There's a particular kind of helplessness that comes from being fast enough to see a disaster and still too far away to stop it. I'd felt it once before, the night Kravius's blade found the space between my ribs. I hadn't expected to feel it again from a rampart, watching someone else take the hit meant for a lesson I already knew.
The stair down from the wall was too long. The ground between the wall and the valley floor was worse—open, contested, exactly the kind of killing field Zereth would have chosen if he'd been planning an ambush instead of trying to prevent one. Noa Genesis calculated three routes in the time it took me to blink and rejected all three as too slow.
*You will not reach her before the binding completes,* it said, flat as a verdict. *Recalculating is not the same as changing the answer, Neil.*
"Then give me a fourth option."
*I don't have one.*
