I swung. She parried automatically. The sword knocked her rapier to the side, and I backstepped. I needed space. I tried to remember everything you’d learned about this crazy-eyed witch, but it was like thinking through mud. I knew I didn’t want her to touch me, but I didn’t quite know why. The heat haze was turning the room into a sweaty fog, making the red light pouring down from the alarms overhead a wavering strobe. It made her look like she was moving when she wasn’t—she just stood there, perfectly still, that lovely balanced rapier still wet with your blood and that net looking like it was twitching in her hand. All I could do was circle, sword held in a guard across your chest like this time I could protect your heart. Even if I’d been in my own body, I would have been panicking; but I was in yours, and she knew the only game I had. The fuck was I going to do, regrow your thumbs at her?

The net flicked. The damn thing looked like a gossamer slip, but it was weighted; I thought she’d just use it to tangle, not like freaking bolas. It caught me by one ankle and sent you to the ground because I still didn’t understand your weight—knocked all the air from your lungs and dragged us to her. With one flick of her arm we were lying prone in front of her. She flipped that rapier downward: thumb on the pommel, hilt high over her head, readied for one downward thrust that would go right between the eyes, slamming through cartilage, angled upward into your brain.

And then there was a haptic click and a huge blasting noise that ripped the Lyctor’s chest all to fuck. She stumbled forward; I rolled us away. Mercymorn was on her knees, and she was screaming. Not in pain, but in the way we’d first heard her screaming, that warbling bellow of absolute fear, her arms and legs twitching in helpless, spasmodic wriggles. Then she tipped over in a growing pool of blood on the floor.

I was on your feet with the sword, panting; in the doorway I’d come from stood a woman. She was shouldering a huge double-barrelled gun, and the wisps of smoke from the barrel shimmered in that red heat.

She wore a little white tunic, stained with blood. Her feet were bare. Her head was bare. Her pale sugar-brown curls frizzed in that moist, smouldering air, and her face was too pale, and her eyes were dark and dull, not the incandescent blue that was like staring into radioactive water. I would’ve known her anywhere. We’d killed her.

I breathed, “Dulcinea,” because I was a chump, and then—“Cytherea.”