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The Knights closed the last few meters without slowing, and Needle raised two fingers before either blade found range.
Third Eye of Kong Shi didn't touch flesh. It touched intention, the thin thread connecting a decision to the action that followed it, and Needle cut that thread with the precision of a man pulling one string free of a much larger knot. Both Knights stopped mid-stride.
Not frozen. Confused. The nearest one's blade drifted a few degrees off its line, the arm behind it uncertain what it had been doing a half second ago.
"Now," Needle said.
Suture didn't need telling twice. She caught the dragon's descending shoulder, hauled herself up, and it was airborne before the first Knight's confusion cracked into something closer to anger.
They flew.
The district fell away below, rubble and mist and the ongoing catastrophe of Bone Saw's fight still audible even at altitude, a low continuous violence that had stopped registering as unusual sometime in the last twenty minutes. Suture watched it shrink. Didn't say anything for a while.
"That's it, then," she said, finally.
Needle looked at her.
"I thought they all died. Some honorable last stand somewhere. That's why Father never brought them up." Her jaw worked once before the rest came out. "You don't talk about the dead unless someone asks, and nobody asked, because everyone already assumed there was nothing left to ask about. And Armand kept his because Father needed him embedded. A spy needs his cover intact."
"That part is correct."
"But I don't see how it connects. If the power's revocable, why kill anyone to take it back? Just revoke it."
Needle's jaw tightened, the specific set it took right before he corrected something that actually mattered.
"It isn't only revocation." He held up a hand before she could push again. "The bestowal is a connection. A line, both directions, between him and the Knight. He gives the skill through it. He can also send himself through it."
"Send himself."
"His soul." He said it flat, the register he defaulted to whenever a sentence cost him something to say. "Pushed down the same channel the power travels through. Replacing what was already there."
Suture went still.
"He kills them," Needle said. "Not the body. The person. What made them who they were gets erased, and what's left after is a shell wearing their face. Running on his intent instead of their own."
"Armand."
"Was likely first. Or close to it. A working proof before he refined the method enough to use on demand."
Suture's mouth opened. Closed.
Needle watched her not say it.
"You still think there's something good in him."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to."
She looked away from him, out at the mist, and for a moment the only sound was wind and the fight below and the dragon's wingbeats.
"He used to be my father." The words came slower than the rest. "Before all this. I'm not making excuses for him. I just." She stopped. Started again. "I remember admiring him. Actually admiring him. That specific thing a kid feels when they think someone has it all figured out." A breath. "It's hard to let go of that completely. Even now."
Needle reached over and set his hand against the top of her head. Careful. Awkward, a gesture he'd only seen performed once and was rebuilding from memory instead of instinct.
"You have a better father now."
She knocked his hand away hard enough that he had to catch himself against the dragon's neck.
"Fuck off."
He didn't look hurt by it. If anything, something eased in his shoulders, like the reaction had told him what he needed to know.
They flew in silence after that. The wind at this altitude thinned out the blood mist, carried something closer to an ordinary evening instead, cold and clean, and neither of them said anything for a while.
Then Needle's fingers started moving again.
"If I'm right about how it works," he said, "there's a limitation. Cooldown. Range. Something."
"Why does there have to be."
"Because if there weren't, he wouldn't have parked a Knight inside a compromised enemy position for weeks while he handled other business. He'd have overwritten the nearest available body the moment he needed a soldier and moved on. Instead he gave Armand a long post and left him to run it independently for years." He looked at her. "That only makes sense if the overwrite costs something. Time. Distance. Both."
Suture turned this over.
"So he's not doing it whenever he wants."
"He's doing it when it's worth the cost. Which means every time he uses it now, mid-engagement, he's burning something he'd normally save."
The dragon banked, correcting for wind, and below them the fight's noise pulsed once, bigger than before, a distant concussion that reached them a full second after the light of it did.
"So what do we do with that."
"Remove his tools before he can use them." Needle's voice settled into the register he used when a plan finished assembling itself. "Kill the Knights. Every one he can currently reach. If the overwrite needs proximity or setup time, cutting his supply of available bodies takes that option away." A pause. "Then we isolate him. No Knights to protect. No thralls to pull our attention. Nowhere left to hide behind."
"And then."
"Then Father finishes it."
Suture looked down at the district, at the crater where Heaven's Execution had landed, at the sound of something that refused to stay dead.
"He's down there alone."
"He is."
"Fighting alone."
"Also correct." Needle's third eye had gone still, the calculation finished, and what was left on his face sat closer to certainty than she'd seen from him all day. "Which is why we have work before we can help him."
He opened the channel reserved for the Father's network, and his voice went out across it in the same flat register he used for everything that mattered.
"Father. Bone Saw. Forceps. Everyone currently deployed. I have a plan. I need you to hear it before the Knights regroup."
Below them, three blocks from the largest crater, a Knight in bright plate rose from where it had been standing motionless and turned its helmet toward the sky.