"I went to the tavern first. Your tavern. The one with the troll blood still on the ceiling from the night we met. The barkeep said you left three days ago. Wouldn't say where. So I found Krug."
"Krug doesn't talk to humans."
"Krug doesn't talk to polite humans." I adjust my grip on the crowbar. "I kicked his office door in with a fire extinguisher."
Dash blinks. Slowly.
"He still wouldn't talk, so I told him I'd bake him a lemon drizzle cake if he gave me your coordinates. He drew me a map on the back of a bounty sheet. It was wrong, by the way. The second landmark doesn't exist anymore. Something ate it."
"The basilisk colony."
"Who cares what ate it, Dash. The point is I've been driving in circles through a monster wasteland for six hours because your guild buddy can't draw a map."
He closes his eyes. Opens them. The ghost of something pulls at his mouth, but it dies before it becomes a smile.
"After Krug, I went to the Fang & Fetter. Then the Marrow Exchange. Then that horrible little weapons den underneath the bridge where the goblin with no ears tried to sell me a cursed dagger."
"Rotgut."
"Is that his name? He smells like a compost bin. He told me you took a crawler bounty. Solo. In the Wastes. A solo crawler bounty, Dash. Those things kill teams of four."
He doesn't flinch from the impact. His eyes stay on mine.
"I had to bribe three different monsters for information. I used cupcakes. Lemon lavender cupcakes that I was supposed to deliver to Mrs. Chen's retirement party tomorrow. She's eighty-six years old and she specifically requested the candied violet garnish and now a bridge goblin with no ears is eating them out of a pink bakery box somewhere, so I hope you're happy."
"Magnolia."
"Don't." The crowbar trembles in my fist. "Don't say my name in that voice. That low, grumbly, I'm-a-stoic-mercenary voice. You gave me back the gold. You walked away and then you came out here to get yourself killed by a giant bug because, what, your honor was compromised?"
His jaw tightens.
"Your honor. Your precious professional code. You broke contract parameters because you slept with the client, so your solution was to ride a motorcycle into a wasteland and fight a city-bus-sized monster. Alone. Without backup. Without telling anyone."
The dislocated shoulder has started to swell. Purple-green bruising spreads across the joint. He doesn't look at it.
"I tracked you across monster territory with a crowbar and a box of cupcakes, Dash. I don't even have a weapon license. I don't have monster insurance. I barely have car insurance and now I definitely don't because my van is wearing a dead crawler as a hood ornament."
The wind picks up across the flats. Hot and sulfurous, carrying grit that stings my cheeks. The crawler's legs have stopped twitching. Something inside it pops wetly, and a freshgush of yellow ichor spreads across the slag toward my shoes. I step sideways without breaking eye contact.
"So when you ask me why I'm here, you don't get to ask that from the ground. You get to ask that standing up, looking me in the face."
I drop the crowbar.
I extend my hand.
His fingers close around mine, and his grip is the only steady thing in the whole wasteland.
I haul.
Every ounce of my one-hundred-and-thirty-pound frame goes into the pull. My feet slide on the slag. My shoulder sockets scream. Dash weighs approximately the same as a small refrigerator filled with concrete, and for three horrible seconds, nothing happens.
Then his core engages.
He rolls forward, and the momentum carries him upright with so much force that I stumble backward and nearly sit down on the dead crawler. His dislocated shoulder hangs wrong, heavy and swollen, but he's standing. Swaying. Blood dripping from a dozen puncture wounds into the black dust.
A sound behind me.
Not from the crawler. From behind the crawler. From the crevice in the slag shelf where the rocks split into a dark fissure about forty feet wide.
