The cobblestones came up.
Not fast — the specific slow fall of a body losing the argument with gravity, the knees going first, the armor's weight making the decision final before her muscles could negotiate. She caught herself on one hand, gauntlet palm flat against the stone, and stayed there — one knee, one hand, the sword still in her other fist by pure muscle memory, and the warmth leaving her center where Cassius had put his blade.
Bright red on the cobblestones.
Her blood was a specific color in the evening light. She looked at it with the clarity that arrives sometimes after a major wound, the specific lucid quality of a mind that has been stripped of everything except the present.
Cassius stood three feet from her.
His sword was still drawn.
She looked up at him. The eyes above his mask had the expression she'd catalogued before — still calculating, still running the numbers, the specific expression of a man waiting for the final variable to resolve.
