"So you left it," I said.
"I contained it. I built the Insight Division to watch for exactly one thing, and it was not Gates, and it was not you." Her crystalline eyes came back to me and something in them finally moved. "It was the day someone finished the transmitter. I have been waiting twenty-three years for a boy to walk into this room with a lattice in his chest, and I have spent that entire time preparing to kill him."
Natalia's Ring flared. The floor cracked in a spiderweb three meters wide.
"Try it," she said.
"I do not intend to." Seraphina did not so much as glance at her. "I have made the calculation nine hundred times, Miss Kuzmina. In every branch where he dies in this room, the receiver remains, and the next transmitter is built by someone with worse intentions and no six women standing in front of him. The variable I could not model was whether the boy would want the door open."
She tilted her head. It was the first human gesture I had ever seen her make.
