The silver state had no temperature.

Not the chemical bite of the blue or the tracking pull of the crimson or the patient heat underneath everything.

It sat below all of those, below sensation entirely, and what remained when everything with temperature had been removed was only the indifference.

The yard was positions and vectors. The hub wall at a fixed height. The debris field at a fixed spread.

The assassin at position Z, moving, which meant she was at several positions in sequence and was predictable because everything operating at speed follows the physics of what it is moving through, and physics does not improvise.

One thing in the yard was not reducible to position and vector.

Proxy, in the western yard, behind her, in the direction the compass had been pointing since the fight started.

The compass was warm. The state was not. They occupied different places and neither interfered with the other.

She held a blade at his throat.

That was all.

The assassin was at position Z.

The distance closed.

The assassin read the move and deployed the right katana in a horizontal sweep, a deterrent, blade at extension, aimed at the space Nyx was coming from.

The timing was close.

Nyx was not in the space the blade was aimed at.

She was at the assassin’s right side, past the blade’s path, the knife already moving at the forearm where the cyberware sat flush with the skin.

The metal deflected the tip. The cyberware was solid it did not give.

The skin above gave instead. A stream of red opened from elbow to mid-forearm, shallow, where the tip caught the surface in passing.

First entry. Partial payment.

Clippy was holstered at her pack strap and she drew it one-handed with her right and fired once from the hip at where the assassin’s right shoulder was going.

The round made contact, the muscle took it and the assassin made a short sound, the involuntary kind that arrives before the decision about whether to make any sound at all has had time to be made.

I have identified a high-velocity contact event and have several rec-

Nyx shifted her weight and gave the weapon a flat look. "Mm."

...Understood. I will continue monitoring. This service is complimentary.

The assassin retreated toward the partial wall at the hub, using the debris field to create openings.

At normal speed the crossing would take seconds. At the speed the implant provided, she was at the wall’s base before the debris had time to become a problem.

She deployed the left blade reversed, the mount’s wrist pivot turning the forearm until the katana was backward, aimed at whatever came from directly behind.

Nyx did not come from directly behind.

She cut left, wide around the debris field, and arrived at the assassin’s left side.

The left katana swept lateral to intercept.

The pivot read the move and the arc was tight and technically precise.

The flat of the blade connected with Nyx’s left forearm as she came through, because she was past the line where it would have mattered.

It landed like a rod across the bone, impact traveling from the outer forearm straight through to the elbow.

Her hand went numb from the blow’s point of contact to the wrist. The knife did not leave her grip.

Clippy came up in her other hand and she fired into the assassin’s left lateral at close range.

The round entered the muscle below the rib where Proxy had grazed her earlier, steeper, and it went in and stayed.

The assassin’s posture changed.

Oh! I have four recommendations regarding-

Nyx stepped in closer and cut the sentence off with a glance. "Later."

Of course! I will be ready when convenient. This service is com-

She had already moved.

The assassin was doing her best.

Every read was technically right. Every counter arrived in the right place.

The place was simply already the wrong answer by the time the counter got there, because the difference between them was present in every exchange and the assassin was experienced enough to know what that meant.

She went for the wall.

She was three meters up the wall before anyone would be able to see it.

At Nyx’s speed she watched the assassin take the second foothold and the third.

She did not follow up the wall.

She crossed the yard below.

The assassin dropped from the wall in a forward diving strike, both blades forward, using the height and the implant’s speed to convert the fall into an attack.

The attack was good. At equal speeds, it might have worked.

Nyx stepped left.

Both blades struck the yard surface simultaneously.

The impact transmitted through the mounts and up through the assassin’s wrists and into the forearms.

The housing was built for the force but the tendons above the housing were not, and landing at that speed on a locked-out arm pushed the range of movement beyond what tendons are willing to tolerate quietly.

The assassin pitched forward with the momentum of the drop.

Nyx drove her heel into the back of the assassin’s right knee.

It bent in a grotesque direction.

The sound it produced was clean and wet, cartilage separating from its point.

The assassin went forward and caught herself on the right katana, blade in the yard surface, the arm bearing partial weight while the right leg was no longer in a position to make commitments.

The assassin was on one knee.

She swung the right katana upward from the yard surface in a rising arc, blade pivoting from floor level to face height on the mount’s wrist mechanism.

Nyx leaned back.

The blade passed through the space where her chin had been and continued above it.

She raised Clippy and fired at the assassin’s right shoulder from two meters.

The round entered the shoulder muscle and passed through the back of it and exited clean.

The arm was still attached.

The muscle that had been holding the katana extension was not in the condition to continue doing so.

The arm dropped slightly against the force of the swing’s continuation and the right katana dropped with it, point in the yard, held by a grip that was now doing the work the muscle was no longer able to.

The assassin made a noise, suppressed pain.

She was on one knee.

Right leg broken at the knee. Right shoulder through.

Left side carrying a round that had slotted into the muscle below the rib and was adding internal hemorrhage to every movement.

From the western yard, Proxy sent the pulses through the network.

Nyx felt the effect before she realized the cause.

The world, which had been at a slow motion for both of them, dropped on the assassin’s side only.

She did not slow. The assassin did.

What had been close to parity became one-sided in the space of one second, and one second at that level of speed was not a second in any conventional sense.

She crossed the distance.

Her left hand, the numb one, aching from the bone impact, still doing its job, found the back of the assassin’s skull.

Her right hand held the knife, but the knife was not long enough for this in one motion.

The assassin’s right katana was still in the assassin’s right hand, the arm dropped, the grip maintained by reflex because the grip had been there for the entire fight.

She took the assassin’s right wrist.

She drove the arm backward and around, using the cyberware own weapon against the direction the compromised muscle could no longer resist.

The mount followed its designed arc. The blade followed the mount.

The neck received the blade. It was not a clean passage.

Three centimeters of cartilage separated last, ragged, the blade pushing through the flesh with the speed the implant provided and both of Nyx’s hands driving the motion.

The head separated.

Deep red, arterial blood, it went everywhere in a torrent at once at full pressure, covering Nyx’s hands and forearms and the front of her jacket and the yard surface in a radius of two meters.

It continued for two seconds because two seconds is the time between pressure and the understanding that there is no longer anywhere for the pressure to go.

The body went down separately from the head. The head had flew upwards.

The katana stayed in her hand.

The silver state reduced.

Temperature returned to the world.

The ambient heat of the industrial zone. The warmth from the fires the fight had left in the hub.

The specific warmth of blood cooling on her hands and forearms, which she noticed now in the way she had not noticed it during the state.

The pain arrived with the temperature.

The left forearm, bone-deep ache from impact to wrist.

The legs, heavy, the kind of heaviness that comes from a body that has been running at a demand it was not asked to maintain for long.

The shoulder, the gang leader’s armor having hit it multiple times before, and she had been ignoring it since then with the state’s assistance, and the state was no longer assisting.

She stood above what the body had become and looked at it for one moment.

The vendetta, the older thing, the thing underneath the state and all the other things, required the one clear look at the result before it closed the debt.

It ran warm and it always had, and it had waited through the entire fight for this.

Debt closed.

The compass was warm.

It had been warm through the entire fight, Proxy on the right side of things, but the fight had not left room to notice the warmth as warmth rather than as a fixed coordinate to return to.

Now she processed it.

She skipped back across the yard.

The specific way she moved toward him when the world was back to being fine, shoulders easy, pace quick, the weight of the fight not showing in how she moved because how she moved toward him was its own way, separate from everything else.

Her hands were covered in blood.

Her forearm ached from the bone to the wrist.

Her legs were heavy.

The shoulder was making itself known.

She skipped anyway, because those things were details and he was on the other side of the yard.