The week before a formal duel, Werner told me, is not for resting.

I found that out at five-thirty Monday morning when he appeared in my doorway for the first time in my memory before count, said "Up," and walked away. I got up. We went to the yard in the February dark—the motion lights on the perimeter walls giving everything that orange prison glow that I'd stopped seeing after the first six months—and he ran me through three hours of between-space work. Not projection. Architecture. The Skáli under active strain, the chaos-mode engaged and held for sustained periods instead of the short burns I'd been managing. Learn to run it longer. Learn the cost curve. Know exactly when it starts to take more than it gives.

The cost curve was steep. That was the honest answer. Twenty minutes of chaos-mode ran me down like forty minutes of anything else I'd ever done. Werner clocked it and adjusted. We'd identified the threshold. Now we worked at the edge of it, every session, pushing that edge a centimeter at a time.

We did this every morning for six days.

In the afternoons, Werner talked. Eleven years under Kask—every working he'd seen, every pattern, every preference. I started to understand what forty-three years of practice looked like from the inside. Not just stronger. More economical. Every movement exactly what it needed to be and nothing else. A man who had stopped wasting energy on anything that didn't matter because he'd had four decades to identify what mattered.

"He'll be patient," Werner said, second day. We were at the wall, the one that was becoming ours, cold concrete and grey February sky and Werner speaking at a register that didn't carry to the yard. "He won't come in hot. That's the error a young practitioner makes. He'll wait. Take his time. Look for the thing he can use."

"The binding."

"Yes. But the binding is the end, not the beginning. Before the binding there's an hour of erosion. Small attacks. Testing. Not to damage—to see. He reads what you do when you're pressured. How your architecture responds. Where the decision points are." Werner turned a pebble in his fingers. "When he pulled you into his Construct, he got a clean look at your signature. He spent the time since then building a model of how you work. In the between-space, he'll be running that model against what he sees. Looking for where the real you matches his prediction."

"And when it doesn't?"

"He adjusts. He's fast. You won't rattle him by being unexpected—he's adapted to unexpected over forty years. But every adjustment takes something from him. And if you stay unexpected long enough, he starts building new models while fighting instead of executing the one he prepared. That costs more." Werner put the pebble down. "That's your window. Not power. Not experience. The moment he's solving a problem he didn't plan for instead of executing the solution he did."

The sixth day—Sunday—Werner stopped running drills. We sat at the wall and watched the yard in the thin morning light, and he told me about the close. The patience strategy. The wire finding the crack.

I already knew my defense. He'd made sure I knew it. But hearing it confirmed in Werner's flat, almost-reluctant voice—the voice of a man admitting his own failure so I wouldn't repeat it—made it sit differently in my chest.

Your six principles. Every line you won't cross. A will completely defined has nothing for the binding to find.

That night, cell count done, Books on his bunk reading Marcus Aurelius—he'd gotten out of the Hole ten days ago and hadn't asked many questions about what came next, just started showing up again where I needed him to be—I lay on my bunk and went through the principles. One through six. Each one stated clearly, internally, no hedging. I did this until I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was Monday. The duel was today.

The challenge terms had been formal and clean: between-space arena, witnessed, winner takes all, loser submits and withdraws from practice. Standard protocol. Kask had proposed his Construct as the arena—his home ground, his rules, every advantage stacked. I'd countered with neutral space. Limbo between Constructs, unclaimed territory.

He'd accepted within an hour.

He thought neutral space advantaged him. More years in the between-space. More comfort with its properties. Better reserves. On paper, he was right.

What he hadn't factored was that neutral space doesn't stay neutral when two practitioners are in it. It responds to will. And the Skáli wasn't really a place I brought anymore—it was a place I was. Wherever I went in the between-space, the longhouse geometry came with me the way your shadow comes with you. Not a weapon. Not a technique. Just what I was, in that space, after two and a half years of building it.

I'd told Books this the night before.

He'd thought about it for a while, then said: "He prepared for your magic. He can't prepare for your place."

"Werner said the same thing."

"Then you're surrounded by people telling you the same thing." He turned a page. "Usually means they're right."

Now he sat in the chair at our small table, watch on his wrist where he could see it, spare cloth folded on the table's edge. Werner stood by the door—not sitting, never sitting when he was serving as anchor, because sitting invited relaxation and this wasn't that. He'd positioned himself so he could reach me in two steps. He'd been very clear about the two steps when we'd discussed contingencies.

He can't cast. But he can break contact. It terminates the working. Not clean. But it terminates.

"Ready?" Books asked.

I'd been lying on my bunk for twenty minutes, already half-gone into the prep state. Temporal anchoring sigil on my left forearm, drawn carefully with my thumbnail. Present moment. Here. Now.

"Same answer as always," I said.

"Then go."

I closed my eyes. Let the tier sounds settle. The institutional soundtrack of my life—someone's television through the wall, the heating system's irregular clank, voices from the tier above doing what voices from the tier above always did. Real sounds. Physical world.

I held them as long as I could.

Then I let go, and the between-space came up around me, and everything went grey.

I came into the between-space and stayed still.

That was the first thing Werner had taught me about fighting there. Don't arrive moving. Arrive, assess, then move. Every practitioner's instinct on entry is to start establishing presence immediately—asserting, reaching, shaping. Kask had done that in our last meeting. He'd arrived racing to override, to lay his geometry down before I could respond.

The instinct made sense. Made sense to fill the space before your opponent did.

But the space wasn't empty. The Skáli was already there.

I hadn't brought it deliberately. I was incapable of not bringing it. The longhouse geometry was in the grey nothing around me before I'd fully arrived—the suggestion of timber framing in the way the nothing organized itself, the subtle warmth that said hearth somewhere, the threshold quality that said there was a door even if I couldn't see it. Not a full Construct, not the detailed interior I'd built over three months of deliberate work. Just the presence of it. The way a person carries their home in their body even when they're not in it.

I waited.

Kask arrived.

I felt him the way I'd felt him in our last meeting—cold precision, Baltic architecture, the quality of absolute competence. But this was different from the meeting. In the meeting, he'd come in asserting. Now he arrived contained. No immediate expansion. No geometry pressing outward. Just presence, assessing, the way a surgeon settles before making the first cut.

He'd learned from the meeting too.

"O'Reilly," he said. His voice came from one direction this time—a choice, locating himself deliberately, telling me exactly where he was. Confidence or strategy. Maybe both.

"Kask."

A pause. He was reading the space. Reading what I'd brought into it without meaning to.

"The same architecture," he said. "Your Construct."

"I didn't bring it deliberately."

"I know." Something moved in his voice. Not quite satisfaction—something colder, more professional. "I know you didn't. I've been thinking about that since the meeting." He paused. "It doesn't change what I know about how you work."

And then he hit me.

Not like the meeting. Not an opening shot meant to establish. This was the prepared approach he'd spent two weeks building, the model he'd been running since he read my signature in his Construct—a precise, calibrated assault on the architecture he'd mapped. He came at the hesitation point first, the gap where my working shifted between intentions, the split-second stutter he'd identified as the place where chaos magic paid its organizational tax. He'd watched me manage it in the meeting, watched me compensate for it. He'd mapped it to the millimeter.

He hit where the hesitation used to be.

The Skáli had smoothed it.

Not deliberately—not a technique I'd applied. Just three more weeks of working in that space, pulling my practice through it, had layered over the gap the way scar tissue layers over a wound. The hesitation he'd prepared for wasn't there anymore. His assault, calibrated for an architecture that no longer matched, landed on geometry it hadn't been built for.

I felt his adjustment. Faster than the meeting—the near-instant recalibration of an expert who'd felt the wrongness and was already adapting before his initial approach had finished landing. In the meeting, that speed had been pure threat. Now I understood it differently. Every adjustment was a decision. Every decision drew from something.

I moved.

Not a counter-attack. Not yet. A scatter—fragmented chaos architecture spreading across multiple vectors, too many angles for a structured response to track cleanly. Werner had drilled me on this. Make him solve the scatter first. Make him commit pattern-reading resources before he's ready to commit binding resources.

His geometry compressed inward from three sides.

Not chasing the scatter—containing it. His response wasn't to match my movement; it was to reduce the space I could move in. Classic Kask strategy, Werner had said: patient architecture, methodical reduction. He wasn't trying to hit me. He was building the situation where hitting me became simple.

I let the longhouse bleed.

Not a technique. Not a choice, exactly. Just the Skáli being what it was—present, responsive, as much a part of me in this space as my own thinking. The geometry didn't stay where Kask had modelled it. The floor moved. Not dramatically, not suddenly—a gradual wrongness, the angles declining to be where they'd been, the walls developing an opinion about their own location. Kask's containing structure was built on the assumption that the architecture I occupied had fixed coordinates. The architecture disagreed.

His geometry found walls where it had expected open space. Adjusted. Found different walls.

He came at me differently—angle from above and left, the direction Werner had warned me about, the one Kask defaulted to when his initial read failed. I was ready for it. I scrambled. Not elegant—scramble never was. The chaos response that didn't look like technique because it wasn't technique, just full commitment to whatever the next second required.

His working caught the edge of mine and I felt the impact as real cost. The between-space pressed in around me, his cold geometry reducing my options down toward a corridor. Not there yet. But trending.

He was wearing me down. That was the plan. Patient. Methodical. An hour if he needed it.

I stopped scrambling and attacked.

Werner had been clear about this. "You're going to want to stay reactive. Don't. Pick a moment and be the one initiating. Doesn't have to work. Just has to cost him something to address." And then, with the reluctance of a man admitting his own tactical mistake: "He wore me down because I never made him work. I kept defending until I had nothing left. Don't do what I did."

I hit him with everything I had in a single complex working—layered chaos architecture, old Kraus sigils under Werner's combat theory under the Skáli's geometry, no sequence, no structure, just simultaneous. The thing Werner called the full scatter and Axel's crew called the cloud and Books had once called "watching you fall off a building and somehow land on someone else."

It hit him from nine directions at once.

Six of them he deflected. Two, he absorbed—redirected, repurposed into his own structure, the efficiency of a master practitioner who doesn't waste anything his opponent gives him. The ninth landed.

Not a killing blow. Not in the between-space. But it cost him. I felt it as a disruption in his geometry—smooth architecture briefly jagged, the Baltic precision developing a stutter, his containing structure losing a wall and having to rebuild it. Two seconds of him solving a problem he hadn't planned for instead of executing the plan he had.

That was my window.

I pulled the chaos-mode as hard as I'd ever run it. Not subtle. Not gradual. Full chaos, the Skáli in maximum instability, the longhouse becoming something that had never decided what it was—hearth relocating, the threshold he'd been using as a reference point becoming wall, the geometry that he'd been using to model my position deciding it had no position because position was a structural concept and structure was someone else's idea.

His binding arrived in the middle of it.

I'd been waiting for it. Werner had told me exactly how it would feel—not a blow, not an attack, but a threading. Something thin, looking for the crack. Looking for the moment of doubt. The gap where I wasn't sure.

It searched.

Every edge was already decided.

Principle one: No working against someone's will without consent. Decided. Principle two: No magic used to harm the innocent. Decided. Principle three: No working that serves my survival at another person's direct expense. Decided. Principle four: No lies through magic, no illusions to deceive for advantage. Decided. Principle five: Protect those who can't protect themselves. Decided. Principle six: Pay the cost. Always pay the cost.

The binding had nothing to grip.

Not because I was more powerful. Not because my principles were righteous in some cosmic sense. Just because a will that is completely defined has no surface for a binding to work with. The binding needed doubt. Needed the place where I was negotiating with myself. I'd spent two and a half years in a place specifically designed to make me negotiate with myself, and I'd come to every single negotiation and decided anyway. No exceptions. Even when it cost me.

The binding slid off.

Kask disengaged.

Same as the meeting—the professional withdrawal, orderly. But this time there was something underneath the orderliness. Something that hadn't been there in the meeting. I couldn't name it exactly. A practitioner of Kask's experience didn't let things show in the between-space if he'd decided they shouldn't show. But the geometry of his withdrawal was different from his geometry of his arrival, and I'd been watching his geometry for two and a half months, and I knew the difference.

He hadn't expected the binding to fail like that.

He'd expected the Skáli to be a problem. He hadn't expected a will with nothing to grip.

I closed the distance.

Not what he was planning for. His withdrawal was organized, systematic—the controlled retreat of a practitioner making a decision, not a practitioner losing. He wasn't expecting anything to follow him into the withdrawal. I followed him anyway, chaos architecture pressing into the space his geometry had occupied, the Skáli bleeding into every corner he'd vacated, giving me territory while I still had something in the tank and before his rebuild could settle.

The chaos-mode caught him mid-rebuild.

One more exchange. Brutal and short. His defenses up but incomplete, mine running hot and spending fast—I felt the cost as a physical thing, a burning-out that was worse than the anchor working, worse than the night Kask had cracked my blood ward, worse than anything I'd paid before. I paid it. Principle six. Always pay the cost.

Then I ran out.

There was nothing left. Whatever I'd had at the start of this, I'd spent it. The chaos-mode collapsed—not gradually, all at once, the way a light goes out. The Skáli went quiet. The between-space went grey nothing and stayed grey nothing.

Kask was still there.

We both were, for a moment. Two practitioners on the other side of everything they'd prepared to spend, in the grey nothing that existed before anything else.

"You're done," he said. Not a question.

"Yeah."

A pause. Long enough that I started calculating how fast Werner could break the connection if Kask decided a formal agreement didn't apply to a practitioner who had nothing left.

"So am I," Kask said.

I followed the tether home.

I came back wrong.

That's the only honest way to describe it. Not the usual snap-back of a hard projection—I knew what that felt like, I'd done it enough. This was different. This was a return from somewhere I'd spent so much in that the distance back felt longer than it had any right to be. Like the tether had stretched, and the stretch hadn't all come back.

Werner caught me before I'd fully found vertical. His hands on my shoulders—steady, strong, the grip of a man who'd been standing in exactly that spot for exactly this reason for however long it had taken.

"Got you," he said.

I couldn't see well. Not the eye this time—both eyes, both equally wrong, the world too bright and too tilted and too complicated. Books was already at my other side. The cloth was there before I'd identified what I needed it for.

Both nostrils. Both eyes. I found out later about the eyes—the left vessel had gone the same way as after the anchor working, but the right had decided to join it. Made me look, Werner said later with zero inflection, like something that had lost an argument with a wall.

Books put water in my hand. I drank it. It helped marginally and then not at all.

I ended up on my bunk without a clear memory of getting there. Books was doing the methodical thing, same as every other time—cleaning, checking, cataloguing. Not talking yet. Werner had gone from catch-mode to stand-watch-mode, back against the wall near the door, arms crossed. He had that controlled assessment face that he'd been wearing since I'd known him and I still couldn't fully read, but something in the set of his jaw was different from usual.

"Did you win?" Books asked. Matter-of-fact. The voice he used for information gathering.

"I don't know."

"What don't you know?"

"At the end. Both out of gas. He said—" The memory was a little cloudy, the way high-cost workings sometimes made recent memory cloudy. "He said he was done too."

Books looked at Werner.

Werner looked at me. "The formal duel protocol," he said. "When both practitioners are depleted and neither can close—the rules go back to the terms. Winner takes all means the one whose binding attempt failed loses. He tried to bind you." A pause. "The binding failed."

"He could argue it was inconclusive," I said.

"He won't." Werner's voice was flat. Final. "Kask is many things. He's not someone who argues protocol to avoid what the protocol says. He lost. He knows he lost." He pushed off the wall. "You'll hear from him."

I didn't hear from him that day. My body had opinions about that day that didn't involve communication. Books made me drink water and stay horizontal and not do anything that used willpower, on the grounds that my willpower was temporarily unavailable and I should stop pretending otherwise. I didn't argue. I didn't have the resources to argue.

I slept. Badly. Woke up twice with the wrong kind of disoriented feeling and lay there until it passed. Books was awake both times, reading by the dim of the tier lights. He didn't say anything either time. Just present, the way he was present. Enough.

The Skáli was very quiet. Not absent—it was always there now, that background hum of a place that existed whether I was paying attention to it or not. But quiet in a way it hadn't been before. Like something that had worked very hard and was resting.

The communication arrived sometime the next morning.

Not ash-letters. Not the formal between-space knock of the challenge. Something quieter than both—a directional presence at the edge of my awareness, the way you know someone is in the room with you before you see them. It didn't enter my cell. It stopped at the threshold and waited.

That was protocol, Werner had explained. The same formal practitioner etiquette that governed the challenge and the duel. You didn't enter a practitioner's established space without invitation. Not after a duel. Especially not after you'd lost one.

I let him say what he came to say.

Kask's voice arrived precise and even, stripped of the interrogation-room quality it had carried through most of our history. No little kitten. No psychological management. Just a practitioner communicating to another practitioner.

"The contract is void," he said. "I have discharged my obligation to Keyes. He has no further claim on my services."

I waited.

"Danny Keyes is patient," he continued. "I am no longer his concern. You have made yourself his concern directly. I want you to understand that clearly."

"I understand it."

Silence for a moment. I felt him turn something over, the way you can feel a person thinking in a space they share with you.

"You fought with principles instead of power." His voice was different when he said this. Still even. But something underneath it that hadn't been there before. "I have been practicing for forty-three years. I have not seen that before." A pause that felt deliberate. "I prepared for a practitioner. I was not prepared for what those principles made you in the between-space."

He was gone before I could say anything to that.

I lay there on my bunk and stared at the ceiling and thought about a man who'd spent forty-three years getting ready for every possible opponent and had not, until today, met one who'd already decided everything in advance.

Then I thought about Danny Keyes, eighty miles away, patient as granite, making new plans.

Then I stopped thinking about that, because I didn't have the reserves for it and there was nothing to do about it yet.

Two days later, I was mostly functional. Still looked terrible—both eyes spectacular, moving carefully, Werner had told me I was eating commissary soup and not arguing about it. He was right. Soup it was.

I was on my bunk reading one of Books's philosophy texts—Epictetus, not Marcus Aurelius, Books had decided I needed a change of scenery—when the cell door opened for the late-afternoon guard walk and didn't close again immediately.

Warden Hutchins was in the doorway.

Not a guard escort. Not the institutional visit setup with another CO standing in the hall. Just Hutchins, in his jacket and his quiet, doing his rounds the way he sometimes did them when he wanted to look at something without making it a formal looking.

He looked at my face. The both-eyes version of the damage. Something in his expression acknowledged it and then filed it.

"O'Reilly," he said.

"Warden."

He didn't come in. Stayed in the doorway. His eyes did a casual sweep of the cell—the table, the bunks, Books on the upper reading, the Epictetus in my hands—that wasn't casual at all. Twenty-two years running medium-security corrections. You learned to see everything without looking like you were looking at anything.

"Clean record," he said. His voice was conversational. Not the administrative voice he used in the formal office setting. The quiet version. "Two and a half years. No infractions."

I waited.

"There's a program." He shifted his weight slightly. Not uncomfortable—just the physical adjustment of a man choosing his words. "Statutory release. Six years served, exceptional cases. Clean record. Institutional contributions." He paused. "Demonstrated rehabilitation."

I didn't say anything.

"Not guaranteed," Hutchins said. "Not automatic. There's a review." He looked at the wall above my bunk—the one with the rune markings that he'd been not-seeing for two and a half years. "But for the right inmate, it's a real possibility."

He left. The door stayed open for the regular count and then pulled closed and that was it.

I lay there.

Books came down from the upper bunk. Not immediately—he gave it two minutes, which was the Books version of patience in the face of something significant. He sat in the chair at the table and took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt, which was the thing he did when he was thinking hard enough that he needed to be doing something with his hands.

"You heard," I said.

"The cell is nine feet by eleven feet."

"Yeah."

He put his glasses back on. Looked at me.

"That changes everything," he said.

"Six years total."

"Three and a half from now." He said it simply. Like numbers. Like the numbers were easy to say.

I'd been doing the math since Hutchins left, running it on the ceiling where I couldn't see anything else. I had seven and a half years in my head. Seven and a half years as the shape of what was left, what I was navigating, the weight of remaining time I'd learned to carry. You get used to a number. You don't understand how much you've organized around it until it changes.

"I thought I had seven and a half," I said.

"You might have three."

Silence.

The cell sounded the way it always sounded. The heating system. The tier. Someone's radio from Cell 44 that they played at the same time every evening. The institution continuing in its circuits regardless of what was happening inside the people inside it.

Below everything, very quiet, the Skáli hummed. The way a fire hums when it's been built right and doesn't need tending—just burning, doing what it was built to do, in a hall that had learned the weight of the person it belonged to.

The hearth threw light that wasn't quite any color I knew how to name.

"Books," I said.

"Yeah?"

"He said he'd never seen someone fight with principles instead of power."

Books was quiet for a moment. Then: "No. I imagine he hadn't." He picked up Marcus Aurelius from where he'd left it on the table—the prison-worn copy, spine creased from a hundred reads. He didn't open it. Just held it. "The principles aren't a constraint, Thor. I've been saying that since we worked them out. They're load-bearing. Remove any one of them and the whole structure changes."

"I know that now."

"You knew it before. You just didn't know you knew it." He set the book down. "You know what the difference is between two and a half years ago and today?"

I thought about it. The fish who'd arrived at CNCC, not knowing what he was, inheriting a dead man's grimoire and a reputation he hadn't asked for. "A lot of things."

"One thing," Books said. "Two and a half years ago, you'd decided what you wouldn't do. Today you know what you are." He picked up his book. "That's the whole of it."

I thought about Kask. Forty-three years in the between-space. A construct built over decades. Every pattern of magical practice he'd encountered, prepared for, adapted to.

He hadn't been prepared for someone who'd already finished deciding.

I thought about three and a half years. The shape of it. The difference between the number I'd been carrying and the one I was holding now.

Somewhere in the back of my head, Carlos was still watching me from the Kings' table. Quiet all week. Patient in a way that Rey never was. I filed it and left it there. Some problems you don't solve. You just don't forget them.

Then I stopped thinking about all of it, because the Epictetus was still in my hand and I had nothing left for the night but reading, and that was enough.

Eighty miles away, Emil Kask sat in his cell.

No workings. No sigils traced with a thumbnail or a chipped stone, or a thumbnail dipped in water. No reaching into the between-space to check his Construct's structure, no ward maintenance, no monitoring. His commissary account had Danny Keyes's money in it. The money didn't mean anything now.

He sat and looked at the wall of his cell and thought about a young practitioner who'd walked into a formal duel with nothing unusual—no unusual power, no unusual experience, no unusual tradition. Just an architecture that moved because it wasn't performing stability, it was stable. Just a will that had no cracks because every edge had been decided in advance.

Forty-three years.

He hadn't seen that before.

Before he went fully quiet, one last thing crossed the between-space—not directed, not aimed. Just released into the air between the two facilities, the way you'd speak a thing aloud in an empty room because it needed saying.

The kitten is not a kitten anymore.

Then Emil Kask stopped practicing.

And the between-space settled into grey nothing and stayed there.

END OF BOOK 2: BLOOD SIGILS

Three and a half years to go. Maybe.