I heard her before I saw her.
It was past seven, and full dark, and the festival grounds had gone loud in the way they did after an event—music on the lawn, crowds around the replay screens, Clara's face ten feet tall above the cafeteria doors, scowling at a mirror. I'd slipped away from all of it to walk. After a day of watching other people fight, my body wanted to move, and since Training Room Four my body had been wanting to move all the time.
I'd come round the back of East Hall, where Mythos had put the Starcrest delegation for the week, and the noise of the lawn had dropped away behind the building. And in the quiet, I heard it.
A blade cutting air.
Not a swing. A swing has a sound that rises and falls. This was a single clean note, short and flat, the same length every time. A pause. The same note again. Again. The same line, cut over and over by someone who wasn't going to stop until it was right, and who had decided that right was further away than anyone else thought.
