Chapter 1The collar was already burning when I finished counting my fingers.Three. Three still attached, blood to the wrist, and a woman standing over me with claws the color of wet slate. She watched me breathe like it was a trick she hadn't paid for."You died," she said.Low voice. Unhurried. The way people talk when they've said the same thing a hundred times and were never once wrong."Four minutes and eleven seconds. Your heart stopped. Your eyes went the color of old milk. So." She crouched, and the floorboards complained about it. "Why are you breathing now?"The collar at my throat had tightened the moment I opened my eyes and hadn't loosened since. Iron, or something that wanted to be iron. No clasp, no keyhole. It sat against the pulse and hummed, and the hum had a temperature.I did not reach for a weapon. There was one, three feet to my left, still in the hand of the man who'd owned this room before I did. I didn't reach for it, because her claws were out but her weight

Chapter 3 "—and I'm telling you," I said, "if you'd taken the left corridor instead of the right, we'd have three more minutes before—"The knife went past my ear and stuck in the doorframe with a sound like a cough."—before that," I finished. "Odds that was a warning shot: high. Odds the next one's a question: higher."The collar tightened. Not from a lie. From proximity — I'd learned that much in two days. It read danger the way a dog reads thunder, a half-second before the sky agrees.Kira didn't move from the wall. Arms folded. Claws in. Watching me the way a woman watches a horse she's thinking about buying and suspects is lame."Three," she said."Four. One on the roof, I heard his weight shift when we started talking.""You heard—" She looked up. Something crossed her face that was almost respect and mostly irritation. "Three on the ground. One on the roof. And you want to do this without me.""I want to do this without dying. Those are different hands." I stepped left, out o

Chapter 5 "—five minutes," I said. "Five minutes and if I'm not dead, you owe me a truth. A real one. Not the kind you tell with your teeth."The collar tightened. One notch. It had opinions about this plan.Kira's hand was flat on the door, holding it shut, and her claws had come out and sunk into the wood, and she was looking at me the way a woman looks at a man she's decided not to kill yet but reserves the right to revisit."Two minutes," she said."Four.""Three, and I'm standing behind you the whole time, and if he so much as looks at your chest I take his head off.""Odds you take his head off anyway," I said."High.""Then we're agreed."The knocking came again. Three times. Patient. The same rhythm. And the voice behind it, mild and unhurried, said: "I can hear you negotiating. It's very charming. Open the door."I opened the door.He was standing in the grey of the shop's front step with his hands folded in front of him like a man waiting for a carriage. He was tall. He was

Chapter 7"—three steps," I said. "Three steps to the door and back and you don't move from that counter. If I make it, you tell me what you saw in the mirror in Season One and never said out loud."Kira's hand was still flat on the counter, holding herself up, and her eyes came up slow."Two steps," she said."Three.""Two, and if you fall I don't catch you.""Odds you catch me," I said."High." She said it like a curse.The collar burned. I took the first step.Behind me, Mukanshin had not moved, and the tiredness was coming off him in slow waves, and my knees wanted the floor the way a drunk wants a bottle. I took the second step. The window was three feet away and the shape beyond it was patient and grey.I took the third step and put my hand on the glass."Odds you're a messenger," I said."I'm a herald." The voice was flat as a closed book, and the face beyond the glass was flat too — a woman's face, unremarkable, the kind you'd forget while looking at it. "The Council notes an

Chapter 9 "—her hands on mine," I said. "Both of them. Palm on palm. And if she tries anything, you take the arm at the elbow and I'll apologize later."Zansho was sitting on the well's edge with her feet out of the water and her sleeves rolled up, and she was watching Kira the way a woman watches a storm decide which field to ruin."Elbow's fair," she said.Kira did not answer. She stood behind me with her arms around me, and her chin was on my shoulder, and her hands were out in front of me with the palms up, and her claws were out, and she was breathing very steadily and very close to my ear."Say the words," she said."Odds this works," I said."Low. Say the words anyway."I put my cut hand into Zansho's cut hand. Kira's palms came down over both, one on top of the other, and her claws drew a shallow line across the backs of our hands, all four in one stroke, and the blood came up and mixed in the cup of our joined palms.The sigil was three circles and a line through them. The s