Chapter 45.4: Inevitable Confrontation

Jindel was the first to find her words. “Sergeant, we— appear to be clear, at least for now.”

Everyone took in their surroundings, processing what had just happened. Penny noticed Minkus in particular, though. He frowned curiously at the ceiling. “Does anyone else hear that, or rather not hear that?”

“Hear what?” Jindel asked. But an uncomfortable expression crossed her face at the moment it did everyone else’s. “The alarm stopped.”

Minkus nodded.

The vigilwoman stowed her weapons. “We need to move.”

“We most certainly do,” Ventyr agreed. But as the others took steps back toward the landing, he started in the oposite direction.

“Sir,” Jindel said, stepping into his path and pointing back toward the door they’d come in. “Our exit is that way.”

“Crusader Jindel,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. It should have been a warm gesture, but it wasn’t. “I am not leaving. Not yet.” He pressed his way past her. Neither she nor the other crusader said anything, though Fjornsson followed with a satisfied grunt.

“OK, come on, Carrot-stick.” Penny’s mouth and feet were both moving before she’d given it a hair’s thought. “We came all the way out here to get you free of this mess, so there’s no way in Torment we’re going farther into it with you.”

He snapped around to face her, and she stopped, taking an unbidden step back.

“What are you even doing here, Penny?”

She suddenly wanted to look away.

“Didn’t I just say that we’re here to save you?” she said, consciously pushing herself forward again. “I would have assumed that was clear from the norn ripping crazy animals off your back.”

The sylvari glanced briefly at the others around them. “I understand why they are all here, Penny, and their service is appreciated.” His words were cold as iron, despite the heat still rippling at his tightened fists. “But why are you here? Have the profits from your first theft run dry already?”

Penny scowled, embarrassed and angry. “Theft? You still think I stole them, your stupid rocks? Gods that little shit was good.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Ventyr hissed, his tone finally heating up. He turned and started again toward the far end of the room. “Crusaders, keep Miss Arkayd in your sight at all times. Whatever she may have told you, she’s not to be trusted.”

Penny sighed, curbing her frustration. She put a hand to Ventyr’s shoulder. “Look, Carrot-stick, I—” He stopped again, glaring at her over his shoulder, and she froze.

Ventyr returned to his course away from her, and the two crusaders passed her without stopping. But Minkus paused. He offered a faint but encouraging smile and nudged her forward.

Penny shook her head. She didn’t have to take this. “You saw him. You heard what he said. He doesn’t want to hear it.”

Minkus didn’t move and his expression didn’t change. He just gazed up at her, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the three soldiers were moving away from them, ever closer to the big steel doors at the end of the room.

“Gods, we’re in the middle of a psycho circus-lab,” she argued, trying to laugh. “This has to be the worst possible time.”

Minkus shrugged and nodded toward Ventyr.

Penny rubbed at her temple, though the real pain was the one in her gut. “Gods,” she groaned. “You really are a stubborn pain in the ass now.”

He blushed and grinned, gesturing toward the sylvari again, and Penny knew there wasn’t a damned thing she could say that would change his mind, even now. How in Grenth’s green ass had she wound up with these people?

“Vent,” she called with a sigh, while speeding up to catch the soldiers again. Every step was a fight to keep her eyes off the floor.

Jindel glanced back, but Ventyr didn’t acknowledge her.

“I didn’t steal anything, OK? Not really.” He still wasn’t looking at her, so she could only assume that he heard. Each word twisted the knot in her belly just a little tighter, and she hated that she was saying any of it at all.

“It was Skixx who stole it,” she went on. “He stole your rocks. I just took the fall for him. Not my best moment, I guess, but—”

The sylvari stopped in his tracks but refused to turn back to her. The tension beneath his barked shoulders said he was actively controlling himself now. “We searched Skixx,” he said, biting off the words though he still looked away. “Just like everyone else, Penny, we searched him. The only person we couldn’t search was you, because you had fled in the night. Even you can’t talk your way out of that.”

Penny ran tense hands through her hair. Her stomach was tight, her heart thumped in her chest against her will, and for all her efforts, she couldn’t even get her damned hair to stay where she put it. Gods, she needed something to just work right now.

“Look, I don’t know how that little shit got it by you,” she said, gesturing wildly. “I don’t know, OK? But he did. He blackmailed me into making it look like I stole it, but it was all him.”

Ventyr remained with his back to her, but he turned his head now, a dark amusement entering his voice. “Skixx blackmailed you? What could Skixx have possibly held over you, Penny?”

She sneered at only the thought of her answer. Saying it out loud took effort. “That little asshat took my shop.” 

Ventyr spun on her, slamming the butt of his staff into the floor and meeting her gaze with granite-hard eyes. The speed of the movement drove her back a step again.

“Now you’re claiming victimization?” he demanded.

Penny bit her lip, gawking at him in what suddenly felt like genuine fear. She let her hand fall from her hair, and without a thought, she grabbed a small wrench from her hip pouch. Her fingers didn’t want to work, though, so instead of flipping or fidgeting, she just held it tight.

“Yeah, I am. But—”

Ventyr cut in, his eyes fixed on her as he choked the staff in his hands. “Don’t think I don’t know you, Penny. I have worked hard to believe the best in you, but I know; I’ve always known. Ultimately everything comes back to you, to what’s best for you, what benefits you. So if you’re truly making an admission of guilt, make it. Otherwise, there is too much to do to waste further words.”

She clenched the wrench so tightly, it threatened to become a permanent part of her hand.

“He gave me a choice,” she said, hearing the flatness in her own voice. “I could fight him and lose my shop or help him, and he’d give it to me outright. For good.” Silence fell over the group for a second, leaving just the sounds of sparking equipment, clawed feet scuttling about the dim room, and some kind of grinding on the other side of the steel doors Ventyr had been making for. “He was a lying, little bastard, though. He took it from me anyway, so it’s not like you’re the only one who lost—”

“Mother’s grace,” Ventyr said impatiently.

Penny felt Minkus elbow her in the leg, and she waved her hands in submission. “Fine, fine. I made the wrong choice, OK? I screwed you over, and I’m here to make it right. To help.”

There was another silence as Ventyr studied her. She stood in front of a sylvari in nothing but his skivvies, and somehow she was the naked one.

“Your story is absurd,” he finally said. “And I do not believe you.”

Penny blinked stupidly. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but it hadn’t been that. Her pulse quickened, and the knot in her gut writhed. It doesn’t matter, she thought. I don’t care.

“Besides,” Ventyr went on. “That is not how justice works. A wrong is on the record, and no amount of rights can change that.” His eyes went distant: too cold to be sad, but maybe something like it. It was hard for Penny to pay much attention to it as he turned away from her, back on his route to the door. “Do what you will, Penny, but any trust I had is gone. Even if you did tell me the truth, there is no getting it back.”

Penny stood silently as Ventyr, Jindel, and Yult moved away. It wasn’t far to the doors now, but some sort of vertigo seemed to stretch the scene out before her. She tried to shake the sensation away, to shake the whole conversation away. Who the hell cared what the carrot thought of her. She certainly didn’t.

“Penny?”

Minkus stood beside her now. When had he gotten there?

“You— did well,” he said, pulling at his ear.

“Yeah, sure.” She heard her own mirthless snicker. “Really panned out great, that whole apology thing. Why the hell did I do that?”

Minkus raised a finger, searching for something, and the words eventually found him. “You know, for what my opinion’s worth, I don’t think he’s right.”

She looked down at him. What the hell was he talking about now?

“Maybe you can’t do anything to make up for a wrong,” he said, “But I think he could have.” He gazed up at her, expectancy in his eyes, like that should have made sense to her. It didn’t.

“What?” Penny tried to hold a gentle tone. If anyone deserved that, it was Minkus. “I don’t know what that means.”

He pulled at his ear again. “I just mean to say that— well, I don’t know what happens with all our right actions and wrong actions in the end. Maybe Ventyr is right about that part. But I do know—I think I know, anyway—that he could have…” Minkus trailed off a moment, glancing at the growing distance between them and the three Vigil soldiers. He lowered his voice. “Ventyr could have forgiven you. That would have been right, I think. It wouldn’t have been easy. But, well,  if he’d done that— I think your wrong could have been righted. At least for now.”

His eyes were warm and sad, and he clutched her hand. It loosened her grip on the wrench. “Does that make any sense?”

She wasn’t sure, but Penny thought, if only for a second, that it did.

Before she could respond, though, there was a gas-valve hiss and the steel doors at the end of the room parted. Everyone’s attention flew to it.

“Oh gods,” Penny groaned, reclaiming her hand and stuffing the wrench back into its pouch. Her vision cleared as adrenaline began to course through her again. “What is it now?”

“Find defensive points,” Ventyr barked.

Both the soldiers obeyed, the norn lunging to the wall alongside the door and Jindel fleeing back to a position behind a standing cylinder. Ventyr, however, stood his ground, drawing deep breaths as he made some magical gesture toward the floor. Penny realized she’d seen it before. He was exhausted, naked, and injured, but was still setting up to pull one of his rock walls out of the floor. Even she had to respect that.

The gap between the doors widened, and Ventyr drove his staff upward in both hands, drawing a fat strip of stone up through the floor. The fine-hewn stonework of the complex cracked and parted, making way for its natural counterpart to rise and block the door, just feet in front of it. Ventyr repeated the motion, yanking the slab higher with each pantomime pull. It seemed counterproductive, if that door was where Ventyr was hoping to go, but given the circumstances and the ton of trouble they’d already gotten into, Penny wasn’t going to argue the choice. She didn’t really want to argue anything with him right now.

When the doors had fully retracted, Ventyr’s wall had reached nearly as high as the doorway itself, some ten feet tall. Fjornsson had moved back behind the wall, ready to put that sword of his through whatever new horror crept out of the small opening between bedrock and steel.

Penny could see light shining in through that crevice, but she and Minkus had moved away from a direct line of sight, giving themselves an advantage over whoever entered, just like the norn.

Ventyr was panting now, further worn from his exertion. He paused to collect his strength again, and a sharp, clear voice came from the other side of the barrier. “So the elementalist is free.”

Ventyr’s face hardened. “It’s her.”

Everyone exchanged wary looks.

“Oh, yeah,” Penny echoed sarcastically. “Her. I was afraid it would be her. Of all the people it could be, it just had to be—”

“Oh, would you please just shut it!” Jinkke squawked from several feet behind her.

There was a quick sound of grinding machinery, and something massive slammed into the other side of Ventyr’s wall, shaking slivers of stone and dirt shook free. Everyone was silent then.

“Non-standard construction element still intact,” said a mechanical voice on the other side of the wall.

Penny glanced at Minkus. “I think it’s a golem,” he said.

The grinding started again. Fjornsson and Ventyr each stepped back from the barrier as it was battered a second time. This time the seismic impact knocked a foot-wide section of stone free. Light from the room beyond pierced it, and cracks spidered out across the center of the wall. It wouldn’t take nearly as much force to finish the job now.

From her position behind the holding cylinder directly in front of both the door and barrier, Jindel was the first to recognize anything on the other side. Sergeant, that is one big golem.”

The grinding gears started up again, and the next blow sent an enormous, steel fist right through the existing hole, blowing out another several square feet of stone that barely missed the sylvari as he dove to ground. He crawled clear of the failing defense, still sucking air, and made for the closest cover, the fallen cap of a testing chamber. The golem continued to beat at the stone, increasing the speed of its destruction. Piece by piece the wall fell in broader and broader slabs that broke free and crashed to the floor. It took less than a minute for the monstrosity to reduce Ventyr’s barrier to a jagged line of rubble. It was still too tall for the construct to step over and enter the room, so they had that going for them.

Actually, Penny recognized with a critical frown, the golem wouldn’t even reach that wall with anything but its huge arm. The stupid thing was too tall to get through the doorway.

Every one of them had a clear view of it now, though. It was huge: feet taller than Fjornsson and probably as wide at the shoulders as the norn was tall. It’s coal-gray torso was etched with glowing blue lines that seemed to pulse with flowing energy. It filled the doorway and all but consumed the comparatively small, domed head that peaked out just above its armored shoulders. It hunched forward, glowing eyes scanning the room just beneath the head of the doorway. Like so many golems Penny had seen now, it seemed to be a composite of metalwork and stone cased inside a steel, armored shell. Stocky arms and legs moved with a combination of standard enough motors and those magitechnical magnets that Minkus had taught her about; the latter held forearms to elbows without a single piece actually touching—that still amazed her. At the center of its chest, however, was something unique. There, the exterior shell cut in, exposing some kind of recessed dish, with a hole at its center. All the pulsing lines seemd to meet there, and Penny could swear she saw the faintest purple spark at its center, deep into the thing’s body.

She could have stared at that thing all day. Sure, she had no love for golems, but it seemed like there were technological advancements in the thing that she could learn from for seasons. Something beside it claimed her attention, though. Or rather, someone beside it: a dainy asura woman.

Penny narrowed her eyes, squinting to see the little person’s face against the backlight of the chamber behind her. She didn’t need that confirmation, though; she could tell just by the asura’s posture and general shape.

“Her?” Penny said. She pointed back to the opposite entrance to the testing room. “She’s the one who brought the guards.”

Minkus inched closer to her side. “Penny, that’s her.”

“I know. That’s what I just said. It’s…” Penny trailed off, recognizing the growing unease on his face. He hadn’t been agreeing with her, and suddenly she got the feeling she too knew who this was. “Her who, Biggie?”

Minkus swallowed. “That’s Kikka.”