Mostly, it’s terrifying. Compact and efficient and light on her feet, her strikes are so easy, they’re almost lazy. Her footwork is a blur, impossible to read. I keep searching for a chink in her defences. I cancel out the others in the room. Narrow my focus to Shinigami and our two blades, whipping through the air like lightsabres.

She cuts me across the shoulder. Not deep, a surface wound, but it burns and I can’t stop the yelp that escapes my lips.

“You’re shaking,” she says.

She’s right. I am. My whole body is shuddering. I spin through darkness and despair. I lunge at her and miss. Swing again and stumble past her.

She’s a machine. An automaton. She keeps coming.

She cuts me again. A deeper slash this time, across the stomach. I gasp and swerve out the way of her next strike. I see the triumph in her expression. She knows we’re close to the end now. We move around the space and I see a gap and thrust, but she slips out the way like mercury and Ra stabs into the pale face of Goya’s Saturn.

Shinigami laughs.

I pull the blade free, sweating. A surge of panic tears through me.

I curse my mistakes, the poor timing, the clumsy manoeuvres. Everything I’ve learned, everything Akuji—no, Mara—taught me, disappears.

I’m a Noob again. A beginner. Nothing in comparison to Shinigami.

How long to the end now?

How much time before I feel the steel of her blade cutting through my throat?

Will it hurt? I wonder.

Will I even see Death when it comes?

I jerk my body out the way of another brutal strike and stagger back.

I recall the tent in Lūna and Mother hitting me, time and again, so long ago. Coming after me and hitting me and hitting me. I think about fighting Mara, high above the desert plains, and the relentless, unforgiving way she came at me.

And that’s when I remember.

You get stuck in your mistakes. It is why you lost. Put them behind you. Let go. Find a way to win, from inside.

I let go. I float. I feel the Seventh Gate pulsing. Pulling.

And I think about a line from The Book of Seven.

If you have darkness in you, you will see only darkness; and it will be hellish, from first moment to last—an inescapable prison.

Everything else the book has said has been true. Maybe I need to trust it one more time.

“You were right about one thing,” I tell Shinigami, breathing hard. “I can’t change the past, but the future, my future, that’s up to me. And yours is the seventh.”

Shinigami smiles coldly. Her black sword whips through the air…