The obsidian blade goes through the grey Harvester’s plate as though the plate is warm wax, and the cut does not slow at the armor the way every law of the physical world says it should, because the engine is at full and full means the blade carries my entire frequency into the steel ahead of the edge, and the steel forgets, for one impossible instant, how to be solid.The Harvester comes apart at the gorget and I am already past it, already turning, already cutting down the second one that drops behind it out of the spine, and the corridor fills with the smell I have spent my whole life learning to scrub and hide and bury, scorched ozone, the burnt-storm reek of a Sovereign at full song, pooling thick and bitter in the dead air around my fists like weather trapped indoors.I do not count them. I used to count everything, exits, cameras, guards, the inches to a man’s carotid.Now I just move, and the moving is enough, and the white shapes and grey shapes the Dir
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