Mina reached up with both hands then, palms out, and the effect of everything Seraphis had thrown recoiled like a spring and slammed back on itself. The rain cut into itself, the blades folding inward and collapsing.
Where Seraphis expected to see explosions and ruin, there was only a silence that wound tighter than any knot and left behind a bare, clean wound. Mina clapped: a small, perfunctory applause, the sound the same as a dry leaf falling.
"You had such pretty ideas," she said, and her voice was calm enough that it made Seraphis want to strike her harder.
Seraphis pushed through the fog of exhaustion and the weight of the wound in her back. She felt the world leech away in windows — an absence here, a fold there — and she cursed without thinking.
The blade in her hand was heavy, stained, and humming with a red that looked like a lit throat.
