The entire machine started with a click somewhere above Kori's head.
She kept her eyes shut. That was the whole point of the profile — the Chasmis had given her nothing on that rooftop, not one reading, not one signature, not a smudge or a displacement of air. She had spent twenty years fighting with an instrument that told her where everything was, and for four minutes on an industrial roof in the western district she had been just an ordinary woman with two knives that couldn't hit their target. If she was going to meet Lay again, she was going to meet her like this. Blind. On hearing, skin and whatever her body had learned before the eye ever opened.
She heard a mechanical arm swing a fraction of a second before it arrived — a short, fainy mechanical exhale from the housing, the whisper of steel through air — and she sprang clear as it passed beneath her boots, but a second one she hadn't noticed caught her across the face on the landing.
