The rapier was still in my dead forearm when Draven tried to pull it back. He got about two inches of withdrawal before the blade stopped moving. He pulled again, the same clean, controlled motion he used for everything, and the blade didn't move at all this time because I had closed the dead hand around it.Not with a muscle, but with the field. The same pressure system I had been using to puppet the arm, redirected to the fingers, squeezing inward against the flat of the blade from both sides. The grip was imprecise, and the pressure was not evenly distributed. With more than a second to work with, he probably could have torqued the blade free at an angle I could not have compensated for in time.He had less than a second. He looked at the hand holding his blade. Then at my face. His expression did something small, it was just a very brief recalculation, the same updating process I had seen before, running faster this time."Let go," he said. "No," I said, then I stepped in. The P

The left hand was slower off the draw, but everything else was wrong in a new way. Draven's first left-handed strike came in low and from an angle I hadn't seen once in the previous exchanges. I got my right arm across and caught it, but the block landed in the wrong place on my forearm. The impact jarred my elbow instead of absorbing cleanly. He pulled back and reset before I finished adjusting."Different, yes?" He said. "A little," I said. He came in again, this time targeting the gap on my right side, which had been his weaker line with the right hand but was now his cleaner approach with the left. I stepped back and used the dead arm to cover the angle, pushing the field to bring it across. The arm arrived late, as usual. The blade caught the dead forearm and opened a cut about four inches long.I saw the blood. I felt nothing from the arm itself. "You're watching your own arm," Draven said. "Hard not to," I said.He wasn't wrong. Every time the dead arm took damage I had to l

Draven raised both hands and looked at me. "No blade," he said. "No technique. Just this.""Fine," I said. He came forward and threw the first punch before I finished exhaling. It caught me across the left cheek and my head went sideways. I turned back and he was already throwing the second one, a short hook to the body that landed exactly on the broken ribs.My knees wanted to go down. I told them no. "You're still standing," he said. "Apparently," I said.The third punch came for my jaw. I slipped it enough that it caught my ear instead. The ringing started immediately, loud and specific, the kind that makes everything else sound like it's coming through a wall."Three clean hits," Zeryth called from the rail. "Vaxien, hit him back!""Working on it," I said. Draven reset his stance. He was breathing normally. His knuckles weren't bleeding and his ribs weren't broken. We were not in equal condition and both of us knew it."You should go down," he said. "I know," I said. "It's a bad

The intake office was on Level 7, behind a plain gray door with no crest on it and no guard posted outside. Just a number stenciled on the panel in small print.Corvel was already at his desk when we walked in. In his mid-fifties, thin gray hair, reading glasses sitting halfway down his nose. He did not look up when the door opened. He did not acknowledge that anyone had entered, he just kept typing."Name," he said. "Vaxien Valerost," I said. "Universe of origin.""7-Beta.""Classification.""Glitch-Active."He typed everything without reacting to any of it. His desk had three screens, two stacks of physical folders, and a coffee mug so old it had a permanent brown ring baked into the ceramic. The man had the energy of someone who had sat in this exact chair for thirty years and found every single day completely identical to the last one."The biometric scanner is on your left," he said. "Keep your palm flat. Hold until it releases you." I put my hand on the scanner. It ran its cyc

She picked the busiest café on the station. Every table is full. Screens were covering every wall. The staff was moving fast between orders. The kind of place where a conversation dies before it reaches the next table over.Prya Osei was already seated when we walked in. Short hair, dark jacket, both hands wrapped around a coffee cup. She looked like someone waiting for a friend. Not like someone who had been hiding a Glitch classification behind a false taxonomy for two years.She watched me sit down and she didn't look at Zeryth or Nyxra.I talked, she listened. I told her about Drel's file— the scrubbed record, the three Revocations. The pattern Lucas laid out the night before. I told her about the network architecture, what we were trying to build, and what signing the Provisional seat actually meant going forward.She did not interrupt once. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said it plainly. "I know," she said. "I've been waiting for someone to say it out loud