Which was highly relevant, since I was pretty sure those two bullets had been fired at me. I’ve been shot (well, seen my future self get shot) enough times to recognise it. That just left the question of who’d done the shooting . . .

“Nothing,” Trask said.

“What does that mean?” Haken said.

“Don’t have a cause of death.”

“Then what do you have?”

“Stomach bruising.” Trask pointed down, then moved his finger up. “And a shot to the leg.”

“She got shot?” Lizbeth looked hopeful. “It was their fault then . . .”

Trask was shaking his head. “Why not?” Haken asked.

“Muscle wound,” Trask said. “Missed the arteries.”

“What did you hit her with anyway?” Lizbeth said to Slate.

“It was just an enervation bolt.”

“Well, those are dangerous.”

“I know how to do my job, all right?” Slate said. “Was the same thing I hit those guys downstairs with, and they’re fine, aren’t they?”

“People have died from enervation spells . . .”

“She’s a fucking life mage,” Slate said. He gave Vihaela’s body an angry gesture that seemed to imply that her death had been a personal insult. “You have any idea how tough they are to kill? They’re like frigging cockroaches.”

Lizbeth shrugged. “Didn’t seem that tough to me.”

Haken put a hand over his eyes. “Abeyance?”

“I’m not getting much,” Abeyance said. She’d stayed out of the argument. “Best guess is the bullet was from a burst aimed at one of those constructs. What took her down was Slate and Lizbeth’s spells, but I can’t tell what killed her.”

“What do you mean, you can’t tell?” Haken said. “The more recent an event, the easier it is to timesight it, right? So why can’t you see?”

Abeyance shot Haken an annoyed glance. “There’s interference. A shroud maybe, or spell static. It’s not as though I have lifesight—I’m not going to be able to tell you the exact moment she went from alive to dead.”

I ran my fingers along the bullet holes, then turned around, crouching slightly and angling my head to look back along the line they’d come from. I tried to remember who’d been in that position. It hadn’t been Vihaela or the constructs. Hadn’t been Haken or Slate, either. Coatl had been downstairs. That left Trask, Abeyance, Cerulean, and the Council security.

More to the point, no one seemed to have noticed anything. No one had said anything about my dive sideways, or about any shots going in my direction. That meant that either they’d seen it and said nothing, or there hadn’t been anything to see. The first was technically possible, but seemed like an unreasonable risk. I didn’t believe that everyone on the Keeper team wanted to kill me, which leant me towards the second option. It was always possible that the shooter had just hung back and taken a shot while all eyes were turned on Vihaela, but even in the confusion, that seemed unnecessarily dangerous. With the number of magical senses around, there was too great a chance that someone would notice. The simplest explanation was that it had been done in such a way that no one had been able to see anything at all.