The silver state had no temperature.
Not the chemical bite of the blue or the tracking pull of the crimson or the patient heat underneath everything.
It sat below all of those, below sensation entirely, and what remained when everything with temperature had been removed was only the indifference.
The yard was positions and vectors. The hub wall at a fixed height. The debris field at a fixed spread.
The assassin at position Z, moving, which meant she was at several positions in sequence and was predictable because everything operating at speed follows the physics of what it is moving through, and physics does not improvise.
One thing in the yard was not reducible to position and vector.
Proxy, in the western yard, behind her, in the direction the compass had been pointing since the fight started.
The compass was warm. The state was not. They occupied different places and neither interfered with the other.
She held a blade at his throat.
That was all.
