Our memories passed through the Crown.
Kane saw the dead end, the tiny Styx in my closed hand and the first brood in the academy forest. He lingered over the image of me sheltering a useless mosquito with my palm, though she could not yet give me anything.
"You got nothing from her," he said.
"Not at first."
"Then why did you keep her?"
The contract would have had an answer: calculation, hope of an awakening, a hidden inheritance. The real answer sounded too simple.
"Because she was free to stay."
Kane struck with the full force of his armour.
The floor split under my feet. I fell, and a white plate pinned my chest to the stone. Styx tumbled to the edge of the crack.
Beyond the wall, Leon was trying to break through. The little dragon clawed at the white surface. The captains kept relaying the faces of the absorbed creatures, but Kane sealed each of them inside a separate ring.
Styx rose on her damaged wings and settled on his armour.
The path she had opened into Kane's nervous system had not yet closed. The red point slipped beneath a plate.
Once again, we felt his body.
His heart beat close by. A single impulse would have been enough to stop the muscle. The owner's death would have freed me from the fight, and forty-one thousand bonds would have passed to the victor.
The System had already displayed the reward.
"Absorption available."
His memories came with his body: a boy at the gates, his mother in the snow, the first beast to submit in time, and the people who thanked him for saving them. Then came decisions, each made faster and challenged less. He had not noticed the moment when his fear of losing people became the right to own them.
Styx touched the muscle of his heart.
Kane felt her.
"Do it," he said. "Take the city the same way you gained your first strength. Through death."
Brutus surfaced in my memory again, still faceless. I remembered standing beside him and not stopping the attack because ten points were worth more than someone else's life.
If Styx killed Kane by my decision, the Crown would turn him and every creature bound to him into one more number.
I pressed two fingers to the red point on the armour.
"Come out."
Styx lingered beside his heart. Then she severed only the slender thread holding the plate against my chest and crawled out.
Kane remained alive.
I was not free either: he still held the Crown, and the armour was already reforming.
"You're keeping your hands clean," he said.
"No. I'm leaving you your body."
The words did not stop the blow. Kane hurled me to the edge of the circle, and the wound in my shoulder opened again.
But for the first time, he could not call refusal weakness and have the Crown agree at once. The System continued to display the available absorption, but a new line appeared beside it:
"Target rejected appropriation."
Kane saw it and tore the white plate from his own face.
Underneath stood a man who, for the first time, had been denied the chance to make his death the final word.
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