In an open street or a wide courtyard, Daro Kesh would never have stood still under a dropping Jade blade.
Seven mornings ago beneath the black roof of his school, Daro had reached Deeper Bronze exactly by learning that a single unbending line is not the only honorable answer. That a swordsman can hold a second route open and step aside when an overwhelming force tries to crush his center.
Here at the southern base of the black bronze pillar, Daro looked over his shoulder for a tenth of a second before Reth Mal’s blade fell. And saw why he couldn’t step aside.
Directly behind Daro’s left boot lay Bed One, where sixteen-year-old Halin was pinned to the iron frame by his fifth-rib wire. Directly behind Daro’s right boot lay Bed Seven, where twenty-year-old Kori was still recovering from the morning’s pipe hub oscillations. And between the two beds stood Mina. She knelt with her hands over Halin’s metal ring to shield the boy’s chest from the shriek of Reth’s aura.
If Daro used his Deeper Bronze multi-route footwork to slip sideways out from under Reth Mal’s linear Jade enforcement stroke, the full, unbuffered weight of that thirty-six-inch Jade blade would shear straight through the space Daro vacated—cleaving through Mina’s back, severing Halin’s and Kori’s live rib-wires, and splitting the sub-floor amalgam pipe hub open in a single lethal explosion.
