the wrong end of both a sniper rifle and a revolver.

“Your clothes are the closest thing to clean I’ve seen in a month. Some people, you rob ’em and they’re ruined for life. You? You look like you could survive a little pickpocketing.”

The man scowled and shook his head. “Terrible reason. Try again.”

Fiona frowned. “You looked rich. Might have something worth selling.”

“Getting warmer. Try again.”

“Because we’re hungry.”

“And you’d do anything to fill your bellies, would you? Even rob a one-eyed man?”

“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘rob.’ I didn’t mean to offend—”

The man cocked the revolver with a chunky click. “Be honest, now,” he said. “With yourself as much as me. Why did you choose to rob me?”

Fiona stared into the man’s eye and tried not to think of a very large, gold filigreed bullet entering her face. Tried not to think of what Sasha would do without her.

“Because your peripheral vision sucks. Because you walk with a limp and would have a hard time chasing me down. Because you smiled at the waterseller and nobody smiles on Pandora except for idiots and conmen.”

The man held her gaze for a moment, then nodded.

“Tell your sister to leave the gun and come down,” he said, holstering his gun. “We’ve got a lot to discuss.”

“I’m not going to a second location with you.”

“I’m not going to murder you, you idiot.”

Fiona, after briefly flirting with the idea of signaling Sasha to blast the guy apart anyway, waved her sister off, then beckoned her to join them.

“Your instincts are good,” the man said, setting her back down on the dry Pandoran dirt. “But your execution is terrible. A man with one eye has sharper hearing than a man with two. You should have made more noise to mask your approach, not less. And if my clean clothes and winning smile make me look like a fool, well… then I suppose they’re doing their job, aren’t they?”

Sasha approached the man from his front. She walked with her hands clasped behind her back, which was about as subtle as a T-shirt reading, I HAVE A GUN TUCKED INTO MY WAISTBAND AND WANT TO BE ABLE TO ACCESS IT QUICKLY.

“Take the gun out if you want,” the man said. “You’re not going to need it. Let’s walk.”

Sasha did. The small Tediore pistol looked massive in her hands. Her arms shook with the strength required to keep the weapon up, but she bit her lip and struggled to keep it level anyway.

As the three of them stepped away from the waterseller’s stall, the man smiled again. Fiona typically wanted to put her fist through smiling faces, but there was something warm about the way the man’s eyes crinkled. Something that, on any other planet, Fiona might have mistaken for authenticity.

“I’ll admit, I look like an easy mark. That’s the point. If you’re going to be a proper villain, though, you’ll need to see past the obvious. The bulge in my hip pocket should have told you ‘personalized shield,’ which should have told you ‘prepared.’ And after I caught you pickpocketing me, you—much like the unfortunate proprietor of that water stand—should have been watching the hand without the gun in it.” He pulled a thin metal tube from his pants. A blue snowflake emblazoned on its side.

“Cryo-tubes typically go for a few thousand bucks at your typical waterseller’s stand. But if your fingers are quick enough, and you’ve got a distraction—like, say, a young girl and her sister trying to rob you in broad daylight—you can get one for the low, low price of free.”

Fiona and Sasha tried to look unimpressed. Neither had seen him pocket the cryo-tube from the waterseller, and Fiona had been inches from him while he’d done it.

“Now, I’m going to go sell this to a ’nadesmith. As you assisted with the theft, I’ll cut you in to the tune of one percent.”

“Ten,” Sasha yelled, trying and failing to raise her gun menacingly.

“Two,” the man calmly replied.

“We’ll take it,” Fiona said, signaling Sasha to fall silent. “But the next job we split fifty-fifty.”

“The next job? Presumptuous of you.”

Fiona put her hands on her hips. “No thief worth their skagspit works alone. I had your cashpurse out of your pocket before you caught me. So, we’ll work with you.”

“Fi,” Sasha whispered. “You sure about this? He could be a… a serial killer. A pervert, or something. He’s got a mustache.”

“What’s wrong with my mustache?”

“What’s right with it?” Sasha countered.

Fiona waved her hand. “If he tries anything on me, you shoot him. If he tries anything on you, I’ll shoot him. Sound fair?”

Sasha sighed.

The man crossed his arms. Leaned against a rusted road sign. The girls tried their best to act like they didn’t care if he accepted their deal or not.

“Never had apprentices,” he said.

“You still don’t. We’re partners.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Whatever you say, child. But if we’re going to work together, you need to know: That was the wrong answer you gave me, back there.”

“How so?”

The man knelt before Fiona. She heard his cyber-prosthetic whirr as it once again focused on her. “You don’t rob somebody because they look like an easy mark. You don’t rob somebody ’cause they look like they can take it.”

He thrust his pistol into her hands.

“You rob somebody because fuck ’em. There’s only one rule to surviving on this planet, or any other: You always look out for number one. Doesn’t matter what you have to do. Doesn’t matter who you have to hurt. You take care of yourself. And…?”

He gestured at the smaller of the two girls, the unspoken question still on his lips. They’d nearly blown each other apart, but they didn’t know one another’s names yet.

The older girl hooked a thumb at her younger sister. “Sasha. And I’m Fiona.”

“Nice to meet you,” the man said. “I’m Felix. And anybody who isn’t us can go straight to hell.”

Many years later…

1SASHA

Sasha died.

She and her sister were speeding through the innards of a large ancient alien Guardian in their jet-fueled caravan.1 The Guardian protected a Vault—an alien cache of immeasurable wealth.

Sasha and Fiona were fans of immeasurable wealth, and so they’d decided to blow up the Guardian. They’d planted a hilariously powerful bomb inside the creature’s teleportation gland and were boosting their way out of the monster’s body when everything went wrong.

“Fiona, what’s your status?” a panicked voice barked through Fiona’s earpiece. The voice belonged to Rhys, a former executive who had helped Sasha and Fiona track down this Vault over the course of a few years with just as many betrayals. Rhys had wanted to buy a Vault Key. Sasha and Fiona tried to con him into buying a fake one. After that, several interested parties tried to kill all of them, which led directly to the trio becoming friends.

Sasha and Rhys had developed feelings for each other, much to Fiona’s consternation. Sasha had never asked Fiona why she objected so much to the pairing, but it wasn’t much of a secret: Sasha was intelligent and dependable, and Rhys once gave himself a papercut opening a box of cookies.

Sasha had initially felt that Rhys had half a brain cell on a good day, and about as much dependability as an outrider with a faulty brake line. Through their adventures together, however, and through seeing the lengths he’d go to protect his friends, those feelings had shifted.

“The charges are set,” Fiona radioed to their allies outside.

Fiona weighed the detonator in her hand as Sasha watched in anticipation. Years of chasing leads and dodging bullets had all led to this. She clicked the detonator.

Nothing happened.

“Uhh, no,” she said. “Shit. We’re out of range. We’re out of range! We have to stop.”

Sasha shook her head as the caravan vibrated with speed around them. “We can’t! The boost is going! We can’t shut it off mid-burn.” Sasha snatched the detonator from her sister’s hand and gave it another click. Maybe, she thought, she just didn’t press the button hard enough. Then she remembered Fiona had just spent the last half-hour dodging bullets and killing alien robots. Maybe Fiona deserved a little more credit.

“Dammit!” Sasha shouted at the lack of an explosion which followed.

“Fi,” Rhys yelped over the radio. “We’re commencing our attack!”

At that moment, Rhys and a handful of Sasha’s other allies were strapped into the cockpit of a bipedal mecha, preparing to pound the Vault Guardian into submission once the sisters destroyed its ability to teleport.2

“Are you almost out?” he asked. “Fiona? Come in!”

Fiona floundered, hurriedly trying to come up with a plan. Something about how the detonator was too far away from the bomb, that they’d have to wait for the boost to finish, then turn around and try the detonator again.

It was a bad plan, and Sasha knew it. Everyone would be dead by the time they could so much as turn the caravan around.

As Fiona struggled for a solution—Fiona always had a solution—Sasha crept to the caravan door. She yanked it open.

The sisters had saved one another’s lives countless times. They never talked about it, but each of them privately kept a tally of who had saved their sister on more occasions. Today, Sasha was ready to come out on top. For good.

“Fiona,” Sasha said, the wind nearly drowning out her voice. “It’s okay.”

Sasha winked.

Smiled.

Threw herself from the caravan.

She tumbled backward, deeper into the heart of the Vault Guardian, every bump and bruise bringing her closer into range of the charges. Sasha hammered on the detonator’s trigger over and over, panicking with every uneventful click.

The vehicle that had once been Sasha’s home continued its uninterruptible burn, boosting Fiona safely out of the beast.

Sasha’s last thought before the detonator fired was one of smug satisfaction. Fiona is safe, and she’ll be so pissed at me.

Minutes later, the fight was over. The Vault creature was dead, its teleportation gland detonated along with Sasha and its head cut from its shoulders by an oversized beam katana.3

*   *   *

Rhys found Sasha among the wreckage, his typical panic mixed with a heartbreak that almost made Fiona regret trying to keep them separated for as long as she had.

“Hey Sis,” Sasha groaned through wet, broken breaths. She reached out for her gun as if it were a stuffed animal, something comforting to hold onto as she died. “The Desolator,” she said, wrapping her fingers around its grip. “Not really my style, but it’s a great backup weapon.”

She loved the loot. The adventure. The danger. And she saw the conclusion in Fiona’s eyes: Fiona blamed herself for this. Her big sister had failed somehow, as if this hadn’t been Sasha’s choice in the first place.

Fiona and Rhys tried to lift Sasha up. She screamed a scream that made Fiona look more heartbroken and terrified than Sasha had ever seen her.

Sasha asked for the gift Felix had left behind for her before he disappeared. A pocket watch with the words TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS etched into its back.

Rhys sobbed so loud Sasha couldn’t think. He bent over Sasha and poked at his eye as if trying to pick a stray hair out of it. “What are you doing?” Sasha asked.

“There’s all those stories,” he cried, “where someone’s tears heal people. I really feel like that’s a thing.” Dumb as a rock, but he had a big heart. Had to give him that.

“This isn’t one of those stories,” Sasha said.

Then she died, cradling the watch in her hands.

*   *   *

The pocket watch glowed an ethereal green. The atmosphere of grief transformed into one of confusion as the watch floated into the air. It emitted a cone of green energy, bathing Sasha in soft light and pulling her from the ground. The watch hauled her limp body upward, suspending her within the flood of unnatural jade light.

“Sasha?” Fiona whispered, as much out of surprise as anything else.

Sasha’s body continued to rise upward, pulled by the otherworldly power of the watch. Bright green beams of energy played up and down Sasha’s lifeless form. They scoured her body, tracing every broken bone, analyzing every internal rupture.

And then Sasha came back to life.

With a gasp, her back arched and her eyes flicked open. She looked around, disoriented but serene.

“I guess Felix did…” she said, unable to finish the sentence as the beams of green light unceremoniously shut off and sent her plummeting back down to the ground.

“Ow,” said the no-longer-dead Sasha.

She and her sister embraced, and laughed, and Fiona was furious at her. Sasha couldn’t exactly blame Fiona; if their places had been switched, Sasha would have never forgiven Fiona for dying and coming back to life so casually.

Still, after relief blasted away their grief, the sisters put the tragedy out of their minds. There were more important things to be done.

They had riches to collect.

2FIONA

I was standing in a Vault.

Hot damn.

Not even an hour ago, I was mourning my sister. Now, I stood within an alien cache of riches and power—typically, the kind of thing opened only by entire armies or superhuman killing machines we call “Vault Hunters” because that nickname rolls off the tongue better than “Gun-Hungry Mass Murderers Who Sometimes, Even If Only By Accident, Do Heroic Things.”

But there was no army here. No Vault Hunters.4 Just me and Rhys.

Me, the Pandoran con artist with a sharp hat and an even sharper sister.

Him, the corporate stooge who wanted to climb the corporate ladder and ended up blowing the ladder to smithereens.

And now we were standing in a Vault.

Hot damn.

Our voices echoed through the cavernous chamber of the Eridians, veins of purple energy running through cold alien rocks. We stood before a stone chest that glowed violet and hummed with otherworldly energy.

The end of our journey.

Our reward.

Sasha and the others were outside, filling their pockets with cash and weaponry. Hunting big-ass Vault monsters can be good business if you’ve got a good team. As teams go, we were better than most. But we hadn’t gotten here without losing people. People more valuable than—

“Would you like to do the honors?” Rhys asked, cutting off my thoughts. Rhys and I hadn’t always gotten along. Partially because he’d screwed me over on more than one occasion, but mostly because he was a big dumb idiot.

If there was one thing this planet-crossing, gun-shooting, sister-almost-dying adventure had taught me, though, it was this: Judge slowly.

“It’s the last one,” I said, thinking of the half-dozen Vault clues we’d followed and several dozen corpses we’d created to get to this very moment. “It’s only right we both open it. It’s the best part.”

Rhys nodded, an exhausted smile threatening to appear on his lips. “Was kinda hoping you’d say that.”

The alien treasure chest sat before us. Mysterious. Inscrutable.

Most stories of Vault treasure-hunting don’t end particularly well. Best-case scenario, you get a handful of guns. Worst case, nobody ever sees you again.5 But we hadn’t come this far just to leave our quarry unopened.

Rhys and I put our hands on the warm lid of the chest. We pushed.

The chest slid open with an ethereal hiss, unfolding and retracting along the veins of Eridian magic etched into its surface. A bright purple light shot from the innards of the box, completely overwhelming my senses. I could hear the light. I could taste it.

Everything went white.

Ah, I thought. So it’s a bomb. An alien bomb just exploded and killed us all. If this is the afterlife, I’ll be sure to apologize to Sasha at my earliest convenience.

Then I heard a sound that convinced me I couldn’t possibly be in heaven: Rhys’s voice.

“Uh, the Atlas Corporation, I guess?” he said, pulling out a legalese-riddled piece of paper. “I got the rights, but they’re not, uh, signed. Or legal in any way. And I’m still poor.”

My vision cleared. I stood within an infinitely large, infinitely purple void. A pinprick in the distance gesticulated much like Rhys would. As the pinprick spoke, I could hear its voice as if Rhys were right next to me.

“I mean, I just want to build something of my own, you know? Blaze my own trail. Stop following false idols. Maybe restarting Atlas could help me do that? Unless… Oh god, unless that’s a trick question. Like, if seeking power is bad and you’re gonna, like, turn me into a big monster, like an ironic twist thing. In that case, I wish for, uhhhhhh—”

Rhys cut himself off, as if interrupted.

“Oh! No ironic twist? That’s great. Super. Glad to hear it. So, uh, yeah, I guess the ownership of the Atlas Corporation and all its trademarks and—”

Pop. A chest appeared at Rhys’s feet.

“Oh! So, these are the documents? That’s gr—”

He disappeared.

For a horrible moment, I thought that was it. Rhys was off, free to rebuild gun corporations and hit on my sister while I languished in this royal-colored void for the rest of eternity. Stuck in one spot. Alone. For ever.

Then something worse happened.

“Hellooooooooooo, traveler,” said a voice that sounded like someone had inhaled a lungful of helium and then gargled rusty nails.

I turned and, to my endless disappointment, saw a CL4P-TP robot wheeling toward me. A steward-class automaton whose designers confused “friendly” with “deeply annoying” when programming its personality.

“Be not afraid,” it said. “I am not a Claptrap. This is merely a form I have chosen to make you more comfortable.”

“If you want to make me comfortable, be literally anything else,” I said.

The Claptrap narrowed its eye. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Go for it.”

“Fine. Then I will speak to you with the First Voice. Prepare thyself.”

The Claptrap disappeared in a blink.

HOW ABOUT THIS? a voice asked from around me and inside me. HOW DOES THIS FEEL?

Every syllable punched me in the heart with a spiked iron gauntlet. My bones vibrated in fresh agony with every word. My nerve endings burned with infernal pain. My skin felt as if it would melt off my skeleton. Worse than that, I gained a true sense of my place in the universe. I was small. I was mortal. In a hundred years, no one would remember my name. My life—indeed, all lives—boiled down to a series of alternating joys and tragedies culminating in absolute oblivion. The only variable of note was whether my loved ones would die before me or I before them. Life was nothing more than the space between the parentheses of nonexistence. I was, and would forever remain, utterly meaningless.

“Yeah, this is better than the Claptrap,” I said.

COOL, the voice said. SO, WHAT DO YOU WANT?

“What do I…? It’s that simple?”

YES. ONE WISH.

“Oh, okay. I’d heard Vaults were a little more complicated than that.”

ALL VAULTS ARE DIFFERENT. EXCEPT THE ONES THAT ARE NOT.

“Great. And who am I talking to, exactly?”

THE VOICE OF THE SERAPHIM, SPEAKING TO YOU IN A LANGUAGE AND STYLE YOU WILL UNDERSTAND.

“And you’re, what? An Eridian? One of the aliens that built these Vaults?”

NO. I’M LIKE… YOU KNOW THE GUARDIANS? THOSE CONSTRUCT-ROBOT THINGS YOU FOUGHT ON THE WAY IN HERE?

“Yeah.”

I’M LIKE ONE OF THOSE, BUT BETTER. ALSO, WHAT ARE WE…? WHY DO YOU CARE? YOU’VE GOT A FREE WISH AND YOU’RE DRILLING FOR LORE? FOCUS UP. GET YOUR LIFE TOGETHER.

What did I want? An hour ago, I’d wanted only one thing: for my sister to be alive again.

Then I’d gotten my wish. At that moment, everything else felt small, irrelevant. Minutes ago, my sister was dead. Now she was alive again. The relief I’d felt when she’d opened her eyes… That was, in its own way, the biggest reward I could ever receive.

I mean, sort of. I still wanted money.

I sighed. “Man, I wish Sasha were here. She’d know what to ask for.”

IT IS DONE.

A gust of wind nearly blew my hat from my head as my sister popped into the empty space next to me. Her skagtooth earrings rattled in her ears, and her hairband had come loose in the teleport. Less than an hour since she’d died, and now she was being blipped from one place to another without her consent. She yelped in shock, then shrugged and pulled her hair back into a bun. I was surprised she didn’t look more rattled, but that was Sasha all over—she’d learned to live with sudden, unpleasant change. Tragedies that would have reduced others to a gibbering, sobbing mess often elicited little more than a shrug from my little sister.

“Wuh,” Sasha said as she appeared into existence next to me. “Where are…? What’s…?”

YOUR WISH IS GRANTED. FAREWELL.

“Ah,” Sasha said, snapping her fingers. “Vault. Wish-granting thing. Got it.”

The purple void around Sasha and me began to fade away. Beyond it, I could see the Pandoran desert from whence we’d come.

“What? No! That wasn’t my wish! Come on!”

YOU SAID, “I WISH.”

“It’s a figure of speech!”

YOU ARE A FIGURE OF SPEECH.

“Shut up. You haven’t been waiting thousands of years just to grant a stupid technicality wish, have you?”

NO. I AM MESSING WITH YOU.

The void resolidified around us.

“Ugh. Dick.”

Sasha put her hand on my shoulder. Her knees wobbled. “Fiona… the voice… it hurts.”

OH, RIGHT, SORRY.

A Claptrap poofed into view in front of us.

“Hellooooooooooo, traveler! This is my alternate means of communication! I am just as capable—”

“Never mind,” Sasha said, waving her hand. “Go back.”

FINE. NOW, IF YOU COULD QUICKLY DECIDE ON A WISH, I WOULD APPRECIATE IT.

Sasha pulled me into an embrace. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just need to choose a perfect wish.”

Sasha blinked. “Infinite guns? Is that allowed? Can we…” She turned away from me to address the void. “Can we wish for infinite stuff?”

PROBABLY NOT.

Sasha snapped her fingers in frustration. “Ah. Well. Maybe just, like, a million guns, then? That’d give us a heck of a leg-up on the new Vault Hunter career, right?”

I shook my head. “No. Let’s ask for money.”

Sasha frowned. “What’s going on? I thought you were beginning to like Vault hunting.”

She was right, of course. Our quest to find the Vault of the Traveler had awakened something in me: a sense of purpose. A sense that, after years of conning and scrimping and scraping and hating damn near every second of it, I’d finally found it: that magic three-way intersection of something I was good at, something I enjoyed doing, and something that paid well.

Older siblings have only one job, and I had failed at it. I’d pushed it out of my head in my excitement to step into the Vault. But now that I was here, it hit me just how close I’d come to losing the one thing that mattered most. Vault Hunters were known—apart from their tremendous body counts—for overthrowing dictatorships and vanquishing villains. Exciting stuff. Dangerous stuff. On occasion, selfless, heroic stuff.

But I remembered one of the first things Felix ever taught us: To hell with everybody that isn’t us.

“We’re not Vault hunting,” I said.

“But we’re literally—”

“That’s final.”

Sasha narrowed her eyes. It wasn’t often I pulled rank as the big sister. When I did, she knew I damn well meant it.

“If you say so,” she said, trying to hide her frustration.

I raised my voice to address the Eridian intelligence. “We’d like as much money as you can give us, wired directly into our cash accounts.”

I CAN’T DO THAT, it replied.

Sasha cocked her head. “Uh. Why?”

I CREATE PHYSICAL THINGS. I COULD GIVE YOU A BILLION DOLLARS IN CASH.

“Bah,” Sasha said, waving her hand dismissively. “Way too heavy. You can’t write us a check?”

GREAT IDEA. A CHECK. FROM A BANK ACCOUNT.

“Okay,” Sasha said. “I get it—”

A BANK ACCOUNT THAT I, AN ALIEN INTELLIGENCE, POSSESS—

“—I said I get it.”

“Give us something we can sell,” I said. “Something small. And light.”

Sasha clapped. “Yes! Okay, good idea. Something we can easily transport, but that doesn’t scream, ‘Hey, kill me and take this off my corpse.’ Something like… Ah! I’ve got it!”

Her eyes lit up with joy. She had a look on her face I hadn’t seen since we were kids.6

“Is it okay if I make the wish?”

I nodded. She gave me a quick hug and then turned to face the endless abyss of nothingness before us.

“I’m ready,” she said.

HIT ME.

“We wish for… a mint-condition, first-edition Typhon DeLeon Vaultlander™ figurine.”

WEIRD.

Silence enveloped us as the alien supercomputer considered the request.

YEAH, OKAY.

With a hiss and a pop, a small box digistructed before Sasha’s feet. Its transparent front showed off a plastic sculpture of Typhon DeLeon, diminutive Vault Hunter, a shockwhip firmly grasped in its poseable hand.

NOW GET GOING, the voice rumbled. The void around us faded away as we were thrust back into the dry heat of the Pandoran desert. The dry expanse was silent save for the buzzing of biteflies that hovered around a desiccated spiderant corpse. The moon crawled over the horizon as night fell and a chill seeped into our bones.

DON’T COME BACK.

*   *   *

Before I knew it, we were back in the Badlands. No purple void. No alien supercomputer. Rhys, Vaughn, and the others who had helped us open the Vault chatted animatedly in the distance. Rhys showed off a certificate emblazoned with the Atlas Munitions logo and his name written on the bottom. He’d gotten what he’d always wanted: he was the head of a major corporation.

As for Sasha and me, our wish had been granted. And that wish had a big yellow sticker on the front reading, “push my tummy to hear my catchphrase!”

I held the box in my hand and could not stifle my sigh. “Did you just waste our wish on a toy?”

“Toy? Yes. Waste? No. Allow me to explain,” Sasha said, holding the thin cardboard box in the air like a religious icon. “Though the Vaultlander™ series of games, comic books, and action figures has yet to make a splash on Pandora, the shared Vaultlander™ Transmedia Universe7 has taken the rest of the galaxy by storm. These toys, based on the exploits of the galaxy’s most famous Vault Hunters and villains, are priceless to the right collector. Especially—” She waggled the box for emphasis. “—if said Vaultlander™ has been out of print for the last twenty years.”

She pushed the action figure’s tummy. “Lotta money in turds,” it chirped.

“Where is all this coming from?” I asked. “You’ve never shown an interest in this garbage before.”

“I accidentally brushed my hand against Rhys’s arm and he got so nervous he wouldn’t stop talking about these things for twenty minutes.”

“So, you wanna sell this thing to Rhys?”

“What? No. We can do better.”

“Yes! That’s what I keep telling you!”

“No, not… Don’t be such a mom. He’s a nice guy. No, I know exactly where to find a buyer who will drop so much cash for this thing—”

“—we’ll never have to work another day in our lives,” I finished. “This could be our last big job.”

“I dunno about that,” Sasha said, cocking an eyebrow, “but still—payday. We’ll be safe behind turret-gun walls, eating food with a lower than average amount of fecal matter in it. And our journey to sell it—it’ll be, like, our last adventure. A last hurrah. The last big job before retirement.”

She shook the doll again. Its stupid big head rattled inside its stupid cardboard box.

“This is stupid, right?” I said.

“Yes. And it’s going to make us stupid rich.”

This was what all the blood, sweat, and tears8 had been for? A big payday from some toy-collecting nerd? I didn’t know what I envisioned for my and Sasha’s future, but I imagined more drama.

But drama gets people killed. So, hell with it—it was time to retire. Forget the Vault-hunting business. I was now in the Vault Hunter Collectible Whatever Toy Nerd Thing business.

“Fine. Let’s say our farewells. I think I’ve got just enough hard cash left to buy us a couple off-planet shuttle tickets to… Where are we going, exactly?”

Sasha smiled. “I am so very glad you asked.”

3FIONA

Eden-5 smelled like money. You could taste it in the air the instant our shuttle punched through the atmosphere. We’d journeyed from the old-ham-and-violence smell of Pandora to the sour, metallic recycled air of the transplanetary shuttle. We’d just come out of hyperspeed above Eden-5 and were breaking atmosphere. The planet’s breathable air vented into the shuttle and I felt my muscles involuntarily relax. It smelled like the entire planet had jumped out of a warm perfumed dryer directly into a patch of freshly cut grass.

Looking around the shuttle, most of the faces looked like ours: dirty. According to Sasha, Eden-5 flew in most of its labor force from offworld. No doubt most of our fellow passengers were destined for lives of service.

“Oh shit,” Sasha said, slightly too loudly. “Look.”

The capital city was a shotgun blast of skyscrapers, bright lights twinkling from the buckshot wounds. A thousand towers of commerce and wealth all packed so close together you couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. The city sat in the middle of an intricate web of glowing veins—power cables, all designed to siphon energy from one part of the planet and redirect it to this shrine of plastic and steel.

Near the capital city, separated by a small band of desert, sat a smaller town. Compared to the grandeur of the capital city, it looked like a pimple on the surface of the planet, just waiting for someone to pop it. Its few buildings glowed weakly with sick flickering lights.

Next to me, Sasha hugged the Vaultlander box close to her chest, as if afraid it’d leap from her arms. She kept taking it from her shoulder satchel to check that it still existed. She tapped the box. “Think they’ll ever make one for us?” she asked.

I frowned. “A Vaultlander? Doubtful.”

“I’ll commission one for you. Once we sell this thing, I’ll get you a posable Fiona made out of solid gold.”

“I don’t want—”

“Her hat will be made out of one big-ass diamond. And if you press the button on her back, she’ll say, ‘Sasha, stop it!’”

“Yeah, never mind.”

“Why are you being such a bummer? You’re about to be as rich as Handsome Jack, except alive and not a weird pervert.”

The shuttle began its final descent to the planet below. We weaved nauseatingly between skyscrapers as we corkscrewed down to the surface.

“I just… wanted to apologize.”

“For what?”

“For… what happened to you. The part where you died.”

Sasha put the doll back in her satchel. Sincerity often caught her off guard. Especially when it came from me. She turned away from the aisle to face me.

“Why would you apologize for that? We had to set the bomb off. I had the detonator. It was my choice.”

“You shouldn’t have had to make it. It’s my job to—”

“Oh, stop flattering yourself. Just because you’re older doesn’t make you—”

“It’s my job to keep you safe,” I said, too loudly.

“Hey. You’re doing a pretty good job of it. How long’s it been since someone shoved a gun in our faces?”

“Ah,” I said. I’d intended to say, “About twenty-six hours, give or take, unless you count the autoguns at Marcus’s store when we sold him the Desolator.” But instead, I said, “Ah.”

Because someone had just shoved a gun in my face.

“Gimme that box,” rasped a voice that smelled of stale skag jerky. He stood in the aisle, a rusty Maliwan pistol clutched between his crusty fingers. He rested his gun hand on Sasha’s shoulder. I couldn’t tell which looked greasier and more worn out, his face or his pistol. The latter looked like it might explode if he tried to pull the trigger. He knew it. I knew it. Judging from the look on Sasha’s face, she knew it too.

“In the future,” he said, “you might wanna lower your voice when talking about your valuables. Give it here.”

If the expression on Sasha’s face could be used as a weapon, the mugger would have exploded into a thousand meaty chunks right then and there.

Sasha raised the box above her head. The idiotic face of Typhon DeLeon stared back at me as Jerkybreath tucked the doll under his arm.

“Lovely,” he said. “Obviously, don’t follow me.”

He backed up toward the shuttle door, making sure to keep the gun trained on me even as he pushed past an alarmed shuttle attendant.

The shuttle shuddered to a stop, the harness signs clicking off as the retroboosters finished firing. The shuttle door opened and, gun still trained on us, the mugger disappeared into the procession of passengers as they filed outside.

We jumped to our feet. I flicked my wrist, sending the pistol concealed up my sleeve into my palm. It was a little thing and held only a single shot, so I’d have to make it count.

Sasha and I pushed our way through the crowd and out the shuttle. I scanned the throng of raggedy passengers all ambling their way toward the security checkpoint, but other than the human-sized floating-torso robots that guarded the spaceport exit, I couldn’t see anything.

“Sasha,” I called out. “Eyes on him?”

We saw it at the same time. A particularly greasy, panicked face looking back at us through the crowd as he shoved past a handful of travelers. The toy under his arm.

“There!” Sasha yelled, and dove into the crowd. Others might have had a hard time slinking their way around the mass of people, but Sasha, small as she was, was used to sliding around those who refused to move no matter how much of a hurry she appeared to be in.

I didn’t bother with that if I didn’t have to.

“Hi, sorry, outta my way,” I yelled, elbowing people left and right.9 After a few near-collisions, the travelers in front of me cleared a path. I saw him. I had a shot.

“Hold it!” I yelled.

He did not, in fact, hold it.

He whirled, raising his gun, which shot a bolt of elemental fire toward me that almost sizzled my ear. That’s one of the better parts of your body to be almost sizzled, but still not ideal in an objective sense.

The travelers dropped to the ground around us. The thief sprinted toward the checkpoint, firing blindly over his shoulder.

I raised the gun. Took my time aiming, even as he stopped in front of the secbot at the checkpoint gate. He produced a bright yellow work permit from his coat and started saying something I couldn’t make out.

Only later would I wonder: why the hell weren’t they doing anything? A crazed, greasy boy firing wildly at a crowd—surely that should count as a security issue?

As I said, though, I only thought about that later. At that moment, I thought what I always do when I’m about to fire:

Breathe in.

Hold.

Bang.

The thief’s ankle exploded.

He screamed in pain as he fell to the ground mere inches from the checkpoint. A chorus of other screams around us joined his own. At first, I thought the people around us were being attacked as well. It was only after glancing around at their horrified faces and pointing figures that I understood our fellow passengers were not as used to the sight of protruding bone and spurting blood as Sasha and I were.

We ran toward his prone form at full speed—until one of the enormous secbots dropped in front of us, mammoth arms outstretched.

“NO CUTTING IN LINE.”

It was even more massive up close. A floating metal torso with two bulky arms, each supporting a fist with sharpened digiclaws protruding from its knuckles. In lieu of a skull, a box atop the torso contained a single menacing light that changed color as it scanned us.

“But he cut in line!” Sasha shouted.

“NO TATTLING IN LINE.”

Over the secbot’s shoulder, I watched as the bleeding thief pulled himself toward the metal detector. He tossed his gun aside, to absolutely zero reaction from the secbots. He again raised his work permit.

“Just scan the work pass. Let me in. I’m good to go.”

“SCANNING,” the secbot intoned.

“He’s got our property!” I protested. “He’s a thief!”

The secbot before us leaned in. Its eye flashed crimson.

“IF THAT IS TRUE, YOU HAVE LITTLE TO WORRY ABOUT.”

The bot nearest the thief nodded. “WORK PERMIT ACCEPTED. PROCEED.”

The thief, still crawling on his belly, turned back to give us a final shit-eating grin. He hauled himself through the metal detector. It emitted a shrieking beep the moment he was halfway to the other side.

“ERROR. UNDECLARED GOODS DETECTED.”

Red lights flashed over the security checkpoint. Two more bots swarmed the thief, encircling him.

“IDENTIFY,” one droned, ripping the Vaultlander from his arms.

“It’s a toy. For my kid.”

One of the other bots pulled him up by the scruff of his neck. “YOU DID NOT DECLARE IT WHEN DEPARTING FROM YOUR ORIGINAL DESTINATION.”

“I bought it from a friend on the shuttle ride over.”

“SMUGGLING WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it smuggling,” he said.

Or at least, that’s what I assume he would have said. As it stood, one of the secbots decapitated him by the time he’d got out “I d—”

A single swipe of the robot’s digiclaw sent the thief’s greasy gourd flying toward us. A ribbon of blood twirled and spun through the air like someone writing cursive with viscera. His head landed at my feet, the wet splat of its impact speckling my boots with his blood.

A new set of screams joined the chorus from before: two younger, high-pitched voices with more agony than shock in their howling.

Beyond the checkpoint, two children ran toward the headless form of the thief. One was the cutest child I had ever seen in my entire life. The other was fine.

I don’t generally find kids very cute. They’re like adults who can’t talk to you about books, which is fine, but I’ve never seen a kid and had an emotion stronger than “I hope it doesn’t wipe its hands on me.”

Until I saw this first kid.

I wanted to squeeze his little rosy cheeks until his big eyes popped out of his skull. I wanted to tousle his hair until the friction turned him completely bald. I wanted to grab his little belly and throw him into a wall with all my strength. I wanted to feed him marshmallows until he popped like an overripe melon. I wanted to grab him by his little turtleneck and hurl him into the sun. Unfortunately, when he cried, he got even more pathetic and cute.

“Daddy!” he wailed. His wet, agonized face turned to the bots. “You killed my daddy!”

Oh. Well, that wasn’t cute. That was sad.

“YOUR VOICE HAS REACHED AN UNACCEPTABLE VOLUME. SILENCE YOURSELF.”

His older sister grabbed him by the arm. “We gotta go, Face,” she said, and yanked him back beyond the checkpoint, even while her adorable brother kept reaching for the remains of his dad.

“ACCORDING TO CUSTOMS FORMS, THIS IS YOURS.”

The bot’s voice broke me out of my horrified reverie, and its owner shoved the Vaultlander into my arms. The cardboard felt heavy and wet in my hands, blood dripping from its edges onto the spaceport’s metal floor.

“Goddammit,” Sasha winced. “That’s going to hurt the resale value. Oh, and you’ve, uh, got some… some goo. On your… everything.”

How many times had I been in this exact situation? Sticky blood on my hands and my clothes. My nostrils filled with the sour-metal stench of human death. I’d grown used to those sensations over time, sure. These days, though, they reminded me of my sister’s unmoving corpse.

With the greasy thief’s greasy blood trickling down my arm, I realized that Sasha was right. Rich people don’t get shot at. Rich people don’t have to wipe bits of other people off their boots. Rich people are safe. Content.

Enough of this getting rich crap. It was time to be rich.

The secbot waved us forward.

“WELCOME TO EDEN-5.”

4FIONA

“Where you headed?”

As is the case with most spaceports, the street surrounding Eden 5’s was filled with bikes and autos and copters looking to take new arrivals wherever they needed to go. Being low on cash, we opted to head for the cheapest-looking ride we could find: a rickshaw bike with an oversized passenger cart and an undersized rider. The bike had flames painted on it. The chauffeur had hair he’d shaped into flames, presumably with the aid of superglue.

The transpo-biker ran a comb through his hair, which had roughly the same effect as trying to shape a tidal wave by blowing at it. He waved us into the rickshaw with a practiced smile.

Sasha checked her ECHO journal. “Uh, the Villa Holloway, please.”

“Elite District, eh? You’re not dressed for cleanin’.”

“We’re not workers. We’re… It doesn’t matter.” Sasha waved off the question.

The driver shrugged and kickstarted the bike. We rode past a large corrugated metal sign with “rustville” painted on it, with an arrow pointing down a filthy firelit alley.

“Little on the nose,” I said.

“First time here?” the biker asked.

“No,” Sasha lied.

Even over the wind rushing past us, I could hear him scoff. “Mm-hmm. Well, then you’ll already know how the capital city’s divvied up, then. Elites live in the east. Them what work for ’em—Rusters—live in the west, down there in Rustville. Not so named ’cause of the poor accommodations, mind you. It was founded by a missionary, name of Jonathan Rust.”

“Really?”

“Nah, I’m playing. It’s called that ’cause everyone’s poor as shit and the buildings are all made outta rusty metal.”

“Ah.”

“You want me to drop you off at Dapper Delilah’s on the border of the rich district? Maybe you can get some clothes that aren’t so… sticky?”

I checked the small wad of cash in my pocket. It was grim. We’d spent nearly every last cent we had getting to Eden-5; the transpo-bike alone would probably tap out the last of our cash. Sasha saw the look on my face.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You’re always more charming when splattered with gore.”

“Who are we meeting again?”

“Countess Cassandra Holloway. She blew up my ECHO practically before I’d finished making the VagueList post.”1011

The Vaultlander poked out of Sasha’s satchel, Typhon DeLeon’s smiling face indifferent to the world around it.

“Should we take it out of the box?” I asked.

Sasha looked at me as if I’d just suggested we buy a puppy and use it as a speed bag.