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inadvertently toe it back within her reach. Again, in a movie she would perform some trick, nimbly kicking the sword into the air and carving a path to freedom through the growing ranks of heavily armed men and women.
    In the real world she carefully took another step back away from the man and the weapon.
    “Just pick it up,” Trinder said.
    The man did and then screamed as his arm fell off, blood fountaining out under pressure.
    Karin was as stunned as anyone. Her double take would have been comical had she been able to see her own face. But she could see the faces of the Americans, a horrified tableau of shock, incomprehension and sudden animal fear. The man had screamed more in surprise and violation than pain, she thought, and the idea was not distant and abstract. It was intimate, and again she realized that she knew his feelings, not by guess or intuition, but much more intimately. As though shared between them on some unknown level.
    The connection dropped out as the man fainted, blood still gushing from the clean-cut stump of his severed forearm.
    And just as she had felt his fright and horrified amazement, she now felt the surging flood of raw emotion from the others in the room, much of it swirling and churning in panic and disorientation, but not all. She tasted hot and bitter iron in her mouth, felt acid roiling in her stomach, and her hands balling into fists. But these sensations were not hers, they radiated, like a burning heat, from Trinder, and Karin Varatchevsky began to fall to her left long before she understood that her fists were not clenching—that was the feeling of Trinder’s hands closing around the stock of his shotgun and his index finger squeezing the trigger.
    She did not need to look at the muzzle to know he had it lined up on the center of her chest. She did not have to tell herself to dive out of the line of fire. Time stretched as it will in these moments—the body turbo-charging itself, the senses accelerating, everything outside the warm and cozy world of subjective existence slowing to half speed, and then slowing even more.
    The dark, black hole of the shotgun muzzle turned white with the contained explosion of super-heated gases and the swarm of deadly tungsten pellets that rode within it. Karin felt hot claws raking at her shoulder and upper arm. Her cheek and one ear stung wickedly. But she was still moving, still breathing, still diving when Trinder racked the slide and pulled on the trigger a second time. She was moving so quickly that the second shell spat its contents through empty air, save for one pellet which she felt as a distinct puncture in her left calf.
    Karin landed in a judo roll. The most basic of the break falls she had first learned in gymnastics class, and then practiced an unknowable number of times in the training halls of the GRU. She had dived, without thinking, toward the katana, which lay next to the severed arm. This was another maneuver practiced again and again in her childhood—diving and rolling on ribbons and batons in the gymnasium—and then with even greater focus and intent as a young woman in training, when Spetsnaz instructors dropped knives and guns on hard concrete floors, barking at her to pick them up mid-roll, and kicking her when she failed.
    She did not fail now, gathering the katana, diving and rolling again to pick up the long, lacquered scabbard, and coming up out of the second roll, partly shielded by the bulk of the dead Threshrend. Shotgun pellets ground against torn meat in her shoulder. She expected her injured leg to shriek and possibly even collapse under her weight as she prepared herself to override the body’s natural mechanisms. But Karin found her feet without stumbling. In fact, the pain in her leg and shoulders was fading so quickly she wondered whether she had imagined it.
    There was no imagining what happened next though. Karin Varatchevsky lived it and then relived it repeatedly for the next few days, trying to