His foot had lifted for the first step toward the exit when something stopped it.
Not an external force. Not a sound or a movement from the surrounding stillness. The interruption came from inside — the specific, sharp quality of a realization arriving at exactly the wrong moment, the mental equivalent of reaching the door and remembering something left on the stove.
How did I almost forget that?
He turned around.
The bodies were where they had fallen — the black-robed figures distributed across the cavern floor with the particular, final stillness of things that had concluded. Seven of them. The woman at the end, her loose black robes still carrying the long gash he had opened across them, her sequence seven cultivation having done nothing, ultimately, about a poison it hadn't seen coming.
He moved through them efficiently.
