Lay tilted her head.
"Alright," she said. Her voice was quieter now. The mockery was gone. What remained was something close to honest tiredness, and beneath it, the faintest edge of something Kori couldn't quite read - not fear, not resignation, but the calm of a person who had reached the end of a particular game and was waiting to see what the next one was going to be.
"You win."
Then she leaned back.
The motion was so slow that Kori, even with the Chasmis open, saw it as just gravity rather than action. Lay's spine bent backward at the waist. Her arms remained raised in surrender. Her boots stayed on the rooftop's edge. The cloak settled along the curve of her body as her weight shifted, the brass canteen still tucked somewhere in the folds, and her head tilted backward over the few dozen meter drop until the wind from below caught the underside of her hood and lifted it.
Then her feet left the parapet.
She fell down her back.
