The roof was big enough for a bad dream. Brass ribs framed a pale, fake sky, and the miasma breathed like a sleeping, venomous animal. The Archduke didn't rush. He trimmed my space the way a patient butcher trims fat—one careful, irreversible cut after another. A thin veil slid across the lane my hips liked. A drifting after-blade waited half a step behind my shoulder.
I was losing. It was a simple, mathematical fact. My sword was a screwdriver at a house fire.
Red Hunger pressed in like warm applause for a fight well fought and slid off the glass of my Harmony. He cut, and I parried, and everything in that exchange was simple and ruinously expensive. His edge rode the shortest line without announcing it. Mine met it and did not argue, but the cost of the meeting was a shudder in the bones of my arm. He checked my sleeve with a touch of trained weight as a veil leaned into my elbow. Valeria's bone-shell flashed white and cracked with a sound like heartbreak.