Dalliance seemed to fall in slow motion, his arms screaming in pain from the impact with the heater shield, his chest shocked from the breath being knocked from it. He saw it all in a horrifying flash: Prosperity Rotter’s spear lancing out, clipping the crow’s beating wing just as Charity jumped sideways. The change in trajectory turned a two-footed grab, which should have transfixed her skull at multiple points, into a gruesome, tearing graze from the top of her scalp and down along her jaw, and she fell away in a blur of black hair, white skin, and spraying blood. The water’s impact hit him like a battering ram, and his view of the world was occluded by a chaotic jumble of refracted sky, murky stone, Earnest’s flailing form clinging one-handed to the stone walltop—before the storm of bubbles and the icy shock of the mill race swallowed him whole.

  Underwater, the world was a roaring, thundering thing, cold claws snatching the very heat from his blood. The current dragged him down, slamming him against the inexorable turn of the millwheel. He couldn’t find up or down, and something held him still—thrashing wasn’t pushing him forward! He looked down, squinting to see through the turbulent water, and confirmed his worst fears: His shoe was caught between the rough boards of the scoop and the rough brick of the wall. He was trapped.

  Panic gave way to a deeper horror: he wasn’t starving for air, not yet: his two points in Grit granted him an inhuman lung capacity. But despite the similar augmentations to his strength, he simply couldn’t budge his foot. The whole weight of the river was piled up against him. He strained, and thrashed. He kicked. He pried at the boards, the rough material tearing the once-delicate skin of his fingertips even now.

  Minutes ticked by.

  He was going to die. Under a water wheel.

  What sort of stupid death was this?

  His racing thoughts couldn’t cohere. The rough wood was still rotating, scraping his newly-healed ankle against the stone, the current battering him against the wall and skinning his knuckles and bruising his brow.

  What could he do? He tried to take stock: none of his skills would apply. Two points banked meant he couldn’t upgrade grit if he wanted to, or might either. The choices were Spirit and Agility.

  Could swimming faster get me out of here?

  Having more mana wouldn’t.

  But . . . what’s a wizard without mana? And he couldn’t just do Agility now, and Spirit later. He’d tier up. He was that close.

  Moments more, in which he wrestled with the inevitable. Do nothing, and die, or invest a point in agility, and . . . lock yourself out of your perfect [Wizard] build.

  He could train spirit later; it would just take twice as much experience to make headway.

  Is slower growth in the future worth my life now?

  It was obvious when he thought about it that way.

  He invested the point, and his thoughts changed.

  There was time to see, time to think, between being banged into the wall again and again.

  His shoe was caught.

  He should take off the shoe.

  He’d have to deal with how much an idiot he was later—for now, he needed air.

  He surfaced, gasping, amidst a flood of self-recriminations, into a world that had moved on without him.

  The air was filled with the raucous cries of the crow as it circled overhead, sunlight gleaming off its impossible metallic beak and claws. It swooped suddenly, beating its wings with unnatural power, and flashed down through the air like a meteor—only to meet the rising edge of Earnest's kite shield. He slammed it point-on into the oncoming bird. Though not obviously hurt, the crow was light enough to be knocked backward, but it just flapped its wings to regain altitude and cawed at him in a rough, cackling ululation.

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  Earnest drew back his shield as though to throw it, and the crow swept mockingly in an arc to the side, where it was met with a flash of incandescent white. The lightning spell, coruscating and rising like a snake, connected Effluvia's hand of spitting sparks to the thrashing, falling body of her foe.

  She had never been this powerful before. Someone had been leveling Spirit.

  She let out a cry of frustration as the twitching body fell behind the low, whitewashed gardener's shed. The crow recovered from its fall, looping smoothly into a rising path along the channel just below the rim, where she couldn't have seen it from her position.

  Another pump of its wings sent it zooming upward at a sharp angle, directly for the juniper tree in which Effluvia had been standing. But Effluvia was gone; she had already jumped down to hide behind the tree, beside where Circe was also taking cover. Undeterred, the wicked bird swooped low, banking to round the trunk. It braked at the last second with a back-flapping of its wings just as the top half of the juniper tree exploded into splinters.

  As the air cleared, Dalliance could see the retreating creature looping back behind the garden shed for another pass, and the top half of the juniper tree completely gone, sheared off clean. Though the monster hadn't noticed him yet, it was only a matter of time. Dalliance looked around for cover, and that's when he saw her.

  Charity's arms were clinging to the top of the Watergate, her head bowed. The dark stain of blood flowed down the stone wall and across the metal surface of the gate, glistening in the light, sickeningly clear even from his distance.

  Dalliance scrambled for the shore, his fingers scrabbling to find purchase on the slick, snow-dusted stones of the bank. He hauled himself out of the freezing water, a deep, shuddering tremor racking his body the moment the frigid air hit his soaked clothes. The cold drove the very air from his lungs and turned his limbs to lead. His ankle screamed in protest, and his bare foot burned in the snow. There was no time for pain. He needed to know what was going on.

  Wiping the water from his eyes, he saw Sterling and Immaculate charging into view, Fallowfield at their heels, their heavy boots kicking up sprays of snow. Looking across the way, he saw Zenith on the roof, pulling back an arrow on her new bow, a lone figure silhouetted against the gray sky. She’d practiced her archery at the Games, enough to earn the weapon, but Dalliance knew she was middling at best.

  The crow, having failed its gambit toward Effluvia, allowed itself to be driven off by Earnest's charge. His voice screamed in raw defiance, shield held high. The crow veered around him with contemptuous ease, circling in search of an easier target. Then, with a pump of its wings, it blitzed towards Zenith on the cold storage roof.

  Effluvia unleashed another spell from the ground, but the bolt fizzled into nothing more than a handful of dying sparks. Dalliance smelled ozone on the wind, which also carried Circe’s shocked "WHAT?!" to his ears. He saw Effluvia collapse sideways into the snow. The crow closed the distance to Zenith. Her arrow flew—he couldn't tell if it hit, only that if it did, it wasn't enough. Barreling toward her, it gave her no choice but to throw herself to the side. Her slim figure crashed through the glass of a warehouse window and out of sight. The sound of remnant pieces falling in intermittent crashes echoed, loud and terrible in the sudden silence.

  The bird looped back around, a dark blot against the gray sky. The wind had picked up, and the pall it cast over the land felt like a premonition. Dalliance's [Prediction] wore off—a sensation like closing his eyes and stepping off the top step of a staircase, a jolt as he re-acclimated to what he could know and what he couldn't.

  He pushed his will outward to recast, but it failed. His tired mind reeled momentarily, a buzz with the dregs of adrenaline. It wheeled toward him, and he stumbled, his toenails clipping the frozen ground in agony as first [Deflection] failed, and then [Prediction] caught, flooding his mind with a useless, dizzying flood of images too chaotic to comprehend all at once.

  Before he could process the sensory assault, a spear flashed past, a dark line against the snow, puncturing through the wing with the wet sound of tearing muscle and the flat, paper-sound of feathers. Immaculate charged forward and regained control of his spear, wrestling the creature as it screamed with a sound like tearing metal, bringing it crashing down against the retaining wall. It lay there, a broken thing pinned by the spear shaft. For an instant, Dalliance dared to believe it was downed.

  But it was not over. With terrifying persistence, it raised its broken body from the stony wall top and pushed itself forward, driving the spearhead further through its own flesh. Blood gouted, feathers snapped, its other wing beat wildly, its beak snapping at Immaculate’s suddenly withdrawn fingers as it kicked off the ground, free of the shaft. A spray of dark splatterings and an impotent spear were left behind as it launched into the air.

  Sterling's sword met it there.

  It flashed in a brutal, whistling arc, and a metal-taloned foot spun away into the snow.

  The monster beat its wings, screaming, brassy shrieks echoing across the snow-deadened mill as it climbed, becoming a receding point of darkness against the churning grey sky.

  For a single, breathless moment, there was peace. Dalliance could hear his heartbeat hammering in his ears, his throat. The snow falling made a muted hiss, punctuated by Servility’s footsteps in the snow as he stalked forward to reclaim his spear. “Damn it.”

  The lanky boy straightened painfully, and Dalliance saw a doubled row of triple scratches across his back, bleeding sluggishly.

  Dalliance’s attention snapped back to the Watergate, his mind finally free to latch onto the image that had been haunting him, and his breath caught in his throat. Charity’s arms, which had been a desperate, clinging anchor against the stone, were no longer visible.

  "No," he whispered, the word a puff of mist.

  He sprinted, his ankle screaming in protest, his good shoe and bare foot finding different purchase on the treacherous stones of the wall. He scrambled, half-falling, his raw fingertips scraping against the frozen rock. He reached the edge and looked down into the churning, slate-grey water of the spillway.

  She was there, floating face down, her black hair fanned out around her head like a dark halo. The water around her was a blooming cloud of red, staining the snow-dusted bank of the river and turning the pure white to a fragile peach, then to a deep, spreading crimson.