Sirach looks up to see the woman’s eyes have gone wide and glazed. She doesn’t understand until the hunter topples forward. Sirach has to roll from the path of the falling giantess to avoid being crushed.

Evie has swung Namrok’s severed head into the back of Tomoe’s skull, shattering her bone helm and planting most of those face spikes through her brain. Blood is still spilling down her neck and over the white bones of her armor’s back plates.

Evie offers Sirach a hand caked in dirt and blood from three different bodies. The Sicclunan agent takes it and stifles a shriek as her body’s every fiber lights in pain at being forced to stand.

The two women stand above the elongated form of the slain blood coin hunter, less than an arm’s length apart. Their shoulders rise and fall with each labored breath almost in perfect time with each other. Eventually they both look up from their shared enemy.

Their eyes meet, and Sirach’s grip tightens around the handles of her curved daggers.

Evie holds no weapon, but her hands begin to rise.

Neither woman strikes, however.

“Now,” Sirach says, “now I owe you.”

Evie shakes her head. “I’d say we’re even.”

Sirach doesn’t answer her right away, and Evie can see the heavy clouds of thought swelling in her eyes.

“Then perhaps I just don’t want to kill you anymore.”

Evie grins. “Perhaps I feel the same way.”

“Where does that leave us?”

“Well… if we aren’t enemies, that does narrow our remaining options, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does.”

Evie slowly relaxes her posture, allowing her tired body to fold forward just enough to give relief to the frayed muscles of her upper body. She braces her hands against her knees and lowers her head, sighing deeply.

Sirach watches her, again with that quietly marveling gaze, but she’s also lowered her weapons to her sides.

“I think I have an idea,” Evie says a few moments later.

Sirach continues staring at Evie in silence, then looks between the crescent blades of her daggers. With a sigh of her own, she sheathes them both behind her hips in their scabbards.

The cattish grin returns to her lips.

“I’m listening,” she says.

RIDDLES SHAPED IN STONE

RIKO HANGS SUSPENDED FROM THE ceiling above the massive scale model of the Capitol on the maps level. She blows a dark tanto-tipped bang from her face as she concentrates on affixing the experimental sundial over the great stone awning that crowns the entrance to the Spectrum.

Dyeawan is lying on her stomach in the street outside the Spectrum, chin propped on her small balled fists as she scrutinizes every inch of the building’s perfectly replicated-in-miniature form. She takes a break from her staring to look up at Riko.

“Are you mad at me?” she asks Riko. “Because Edger wants me to be a planner?”