The line hung in the mechanism room's amber light with the unhurried weight of something said by a man who had never once had to repeat himself.
"I would prefer knocking you up than the doors of this place."
The mercenary queen's hands went still on the prosthetic leg.
Not careful-still. Not composed-still. It was the stillness of a woman whose brain had processed something it was not architecturally prepared for, all neural function briefly rerouted to the task of determining whether she had, in fact, just heard what she thought she had heard.
She had.
The amber screens ran in their copper-threaded lines. One hundred formation crystal panels, each showing a different angle of the same man standing in her mechanism room, holding an unconscious woman on his forearm the way someone might carry a coat they'd picked up in passing. The screens reflected in his crimson-gold eyes, giving them a dozen colors at once — none of which looked remotely concerned.
