The concave quartz disk hummed to life, and three pale planes of refracted force swept outward across the cluttered flat stone slabs.
On that first blind run, the sheer speed of the tuned pressure lens combined with the cluttered obstacles on the flat stone slabs stripped away three seconds of philosophical good intentions in half a heartbeat.
Seyun didn’t pause to look at the strap tension on Kes’s shoulder or the bounce of the leather bottom against the stone when the boy stumbled on the west. He saw a medicine bag falling under a blade plane. The boy who had once burned both of his palms raw pulling half of a transfer order out of Steward Osen’s fire bowl took over his legs.
Driving his Returning Step hard to the west and taking the blunt, jarring slam of the lens’s main sweep across his braced ash staff—sending a dull ache all the way into his left hip bruise—he hooked the brass buckle of the satchel with his iron metal ring.
The leather bag flipped up into the air as light and hollow as a dried gourd stuffed with oat straw. Then, Seyun felt his stomach drop.
Seyun’s eyes locked right away onto the most dramatic motion in the yard. Ten paces to the west, right near the inner prism’s main sweep, student Kes caught his boot toe on a raised dark rock paver, pitched forward onto his hands. Then it dropped the sealed leather medicine satchel directly into the path…
