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He turned the monitor, which showed a startlingly high-resolution view of the front
door. Marla was used to grainy low-res security camera footage, so this was a surprise,
but it made sense that Dalton would have better tech than the average person. The door
didn’t open, but there was something—a brief flicker, almost too fast for the eye to see,
but Marla caught it. “What’s that—”
Blood welled up out of Dalton’s mouth, then fountained, spattering the desk and
computers. Marla leapt backward, putting distance between herself and whatever had
attacked Dalton—but what had attacked him? There was nobody else in the room,
unless there was someone invisible. “B, Rondeau, get out!” she shouted, and they
complied with alacrity, Rondeau dragging B by the hand. Dalton’s mirror-selves came
forward and flanked her, but they seemed at an utter loss as to how to proceed.
Then Marla saw a hummingbird fluttering high in the corner of the room, and knew this
was Mutex’s doing. Something invisible flung Dalton’s body—he was quite obviously
no longer among the living—on the desk, knocking over the monitors, which crashed
and sparked on the floor. Something tore Dalton’s shirt open, shreds of cloth flying, and
then bright red arterial heart’s blood gushed as his rib cage was ripped open. Something
flickered behind the desk, like the ruby flutter of hummingbird wings, moving faster
than the eye could see.
“This is bullshit,” Marla said. The time had come when nothing else would work, so
Marla reversed her cloak.
The benevolent, healing qualities of the white side disappeared as the inner lining—the
deep purple of a bruise—became the cloak’s exterior, clothing Marla in a veil of
imperial shadow. When the cloak reversed, Marla’s rational mind receded to a distant
corner of her consciousness. She could move with superhuman speed in this form,
perform feats of strength that would normally break her bones, but it wasn’t much good
for planning, or even for following a plan. While clothed in the purple, Marla could
only assess and dispose of threats.
With her heightened senses, she could just barely see Mutex. He was moving incredibly
quickly, his body a blur of faintly red-tinged motion, wielding an obsidian knife to cut
out Dalton’s heart. He’d accelerated himself somehow, far beyond the normal human
time-scale, so that relative to himself, everything else probably seemed to be standing
completely still. That’s what the flicker of motion on the video had been—the brief
opening and closing of the front door as Mutex had entered. He’d either somehow
cloaked his body heat, or else he was moving so quickly that Dalton’s sensors hadn’t
been able to pick it up. Distantly, Marla wondered how he achieved this effect without
destroying himself—most experiments in physical acceleration this extreme ended with
the researchers dead. Marla could only accelerate herself to this extent because of her
cloak, which was a magical artifact whose origins and mechanisms were unknown and
highly resistant to analysis.
In the microseconds it took Marla to identify Mutex and bunch her muscles to leap at
him, he finished taking Dalton’s heart and ran from the room, holding it, dripping, in his
hand. On his way out he looked at Marla—a stare long enough for her to notice, which
must have been quite a long look from his perspective—and she jumped for him