Not good. The platform had cover, but not enough. Maybe I can hide . . . The pillar I had ducked behind was more of a girder, really, holding up the roof over the platform. I held very still.

The air mage reached the top of the stairs, looking left and right. He was maybe twenty feet from where I was standing. I held my breath.

Silence.

The other man was standing quite still. The futures flickered, uncertain. In some of them he found me, in others he didn’t. I couldn’t see what I needed to do to shake him. He began walking down the platform.

I edged very carefully to the left, keeping the pillar between us. The wind had dropped and the air was still. I made it around and the air mage was walking away down the platform. Hasn’t seen me yet . . . I drew in a soft breath and let it out.

The air mage’s head snapped around.

Shit.

He cleared the benches in one jump, seeming to hang in the air, eyes locking onto me. I leapt back behind the pillar as a spray of something almost invisible and very lethal flashed down the platform towards me. I needed time. I grabbed a forcewall from my pocket, flicked the gold discs out to the platform edges, and said the command word just as another spell came flying at me.

The discs ignited, throwing up an invisible barrier, and the spell bounced off; it had been some sort of whirlwind. I backed out into the open, looking at the mage through the forcewall. “Can we talk about this?”

He threw another spell. Fragments of hardened air slammed into the forcewall, dissolving back into gas as soon as they struck. The forcewall didn’t budge. “Okay, so you’re not the chatty type,” I said. “That’s fine, we can work something out. So why exactly are you trying to kill me? I’m guessing it’s got something to do with what happened last night?”

No answer. I couldn’t see the guy’s eyes behind the dark glasses, but the rest of his face was expressionless. Usually when someone attacks you, they want to talk, either to justify themselves or to convince you to give up. When they’re silent and blank-faced, it’s a bad sign. It means they’ve already written you off and they’re not going to waste time talking to a dead man.

The air mage fired off another useless spell at the forcewall, then stopped. His head tilted up as he looked at where the forcewall met the platform roof and I knew he was studying the spell with his magesight. Forcewalls transfer energy into whatever they’re anchored to when they’re attacked, which makes them very hard to blast through. Air magic isn’t much good at blasting through stuff. It’s much better at moving things around.

Unfortunately the forcewall only went as far as the platform edge.

Magic curved around the mage as he floated into the air. He flew out over the train tracks and right around the wall.