At the western edge of the smoking recess crater, with the rear of the lower returning hub exposed upslope and the two-breath commitment window ticking away, Seyun looked straight at Ilyra. He didn’t ask her for a verbal oath that she would survive. That was because words spoken in the heat of a charge were too easily bent into polite assurances. Instead, trained by years of reading her spear from the funerary shrine on the burial road to the northern ridge, he looked at the actual shape of her boots, her hips, and the eighteen-inch marsh-iron spearhead in her hands.
Ilyra had first pivoted along the western seam to cover Nara and Soran’s departure a breath ago. Then, her right boot had been planted inside a narrow V-shaped notch of dark rock facing straight into the hub’s lower teeth. Had she launched from that exact foothold to pin the lower blade for Seyun’s dash, her driving force would have carried her hips inside the bronze basin wall with no lateral ledge to roll onto. Just then, a returning shard came back at her throat.
Ilyra saw Seyun’s glance drop to her right boot and understood the question instantly without a syllable passing between them. She didn’t waste a quarter-breath speaking a reassuring promise. Instead, she answered with an immediate, concrete physical shift. She slid her left boot half a pace back onto the flat granite apron outside the V-notch. She opened the angle of her rear hip by thirty degrees…
