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The construct charged forward like a battering ram, and she leapt out the way and left half the skin of one knee on the ground for her pains. She still had a mouthful of blood as she began to holler, “Har—”
“Nearly,” crackled the speaker.
“—row, just let me take a whack at it—”
“Not yet. Nearly. The bitten tongue was good. Hold it off for a second, Nav! You could do this asleep!”
Not with a rapier. She might as well have chucked both knuckle and sword to the ground and started jogging for all the good her weapons were doing. Gideon wasn’t equipped for defence, and her head hurt. Her focus kept twitching in a migraine blur, dots and sparks coruscating in and out of her vision. A titanic blow from the construct bent her parry almost all the way back around to her head, and she moved with the blow rather than against as more of an afterthought.
“Three seconds. Two.” It almost sounded like begging.
Gideon was feeling more and more nauseous: there was an oily, warm feeling in the back of her throat and her tongue was running wet with spit. When she looked at the construct now it was through a hazy overlay, as though she were seeing double. There was a sharp pain between her eyes as it hauled back its centre of gravity, lurched—
“I can see it.”
Later on Gideon would think about how little triumph there was in Harrow’s voice: more awe. Her vision blurred, then spiked back abruptly into twenty-twenty colour. Everything was brighter and crisper and cleaner, the lights harder, the shadows colder. When she looked at the construct it smoked in the air like hot metal—pale, nearly transparent coronas wreathed its malformed body. They simmered in different colours, visible if you squinted this way or that, and in admiring them Gideon nearly got her leg broken.
“Nav,” hollered the speakers.
Gideon took a hard dive out of the way of a low stab, and then rolled away as the construct followed up by stomping hard where her foot had been. She hollered back: “Tell me what to do!”
“Hit these in order! Left lateral radius!”
Gideon focused on the nubbly, too-thick joint of the high left arm, and was surprised to find one of those mirage-like lights there: she sliced down and fell nearly off balance as her blade went through like a hot knife through fat. The long blade of the mutant arm clattered to the floor forlornly.
“Bottom-right tibia, lower quadrant, near the notch,” said Harrow. Now her triumph was barely held at bay. “Don’t make any other hits.”
Easier said than done. Gideon had to play grab-ass, snaking out of the construct’s remaining blades, before she disdained the rapier and slammed her booted foot down instead. It wasn’t hard: that part, just like the radius, was glowing like a flare. She got a square hit in and the construct’s leg shattered—it rocked to the side, trying to compensate, and the leg did not start regenerating.
The next was easy. Side of the mandible. The eighteenth rib. She peeled the construct apart, removing the unseen strut mechanisms that turned it from monster into pathetic, jaw-clattering fuckup, some kid’s first attempt at bone magic without ever having taken a look at an anatomy chart. When at last the Reverend Daughter said, “Sternum,” Gideon was already there—raising one gauntleted fist up where a slice of sternum glowed like a candleflame, and punching it into dust. The construct collapsed. Gideon felt dizzy for just a second, and then it left her. The whole world brightened and sharpened.
The only thing left of the monster was a big chunk of pelvis, atomizing slowly into sand. There was a pleasing overhead beep and the door to Response whooshed open—and remained open, letting through a Harrow so wet with sweat that her hood was stuck to her forehead. Gideon was distracted by the pelvis as the sand crumbled and parted to reveal a gleaming black box. Its lead-coloured screen ticked up—15 percent; 26 percent; 80 percent—until it swung open with a soft click to reveal nothing more interesting than—a key.
Harrow uttered a soft cry and swooped, but Gideon was quicker. She took it up and unsnapped the key ring she now kept down her shirt, and she looped it through one of the ornate clover-shaped holes on the handle. Two keys now dangled there in triumph: the upper hatch key, and their new prize. They both admired them for a long moment. The new key was chunky and solid, and dyed a deep, juicy scarlet.
Gideon found herself saying, “I saw—lights, when I was fighting it. Overlay. Bright spots, where you told me to hit, a glowing halo. Is that what you meant by thanergetic signature?”
She expected some dismissive You could not have comprehended the dark mysteries only my mascara’d eye doth espy, and was not prepared for Harrow’s open astonishment. Beneath the thick rivulets of blood and the smeared paint, she looked completely taken aback. “Do you mean,” her adept said slowly, “that there were things in the skeleton framework—mechanical lights, perhaps? Dyed segments?”
“No, they were just—googly areas of light. I couldn’t really see them properly,” she said. “I only saw them toward the end, when you were messing around.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’m not lying.”
“No, I’m just saying—that shouldn’t have been possible,” Harrow said. Her dark brows were furrowed so deeply that they looked like they were on a collision course. “I thought I knew what the experiment was doing, but—well. I cannot assume.”
Gideon, tucking the keys safely back into her bandeau and, wincing at the chill, readied a flip comment; but as she looked up Harrowhark was looking at her, dead in the eye. Her chin was set. Harrow always looked so aggressively. Her face was moist from the effort and there were starbursts of broken red capillaries tucked into the white of each eye, but she turned those pitch-black irises right on her cavalier. The expression on her face was completely alien. Harrowhark Nonagesimus was looking at her with unalloyed admiration.
“But for the love of the Emperor, Griddle,” she said gruffly, “you are something else with that sword.”
The blood all drained away from Gideon’s cheeks for some reason. The world spun off its axis. Bright spots sparked in her vision. She found herself saying, intelligently, “Mmf.”
“I was in the privileged position of feeling you fight,” Harrow continued, fingers nervously flexing. “And it took me a while to work out what you were doing. Longer still to appreciate it. But I don’t think I’d ever really watched you, not in context … Well, all I can say is thank the Tomb that nobody knows you’re not really one of ours. If I didn’t know that, I’d be saying that you were Matthias Nonius come again or something equally saccharine.”
“Harrow,” said Gideon, finding her tongue, “don’t say these things to me. I still have a million reasons to be mad at you. It’s hard to do that and worry that you got brain injured.”
“I’m merely saying you’re an incredible swordswoman,” said the necromancer briskly. “You’re still a dreadful human being.”
“Okay, cool, thanks,” said Gideon. “Damage done though. What now?”
Harrowhark smiled. This smile was unusual too: it betokened conspiracy, which was normal, except that this one invited Gideon to be part of it. Her eyes glowed like coals with sheer collusion. Gideon didn’t know if she could handle all these new expressions on Harrow: she needed a lie down.
