[i]What if I kill her?[/i]

It’s a dull roar of a thought thudding in Redana’s head as she comes to guard. Bella looms in front of her like a nebula, like the rainbows of the sea, vast and enveloping and dangerous. In her dark waters there are sharks and pearls, and Redana dives into her like a Plover with a cut tether. No, not right— she’s not bleeding power. It thrums in her as her fingers find the familiar grip, tear the blade’s tip through the air as she tests the balance and the weight that she already knows.

She’s been here before, after all. It’s just that Bella is much grander than her usual choices of partner. Much more dangerous, too. Like a nebula. Like the rainbows of the sea.

At the start, the Auspex tries to read Bella. It suggests probable arcs, tries to calculate the strength of her arm, then comes to the immediate conclusion that Redana needs to stop letting her hit their sword. Red flares of warning racing through her skull. But it’s been on edge since Aphrodite lit his cigarette. Even her mother’s eye can be surprised; even it doesn’t know everything. It didn’t know what Aphrodite had done, after all, or it had buried that knowledge so deep inside itself that Dany was never meant to access it. Not until her mother decided she was ready. Or, perhaps, not until Nero Claudius was honest with herself.

Redana Claudius leans into the clash of swords. She strains her own muscles against Bella, stares into her face, grins without knowing exactly why. Her body’s smarter than she is. Her body knows, her body learns, her body—

Knows the punch is coming when Bella grabs the sword. She’s already half-turned. The kick was a surprise, though. When she hits the far wall, the wall isn’t the only thing that cracks. For a moment she is a marionette with cut strings, slumping as her nerves scream and flail, cut. Then they reroute, rejoin, reset—

The sword buries itself into her to the hilt. The world is a shriek. The world is the Spear firing again and again and again. The world is nerves come back online just to be overwhelmed. The world is Bella panting bloody-mouthed screaming howling monstrous. The world is surrender. The world is a black pyramid inverted. The world is the hungry grass underneath her body waiting for her to succumb.

The world is the feeling of a hilt under her palm. That, she knows. That, she can do. She can draw a sword. Ignore— ignore— the sound, the long sucking wetness, the throb of sensation. Draw a red sword. Draw a sword for Mynx.

She takes it two-handed as she charges again, and the noise coming out of her mouth is nothing she learned on Tellus. It is a dead echo of the Nemean, and is it so hard to believe that they are the same person? For all that Dany is smaller, and lesser, and kinder— she is the same metal, for all that she is a different cast.

An obvious feint, a thrust caught by the blade again, and this time Bella squeezes and twists and her claws bleed against a sword made by humanity, made to endure, made to be unbreakable, and on the one side are the claws of Bella, the holy monster, the leviathan, the bloody-handed, and on the other is the simple sword-arm of a god’s daughter, who strains and screams—

And the clap of the sword’s breaking is a thunderstroke, and she is already reversing it, and Bella breaks her jaw for it, backhands her so hard that her neck nearly snaps, but the half-a-sword comes away red, from rib to chin.

And then it is diving into the storm. Flashes of sensation, of light and dark, of the red of dying stars. Battle roars within her, the drum-beat of Ares, discordant, the roiling chaos of the deep, and she bites the dragon’s neck, the thing of claws and fangs and hair to wrench. And [i]what if I kill her[/i] is drowned under the diving-love, the thing that lies on the other side of pain, the song that is being crushed out of her mouth by Bella’s arms.

Bella’s blood is on her lips. Her Auspex is white noise, calculating her odds of survival, useless, useless. All she needs to know is the fall. All she needs to know is descending along a curtain, and on its far side moves a lioness huge and terrible. All she needs to know is the sword in her hand, the sword which is another part of her hand, the sword that Bella’s muscles grind against as Dany twists it.

Dany makes a noise, the words before language, and what it means is [i]you are beautiful.[/i] And then the noise rises into the shriek of bones buckling underneath Bella’s embrace.

Beneath them, their waters intermingle.