Three broadcast vans had reached Halvers Cross before either of them did, and the crowd behind the barrier ran two hundred deep.
Cameras came second on his list of problems, well behind four hundred people standing under a platform that had lost two of its eight supports.
'That crowd is stood right under the drop line... and the lot of them came here to watch,' Ossian went along the barrier with the mask in his coat, 'get them off the junction first.'
"Everyone under the bridge moves north, now, all of you," Calista went into that crowd with no power, no licence, plus a voice that carried the length of a road junction.
She moved four hundred people ninety feet north inside three minutes by telling each row where to walk.
The flyer working along the underside of the platform had a wingspan wider than the road and edges on every limb.
Precision-class creatures cut whatever holds a structure up, on the principle that a falling deck kills more people than a mouth does.
Ossian put the Glass Mantis on at the foot of the eastern stair, and the fear went out of him like water out of a bath.
'The shaking has stopped in both hands... I did not calm down, it was taken off me,' he read his own fingers on the rail, 'that is not the same thing at all.'
He noticed an absence rather than calm, invisible to every person watching from the road.
Forty-three people were still on the platform, packed at the western end where the deck was highest.
None of them could use the eastern stair, which was the end hanging off two supports.
The eastern end hung off two remaining supports, with four cut cables holding tension in the wrong direction.
'Cut the wrong one and the whole deck goes east... so the order matters far more than the speed,' Ossian read the tension through the rail under his palm, 'damn it, north cable first.'
The Mantis reads a bridge no differently from a man, and every cable on that platform showed him where its load was travelling.
He went up the eastern stair and cut the north cable at the anchor.
[Forty-three above you]
The deck dropped four inches and stopped, with the load moving onto the two supports that still had footings under them.
Calista's voice came up from the junction, telling the western end to stay where it was standing.
The second cut had to happen while the flyer was working the far side, and it came sixty seconds later than he wanted.
[Thirty-one above you]
Twelve people had gone down the western stair between the first cut and the second, which is what her shouting had bought.
'She has moved twelve of them off it while I was on one cable... the arithmetic on this is hers,' Ossian took the second anchor apart with the gauntlet, 'third one is under the flyer.'
The third cable sat right under the creature, and reaching it meant standing beneath a thing that cuts supports for a living.
He went under it anyway, since the deck above him carried thirty-one people with no other way down.
The flyer took the top of his shoulder off in a line four inches long, then moved on to the next support without slowing.
'That thing is not hunting me at all... I am a load-bearing problem to it and nothing else,' Ossian got the third anchor open with blood running into the glove, 'shit, fourth one, east side.'
[Twelve above you]
The fourth cut is the one that either settles a platform onto what it has left or drops the whole deck into a road junction.
Ossian took it at the anchor, on the count, with the deck creaking through both his feet.
The eastern end came down eleven inches, then held on a margin that existed in two cables and one footing.
Nobody watching from behind the barrier could see that margin, and every camera pointed at him got a man standing still under a falling platform.
The last twelve came down the western stair while the flyer was still trying to find a support worth cutting.
Ossian put Dreadweight through its wing root when it came back along the deck for the eastern footing.
It went down onto the road below in one piece, and the crowd Calista had moved ninety feet north watched it land where they had been standing.
[Nobody above you]
[Forty-three head of weak stock preserved]
[None of them are yours, and the system does not understand why you did that]
'Weak stock... it counted forty-three people the way a farmer counts,' Ossian read it with his shoulder open, 'and it cannot work out what I was doing up there.'
[The flyer is finished]
[Its face is yours, if a thing that cuts from above is any use to you]
The mask came off that corpse pale and thin, with a fold along the edge of each wing plate.
'A third face, and I have not mastered the second one... straight into the bag with it,' Ossian put it away without trying it on, 'later, when I can hold the other one still.'
Forty-three people walked off that platform, and the last of them did not know his name.
The clip was on four channels inside the hour, under a headline about an unaffiliated hunter at Halvers Cross.
Viewers watched a man cut four cables in sequence without one visible sign of fear, and they called it confidence.
'They think that was nerve... it was a mask holding my hands still for me,' Ossian watched the loop on a screen in the station concourse, 'nobody down here can tell the difference.'
Two of the four channels looped the same nine seconds: the fourth cable cut without movement in his shoulders.
A commentator on the second channel asked which guild he fought for, and nobody in the studio had an answer to give.
[Influence, Personal]
His Capability posting updated in a public office two miles away while he stood on a concourse watching himself.
The first two columns came off things he did with his hands, while this one arrived from four channels of footage.
'Influence... the city has started measuring what people think of me,' Ossian read the panel with his shoulder bleeding through the coat, 'that is a new column.'
Nobody from the guilds came to the junction at all, since an unaffiliated kill has no paperwork attached to it.
Bastien found him in the stairwell under the concourse forty minutes later with a kit and no expression at all.
"You've let that dry into the fabric," Bastien said it while cutting the coat away from the shoulder, "And you've been holding the arm above your heart, which does nothing for a cut."
"It felt like it was helping," Ossian let him work, since arguing with Bastien about medicine has never once succeeded.
"Felt like something, did it," the old porter put the pad on without raising his voice by a single note, "That's not the same as helping."
'He has listed four things I did wrong and has not once told me off... that is worse than shouting,' Ossian watched him tape the edges down, 'say thank you properly this time.'
Then the mask came off in the stairwell, and every delayed thing arrived at once.
The fear he had not felt on the platform came up his throat in one movement, forty minutes late and at full size.
Ossian sat down on the steps with both hands shaking hard enough to rattle the kit against the concrete.
'The whole afternoon is arriving at once... in a stairwell, forty minutes late, with nobody watching,' he got his back against the wall, 'shit, forty-three of them and I felt nothing at the time.'
Bastien put a hand on the back of his neck and said nothing at all for about a minute.
'Damn it, I cut four cables under a falling deck and the shaking waits until a stairwell,' Ossian pushed the heels of both hands into his eyes, 'that is the mask handing the bill back.'
'He has seen this before in somebody... that is not a first-time hand on a neck,' Ossian breathed through it, 'ask him about that one day.'
Then both gauntlets went hot enough on his forearms that he tried to pull them off before he understood what was happening.
[The relic has been fed a precision hunt]
[It is taking a shape it did not have this morning]
The charcoal plate over his knuckles was moving, folding in along the back of each hand into something with edges on it.