A whisper scraped across gravel. I fumble with the seatbelt. The latch is jammed. I yank. Nothing. Yank harder. My thumbnail bends backward and I hiss through my teeth but I don't stop pulling until the mechanism releases and I tumble sideways into the door.
It won't open. The frame is bent.
I kick it. Once, twice, three times with the heel of my good flats, the ones with the little pearl buttons, the ones I wore because some stupid part of my brain wanted to look nice when I showed up to save a seven-foot Orc mercenary from his own bullheaded death wish.
The door pops open on the fourth kick and I spill out onto hot slag. My palms burn. My knees burn. I'm already scrambling around the front of the van, past the twitching mass of dead crawler, past the spreading pool of ichor that's eating tiny smoking holes in the rock.
"Dash!"
He's on his back. Flat in a shallow crater, arms out wide, covered in blood. Green blood, yellow blood, black slag dust. His shirt is gone. Not torn. Gone. Like the crawler peeled it off him. His left shoulder sits wrong, too low, the joint visibly displaced. Puncture wounds dot his arms and torso, each one weeping dark green.
His eyes are closed.
I drop to my knees beside him. The slag bites through my dress, through my skin, and I grab his face with both hands. His jaw is massive under my palms. Heavy. Warm. The tusk shoving into my right thumb.
"Don't you dare. Don't you dare be dead. I drove four hours through the Slag Wastes in a bakery van with a non functional GPS, Dash. I blew a tire outside the Bone Quarry and changed it myself in a ditch. There was a vulture demon circling me for thirty miles and I threw a rolling pin at it. A rolling pin. My grandmother's marble rolling pin, and it's gone now, in a ditch somewhere in monster territory, and if you are dead I am going to kill you."
One slow, ragged rise as a breath that sounds like rocks grinding together.
His eyes open. Gold and bloodshot and completely unfocused for a long, horrible second before they find my face. His cracked lips part.
"You hit my target."
"I hit your target."
"With a van."
"With my van. My only van. Which is basically totaled, by the way. The engine block is somewhere inside that crawler's thorax."
His gaze drifts past me to the wreckage. Steam still billows. Cake flour tumbles out of the broken cargo door and splits open on the slag, sending up a white mushroom cloud.
His good hand comes up. Finds my wrist. Those massive fingers wrap all the way around and overlap.
"You're not under contract."
"No."
"Then why are you here, Magnolia?"
I don't answer him. Not yet. Not with words, anyway, because my throat is closing and my eyes are burning and I refuse, absolutely refuse, to cry in the Slag Wastes next to a dead rock crawler while covered in yellow monster fluid and powdered sugar.
Instead I stand up.
My knees are bleeding through my dress. My palms are raw. I walk back to the van on legs that shake so badly my ankles wobble in my flats and I rip open the door, which comes off easier than the driver's side because the impact torqued the whole frame clockwise. I reach behind the seat. Past the scattered whisks. Past the box of piping tips that exploded across the footwell. Past the dented KitchenAid bowl I brought as a weapon before I found something better.
The crowbar is cold and heavy in my grip.
Three feet of solid steel. I took it from the tire change kit after the blowout at the Bone Quarry. Kept it on the passenger seat the rest of the drive, one hand on the wheel and one hand on the iron, because that's what you do when you're a five-foot-three baker driving alone through territory that eats people.
I carry it back to him. I stand over his broken, bleeding, stupid body, and I point the crowbar at his chest.
"You want to know why I'm here?"
He tracks the crowbar. Then my face. His hand is still half-raised where it lost its grip on my wrist.
"I'm here because Krug wouldn't tell me where you went."
His expression shifts. Something tightens around his jaw.
