“She’s just about got it,” Dolly lies, encouragingly. Her smile shifts from a facade to genuine as the technician does her fumbling best to fix it. Then, because only the very best of girls would be able to resist, she turns her attention back to Sam. “And really, you think I look like D— Seven Quetzal? Is she your favorite~?”

[i]Hmmm. No, this can work. All she has to do is get behind the guns. She drops like a cenote stone, into the narrowing spaces. All she has to do is do a light/shadow attack— something that any reasonable program would have defenses against, but not this, not with the holes in its conception.[/i]

“Because if she wasn’t up against Mirror, of all pilots, maybe it’d be her down there against that terrifying Zaldarian, right?” The shiver is, to her surprise, not feigned. She’s getting pieces of the fight over the tall one’s shoulder, and the raw fury, the way that the hulking mountain of a mech moves…

[i]What you do is you make a poison out of your tooth, and when the time comes, you bite the defenses. Light is shadow, shadow is light, the sudden blindness of high hot summer. Legitimate attempts to interact with the system are locked out, treated as the enemy, and the viper at the heart has everything fall at her feet.[/i]

Pins prickle underneath her fur as she watches for a moment, tail brushing against Sam’s ankle. They never could have won this. Not against this demon. Mirror should be losing instantly, crushed under the weight of Hunger and Night. But she’s not. She’s [i]not.[/i] She slips through those claws like she slipped through Jade’s defenses. She is something outside of the game of gods and demons, and that’s why—

[i]But that’s a last resort, even as the venom throbs in her jaw. Better to weave all things from here, constantly plummeting in and out of the dark as  conceptual gravity warps around her.[/i]

“We couldn’t have won,” Dolly murmurs, with the flustered Sam close enough to hear.