Reth Mal’s scream tore through the frost-coated pavilion as a pencil-thick needle of condensed white light punched straight through the belly of his right forearm—between radius and forearm bone—and pinned his weapon arm three inches deep into the bronze test socket on the floor. There was almost no blood at the entry wound. Instead, branching lines of glowing white frost raced up the under-skin veins of his right arm toward his shoulder and collarbone.
Having found a fighter foolish enough to feed three matching breaths into an unshielded channel, Heaven’s Measure had begun converting the assistant judge himself into a fixed human anchor to replace the freed Hollow Summit testers. Already, Reth’s chest muscle was jerking in reflex clockwork spasms as the needle forced his lungs toward the sky-slit’s correction rhythm.
At the broken stone railing, the two outer-outer edge Court guards took one look at the frost climbing Reth’s neck, dropped their spears on the stone, and bolted wildly down the eastern scree slope in terror.
Retrieval Commander Keth Or didn’t run. For all his ruthless enforcement of Court orders at White Heron Hall and in the northern chamber, Keth was a soldier who didn’t leave a friend pinned to the ground. Seeing Reth’s teeth clench as the white frost reached his shoulder muscle—three breaths away from permanently fusing his heart and lungs into the mountain circuit—Keth panicked.
