She blinks up at me. Her mouth opens.
"You said there's a pen. Other pocket."
Her left hand digs into her dress. Comes out with a ballpoint. Pink. Has a little cupcake on the cap. She holds it up and I take it from her and I flatten the contract against me because my other arm won't lift and I sign my name directly over my heart.
The ink smears with blood. Good. Let it.
"Paragraph three needs an amendment."
Her face crumbles. For one terrible second her chin drops and her eyes go glass-bright and I see her start to fold in on herself and I realize she thinks I'm negotiating.
"The previous contract is not voided."
"What?"
"It was the best contract I ever took." I fold the paper with my one working hand, tuck it carefully inside the remains of my vest, directly against my skin. "Every parameter. Every objective. Carrying the shield. The hellhounds. The suit. The boar. The cake."
I swallow hard.
"The cake. You stood in that destroyed kitchen and you commanded me like a general. You handed me a huge whisk and pointed at forty pounds of butter and said 'go.' No one has ever looked at me and seen something other than a weapon."
Her eyes are pouring. Tears cutting clean tracks through the dried ichor on her cheeks.
"You saw a stand mixer."
A laugh punches out of her. Wet and broken and perfect.
"So paragraph three gets an amendment. The previous contract remains in effect as a foundational document. Addendum A: all terms carry forward into the new agreement. I carried your shield. I will keep carrying it."
She sniffs hard. Wipes her nose on her wrist. Leaves a smear of green blood across her upper lip.
"That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me and you compared yourself to a kitchen appliance."
"A high-quality kitchen appliance."
"Oh my God."
I reach down.
My left arm screams. The cracked ribs grind against each other like millstones. The venom burn in my bicep lights up white-hot from shoulder to wrist. I hook my good arm under her knees and my bad arm behind her back and I lift her straight off the slag.
She weighs nothing. A sack of flour. A container of sugar. One of those enormous blocks of enchanted chocolate she orders from the dwarven importers.
She gasps and grabs my neck. Her fingers slide through the blood and grime and lock behind my head, pressing into the short-cropped hair at my skull, and her grip is fierce. Baker's hands. Strong from years of kneading dough and wrestling industrial ovens and apparently beating rock crawlers with steel crowbars.
I pull her against me. She fits perfectly in the space between my chin and my collarbone, her head tucked under my jaw, her body curled into the curve of my arm. The contract paper crinkles between us. Her heartbeat drums against my ribs.
The wind picks up. Slag dust swirls across the wastes. The van ticks and groans behind us.
"You're bleeding on me."
"Yes."
"A lot."
"Yes."
"We should probably go to a hospital."
