Splinter Angel

To Ana's enormous relief, getting Deni's bolt out wasn't as painful as her own. Since it was already all the way through, all Petra had to do was to carefully whittle through the shaft until she could break it, as close to the skin as possible, then pull what remained straight through. Simple, and no guts torn.

Ana learned something useful then: when one of her Party members aggravated an injury, she couldn't absorb the damage. She was at once relieved that she couldn't — the pain in her gut was still there, and the magical healing was seriously sapping her energy — and wished that she could have. She hated to hear Deni howl as the bolt came out, then cry with pain afterward as Petra wiped away the fresh blood and treated the wound with their second to last healing potion. But Deni quickly bit down on the pain — by the time a poultice and bandage came on, similar to the ones on Ana's own wounds, she was only sniffling and whimpering.

At no point had the girl passed out. That was how Ana knew the pain hadn't been too unbearable.

Once Ana and Deni were both treated, the question was: what now? They needed to get back to the outpost, ideally before dark, but it turned out that having three inches of steel-tipped wood stirring up your intestines for a while wasn't something you just walked off, magical potions or no. Not once the adrenaline wore off, at any rate. Ana, to her embarrassment, was not going to be walking home. She'd need to be carried on a stretcher.

Then there were the dead and wounded traitors. Four were very much dead, and Ana had received Crystals for three of them: a Minor, two Lessers, two Leasts, and a Shard. Nothing else; no Skill Levels, no Achievements. As for the fourth, the girl Mista, nobody in Ana's Party had touched her. Ana could only assume that Eria had received a Crystal of some sort for her, but nobody had been quite cruel enough to ask. Eria was almost unharmed, except for a split lip and bruised stomach and cheek, courtesy of Deni. Tolgor the food vendor, though, was half out of it, sallow and sweating with his elbow and shoulder swelling and discoloring. And Rogher the Hunter…

"Rogher's still alive," Petra said, studying their last potion. "But he might not be for long. Not with the way he's breathing."

"I can fix that," Deni gritted out, getting to her feet with the help of her good hand. By the time anyone realized what she intended, she'd already lurched two steps forward and started Shaping, hand extended toward the injured traitor and alight with the tiny sphere of plasma gathering in her palm.

"Deni! No!" Mirell and Varron both screamed and lunged for her, Varron being closer by a step and reaching her first. He shoved Deni's arm up just in time, and when she fired off her bolt it screamed away through the treetops instead of taking Rogher's head off.

"Gods beyond, Deni! What are you doing!?" Varron said as Mirelly joined him to carefully manhandle the struggling Evoker to the ground, mindful of her bandaged arm.

"What's it look like?" Deni said hotly. "I'm putting the bastard out of his misery!"

"You can't just do that!" Mirell insisted, deliberately putting herself between Deni and Rogher. "He's a prisoner!"

"He's a gods-damned traitor and it's more than he deserves!" Deni fired back. "He'll never walk back! Neither will Tolgor. Who's going to carry them both?"

"We can give Tolgor the potion, wait until he can at least walk, and then carry Miss Ana and Rogher on stretchers," Varron said. "We have the canvas, and four able bodies. We can take them both back!"

"Look at him! He won't last!"

"You don't know that! And even if he doesn't, we have to try! Please, Deni. Haven't enough people died?"

Ana couldn't see Deni's face from her angle, but the girl's silence, and the way Varron's face fell, spoke volumes.

"I can't let you. You understand that, right?" Varron's expression was pained, but he wasn't going to budge. Both he and Mirell were principled, Ana had picked up that much. Personally she didn't care much; she wouldn't be the one carrying a dying man, and if someone else wanted to — probably Eria and someone else — she wasn't going to argue with them. They had two people to question, but a third couldn't hurt.

It only took a moment for Deni to relent. She was angry, and in pain, and she was acting impulsively, but she wasn't actually bloodthirsty. "Fine," she said, and Mirell and Varron let her shrug them off, then helped her to her feet. Mirell still blocked her line of sight to Rohger, though. "Carry the bastard if you want. He'll just die halfway back anyway. Same damn thing."

It remained to be seen if Deni was right or not. Rogher was certainly doing poorly enough, unconscious and breathing in short, sharp gasps. With Ana staying out of the discussion, Petra decided to split the last healing potion between the two injured men. Tolgor, she argued, would be able to at least walk, and Rogher only needed to survive the next few hours as they returned to the outpost.

"Could we add them to the Party?" Petra asked Ana softly as Varron administered half of the potion to the unconscious man. "That would help them a lot."

"Good thinking," Ana said tiredly. Being pulled back from the brink of death never got less exhausting. "But no. I don't know how much the Sentinel and his minions know about me, and the less the better. If I let them in my Party…"

"Right," Petra said, disappointed but understanding. "Of course. Forget I asked."

Then there were the bodies. They had four corpses on their hands, and they couldn't leave them to rise as revenants. They couldn't bring them back with them, nor build pyres to burn them. That left one option: beheading. There were even some suggestions of raising them all into a tree so they could be retrieved later for a proper funeral. Only, none of the able-bodied people in Ana's Party quite had the stomach for it. Mirell and Varron both excused themselves as being busy putting together stretchers of cloth and freshly cut young trees. Petra found decapitating a corpse much harder in practice than in theory, and no one would have trusted Eria with a weapon, even if she could be convinced to do the job. It got to the point that Ana simply accepted that she'd have to swallow the pain, get up from where she'd been resting, and do it herself. Then Deni decided to act.

"Gods' sake!" the young Evoker said, her voice aflame with pain and anger and frustration as she got up and approached Mista's body. This time no one was close enough to stop her before she unleashed a ball of plasma into the dead girl's head. There was a dull pop and a stench of burnt pork, and that, Ana figured, was one less potential problem for them to deal with.

The others didn't take Deni's solution quite as well. They protested. Eria screamed and wept. But nobody stopped Deni as she wordlessly did the same to each of the remaining bodies before going over to sit by Ana's side, pulling her knees up to her chest. Then she finally spoke, and all she said was a sullen, "Can we go back now?"

She actually did a really good job of pretending to be unaffected by the whole messy business, going back to the same silent brooding as before she started popping heads, but she couldn't hide her internal turmoil from Ana. Especially when she was sitting so close, and barely masking her aura, which couldn't be anything but a silent plea for comfort.

Fine, Ana thought. I'll bite.

"Hey," she said softly, reaching out. Deni was so close that Ana could easily take one of the girl's hands in her own.

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"What?" Deni sounded annoyed, but she squeezed Ana's hand hard enough it might have hurt if Ana was anyone else.

"Thank you. For coming, and for doing what nobody else could. You did good, okay?"

"Yeah, well… couldn't just leave them. Even traitors don't deserve that."

And there was no way that Deni would endanger anyone else by leaving four revenants to roam the forest, Ana knew that much. So, when everyone else waffled, Deni did something about it. Not the most respectful option, perhaps, but Deni seemed to share Ana's opinions that no one earned any respect just by dying, and that these particular stiffs had lost whatever they were due when they had an innocent woman beaten nearly to death to lure Ana into an ambush.

Thinking of respect, Ana turned her head to regard the young Evoker for a moment. She'd liked Deni ever since their first Delve together, despite a near miss that had left Ana with no choice but to shave her sides; a slightly less severe precursor to what Kaira had managed just recently. These past few weeks had only cemented that liking. Much like Jisha, Deni had shown an admirable resilience. Under the violence and loss that they'd all been exposed to, some people had cracked, and were slowly putting themselves together. Some had shattered, and would never be quite whole again. But Deni was among a small handful who'd been tempered and had come out stronger. She'd been pushed to her limit, and instead of stepping back, she'd set her sights farther ahead. She'd been forced to kill, and found that she could live with herself afterward.

Perhaps it was that Ana saw something of herself in Deni, but she respected that. Many people would probably say that discovering a facility in yourself for killing wasn't necessarily a positive development; Ana would disagree. Some people just needed killing, and the world needed people willing to do the job.

"What?" Deni asked when she noticed Ana's eyes on her. She quickly ran the back of her hand over each of her cheeks, looking at it. "Do I have something on my face? They didn't… spatter, did they?"

Ana smiled wryly. "You're fine. I was just thinking… what're your plans past the next few months?"

"Hmm? Well… to do a lot of hunting with Rellie and Ronnie. Delving, too, when we have the Party for it. Work on my Skills, Level up, get deeper into my Craft…"

"No, past that. Around the end of the cycle."

"Oh. Ah… more of the same?"

"But you're set on getting stronger? Maybe making some money from Crystals?"

"Oh, yeah. For sure! Why wouldn't I be?"

"I can't think of a single good reason." Ana paused then asked, "How set are you on staying here?"

Deni became very still at that. "I have my parents here. My friends. Why do you ask?"

"I'm leaving, Deni. At the end of the cycle. I can't stay."

"I know."

"Messy's coming with me — at least I hope she is. So are Rayni, Jisha if she shapes up in time, and Tor, Omda…"

Deni nodded slowly with each name.

"...and Kaira," Ana finished. "I'd like you to join us."

Deni nodded one final time before stilling, rolling her lips as she held Ana's eyes, silent and pensive. She was doing an admirable job of keeping cool, really, but Ana saw right through her forced calm. And not just by watching her body language, which showed that her attention was entirely on Ana. No — Deni's emotions, as reflected in her aura, were all over the place. Nervous excitement, dread, cautious hope and doubt and anticipation, they all roiled in a way that would have made Ana ask her to clamp down on her aura, if Ana hadn't been sure that it would embarrass the teenager terribly.

"I need to think about it," Deni said a little hoarsely, glancing toward her friends.

It only took a few more minutes for Mirell and Varron to finish the stretchers, and for the healing potion to get Tolgor stable enough for the long walk back. Mirell and Varron took Ana's stretcher, walking behind Eria and Petra, who took Rogher's, and then they were off.

They'd barely gotten going when Ana started hearing the sounds of several someones doing a poor job of creeping through the forest around them. "Keep your eyes open," she said softly to her carriers, and to Deni, who walked beside them. "We're being followed."

"I hear them," Varron said after a moment. "Safe bet it's those Stolen."

"Yeah," Ana agreed. "Don't be afraid to just drop me if anything happens. I can take it. Deni, you okay to fight if you have to?"

"I can make do with one hand," Deni said. "Do you think they'll try anything?"

"If we're right about who they are, I don't think so." She definitely hoped not. "I think it's more likely they'll try to sneak back into the outpost, or give themselves up. But be ready, just in case."

They might just take their chances in the forest. Ana didn't give much for their chances, not with the demons roaming around, but you never knew. People could be resourceful.

"Would you let them?" Deni asked. "Give themselves up, I mean."

"Would I let them?" Ana looked up at the treetops above and the sky beyond, repeating the words half to herself. Would she? They had Eria. Tolgor was going to make it. Rogher might. Was there anything the Stolen were likely to know that those three didn't? Was there any reason for her to spare the bastards who hurt Messy, other than mercy?

"It'd be better for them if they didn't try," she finally said. She hadn't forgotten her promises, neither to the Stolen nor to Falk, but she was in pain, and tired, and she really didn't trust herself just then.

It turned out that she didn't need to worry. Shortly thereafter they were startled by a cheerful, "Aw, thank fuck! You didn't get far, did you?" as they met another group coming the other way. The woman who's spoken was Kosh, a Pathfinder whom Ana had first met after the rescue of Falk's ill-fated expedition from the Trap Delve, and who'd been instrumental in clearing out Karti's sentries as they approached the white obelisk.

"Yeah, the captain got all worked up about you running out of the outpost with a bunch of kids in tow, and only poor Petra to keep you all in line," Kosh told Ana. Some of the volunteers Kosh had with her had taken over carrying the stretchers, and they were making decent time back toward the outpost. "I was in the guard house checking the board at the time, and he grabbed whoever was nearby and sent us after you. Lucky me, right? Anyway, I'm not sure if he was worried about you running into trouble or running out to cause trouble, but it looks like he was right."

Ana hadn't interacted much with Kosh. For the short time between being rescued from the Trap Delve until the defeat of Karti and his cultists, the woman had spent most of her time ranging the forest, keeping everyone else safe. When the first group left the white obelisk to return to the outpost, Kosh had gone with them. Ana couldn't have spoken more than five sentences to her in that time — though Kosh had probably said three times as many back, and ten times the volume of words. But Kosh had always treated Ana with a friendly irreverence at a time when most people were either scared or in awe of her, and that had put her firmly in the "tolerable" column of people Ana was acquainted with.

"He was," Ana confirmed. Gods, she was tired. "Though I didn't expect to run into an ambush and take a crossbow bolt to the gut, or have one of my friends get hurt helping me."

"Yeah, that must've sucked." Kosh's reply was so casual that Ana almost laughed. "Seriously though, you going to be okay?" She turned to Deni. "Parser? That arm been looked at?"

"We'll be fine until we get to Touanne," Deni said, a little more sharply than perhaps necessary. "Petra knew what to do."

"No, yeah, good. That's good," Kosh said, suppressing a grimace. "The whole month's been fucking insane, innit? Gods beyond, I mean, people killing each other? I know it happens, and there's even, whatsit, wars sometimes in the Primes. But having to stalk down sentries, shoot down mages… I tell you, lady, I do not envy you being at the center of this shit-storm. And respect to you, Parser, for standing by her. Ah, speaking of running people down, do you know what those guys following us are about? Want us to go talk to them?"

"They're the Stolen who beat up Messy," Deni answered before Ana had a chance to.

"Messy? Oh! Oh, shit, yeah, the elfin woman. She's your girl or something, right, Miss Ana?"

"Yeah," Ana sighed. "She's my girl… or something."

"Damn. So that's what started all this?"

"Wait!" Deni said incredulously. "You didn't know? I thought Falk sent you?"

"He did! He said you all had gone after a bunch of Stolen, and wanted us to go after you in case things got violent and anyone got hurt. Didn't say anything about them beating up some…" Kosh frowned. "She's like a Jeweler or something, right? Who the hell goes and just beats up some civilian? And there's half a dozen of them, at least! All of them?"

"There's seven," Ana said. "And yeah. All of them."

"Gods be-fucking-yond." Kosh's frown turned into a proper scowl. She looked toward the two empty handed men from her Party, who were watching the two conscious prisoners along with Petra, Mirell, and Varron, and called out, "Hey, Split! Morra! With me! We're rounding some bastards up and dragging them back to the outpost!" Then she turned back to Ana and said, "Don't you worry. I'm not letting them get away."

"Yeah," Ana said. "Thanks." Then, as Kosh and her two men set off among the trees, she relaxed into the stretcher, and let fatigue overtake her for a little while.