She didn't see the petal coming.
The thermal trace had her attention completely - that small, wrong, unevenly-heated human shape moving across the buildings far below, registering on her Chasmis as something strange – with heat signature, but no Eon signature. Her brain had committed every spare cycle of processing to figuring out what she was looking at. But the closing petal was right across her flight path while she was still thinking, and her body, which had been gliding through open sky, hit reinforced alloy at full launch velocity.
The impact was loud.
She heard it before she felt it - a deep, resonant clang that propagated through the petal's surface and up into the upper atmosphere, the sound of a Phalanx-class body meeting a city-defensive infrastructure plate at roughly the worst angle either of them had been designed for. Kori bounced. Her shoulder took the first contact, the petal's alloy denting inward by perhaps a few centimeters under the force of her arrival.
