Seol-ah Moyong had been one floor behind Jack Blazespout for two hours, and she was beginning to take it personally.
It was always one. On the twenty-first floor she'd come up the stair to find a construct still collapsing, its arms burned off at the shoulder, white embers drifting in the air. On the twenty-sixth, the tokens were already gone from a nest of lightning hawks, and the hawks were ash. On the thirtieth, a hydra lay across the corridor with six of its seven heads burned to stumps and the seventh still twitching, and the stair beyond it was already starting to slide away into the wall. She went through the gap sideways with a hand's width to spare.
One floor. Every time.
