Blood dripped from her temple onto a faded black uniform, but Brielle Dawson didn’t move.

The iron rod had torn a jagged line across her palm, but she couldn’t feel it anymore. Her fingers had gone numb somewhere between the second strike and the third, and now the metal simply lived there, fused to her hand like something that had grown out of her own bone. A thread of blood crawled down from her temple, over her cheekbone, along her jaw, dripping onto the collar of a black server’s uniform already gray with street dust. That was the only wound anyone passing by could see. The others — the ones carved into her over twenty-seven years of surviving — no one could see those. But they were the reason her eyes hadn’t blinked in over a minute.