Fixing Claptrap took most of the morning.
Not because it was complicated. The shot had blown the power coupling and knocked one of his arm servos out of alignment on the way down so not catastrophic. The problem was that his internal layout had clearly been modified several times by several different people who had not consulted each other or any kind of documentation and direction honestly, so every time I found one thing I found two more things attached to it that had no business being there.
"Who did this to you," I said at one point, to nobody in particular.
"MANY PEOPLE!" Claptrap's eye flickered on and off as I worked on the power feed. "EACH ONE LEFT THEIR MARK! I CALL IT PERSONALITY!"
"I call it a fire hazard."
"SAME THING!"
I worked through it methodically. Pulled the blown coupling, separated the damaged contacts back to clean copper, fed a replacement through from what I had on hand [copper ~3g used, copper oxide separated to oxygen and base copper, discarded]. The servo alignment took longer — someone had cross-threaded one of the mounting bolts in a way that suggested either significant haste or incompetence, and Im now leaning towards both.
Lilith sat on a crate a few metres away watching. She had her repeater field-stripped across her knee and was going through it slowly, she didn't needed to, but her hands needed something to do while she thought. I had noticed she did that.
"You do this kind of thing often?" she said after a while.
"Fix things?"
"In general."
"only when I have to." I got the bolt free and started re-seating the servo. "I'm better at it than I was a week ago."
She didn't ask what that meant. just put it away same as everything else.
The inventory upgrade registered on my HUD when I closed the panel and powered the unit back up. Four additional slots. Small but the kind of thing that mattered.
Claptrap ran his status check, which sounded like a blender disputing a parking ticket, and then threw both arms up. "I FEEL RENEWED! I FEEL LIKE A NEW ROBOT WHO IS ALSO THE SAME ROBOT BUT SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER IN EVERY MEASURABLE WAY!"
"Great," I said, packing up.
"YOU ARE MY FAVOURITE PERSON!"
"You said that to Lilith an hour ago."
"I AM SIMPLY BUILT FOR SUCH THINGS."
Lilith reassembled her repeater and stood up. "Zed wanted to talk before we do anything else."
Zed was in his clinic doing something to a set of samples that I chose not to look too closely at. He turned when we came in and wiped his hands on a cloth that didn't visibly improve them.
"Good. Both alive." He leaned on the counter. "Nine-Toes. That's your next job if you want the bounty. Bandit lord running out of Skag Gully about four clicks northeast, been raiding farms and settlements out here for near a year." He paused. "Getting to him isn't simple. He's deep in the gully cave system and you won't find the entrance without knowing where to look."
"So how do we find it?" Lilith said.
"T.K. Baha." Zed pointed south. "Old farmer, blind, runs a place up on the clifftop about a kilometre down the main road then east. Knows this land better than anyone I've met, and I've been here a long time." He picked up the cloth again. "He'll know exactly where Nine-Toes has his hole. Whether he tells you straight away is a different matter — T.K. has his own way of doing things."
"Meaning he'll want something first," I said.
Zed looked at me. "You met him before?"
"No."
"Then how do you — " He stopped, decided it wasn't worth the thread to pull. "Yeah. He'll want something. That's T.K. Just go talk to him. He's prickly but he's straight."
Lilith was already at the door. I followed her out.
The path east out of Fyrestone was well-worn enough that the rocks were mostly kicked to the sides and the worst of the surface had been flattened by years of foot traffic. It branched off the main road after about ten minutes and started climbing, switchbacking up a low clifftop with the valley spreading out below.
I had been talking for a few minutes — giving Lilith some general background on the area, how skags tended to behave in enclosed spaces, things that sounded like observation without being too specific about the source thats when my boot caught the edge of a rock sitting at exactly the wrong angle and I went down.
Not a small stumble but a full trip which sent me over my feet and rolling down the small hill where I lay there for a second with my face upwards staring at the sky.
Lilith had stopped walking.
I looked up. She was looking down at me with an expression that was working to stay neutral and not quite getting there.
"Observant," she said.
"The rock was in a completely unreasonable location."
"There are rocks everywhere on this path."
"This one was specific. Malicious placement."
She reached down and offered a hand. I took it and she pulled me up, and I had been aware intellectually that Sirens had significantly enhanced strength but there was a difference between knowing that and being brought to your feet like you weigh nothing by someone making no visible effort whatsoever.
"You good?" she said.
"Fine." I brushed dirt off my palm. My elbow was going to bruise but nothing was damaged. "It doesn't usually — I don't normally — "
"You blinked off a roof last night," she said. "I'm not judging you for a rock."
"Those are different skill sets."
"Apparently." The corner of her mouth did something brief that she didn't let develop into anything. She turned back up the path. "Come on."
I followed, paying considerably more attention to where my feet were going.
T.K. Baha's farm sat at the top of the clifftop path. A shack repaired many times with whatever had been available, a vegetable garden that had no right being as well-tended as it was this far out, a scarecrow listing badly to one side like it had given up on the integrity portion of its role a long time ago. On the porch, a man who had heard us coming well before we reached the top.
"Two sets of boots," T.K. said, to nobody in particular. He was old and weathered, goggles over blind eyes, a wooden leg propped on the porch rail. A double-barrelled shotgun across his lap pointed in approximately our direction, which I was fairly sure was deliberate. "One moves quiet. One don't."
"Quiet one's the Siren," I said. "The other one is me."
T.K. tilted his head. "Self-aware at least. State your business."
"Zed sent us," Lilith said. "Nine-Toes."
Something in his posture shifted. Not quite relaxing, more like settling into something familiar. "Zed finally sent people worth sending." He pointed the shotgun barrel toward the valley below without moving anything else. "Nine-Toes has been running out of Skag Gully near a year. Got a hole in the deep end of the cave system, can't reach it without going through most of the gully first." He lowered the gun back to his lap. "I'll tell you how to find it. But first you're doing something for me."
"There it is," I said quietly.
Lilith elbowed me in the ribs.
"Skags took my food stores," T.K. continued, either not hearing me or not caring. "Dragged them into the gully, scattered them around their nests. Four caches out there. Bring them back and I'll put you on Nine-Toes' front door." The shotgun shifted slightly in our direction. "And before you get any ideas about arguing with an old blind man holding a shotgun —" He grinned. "You should've seen the look on your face. Blind joke. Got a million of them."
I stared at him. Lilith pinched the bridge of her nose. T.K. laughed to himself for a solid five seconds.
"I like him," I said.
"Don't encourage him," Lilith said.
"I ALSO LIKE ME," T.K. added cheerfully.
We left him on his porch and started back down toward the main road. The bright cycle was well into its hot stretch, the rock on both sides of the path radiating back everything it had stored all morning. The kind of heat that just sat on you.
"Four caches in the gully," Lilith said, thinking out loud. "Skags drag things back to nesting areas."
"Yeah. Should be in the shallower sections before the main bandit presence."
She glanced at me sideways. The look I was starting to recognise — quiet, patient, keeping score. "How do you know where the bandit presence starts?"
"I don't," I said. "I'm estimating. Bandits hold the deep end because it's defensible. Skags hold the shallower parts because bandits don't bother clearing them out. That's just how it tends to work."
She considered that for a moment, deciding whether it was a satisfying answer. It wasn't, and we both knew it, but she let it sit.
"We'll need to resupply before we push into the main section," she said.
"Agreed."
The gully entrance was still a decent walk out. My elbow was definitely going to bruise and the knee I had landed on wasn't thrilled about it either but was managing. Pandora was hot and indifferent and getting on with being Pandora.
Business as usual.