The warehouse floor was one open space, with no wall or barrier more than chest high.

It wasn’t unvaried. Nearly all of the thousands of square feet of the warehouse were full of workstations, bric-a-brac, storage, and hazards; and on the opposite side of the building from Nathan’s perspective was a stage on which a jazz band incongruously stood.

A black-haired man in a sharp, unassumingly navy blue suit sat at the cello, bow at the ready. A near-bald man in monochromes, white shirt contrasting starkly with his skin, brought his trumpet up to his lips. A white-haired man with a short, full beard stood next to a woman with a bob—a hairstyle, dear Reader—of a similar color, both of them cheated out to look half at their audience and half at each other with their fingers upon the keys of their flute. A faded man in a checkered suit, grayed out and seeming as though he lacked vitality, lightly tapped a prefatory beat on the high hat; and there were more. A woman stood at a microphone with her hair teased high, a man in fully opaque glasses sat blind at the piano with his fingers flexed to play. More players rounded out the group with singers, a string bass, a trombone, and other instruments besides, and the moment held still in a frieze as Nathan took it all in.

He did so with just one glance. He took in the performers on their stage, music stands in front of the instrumentalists and performance-joy sparkling in the eyes of the singers. He took in the crowd on their bleachers, a third of them hollering his name as their signs and placards shifted from “Alex” to “Nathan” and two thirds of them hungry with anticipation. He took in the grand obstacle course and the miniature hedge maze, the ropes course hanging from the ceiling, the robot labs and their spark-spitting, sputtering machines ready to surge through the doors into the robo-arena. He took in the armories and the forges, the lathes and the enchanters’ stations, the woman putting the finishing touches on an arrow and the man sitting on his own knitting a pink hat.

He took in the jovial woman approaching him with a nametag reading “Chris” and a friendly, combative expression.

Her face matched a third of the placards.

Her name matched a third of the banners.

Face expressionless, heart empty of feeling, he shot her.

She staggered back, eyes wide and unseeing—one step, two, and in the shadow of that deafening crack Chris toppled like a felled oak. The ground shook underneath her and the bullet Nathan had forged out of Alex’s sword glowed redder and redder until the fire rose to claim her.

“I am tired of this,” he said calmly, holstering Saucer absently. “Fuck it. Who do I need to kill in order to call this a win?”

The clicking of the knitting woman’s needles was the only sound in the aftermath of his words. A few moments later, as she finished her row, she stood with a kind smile. “That’d be me,” she said. “Madison. Call me—”

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Nathan flicked his fingers, using Saucer’s rapier form as cover for a dense metal dart propelled by a flex of his basket-hilted weapon. She didn’t blink, leaning to the side before he completed the motion and pre-dodging the supersonic projectile.

“—Maddie,” she finished calmly. She walked steadily towards him, tilting her head at him in a motion that, combined with her general body language, felt to him like deliberate mockery. “Pleased to meet you at last, Nathan.”

“The pleasure,” he said flatly, “is in no ways mutual.”

“It so often isn’t, I know.” She glanced over her shoulder at the stage, snapping a finger at the performers. They dropped out of their frieze as she swayed to avoid another needle he fired at her. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she called out as though she hadn’t been interrupted, “and those who otherwise identify, introducing: our intrepid Millionborn Earther’s memory’s best efforts at a jazz band. I’ll spare you the introductions until you’ve heard them play! Boys and girls, let’s have a song… and Nathan?”

The band struck up a held note, a tuning note, sound meshing and blending from its ragged first beat into one perfection of sound.

“Let’s dance.”

“Trite,” the man responded brusquely. “Eat steel.”

The band swept into an instrumental piece that Nathan recognized only distantly, a spritely ragtime number that had the performers’ feet tapping and their instruments flourishing. He couldn’t properly ignore it, no matter the coldness which had overtaken him; its beat seeped into his motions, guided his step to a degree of grace that he resented.

He and Maddie were of a like size, neither larger enough or with a different enough build to draw notice, though her boots would be superior for kicking than his own and her turquoise jacket was clearly armored. He’d expected, inasmuch as his fugue state allowed him the leisure of expectation, that he would have an advantage in reach—and the first exchange almost ended in his death when, stepping into a fencer’s stance and brushing her cowlick with her offhand, she lunged with a knitting needle now suddenly the same length as his rapier.

He parried on autopilot, distantly aware that he owed the entirety of that motion’s speed and reflexivity to the tutoring he’d gotten under Tanya, and she did him the discourtesy of deflecting his parry and riposte by bringing her front foot back and leaning away from his strike, executing a perfect stop thrust to try to skewer him on his attack’s momentum.

“Let’s hear it for our first soloist,” the vocalist purred in a voice like if silk had perfect diction and spoke rather than being a type of material and therefore incapable of speech. “Zat-ba do, yeah.”

Nathan stepped forward with a beat attack, cut, deflected and cut again. Maddie parried and countered, giving ground and then taking it again as she beat Nathan back in turn. Her auburn hair cut through the air and shone, his own brown hair ruffled as she went high and he ducked and stabbed for her hip as she hopped lithely back, and they moved with the beat of the music until it suited them to do otherwise as their strikes and counters snapped back and forth with mind and timing games that were no less important than the blades in question.

And the band played on, as the evenly split crowd hollered and cheered.