Chapter 70 — Five Shares III (Bonus)
I got up.
I do not know how, and my left leg was not carrying its share, and I got up because there was a woman with a shaved head forty metres from the door with her hands under somebody’s arms trying to drag him and getting nowhere.
Gideon saw me go down.
I know he did, because he broke off Cormac, and his whole body turned toward me across thirty metres of stone.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
Cormac was in front of him before he had finished the turn.
He did not even attack. He simply arrived in the line Gideon needed and made him deal with it, and that was three seconds, and that is what those three seconds were for.
Something went out of Gideon Rook then.
I have known that man for eleven days. He took a Giant’s wrist on his forearm two nights ago and then shook his hand out afterward and said nothing about it.
He was not quiet in the same way now. His breathing had gone through his teeth and I could hear it at eleven metres.
His next strike put Cormac Keane completely onto the back foot for the first time in the fight.
The one after that took a piece out of the floor where Cormac had been.
But Cormac had stopped trying to hit him at all. He was standing in the line and taking it, and a man taking it does not go anywhere quickly, and every second of that was a second I did not have.
---
> **[Ability Activated: Aten.]**
>
> **[Mana: 116/230 → 104/230.]**
Six seconds, both gauntlets, and it moved Søren Juel four metres.
Not because I found something extra. Because six seconds of it is twice three seconds of it, and that is the only lever I have left that still works.
He came off it and reset and started walking at me, and he was not hurrying, and that is when I felt the other thing come up.
Lycaon.
It was *right there*. I have never used it and I have never dared to and I could feel exactly where it sat, and my hand closed so hard inside the gauntlet that the padding went flat.
Three hundred kilos. Claws. A body that closes its own wounds while you are still using it.
I could put that man through the wall.
And then I would be standing in the middle of ten surviving Players and a Meridian raid captain, in a full SS wolf transformation.
Holding an Ability that belongs to a man who died in a forest last night with my father’s employee standing over him.
Renard would file it.
The Bureau would read it.
And every question I have spent four weeks not answering would arrive at once, in a room, with my father in it.
My hand stayed closed and I did not do it.
---
He did not give me time to finish deciding.
He came at my head and it was the same low crossing angle as before, and I read it correctly, and I did the correct thing.
> **[Talaria activated.]**
I came out of the line.
And my landing foot went down and stopped belonging to me, and the whole of my momentum arrived at an ankle that was not permitted to move.
That is not how Talaria works. Talaria puts the arresting force through my body and my body deals with it.
My body could not deal with it, because my body was nailed to the floor.
Something below the knee tore.
I went over sideways with my leg still fixed and the release came off in the middle of the fall, and I hit the stone flat on my back with my arms out and no air in me anywhere.
Then he was standing over me.
---
Everything had gone quiet, or my ears had.
I could see it happening. Clara was moving somewhere off to my right and her mouth was open, and there was light coming off whatever the Mage was throwing, and metal was hitting metal in three separate places.
All of it arrived through wool.
The stone under the back of my head was very cold. That is the thing I remember most clearly, that the floor was so cold, and that inside my armour something warm was moving down my side and pooling in the small of my back.
I tried to roll and got about twenty degrees.
I got my right elbow underneath me and it took four attempts.
I was not going to be able to stand. I understood that with no feeling attached to it at all, in the same three seconds I registered that the floor was cold.
> **[Gate collapse in progress: 21:58.]**
Behind him, a long way off, Gideon was still trying to come.
---
I want to be clear about this part, because there was another night in a forest where I made a very different decision and I know exactly what it looked like.
I was not doing that.
There was no arithmetic in my head and no cards and no ranks, and I was not thinking about what Søren Juel might have in his hand for me.
I have a broken leg and I am eighteen and I want to go home.
That is all that was in there. That is the whole of it.
---
He came down and I got the gauntlet up.
Both hands, crossed, above my face, and I lit them.
> **[Mana: 104/230 → 98/230.]**
Ninety-eight left. Forty-nine punches.
There was Mana in me. There was plenty of Mana in me.
There was nothing left underneath it to put it through, because my left leg was in two pieces and my wrist had gone and I could not get off my own back.
The first one landed on my forearms and drove them back into my own chest, and something in my left wrist gave, and my elbows hit the stone on either side of my head.
> **[Health: 84/340 → 31/340.]**
It hurt so much that my whole body tried to fold and could not, and the sound I made was not a word.
I got them up again.
I actually got them up again, about fifteen centimetres, shaking, with one wrist not working.
The second one went straight through the gap between them.
> **[Health: 0.]**
>
> **[You have died.]**