The lunge wasn't a clumsy, desperate tackle like the one Liza had attempted in the arcade. It was a blur of motion that defied physics.
One moment she was standing five feet away, her eyes pools of vantablack; the next, her hand was a vice around my throat, slamming me into the brick wall of the alleyway.
CRACK.
My head bounced off the masonry. Stars exploded in my vision, a kaleidoscope of pain that momentarily drowned out the red warning lights of the System. The air left my lungs in a strangled wheeze.
"Fascinating," Liza said.
But it wasn't her voice. It wasn't the high, harmonic distortion of the Legion, either. It was a smooth, cultured baritone overlaid on her vocal cords, like a parasitic frequency hijacking a radio broadcast. It was the voice of a man who viewed the world through a microscope, and I was the specimen on the slide.
