The warmth vanished from the double’s eyes in less than a heartbeat.
It didn’t scowl. It didn’t drop into a dramatic crouch, snarling like a feral beast, nor did it curse the yellow canvas flag fluttering in the silver starlight. The shift was entirely office. The faint, fraternal smile melted from its lips. That left the planes of its face as flat, blank, and cold as a sheet of zinc-coated iron pulled from a warehouse rack. The office slate slipped from its fingers, falling five feet onto the spruce deck. There, the thin gray stone snapped into three jagged shards with a dry, baked-clay crack that barely stirred the drafts.
The negotiation was closed. The claimant record had formally refused voluntary reconciliation. The town rig had shifted without pause from civil seizure to moving forced payout.
The creature’s right arm cocked back, elbow locked at ninety degrees, fingers rigid and pressed together in a hardened bone spear aimed directly at Len’s larynx.
Then it launched.
There was no preliminary shift of weight, no heard intake of air, no practice flexion of the calves to signal the strike. Burdenless Step removed the physical heavy rush that warned an ordinary road courier of an incoming charge. In a single explosive split second, the double’s body sped up from dead rest to thirty miles an hour across the timber decking. Its boots left faint scuffs of tightly packed wood grain on the four-inch spruce planks.
