The Jackal pulls my razor from his hip and slashes at me. I sidestep, coming at him. He swings again, screaming in rage, but I catch his arm and head butt him in the face before sweeping his legs and tackling him to the floor. I take my razor and stake his left arm to the floor so that he has no free hand. He screams. His spit spattering my face. Thrashing at me with his legs. I drop a knee into his forehead and leave him stunned and pinned to the floor.

“Darrow!” Cassius calls to me as he duels the Joy Knight. “Behind!”

Behind me, Aja’s rising from the shattered remains of the table. Eyes wide with rage. I run from her to help Cassius and Mustang, knowing she’d kill me in seconds with my right hand gone. Blood darkens Cassius’s green jumpsuit. His left leg has been slashed badly by the better-armored Joy Knight, who is using his weight and the pulsing aegis shield on his left arm to overwhelm Cassius. Mustang grabs two razors from the dead Praetorian and tosses one to me. I catch it on the run with my left hand. Toggle the hilt. Razor leaps to killing length. Cassius takes another slash to the leg and stumbles over a body, going down, blocking the second strike with the pulseFist, ruining the weapon. The Joy Knight’s back is to me. He feels me coming, but it’s too late. Silently, I jump through the air and swing a huge looping strike down at him from behind, left arm slowing as it meets the throbbing resistance of the pulseShield centimeters from the armor, then jerking as it cleaves into his sky-blue plate and through muscle and bone. Carrying from left shoulder to the right pelvis, parting his body at a diagonal. His body drips to the ground.

Silence in the room as the bodies hit the floor.

Mustang rushes to my side. She sweeps her golden mess of hair back, a fevered grin splitting her face. I help Cassius up from the ground.

“How was my acting?” he asks, wincing.

“Not quite as good as your swordwork,” I say, looking at the bodies around him. He grins, more alive in battle than anywhere else. I feel a pang, knowing this is always how it should have been. Missing the days where we rode together in the highlands pretending we were lords of the earth. I grin back at him, wounded, bleeding, but almost whole for the first time I can remember.

“Will you two save the flirting for later,” Mustang says.

Side by side with her, we turn together to face the deadliest human being in the Solar System. She’s crouched over a terribly wounded Octavia, who has crawled to the edge of the holodeck and pants on her back, holding her stomach together with both hands. Octavia is pale and shivering. Tears stream down Aja’s face and Lysander’s, who has rushed into the pit to help his grandmother.

“Aja!” the Jackal screams from the floor. “Kill them! Open the door or kill them!” He’s lost his mind. Thrashing about, trying to reach the whip toggle on the razor with his stump. It’s three and a half feet above him and he just can’t quite reach. “Open it!” he says through gnashing teeth.

But to open the door she must reach it. And to reach it, she must go through me and my friends then present her back to us while she enters the code. She’s trapped in here till we’re dead or she is.

“Aja, give us the Sovereign. Her justice is due,” I say, knowing what Aja’s reply to that will be, but minding the holodeck is still active. Still broadcasting as Gold blood wets the floor. Aja does not turn to look at us. Not yet. Her huge hands caress Octavia’s face. She cradles the older woman like a mother holding her own child. “Stay alive,” she tells her. “I will get you out of here. I promise. Just stay alive, Octavia.”

Octavia nods weakly. Lysander touches Aja’s arm. “Hurry. Please.”

“Wear her down,” Mustang whispers. “She’s the one with the ticking clock.”

“Don’t let her pin you in a corner,” I say. “Move laterally like we planned. Cassius, you can still take point?”

“Just try to keep up,” he says.

Aja rises from her crouch to her full height, a brooding mass of muscle and armor, the greatest student of the greatest razormaster the Society has ever known. Face dark, unreadable. The deep blue Protean armor moving subtly with sea dragons. Shoulders nearly as broad as Ragnar’s. I wish I could have brought Sefi here. A meter and a half of killing silver slithers out before Aja and she takes the winter stance of the Willow Way, sword raised like a torch off to the side, left foot forward, hips sunken, knees slightly bent. Mustang and I slide apart taking the right and left. Cassius, the best swordsman of us now, takes the middle. Aja’s hungry eyes devour our weaknesses. The drag in Cassius’s step, my missing right hand, Mustang’s size, the arrangement of obstacles on the floor. And she attacks.

There are two strategies when fighting multiple opponents. The first is use them against one another. But Cassius and I have always been of one mind in battle, and Mustang is adaptable. So Aja chooses the second option: an all out attack on me before Cassius or Mustang can come to my aid. She deems me the weakest enemy. And she is right. Her whip cracks toward my face faster than I can bring my blade up. I flinch back, almost losing my eye. Throwing off my center of balance. She’s on me, blade rigid, poking at me in a poetic frenzy of carefully constructed movements to bring my blade out of position across my body, so she can perform Lorn’s maneuver called the Wing Scalp. Where she tries to lever her blade atop mine to touch the tip to my sword arm’s shoulder and scrape down to the outside of my wrist to peel off the muscle and tendons along the way. I dance back, robbing her the leverage, navigating the corpses behind me as Cassius and Mustang close on Aja. Cassius is rushed in his approach, and he overextends, like I almost did.

But Aja doesn’t use her razor. She activates her gravBoots in a quick burst and launches back at him, two hundred kilograms of armor and Peerless Scarred propelled by gravBoots crashes into flesh and bones. You can almost hear his skeleton creak. His body wraps around her, forehead smashing against her armored shoulder. He drips off her and she spikes him to the ground. Mustang rushes her flank to stop her from finishing Cassius off. But Aja was expecting the rush from Mustang and used Cassius to bait her. She slashes Mustang shallowly across the stomach, nearly opening her lower intestine.

I hurl my razor at Aja from behind. She somehow hears or feels it coming and bends sideways as it passes and sticks into the wall of the holodeck that separates it from the sitting room above. Aja’s leg shoots out at Mustang, impacting her kneecap and jamming it backward. Can’t tell if it dislocates, but Mustang stumbles back, razor outstretched and Aja turns back toward me, because I have no weapon.