At the opening fraction of the third breath, Daro Kesh kept his word to Mina, to Seyun, and to his own black-roofed school in Oran. Having held the hub’s rear returning plane thirty degrees high off the basin floor for his full declared count of three breaths—buying the approach, Keth’s socket break, Ilyra’s pin, Bel’s socket crack. The first two-thirds of Seyun’s cut—Daro didn’t linger a single reckless heartbeat past his limit. With a sharp twist of his raw, bleeding wrists, he unhooked the largest notch of his chipped fire-rib short sword from the eastern current. Then he dropped his weight backward onto his good left hip behind the four-foot-thick granite corner stone support prop.
Released from the thirty-degree incline of Daro’s steel, the eastern returning plane snapped inward toward the back of the lower returning hub like a giant steel spring suddenly unlatched from a wall.
Had Daro released that plane two breaths earlier. Meanwhile, the three ground sockets were still intact and the test seam was whole, the inward snap would have swept across the basin floor and cut the attackers in half. Now, on Breath Three—with all three ground sockets broken and two-thirds of the inner test seam already cut by Seyun’s rapid revisions—the released eastern plane had no intact ring to return to.
