The punch never arrived.
I'd pushed off the wall I was standing on, through all that wrong sense of up and down, and drawn back my fist, and put the Grey into it, and thrown it at her with everything I had. The Emma-image didn't flinch. She just smiled. And the distance between us stretched.
Not visibly. Nothing warped. She was a metre away, then she was a metre away from a fist travelling at full speed, and then she was still a metre away. The gap had turned elastic. I was running through treacle. My power strained against her Control like a horse against a cart with its brakes on, and the cart didn't care.
Then down moved again. It became the ceiling. My lunge turned into a helpless tumble upward. I twisted in the air and reached for a fold to turn myself, and the Grey answered slowly, sluggish, like trying to swim in setting concrete. That was how firmly she held this place.
