“Pinny! Pin!”

Jack wakes up to Lyia’s voice and her face looking down on him. Internally, he forgives her for using her juvenile nickname for him. She’s beautiful. Always has been. Her dark hair hangs in a loose and unkempt ponytail over her shoulder, almost pointing to the perfectly tanned and smooth skin on her outstretched arm. Her open palm hovers just over the surface of his chest. It’s warm, inviting, almost pulsing.

Wait.

Open palm. Jack is fully alert now. She was going to kill me. Kill us. He bolts upright and pushes Lyia’s hand off him. He scoots backward until his back is up against a wall. “Shitshitshit! Not yet! Not yet!”

“Pinny, wait.” Lyia stands and reaches toward him.

He flails his arms out, repeatedly batting hers away. “I ain’t ready to die yet!”

He never sees it coming. There’s a loud smacking sound and the side of his face is suddenly hot, and in pain. He turns his head back forward and it’s no longer Lyia in front of him.

“Hey, idiot! Snap out of it.” Corva is nose-to-nose with Jack. Her hands are on the sides of his shoulders, squeezing so he can’t move.

“She’s gonna kill us, Corva! An’ I’m never gonna get a chance to tell her I love her!” He continues to helplessly flap his arms around despite the fact that she’s pinning his elbows to his waist.

“Hey!” Corva pushes him back into the wall behind him, almost knocking his wind out. “Stop and think for a minute. You’re swinging around like a crazy man. Haven’t you noticed that you can do that without hurting now?”

Jack slows and looks down, noticing himself for the first time since waking. She’s right. His stomach and chest don’t hurt at all. His face, however, is a different story. Corva loosens her grip and he reaches up to his jaw. “So you thought I needed a new source of pain? Ow.”

Corva grins and backs up. “You were being stupid.” She grabs his hand and helps him stand. She leans in, whispering at a volume that anyone in the room can still hear. “Also, I still say she’s way too old for you.”

A rush of blood races to Jack’s face as he feels it redden all over. His ears are immediately hot; Lyia must’ve heard everything he said. Corva steps out from between them and he sees her, Lyia, smiling at him. It’s not the smile that he wants to see, though. Not the one that says she feels the same. It’s a knowing smile, an annoying smile. He turns his head away just as she’s about to speak.

“Zeke is doing better, too.”

Jack’s eyes widen as he spins around, looking for his little fur-covered friend. All feelings of embarrassment evaporate from his mind. “Zeke!”

He looks at the spot on the ground where Lyia had started healing the little monkey, but he’s not there. He looks back up to Lyia, ready to ask where Zeke is. And just like before, it’s not her face he sees. This time, it’s Zeke’s little primate face, flying right toward him. Zeke lands on Jack’s chest. He grabs Jack’s shirt and climbs up and around his back to his shoulder. Wrapping his tail around the back of Jack’s neck, Zeke swings around, planting his feet in Jack’s chest so they can look at each other face-to-face. Zeke’s little monkey face wrinkles into a frown.

Corva takes a step closer. “He’s pretty pissed at you. Says he was sitting on Lyia’s shoulder the whole time and you never even noticed.”

Zeke’s frown disappears as he tilts his head, amused. Jack’s ears start warming up again.

“Shut up. Dick.” He changes his focus back to Corva. “But wait. Why was she—” He turns to Lyia. “Why were you healing me? I thought your plan was for us to die here.”

“I, well. I just—”

“She had a change of heart, Pinny. Cute name, by the way. But we’ll need to talk about all of this later. We’ve gotta get. You feeling okay?”

“Yeah … ’cept for the sting you gave me on the side of my face. I think I’ll manage.” Jack lets Zeke swing back around to a perch on his shoulder. “What’s the plan?”

Lyia tips her head up to the ceiling, pointing with her chin. “The Red Light’s safe room. There should be enough space for us in there.”

Jack eyes Lyia skeptically. “You think ol’ Maddy Shard is gonna let me in? She ain’t exactly my biggest fan.”

“She’ll let you in.”

Corva interrupts. “Alright. Plan’s made. Lyia, what floor’s the room on?”

“The first basement. It’s the floor above us.”

“That stairwell we came down, is that the fastest way up?”

“It’s the only way up.”

“Cool. I’ll take the lead.” She points at Lyia. “You stay close to me so they’ll know to open the door when we get there. Jack, you trail behind us, outta sight until they open the door. No reason to give the lady of the house an excuse to be inhospitable.” Without waiting for a response, Corva turns and heads up the steps to the door leading out of the sub-basement.

Jack looks to Lyia and shrugs. “It’s as good a plan as any. After you.”

She nods and follows behind Corva.

Climbing the stairs, Jack looks up. At least the view is good. The curves of Lyia’s hips swing left and right as she takes each step up to the door. His hypnosis is cut short when he feels a sharp chop to the back of his head. “Ow!”

Lyia stops and turns back toward Jack, concerned. “Pin, you okay? Did I miss an injury?”

Jack’s face flushes as he looks to Zeke, who is sitting on his shoulder, arms crossed. “No. Zeke was hopping around. I think he’s just excited to see me.”

“Hey down there! Shut it,” Corva’s hushed hiss turns everyone’s attention to the door.

Jack looks to Zeke, mumbling, “Not cool, Zeke.”

The little monkey simply stares back at him for a moment, like a disappointed parent, then turns his attention back upward to Corva as she silently eases the door open and peeks into the stairwell.

Almost immediately, she pulls the door shut and looks back down at Lyia. “You said that’s the only way up?”

“Yeah, what’s the matter?”

“Safe room isn’t an option. That floor is crawling with grunts. Probably trying to break their way in to that room.” She slides past them and bounds to the base of the stairs. “We don’t have much time before their seekers sniff out the healing soulmancy you did and find their way down here. What’ve we got for weapons?”

They rush down the stairs. Lyia points at the boxes close to the wall. “Not much. Those boxes just have bottles of Pin’s cornshine.”

Corva turns to Jack. “You gotta light?”

Realizing what she wants to do, Jack’s face drops. “Oh, dude, no. That’s like five or six batches. That’s a lotta damn work you’re askin’ to blaze up.”

“You got paid for it, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, course I did. That ain’t the point. You’re askin’ me to burn art here.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Lyia rushes over to Jack, reaches in his pocket, and pulls out his lighter. “You can make more. Besides,” she walks over to the crates, shaking the lighter above her head, “I told you that you shouldn’t be smoking anyway.”

“Well, but, but what about the fire? Maddy ain’t gonna like us burnin’ down her business … ’specially with her in it.”

Lyia looks back at Jack. “Maddy has a fire suppression system. Actually”—she hands the lighter over to Corva—“what good is this going to do? The fire might be big, but it won’t last long. Best it’ll do is have us go out in a literal blaze of glory.”

Corva frowns at her. “What? No. For a healer, you’re uncomfortably interested in dying. Break open a few more of these boxes.” She tears the top off of one of the boxes, revealing the bottles of Jack’s custom distillation packed between corn husks and bundles of long grass. She nods her head at the tiny tunnel she and Jack squeezed through to get in. “We go back the way we came. The fire will cover our tracks.”

“Then what?” Lyia narrows her eyes, matching Corva’s frown. “We’ll be out in the open then.”

“Better than dying down here.” Corva rips open another box.

Lyia turns to Jack. “Pin?”

Jack looks from Lyia to Corva, and back to Lyia again. He can feel Zeke adjust on his shoulder.

“Shit.” He steps up to the boxes and starts opening one. “But gimme my light back. If anyone’s gonna burn my work, it’s gonna be me.”

Hardly pausing in her breakdown of the boxes, Corva tosses the lighter over. It sails a bit too high for Jack to reach, but Zeke leaps up and catches it, landing back on Jack’s shoulder. Begrudgingly, Lyia steps in to help open more boxes.

As he opens another box, Jack continues talking. “Siege caves are no good. Even if they open the door for us, that only helps with the raid.” He looks at Corva. “We still have Wrinkles to deal with.”

Lyia’s voice pipes up, “Alright, I’m going to guess you’re not talking about getting old. Is this another one of your silly names, Pinny?”

“Oh, yeah.” Jack pulls a bottle from his box and pops it open. They haven’t told Lyia anything about Thegn. As he pours the contents of the bottle over the pile of open boxes he remembers Old Man V’s reaction to hearing about their encounter with Death. Not exactly positive. “I’ll explain when we’re outta here.”

Skepticism paints itself all over Lyia’s face. “It sounds like there’s going to be a lot of explaining later. Don’t think I haven’t noticed that leech rope you’ve got now.”

There’s no time for Jack to respond to Lyia’s comment about his chembraid. The door at the top of the sub-basement swings open and a foot from one of the Umbrati grunts steps into view. Jack drops the bottle he’d been emptying and grabs two others along with a handful of the corn husk packing material. “Go!”

The girls make faces in protest, but Jack points at the hole in the wall. “Get goin’! I got this. You make sure it’s safe where we get out.”

Corva nods and grabs Lyia’s wrist to lead her to the wall.

Jack walks over to the base of the stairs and hands the mass of corn husks to Zeke. “They better move fast. It’s gonna get pretty hot in here. Squeezin’ through is hard enough. Tryin’ to do it while bein’ cooked is gonna suck.”

At the bottom of the stairs, he stops and looks up at the Umbrati grunt. It’s a hideous thing, barely resembling the person it once was. Its skin has no shine, just a dead grayish green. It stands on two legs, but its arms are longer than normal arms, almost reaching the ground. Short talons extend from nails at each fingertip. Torn remnants of whatever this former person was wearing hang from its body. It has no eyes. There’s a palm-length metal spike jammed in one eye socket. The other orbital is covered with scar tissue where it looks like the eye was clawed out. There’s a steel plate riveted on the thing’s face where its mouth is supposed to be. It sniffs the air and turns its head to better listen down into the room. The whole time, it makes a grunting sound, like it’s constantly trying to clear its throat.

Not wasting any more time, Jack throws one of the bottles up toward the doorway. The grunt easily dodges the bottle, allowing it to shatter on the wall in the stairwell behind it. Jack’s cornshine rolls down the wall and puddles on the floor around broken shards of glass as well as the grunt’s feet.

Not waiting to see the grunt’s reaction, Jack kneels down and opens his second bottle. “Zeke! Husks.”

He takes the packing material from Zeke and jams as much of it into the top of the bottle as he can. Pulling out his lighter, he looks back up. The grunt is already almost on top of him and there’s a second one showing in the doorway. Zeke jumps free of Jack’s shoulder just as the closest grunt reaches out with a single arm. The thing’s hand spreads across Jack’s entire chest and pushes forward, pinning him to the ground.

Jack struggles to move but with every buck and twist, it feels like the grunt locks him tighter to the ground. He flips the spark on his lighter and holds the flame to the grunt’s arm. There’s a sick smell of searing flesh, but the grunt doesn’t give any indication that it’s in pain. It just lifts its other arm, ready to strike. Jack exhales and relaxes. At least it’s just death.

He doesn’t even get the chance to fully complete the thought before he sees Zeke bolt by his head. The little monkey shoots up along the grunt’s arm and leaps at its face, using both of his paws to grab hold of the spike stuck in its eye socket. With a lot less effort than should be necessary for a little creature Zeke’s size, he extracts the spike in a single tug. Zeke wastes no energy in his fluid movements. He uses the momentum from that tug to spin around to the back of the grunt’s head, stabbing the spike into the base of its skull.

Jack feels the muscles in the grunt’s hand stiffen and then immediately slacken the moment he hears a pop from Zeke pulling the spike’s head to the side, breaking the grunt’s neck and severing its spinal column. Off-balance, the corpse of the thing releases its grip and slumps over sideways. Zeke leaps free and lands lightly on Jack’s chest as the grunt’s body hits the ground.

There’s no time for Jack to act surprised. Zeke points to the bottle of cornshine in Jack’s hand and then points at the second grunt, now fully visible in the doorway at the top of the stairs. Jack nods and squirms up to his feet as quickly as he can. Zeke climbs back to his shoulder perch. Pulling the lighter, Jack sparks a new flame and ignites the length of packing husks protruding from the bottle’s top.

Jack pauses a moment. This would be a perfect time to say something cool. He looks up the stairs and sees the second grunt about to jump its way down. Nope. “No time.”

He hurls his flaming makeshift cornshine grenade up past the second grunt and through the doorway where the alcohol from the first bottle has formed a nice puddle. The flaming bottle shatters against the wall with a satisfying crash followed by a bassy whoomp as the entire doorway—including the second grunt—bursts into flame.

“That should hold ’em for a second.” Jack turns away and heads to the tunnel opening. Both Corva and Lyia have already wiggled their way in. Zeke jumps from his shoulder and dives into the tunnel as Jack dashes around the pile, opening bottles and lighting bits of packing material. He pockets his lighter and grabs one of the boxes that hasn’t quite caught on fire. As he backs his way into the tunnel, he pulls the box over the tunnel opening. With any luck, the charred bits from this will cover our way out.

Backward, he squirms away from Maddy Shard’s Red Light, mostly the same way he’s done many times in the past.