Chapter 50.2: The Truth Always Finds You

“Human.”

Penny vaguely heard the rough demand. She had the feeling it was directed at her, but nothing at all was clear.

“Human, get up!” the demand came again, followed closely by a sharp blow to the cheek.

Penny opened an eye to see a dim kaleidoscope of black, steel, flesh, and firelight. It slowly crystallized into what she hoped would be intelligible images. Her head throbbed.

The flesh colors moved, and Fjornsson came into focus as he spoke. “I said get up. It’s time for justice.” He grabbed her shoulder in one big hand and drew her up to a seated position.

Tense pain screamed up her back, from butt to shoulders, but she couldn’t stop him. And she absolutely refused to release the wail that slammed against the inside of her lips.

“Gods,” she finally groaned, biting back the pain. Even to her, her voice sounded coarse. “What happened? I—” Before she could finish the question, though, the situation came pounding back to her. “That golem, Kikka, my killswitch.” No single thought came out clearly, but she knew what she was saying. “Did it work? Did we get her?”

Penny tried to spring to her feet, but her body had no spring in it. Her back spasmed. She caught herself, head throbbing again, and rose more slowly, hunched over like an old crone. This must have been how the old apothecary in Divinity’s Reach felt.

“The golem is defeated,” Fjornsson affirmed, gesturing.

She glanced opposite him, wincing with the movement but seeing what he’d referred to. Several yards away, the construct lay face-down on the floor, small spider-leg cracks in the stonework creeping out where it had fallen. Everything it had taken to get the monstrosity to that spot on the ground came flooding back to Penny’s mind.

The norn spoke again, as though there hadn’t been a pause. “And so is she.” He raised something into view, something dangling from his other hand. It was Kikka, held tightly off the ground by a single arm, her other limbs limp and her head flopped to one side.

Penny scowled, inspecting the asura—or trying to, anyway. Her eyes shifted focus awkwardly. “Is she— ?”

The norn shook his head. “No,” he said, tone hardening. “She was unbearable, so I knocked her out.” His attention shifted from Penny to the dead fish of an asura. A dark pleasure came over him. “I thought you deserved to be awake for her justice.”

Justice. Penny had had a conversation with Minkus about that just moments before, which jarred something loose.

“Minkus!” she burst.

She’d gotten lost in everything else, but the image of her friend on the ground rushed to mind, his swelling face just peeking up behind his sister’s head as Penny had pressed them both to the ground. “Where is he? How is—”

She’d started reaching for the norn’s arm, to yank herself to her feet, but he cut her off, grabbing at her arm instead and spinning her around. He wasn’t gentle, and she would have told him so, but her words fell dead before they reached her tongue.

She saw Minkus and Jinkke several yards away. His body was still sprawled out on the stonework floor, and his sister sat hunched over him, cradling his head in her lap. Something about it was wrong—no, everything about it. They should have been up and moving by now, all of them should have been up and moving, escaping this gods-awful place.

“What’s going on?” Penny asked, feeling lead in her feet as she knuckled her back. She hadn’t really meant to ask the norn, but he was the only one to hear her. Hell, she didn’t mean to ask anyone; she didn’t mean for the words to come out of her at all, but her mouth refused any summons for silence. “What are they doing? We need to get the hell out of here already.”

“Raven’s wit, woman, she’s grieving,” he said, his gaze hardening again. He wagged Kikka in the air. “This one has taken more than her share of brave folk, including your friend.”

Penny heard Fjornsson’s words, but the meaning of them drifted off into the Mists. The room narrowed, darkness pressing in on the siblings like a grim iris as Penny moved toward them.

Half Minkus’ armor was removed and strewn about him. His chestplate, marred by a shocking dent, had been unclasped and thrown aside, and his sister sat bent over him, eyes pressed shut and stroking his dirty, wet hair. Her bare feet rested in a thin pool of crimson that Penny refused to think about.

On the other side of him were the smashed remains of the projector pack. A series of images flashed through her mind: Minkus translating tomes, offering apprehensive advice she really should have listened to, saving her ass in her own shop, moving equipment and tools from one place to another without complaint, traveling across the continent to help near strangers, practicing his magic, and smiling at absolutely everything, all the time.

He wasn’t smiling now.

“Biggie?” She lowered to a knee beside him, beside both of them. “Biggie, wake up,” she demanded. “You need to heal yourself. We stopped the golem, yeah, but we still need to get out of here.” She could feel something heavy pressing in on her, but she’d give it no ground.  Nothing else existed until she got them moving, got them out— got him up.

“Damn it, Biggie,” Penny barked. “We’ve got to move. This isn’t funny.” She put a hand to his chest, and a rib sunk at her touch. She pulled back abruptly. There was no rise or fall of breath, and suddenly she had to fight to maintain her own.

“Penny,” Jinkke whispered. It was the first Penny had seen the asura look at her. Her eyes were soft, broken, and hauntingly lilac. “Minkus is expired.”

“Expired?” The question snapped out of her. “What the hell do you mean, expired? This is Minkus the Large we’re talking about— Minkus the gods-damned Large. I’ve seen him take a hammer to the head and get up again. Most of the time, he doesn’t even get hit; things just bounce off him!”

Her mouth was running, and she hadn’t started it. She had no desire to stop it. It had to keep running; Penny had to keep running.

“I’ve seen your brother put up magical walls and bubbles and who knows what else,” she continued, plowing through every argument that came to her. “And in case you forgot, he’s spent days now practicing this little, personal-shield thing he does, which he seems to be able to to control now. Gods he just did it over there!” She pointed to where she and Minkus had first stood off against Kikka and her lackey. “And I know he did it again right now, because I’m still standing here. So, if you expect me to believe—”

“Arkayd!” Tears pooled in Jinkke’s eyes, and iron laced her words. “Your standing here is precisely the reason why he’s expired: you and me both.”

The venomous knot in Penny’s gut writhed, lashed, and imploded. Jinkke had left the implication hanging there, and damn it, it was enough. Penny struggled to rile herself up again, to spin up another argument, any argument—anything at all, to not think about it. She just had to fight it.

But everything escaped her. She shut her eyes, and the truth circled.

“Alchemy, Penny,” Jinkke’s voice cracked. “Don’t force me to spell it out for you. Please. You’re no average human, and I don’t— I just do not have the constitution for it.”

Reality caught her, and Penny opened her eyes. Jinkke was looking down at her brother again, her tears breaking their bounds and dropping onto Minkus’ forehead.

In a way, it was the first time Penny really saw Minkus. All the facts she’d collected were still true, but that new one finally tied them all together: Minkus wasn’t breathing—he wasn’t breathing.

Penny reached to touch him: one last gambit that all of this was a big, awful lie. But she couldn’t bring herself to make contact again. Who was she kidding? She could see the complete lack of movement and— all the unhealing damage. It was true, and she knew it. Gods, she’d known the whole time.

The room swirled and her stomach went sick, but Penny sniffed and stiffened, forcing herself back together. Biggie was dead; he’d died. But people did that, didn’t they? Everyone died. If anyone knew that was the case, it was Penny.

“I mourn your loss,” the norn rumbled. “But the longer we wait here, the more of us die.”

Penny glanced back at him, with Kikka still dangling from his hand by a wrist. Between the length of his slack arm and the extension of her unconscious body, her little toes dragged across the floor, stretching her even more as Fjornsson came.

Unconscious or not, the sight of her curled Penny’s lip into a canine snarl that she couldn’t fight—didn’t want to fight. Only, this time she couldn’t decide where it was directed. Maybe the asura had been the reason the golem had attacked Minkus, the reason they were all in this gods-forsaken lab, and even the reason one more little girl was an orphan—those were enough reason for Penny to hate her to Elona and back. But Kikka had had nothing to do with Minkus taking the golem’s final blows without defense. That— that was on Penny; she was the one he’d saved, the one he’d given it up for. That meant it was on her. His end was on her.

“Are you two listening to me?” the norn demanded. “We need to go.”

Jinkke slid away, lowering her brother’s head to the floor with a soft reverence. A sob stopped her, but she forced her hands to let him go and rose to her feet, wiping her eyes and sweeping dirty, sweat-laden hair out of her face. “You’re correct,” she said simply and wiped her eyes again.

“How do we handle this one?” Fjornsson spat, lifting Kikka’s toes off the ground and glaring down at her. “I’d suggest slowly and painfully, but we don’t have the time.”

Penny swiveled her head. She was just below Kikka’s eye level, and somehow recognizing that height differential further fueled her confused rage. Part of her wanted to put a pistol round in that asura’s forehead here and now. It would liberate some of the tension, she knew, but it could do nothing to make things up to Minkus. That was a debt she wasn’t sure she could ever square up, but she knew for damn sure it wouldn’t be done that way.

Before rising to her feet, Penny glanced back down at her friend, and then to the collapsed golem. Something came clear to her.

“She can wait,” Penny said, shifting everyone’s focus from the krewe leader to the golem. “We still need to deal with that.”

“What are you talking about, human? We already did. It—”

“Minkus was set on stopping that thing from doing any more damage.” Penny started around the massive construct. “The machine is stopped, sure, but I’ll bet my boots that purple crazy-magic is still in there somewhere just waiting for these asshats to dig it back out and try again.” She caught a glimpse of her friend on the ground again, but she set her attention once more on her new project. She’d needed a project, and now she had one again.