The plate of frosted glass showed my outline, and a quarter-second ahead of it, the future the room was planning for me. It was a ghost of my own potential, a prediction based on the tells my body still wanted to leak.
"Don't let it," Valeria said, her voice sharp in my mind. "Be late to your own prediction."
Which was a ridiculous and absolutely correct piece of advice. I loosened the sequence my body used when it was tired—eyes pick a target, shoulder agrees, hips deliver—and replaced it with the lesson the tower had been beating into me: cut first, and discover the rest of your body has already followed.
I exhaled to the count of six and let the last of the air be perfectly quiet. In that space of nothing, something started. Not in the muscle, not in the shoulder, not in the foot. The start was in the cut itself. The blade was already moving, and only then did my body find itself attached to the motion.
