Lariya's hand was on her boot knife.
Zeraya saw it. She saw the angle of her sister's wrist, the white-knuckle grip, the particular stillness of a fourteen-year-old deciding to do something stupid and brave and fatal. She turned away from Isaac entirely. Isaac could wait. Isaac was, horribly, the easier problem.
"Lariya." Zeraya dropped to Lariya's eye level, fast, both hands on her shoulders. "Look at me. Is there another way to platform six? Smaller. From the other side?"
Lariya's eyes flicked toward Isaac. They darted toward the man who had just removed someone's head with a flick of his wrist and apologized for it like he'd spilled a drink, then snapped back to her sister. "There's — yeah, there's a maintenance crawl. It's tiny. Comes out on the far platform, past the—"
"Perfect." Zeraya's voice didn't waver. "You're taking it. Now."
"I'm not—" Lariya's face crumpled. All at once, she was fourteen years old again instead of the calm, competent kid who'd hidden in an alcove an hour ago. "I'm not leaving you—"
"Lariya." Zeraya's grip tightened, just slightly. "I need you to listen to me. You are too much of a liability right now, and I love you too much to be able to concentrate on myself if you're standing here. Do you understand?"
Lariya was crying. She nodded anyway. A year had taught her things, and one of them was that Zeraya didn't say things she didn't mean, even the things that hurt.
"We will see each other again." Zeraya's voice cracked, just once, just barely. "I promise you. Go."
Lariya ran.
She didn't look back. Not because she didn't want to. Every part of her wanted to look back, but some instinct, the same one that had kept her still in the dark an hour ago, told her that looking back meant stopping. Stopping was the one thing she couldn't afford.
Will watched her go. He'd been about to say something. Khan's instruction was still sitting heavy in his chest — protect Zeraya, not the child, her — but Zeraya had already done it. She already made the call before he'd finished processing it. He didn't argue. He just shifted his weight, putting himself between Lariya's vanishing shape and the man who hadn't moved an inch through any of this.
Isaac watched Lariya disappear down the corridor with mild, theatrical interest. He looked the way a man might watch a bird fly away from a picnic, faintly charmed, already moving on.
"Cute," he said, to no one. Then his attention came back around, settling on Zeraya with the warmth of a man rediscovering a favorite toy. "Now. Where were we."
"You were leaving," Zeraya said.
"I was talking." Isaac smiled wider, and started pacing — slow, unhurried, a man warming up to a story he'd been waiting a long time to tell. "The gene therapy never took — that's the story, right? That's what you let them believe. Useless. On loan. Vesper's little nothing, good for nothing but information." He shook his head, almost admiring. "You sold them nothing for a year, Zeraya. Do you have any idea how rare that is? My sponsors are going to be thrilled to hear their asset's been hiding in plain sight this whole time."
He spread his hands, the showman in full swing now.
"Or, at least — that's what you cleverly made us believe, you wily minx." He grinned. "And see, this is why I always had a thing for you. You've got a great ass, Zeraya — spectacular, actually — but it was never the ass, it was the commitment. A whole year of nothing. That takes discipline." He tilted his head, and his eyes flicked, briefly, almost politely, to Will. "Oh — manners. I'm sure you're familiar with it, Will. The ass. Apologies. Didn't mean to keep it to myself."
He didn't get to finish whatever came next.
Will was already moving. He closed the gap, his bracer cocked, the word love still half-formed on his lips as his feet left the ground.
"I love you," he said, to Zeraya, not looking away from Isaac for a fraction of a second, and the strike landed before Isaac had finished turning his head back around.
It wasn't a reaction to what Isaac had said. There was nothing to react to. Whatever Isaac thought he was revealing, whatever weight he thought any of it carried, it landed on a version of Zeraya that didn't exist anymore. It hadn't existed since that night in the penthouse, since a hug in a doorway at 2:47 a.m. Will didn't need the rest of the sentence. He already knew everything about her that mattered, and everything else — the ass included — he genuinely could not have cared less about right now.
For one half-second, Zeraya just stared at Will's back as he charged. It was the half-second where the exact thing she'd been afraid of since the dinner that almost burned the apartment down simply didn't happen.
Then she was moving too. And she was smiling. It was the first real smile since Isaac had appeared, fierce and sudden and completely unguarded.
Will's strike connected with Isaac's jaw and did, as far as Will could tell, absolutely nothing.
Isaac's head rocked sideways an inch. He blinked, almost thoughtfully, and backhanded Will away with the casual, contemptuous ease of someone swatting a fly. He didn't even look at him. His attention was already swinging back toward Zeraya, toward—
A sharp crack of displaced air. Isaac's head snapped around.
Zeraya was gone.
Not folded. It was nothing like the demons, no paper-crumple wrongness, no frost. Just gone, clean and near-soundless except for that single crack. Then she was behind him, her blade already moving, catching the back of his knee with everything she had.
Isaac's leg buckled. Not collapsed, but buckled, visibly — the first crack in an evening of total, bored composure.
"...Oh," Isaac said, and for the first time, he sounded surprised.
She's a jumper, Khan said. Underneath the urgency was something that, on a living man, would have been delight despite everything. Boy. She's been a jumper this whole time. Eight hundred years, and I have never seen a human jump like that. A pause. Ask her how she did it later.
Will scrambled up, every instinct screaming at him to keep moving, to not let Isaac find his footing.
Right now, Khan continued, faster, sharper, he doesn't know how to fight something he can't predict. USE that.
Isaac rolled the buckled knee, testing it, and the smile came back. But it was different now. Tighter. There was something hungry underneath it that hadn't been there a minute ago.
"Huh." He rolled his shoulders, recalibrating in real time, the bored god finding, against all odds, a toy that hadn't broken on the first try. "Okay. Okay. That's — actually, that's kind of great." His grin widened. It was worse than the calm had been, worse than the decapitation, worse than anything. "This is going to be fun."
He smiled. "I haven't had fun in a long time."
He came at both of them at once.