The plate of frosted glass showed my outline, and a quarter-second ahead of it, the future the room was planning for me. It was a ghost of my own intent, a prediction built from the tells my body still wanted to leak.
'Don't let it,' Valeria said, sharp in my mind. 'Be late to your own prediction.'
Which was ridiculous and entirely correct advice. I loosened the sequence my body used when it was tired, eyes pick a target, shoulder agrees, hips deliver, and replaced it with the lesson the tower had been beating into me: cut first, and discover the rest of you has already followed.
This time I didn't chase the quiet. I let it come to me. I stopped asking my body what it was about to do and asked the blade what it had already done. The answer arrived before the question finished: the steel was a hand's width along its path, and my wrist, my hip, my back foot were catching up like latecomers slipping into the back of a lecture hall, careful not to make the floor creak.
