17. Magnolia
MAGNOLIA
The van goes airborne.
All four wheels leave the ground at the crest of the dune, and for one crystalline, absolutely insane second, I am weightless. Flour bags float behind me. A whisk drifts past my face. The industrial cake turntable I forgot to secure lifts off the passenger seat and hovers like a ceramic UFO.
Then gravity remembers I exist.
The van slams down nose-first onto the slag flat and the impact cracks my teeth together so hard I see sparks.
The steering wheel nearly rips out of my hands.
My seatbelt locks and bites into my collarbone.
The engine screams, the tires catch, and three hundred pounds of industrial baking equipment shifts forward in the cargo hold like a metal avalanche.
The crawler fills the windshield.
She's enormous. She's disgusting. She's got Dash pinned flat under six barbed legs and that dripping stinger cocked back like a scorpion's tail and I don't think, I don't calculate, I don't even steer. I just mash the accelerator into the floor mat with both feet and scream until my throat tears.
The van hits the rock crawler doing forty-seven miles per hour. I know the exact speed because the speedometer needle snaps off on impact.
The collision sounds like a building falling down.
The front end crumples. The windshield detonates inward.
Chitin plates explode in every direction, yellow-green fluid splattering across the dash, the seats, my face, my vintage dress, everywhere.
The crawler's segmented body folds around the hood like wet paper, and the momentum carries all of us, van and monster and screaming baker, another twenty feet across the slag before friction wins.
We stop.
The engine dies with a pathetic mechanical wheeze.
Steam pours from the hood in thick white columns. The crawler's body is wrapped around the front of the van like grotesque gift ribbon, legs twitching in uncoordinated spasms. The stinger drags weakly against the roof, scratching a long groove through the metal before going limp.
I sit there.
My hands are still locked on the steering wheel.
My knuckles are white. Yellow ichor drips from the caved-in windshield frame onto my lap.
A bag of powdered sugar has ruptured somewhere behind me and the entire cab is filling with a fine white cloud that makes the whole scene look like a violent snow globe.
"Dash."
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.
"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 fresh gush 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.