A hand closed around Kori’s wrist.
Lay had moved. Kori had not seen the motion - her Chasmis was closed, not wanting to waste any more energy, her attention on the canteen and the falling stream - but the closing of Lay’s fingers around her wrist arrived with the speed of a striking snake, the grip locking just below the canteen’s base.
Their faces were closer than they had been all night. Lay’s eyes, dark and bright beneath the shadow of the hood, were level with Kori’s. The hibiscus tea was still falling.
"What are you doing-"
"Get your hand off me-"
"That’s my tea -"
"You wanted something." Kori’s voice was flat as she nudged Lay away. "Sit and shut up until I tell you it’s done."
Lay studied her face for a beat. The liquid almost touched the ground. The grip released. She stepped back quickly, both hands raised in a small gesture of surrender that was undermined entirely by the smile she did not bother to suppress, and she lowered herself back to the ice with the resigned patience of a woman who had decided the slushie was still worth this much.
Kori turned her attention to the canteen: The pour continued - but now Kori’s left hand opened beside it, and the falling stream started to coil in the air, bending unnaturally.
The tea began to freeze in midair, the first inch of the stream solidified into a thin, glassy strand of red ice. The strand held its shape as the next inch came down behind it, and the stream became a ribbon, the ribbon froze into a curved rod, and within two seconds the entire flow of tea had been arrested in the air between the canteen and the rooftop - a beautiful, suspended curve of frozen liquid, deep red in the cold light, catching the pale blue of Kori’s frost knives now hanging from her shoulder.
Lay made a small weird sound. The kind of sound someone makes when they see a thing they didn’t expect to see, the involuntary noise that came up before the brain could replace it with something cooler.
Kori closed her fist.
The frozen stream shattered. The red ice broke apart along its length, the entire curve fragmenting into hundreds of small shards that hung in the air where the stream had been, each shard a tiny crystalline droplet of frozen tea suspended at the height it had reached. The shards drifted, slowly, on currents of cold air Kori was directing with her fingertips.
The shards moved together - the red drops floating across the rooftop toward her open palm, the shaved snow she had cut earlier joining them from the other direction, the two streams of ice converging in the air above the canteen mouth like a small storm finding its calm centre. The patterns the ice traced as it travelled were deliberate; Kori was sorting the mixture as she gathered it, layering the red tea-ice through the white snow in alternating bands, the slushie composing itself in the air with more care than she had bothered to apply to anything else tonight.
She lowered her hand.
The whole mass - red tea-ice and white shaved snow combined - flowed back into the canteen in a slow, gravity-respecting stream, packing itself into the brass interior until the canteen was filled with a fine, dense, ruby-and-white slush. The ratio was approximately one to three: saturated enough to taste; diluted enough that the brass wouldn’t crack from the expansion.
She replaced the cap... then she kicked the canteen with the toe of her boot.
It bounced across the frost, careful not to dent the metal, then she created something like an Ice ramp, Ice expanding at an instant rate. Then the small stud exploded, sending the canteen flying back towards Kori. She caught it on the next bounce with the side of her foot, lifted it into the air with a small flick, and let it drop into her hand. She tested the seal. Solid. She kicked it again, this time using the inside of her opposite boot, the canteen tracing a tight arc through the air before returning to her foot, and then to her hand. The work was almost playful. The slushie inside was settling, the components mixing further with every controlled impact.
She looked at Lay with the edge of her eyes - she was watching her with both eyebrows slightly raised, the lazy smile still in place but holding a new layer of something - appreciation, maybe, or the recognition that the woman in front of her was capable of considerably more than the fight had so far revealed. The hood had slipped back another centimetre. A part of her neck was visible now: the sharp jawline, the high cheekbones, the curve of dark hair behind her ear. She looked, in the soft light of the rooftop, less like a wanted criminal and more like a woman that lived her entire life lifting weights or something.
"...So?" Lay said. "What did you wanna ask me?"
Kori threw the canteen... A bit harder than necessary. The brass cylinder spun through the air in a fast, flat arc that crossed the distance between them in less than half a second, and Lay caught it cleanly out of the air with her right hand, the impact absorbing into her palm without rocking her shoulder back at all.
Kori slowly walked forward. A few leftover snowflakes were still orbiting her. Her left hand opened and closed once, the cold gathering along the tips of her fingers. Her right hand still held her knife. Her Chasmis was open now, fully open, scanning the woman in front of her with its most invasive depth.
She still picked up nothing. No signature. No trace. No Eon at all anywhere in or around Lay’s body, even with the scan running at maximum and the distance between them shrinking with every step.
Kori stopped two metres from the seated woman. She looked her dead in the eyes.
"I’ll begin with..."
A snowflake reached Lay’s shoes. The canteen was warm in Lay’s palm with the residual heat of the brass holding the tea’s old warmth. The slushie inside settled with a soft, almost satisfying sound.
"What the hell are you?"