"Mother?"
Evelyn's mother raised one hand and pointed, past her shoulder, at the window.
"B-behind... you..."
Evelyn turned.
The window looked east, the way it had looked east her whole life, and for her whole life the view had ended in the same place: the grey shoulder of the eastern wall, forty feet of stone standing across the sky like a closed eyelid.
The wall was not there.
Not fallen. Not broken. There was no rubble in the street, no dust in the air, no fire — only a clean vertical edge where the stone stopped, flat and smooth as a cut through soft cheese, and past that edge, nothing. Open black. The dead lands. A horizon her family had never once seen from this house in three generations, hanging there now above the rooftops as though it had always been allowed.
Somewhere beyond it, small lights were moving. A great many of them.
The wall... is it—?
The cake fell out of her mouth.
The fork went out of her fingers and struck the plate with a small bright ringing sound, and that sound was the loudest thing in the room.
"Evelyn," her mother said. "Evelyn."
A hand found the top of her head and smoothed her hair, once, the way it had every morning of her childhood.
"Eve—"
Evelyn came apart out of the stillness all at once.
She was off the bed and across the room before her mother had finished the syllable, hauling the uniform down off its hook — grey and black, folded four days ago with the careful ceremony of a woman who did not expect to wear it again until Thursday.
Behind her, her mother was already dragging the strongbox out from under the dresser, sweeping in the small things: the marriage papers, the tin of coins, the little enamel bird that had belonged to Evelyn's grandmother.
"The main road," Evelyn said, pulling the collar straight, buckling. "You do not take the main road."
"The bridge stairs are bad on my knees—"
"Take them anyway. Main road runs straight to the river and every person in this district will be on it inside ten minutes. If it jams, nobody gets through." She yanked the belt tight. "The side lanes and the footbridges. Do you hear me?"
"I hear you, I hear you."
Her mother stopped in the middle of the room with the strongbox in both arms, and looked at her daughter in full uniform, and it was clear from her face that she had never once, in twenty-one years, gotten used to the sight.
"Little girl acting tough," she said.
"Mom. Please."
Outside, the street was already awake and did not yet know what it was awake for.
Evelyn stood at the start of the small road with the crimson tie knotted straight at her throat and the katana at her hip, and she looked exactly like what she was, which was the single most reassuring object on that street.
"Go," she said. "Now. Ahead of the crowd."
"Come with me." Her mom tug at her sleeve
"I can't. There's no defensive line yet — not one soldier between the breach and these houses. I have to hold the lane until—"
"Then we go together, both of us, right now! You're Palace Affairs, Eve, you could live an easy life after you worked so hard for it, you don't have to—"
"I can't."
Her mother's mouth worked. Something went across her face that was not fear of the dead lands at all.
"No," she said. "I'm not going."
"But mom—!"
"Eve."
The word came down like an anvil, and it cut every argument Evelyn had lined up behind her teeth clean off at the root.
"You're all I have."
Evelyn looked at the ground. Then away, at nothing.
"...Mm. All right," she said. "Then we stay together. Until the evacuation's done?"
The district was threaded with the footbridges — narrow stone spans arcing up over the main road and down into the side lanes, as if the flourish of an engineer who had once been given a budget and an opportunity and had enjoyed both.
Evelyn stood at the mouth of one with both arms up, waving people through.
"Up the stairs! This way, not the main road! Move—"
They came past her in nightclothes, most of them. Thin cotton, bare feet, a man carrying a birdcage and nothing else, a girl of nine with her arms full of somebody else's baby. This was not a rich quarter. It never had been. Half the people shuffling past her had known her since she was small and had said, at one time or another, that the Lan family girl would go far.
At the foot of the stairs, an old man was failing.
He had a boy of perhaps five on his back and he had made four steps and was not going to make a fifth; his knees had begun the long slow negotiation that ends with a fall. The child was sobbing into his collar.
Evelyn went.
The distance closed in less time than it takes to describe —, four times the pace of a galloping horse, an ugly graceless velocity that ate the street whole — and she had them both, one under each arm, before the old man's knee finished buckling.
She set them on their feet.
"Eve!"
Her mother came past her shoulder in a lunge — a fifty-eight-year-old woman putting her own body in the gap, arms spread, in front of something that was already in the air.
But in that same blink—
"Don't underestimate me, please!"
—Evelyn was through, and the katana came out and across, and the thing that had leapt at them came apart into two pieces that landed separately in front of the old man and the child.
It had been a dog once. Probably.
The blood spilled over, it corrode the stone below and Evelyn's glove too.
Evelyn turned her head.
"Run, please."
The old man nodded, and got the boy up, and went into the covered walkway of the bridge.
That was acidic..
"Mother. You need to go now, too—"
Tch.
They're already pushing this far in.
"We'll go together—"
"I have to stay, Mother, there's still no line—"
THMP!
Bootfalls. Many of them, in a rank, coming up in step.
Evelyn craned to look down at the main road below — and the sound she had heard was not the boots. It was a building coming down.
"Too late," she murmured.
"All right. Let's go."
She swung her mother up onto her back and turned to run, and she did not get two strides.
Light came at her from the back, fast and flat and hard.
Reflex dropped her under it — a duck so sudden it nearly took her knees out — and the bolt went through the space where her head had been and blew a fist-sized hole in the stonework of the far rail. Two more shapes came in behind it at speed.
Bad. Both hands are full and she's on my back.
She used her legs. The first kick took an arm at the elbow and turned the man's whole body sideways in the air; the second caught the other one across the wrist and sent his blade skittering away down the bridge deck. In the same motion she twisted and let her mother slide down off her back, behind her, into the covered span.
The katana came free of its sheath.
"Mom. Stay behind me, please."
They came up over both rails at once.
Not a queue. Not a duel. Nine, ten, more than she could count in the half-second she had — hooded, robed, and each one with a catalyst already lit in the fist, the light of it bleeding through the cloth of their sleeves.
Redcoat-grade. Every single one of them.
The first came in low and fast, blade held reversed, going for her hip. She took it on the flat of the katana and turned it down into the stone — and the shock of the parry went up her arm and into her shoulder and stayed there, a hot pulse under the joint, because he had put a great deal more weight behind it than a man his size should have been able to.
She stepped in and put the pommel through his face.
He went down. He did not stay down long.
Ten of them. Eleven. Twelve—
Two more crowded in from the left rail and she gave ground, and giving ground was the correct decision, and it was also how the shape of the fight changed against her: they had the mouth of the bridge, and she had the span.
The span was narrow.
Good. Narrow is good. Two at a time, three at most, they can't wrap around me here—
The narrowness was also a corridor with her mother at the end of it.
She fought backward. That was the objective and she held it in her teeth the whole time — back, one step, another, don't get pinned, keep the bodies in front, look for the gap to run. She cut the reaching arm of the man at her left and drove her heel into the knee of the one behind him and heard it fold the wrong way; she took a catalyst bolt on the crossguard and the heat of it came through the steel and up into her palm, and after that her grip on the hilt was never quite as good again.
A woman came at her from the right with a spear of hardened light and Evelyn ducked it and the point went over her head and buried itself in a robed shoulder behind her, and neither of them apologized.
Their catalysts are not as good as mine. But they're all reaching — every one of them is a half-beat behind me—
That half-beat was all she had. Thirty percent. Thirty percent faster than those men
"EVE! BEHIND—"
"I know, Mother!"
She did not know. She turned into it on faith and caught the descending blade on the last inch of her own and the impact drove her down onto one knee.
The bridge deck was slick now. She noted this the way you note weather.
Someone kicked her in the ribs and she went over sideways into the stone rail, and the rail took her weight and her breath together, and for a moment the world was a long grey ringing tunnel with her mother screaming somewhere at the end of it.
Get up.
Her arms would not.
Get. Up.
A robed figure stepped over her to get at the covered span behind, and Evelyn — flat on the stone, out of breath, out of arms — reached up and grabbed the hem of his cloak and pulled.
He went over the rail. It was eleven meters to the road.
She got her feet under her while they were still watching him fall.
Her left leg had been opened somewhere in the last thirty seconds, a long clean line above the knee that she had not felt happen and now could not stop feeling. It changed how she stood. She adjusted. She had been taught how to adjust.
Eight left. No — nine. Where did the ninth—
The ninth was at the far end of the span, past her, and he was not looking at Evelyn at all.
He was looking at a fifty-eight-year-old woman holding a strongbox.
The twelfth man was raising his catalyst.
Evelyn did not remember crossing the distance. There is no memory in that kind of movement — only the arrival, the shoulder driving in, the katana going through the man's chest and out of his back and the strongbox falling and bursting open and the little enamel bird skittering away across the stone.
And behind her, in the gap her own body had opened, a blade came in.
It came in at the small of her back and she twisted at the last possible instant on nothing but instinct, and it did not go through her; it opened her along the side, a shallow burning line across the waist, and the blood came fast and warm down into her belt.
She did not lose her footing.
She got her heel up and around and took the man across the throat with everything she had left, and something in his neck gave with a sound like a green branch, and the momentum carried him back over the rail and into the dark.
Twelve.
She put her hand flat against her side, hard, and the other hand tightened on the hilt.
There were still more of them on the bridge.
And her mother was still behind her.