Her boots struck Dyas in the chest as she came charging in. Magnus, unexpectedly left holding her whole weight, staggered and fell backward. All three of them went down together. Dyas and the Sleeper came back up again with almost equal speed, Dyas perhaps a fraction faster, the dagger still in her left hand. She slashed diagonally upward; the Sleeper blocked her arm with a bent elbow, then stepped in and kneed her in the gut. Harrow heard her wheeze out a surprised breath. The Sleeper stepped through, grabbed Dyas’s knife-arm in some complicated hold, and twisted. The dagger dropped to the chilly metal tiles with a musical clatter. Magnus was struggling to his feet, his mouth and chin scarlet with blood from his nose, reaching for his own rapier; the Sleeper dropped Dyas in a heap on the floor, flung out one arm, and shot him in the stomach. Harrow hadn’t even seen the gun appear in her hand.

Magnus crumpled; Abigail screamed. Dyas had hauled herself up onto hands and knees, but the Sleeper kicked her hard in the ribs, rolling her onto her back. She pointed the gun down at her face.

“Four,” she said.

The fallen bulk of Protesilaus the Seventh heaved itself abruptly off the ground, crashing bodily into the Sleeper as he rose, knocking her away from Dyas. She swung the gun up, but he was already too close. He smashed his bunched-up chain into the side of her head with enough force to shatter bone. It whipped the Sleeper’s face mask to the side, and she stumbled, the gun slipping from her fingers. Protesilaus loosed the chain and lunged with both arms, and at first Harrow thought he had tried to grab her the same way Magnus had. Then she understood: he had wrapped the chain around her throat from behind, like a garotte, and drawn it tight. Against his muscle, even the Sleeper’s bulky suit looked small. Blood was pouring freely from three dark, ragged holes in his back, running down his thighs and calves and dripping onto the floor.

“I have known one death,” he said hoarsely, “and I swear that I will not know its like again.”

“Smart boy,” rasped the Sleeper, her voice still strangely fuzzy, as if she were speaking through a communicator. “Figuring out the limits, are we? Doesn’t matter. My rules.”