Len Vey didn’t aim the eight-inch Swedish cold-chisel at the hunter’s chest, throat, or temple.
A showed up double was not a creature of living vulnerability. It possessed no throat pipe that could be crushed to cut off oxygen, no pulsing main neck blood vessel that could be cut to induce fatal heavy bleeding. No brain cortex that would lose mind under bone-shaking trauma. Its physical form was a dense, highly ordered matrix of anchor energy projected onto physical matter. An office manifestation maintaining baseline human thickness through nonstop, closed-circuit feedback with the central Survey registry.
To destroy a double’s limb, you didn’t inflict pain. You attacked the clockwork fulcrums that allowed physical leverage.
Len hit the white pine floorboards five paces from the drafting table. His courier boots struck the dust with a heard slap, but the downward shock never reached his knees. Surefoot absorbed the driving force instantly, redistributing the force through the arches of his boots and the heavy, conditioned tendons of his calves. He skidded across the lime-slick timber, his right hip slamming hard against the dressed granite door post of the breach right beside Edda’s trembling shoulder.
His stitched left arm screamed with a searing, white-hot agony as the sudden slowdown wrenched his shoulder against the linen sling. The puncture wounds inflicted by the double during the first midnight pulled brutally against the horsehair stitches, weeping a hot mixture of yellow serum and stale blood into the cloth wraps. But his right hand remained steady…
