The Chosen Ones are bruised and dull-eyed: their knuckles are blood-blackened and their nostrils are white. Their muscles slide over each other like great rusting cables, smooth but shrieking. Their battle is joyless. This is the cost of the death of a friend.

Only Dylan still moves with their old pinwheeling grace, but if there’s joy in her movements then that joy is savage. She flickers, and blood blooms from the bodies of nameless men (her knuckles are smooth; red ribbons chase her knives). She’s fire and the means of walking amid fire. She is the temptation of revenge.