At the very last instant of the first breath, as the fourteen-inch shard of broken balance weight bronze hooked out of the lower housing toward her left collarbone, Ilyra carried out the exact exit she had built into her stance on the western apron before the sprint began. She didn’t hesitate out of misplaced sect pride, and she didn’t look back to ask Seyun’s permission to save her own life. She used the hooked cross-lug of her eighteen-inch marsh-iron spearhead as a lever against the dark rock crack. She twisted her wrists counter-clockwise to pop the diamond point free of the stone. She tucked her left chin to her chest. Then she drove off her cocked right boot in a low backward roll toward the western apron.
The hooking bronze shard screamed through the exact space where her left shoulder and neck had been a tenth of a second earlier—shearing only a single dark strand of hair from her temple and striking a harmless shower of sparks off the empty dark rock floor.
The moment the marsh-iron spearhead left the cooling crack, however, the clockwork shape of the inner hub changed fully. Freed from the iron pin, the lower western backup vane snapped back into motion beneath the drum. He closed the two-foot western entry lane that Seyun had been approaching.
