The Meridian training hall rents by the hour to anybody with a registry number, which Calista has had for six days.
Her spear came up and took the target drone out of the air before she had finished deciding to throw it.
The handler logged that as nought point one one seconds and opened her old record beside it: six Site Events cleared before Ivory Banner discharged her.
'She has not moved like that in her life... and the drone was down before her shoulder caught up,' Ossian watched from the rail, 'that is the Mantis running her arm.'
Calista lowered the spear and stood there studying her own hand for a while.
Six days ago that hand could not hold a cup through a full minute without setting it down.
"Efficiency's excellent," the handler said it to his screen rather than to her, "Best numbers I've logged off a new registration this year."
The session went into the file as an unqualified success, and a handler measures what a body does with no column for the cost.
'He has written her up as a success... and she has gone the colour she goes when something frightens her,' Ossian came down off the rail, 'do not name it out loud.'
Calista would not put a word to it, and he recognised that refusal on sight as the one he uses himself.
"It threw before I did," she said that to the wall, in a voice with nothing in it, the way she says things she intends to solve on her own.
'That is the exact sentence I would use... damn it, and I would say it to a wall as well,' Ossian stopped six feet short of her, 'ask nothing, stand there.'
The Mantis does not seize a body the way a story would have it. The thing arrives at the answer first and moves her arm on its way past.
Ossian owned a mask that thinks faster than he does for ten days, which is not enough experience to be useful to her.
Every efficient movement she makes now belongs slightly less to her than the one before it, and no panel prints that as a figure.
Then a test creature came out of a holding cage on the far side of the hall, at the end of a morning that had gone well until that minute.
Meridian keeps four of them for combat assessments, in cages with a bolt that a maintenance contract was supposed to replace in the spring.
Nobody had come to do that work, which is a sentence Ossian has now read on two separate incident reports this month.
The creature that came out ran on six legs and went straight at the handler, whose desk was making the most noise in the room.
Both of Ossian's hands went to Dreadweight before any part of him had decided a single thing.
'Four steps and I am there before it reaches him... except she is closer, and faster than me,' he got his right hand off the gauntlet, 'I want to go, this one is hers.'
Stopping his own hands took more out of him than the whole of Halvers Cross had done.
Everything he owns is built to close distance, and the one useful thing he could do was stand at a rail holding onto it.
'Damn it, every part of me is built to go and she is the one who should,' Ossian locked his fingers around the rail, 'let her work.'
"It's yours," he said it out loud, badly, in front of a handler and a desk clerk who both turned around to look at him.
Calista heard that and gave him no answer, being already halfway across the floor.
The efficient line ran along the west wall, took the creature from behind, then finished it four feet from the desk with the handler still in the chair.
That line would have worked on any scoring sheet, and it also left the handler inside the creature's reach for two full seconds.
Going the other way round that room is not a line any assessment in the building would have scored.
Calista crossed the open floor at an angle nobody would score well, put herself between the desk and six legs, then took the charge on the shaft with both hands.
The impact went through her repaired channels and out the other side, dropping her onto one knee for the first time since the binding.
'She took the slow route on purpose... and that mask will have shown her the fast one first,' Ossian stayed where he was with both hands empty, 'hell, she can disobey it.'
The handler got himself out of the chair while she was still holding the creature off the desk.
He went out through the side door without looking back at her once. Ossian kept that detail long after the handler's name had gone completely.
Calista killed it on the second exchange, from a bad angle, with her weight on the wrong foot the whole way through.
Then she sat down on the floor of the training hall and did not get up again for a while.
Meridian's staff went back to their screens inside a minute, since a dead assessment creature is paperwork rather than an event.
The cost of it showed on her afterward, before she was fast enough to put it away.
Her left arm had started shaking in a way it had not done since the repair, so she kept it flat against her thigh where nobody would see.
'That hurt her, and she is hiding the arm from a handler who has already stopped watching,' Ossian sat down beside her without asking, 'say the useful thing.'
"You could have taken it from the wall," he put that out as an observation, with nothing sharp in it.
"I know," Calista watched her own hand, "It showed me the wall before I got out of the chair."
'It showed her the fast line and she went the long way round... with two witnesses watching her do it,' Ossian felt something come loose in his chest, 'she proved the thing can be refused.'
Calista had done what he failed to manage with the same face four days before giving it away.
She managed it inside a week of owning it, from a chair, with a handler's life sitting on the outcome.
"You went slower on purpose," Ossian said it with more in his voice than he had planned to put there.
"I went stupid on purpose," Calista let her head go back against the wall, "It's not the same as being able to do it twice."
The handler filed the incident with a note about a cage bolt and a paragraph covering her response times.
Neither of his notes said anything at all about a woman choosing a worse route to keep him inside his chair.
Then Calista's phone went, and she read the message twice over before saying one word about it.
The guild sends its contract notices from a general address, without a name attached anywhere on them.
Ivory Banner had invoked her old sponsorship contract at four minutes past eleven that morning.
Six days on a public registry is how long it took a guild to remember her name.
The wording ordered her to report to their offices for asset recovery, with a date on it and a clause number underneath.
'Asset recovery... they read the registry posting and reached for a clause number,' Ossian read the screen over her shoulder, 'shit, that took them six days.'
Guilds use that wording for equipment rather than for people, and Paloma would have three things to say about it by evening.
[A rival apex is claiming one of your court as recovered property]
[This is how territory disputes begin, and you have almost no territory]
'It has read a contract notice and called it a territory dispute... and it is not wrong about what they mean,' Ossian read the panel over her shoulder, 'she is not property.'
Calista put the phone face down on the floor beside her and kept looking at her own left hand.