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“I know you didn’t. Everyone knows you didn’t.”

“But it did,” Fenrir whispered, sobs fading but leaving an emptiness in their wake. Like the arm that should be there. A memory of what could have been. “It did, Mum. So, what does that mean?”

Vera didn’t answer. She pushed her hands into his hair and drew him into a hug.

Fenrir of years earlier would have remarked on how he didn’t know she was capable of such affection, but right then, he was no more than a little boy once again caught in a changing world he had no control over, and all he wanted was his mum.

By the time Red’s heavy footsteps echoed up the hall, Vera drew them apart. Fenrir watched her carefully from the corner of his eye while Red made a show of bursting into the room like she hadn’t been waiting for his tears to subside. Vera held herself as she always did—stoic and steadfast, a moor in a raging sea—but he wondered now if she didn’t feel more than she let on. Didn’t understand on some deep, fundamental level what it really meant to fight for what you loved.

Then he forgot it all when Red said, “Good. You’re awake again. Think I might know what happened to Sparks.” And a little of that light Fenrir thought had gone out rekindled.

“Tell me,” he growled.

“How ‘bout I let our elf tell you herself?”

Chapter X

The Other Side

I’ll find him.

Lights marked their path, long cold fingers pointing the way down an empty, white-washed hallway, the Labs a sprawling labyrinth of sterility and too bright light.

I’ll save him.

Voices bled through the doors they passed, some quiet and stoic, others weeping. Fenrir didn’t stop to listen. Couldn’t. Not now. Now that he had his mission. Something to focus on other that this aching, awful itch.

It’s just an arm.

And maybe it so happened to be his sword arm, but Fenrir had seen lesser men relearn how to fight with their non-dominant arm after similar injuries. He would too. He had to.

Orpheus needed him to.

A wail tore from a nearby room and Fenrir grit his teeth rather than look towards it, not even when Vera slowed his wheelchair like she half expected him to tell her to stop. One week after the attack and the Empire still suffered, injuries that hadn’t caused immediate death now slowly stumbling towards it while displaced families reunited with a corpse rather than the loved one they’d hoped to find. Guilt hung like a heavy mantle, making Fenrir feel even more unbalanced without considering the empty sleeve where his sword arm should be.

I’m not the only one who’s lost something. But he was the only one who’d made a promise to prevent this.

I can still fix it. And the first step towards that was finding out where Orpheus went.

Behind him, Vera sped back up, footsteps matching Red’s as she led them down an adjacent hallway, then through an open man door. Here, the walls were more gray than white, finished edges traded for exposed industrial piping and a cracked cement floor stained dark where water had recently seeped through from the ground water deep below.

Soon, freezers replaced the private rooms, and where thick steel sunk into the wall six inches deep, frost edged. Fenrir could guess at what those rooms held, and it gave him pause where it hadn’t existed before. Whatever opinion Red possessed for the Labs, Fenrir had never paid them much mind. He’d never been given a good reason to. Lore had discovered the facility late in their campaign, the supply of bodies she’d provided for their experiments paid back by incredible amalgams like Achates for use in the war.

He’d never really considered where they’d come from, let alone how they were made, but the freezers were an outright tell. The Labs had helped them, and they hadn’t asked for much except their dead, a request Fenrir was happy to comply with because it meant less graves to dig and pyres to build and—at least until Red’s orchards began to produce—less fear of his army going unfed. What the Labs lacked in flesh, they made up for in manufactured material, and he’d never really questioned why they wanted one when the other seemed perfectly sufficient to their nature—until now.

“Your Majesty, it’s good to see you up and about.”

Fenrir flinched. “Please, it’s just Fenrir.”

A person—to put it politely—stood before a heavy looking, metal door with a large wheel at its center, bolts evenly stamped across large solid steel panels. He’d met Bastion once before, years ago when Lore had first unearthed the place and it’d been a disembodied voice emerging from a network of tinny speakers in the walls and a singular mobile, if mechanical, arm. He looked different now, almost human at first glance, in a body of his own making, human limbs with matching proportions, crisp white lab coat fitted to a frame that was neither particularly tall nor heavy, and a voice that sounded normal enough, if in a slightly modulated way. But then Fenrir got to the head…

“We’re very grateful for all the work you’ve allowed us to achieve over the years. It’s been an honor to repay that debt by saving your life. You possess a body of remarkable ability. The scans we took are very revealing. It’s a shame we—well…maybe next time, right?”

Perfectly styled hair framed a flat expanse devoid of expression, only the blink of illuminated eyes offering any kind of indication of intelligence as they swooped over Fenrir.

Behind him, Vera made an indecipherable sound. Beside him, Red bristled. “I swear to Hell, nuts for brains, you keep talking like that and you won’t live long enough to get the chance.”

“The name is Bastion,” the creature continued. “And my brain is made of a sophisticated network of artificial neural pathways I have spent many dozens of decades refining.”