The boy I once loved meets me in a body I've never seen.

Eightfold arms frame a serrated tungsten beak. A Grappler-type, from the looks of it, a hulk from the war's early stages. A relic, but a dependable one, larger and meaner than mine, built for a war we had by then barely begun to understand.

Our orbits trace twin helixes around the crumbling corpse of the Wilma Jay. Between us is the station's debris field, Cherenkov jets of its bleeding reactor bone-white against the background static. I am keeping it angled between us, blinding him in its glare. Likewise, he does the same. Antipodal silence, as the Academy teaches: first to move signals intent to follow through. Vacuum abhors actions done in halves. Either we both strike, or none of us strikes at all.

A flicker in the glow. He must have misread me. I spin my form sleek into the Wilma Jay's wake, thrusting needlelike into the debris field. He's coming in fast, sixteenfold arms trailing for the kill. But I'm a small target, and built to be faster; he commits first, so I commit harder. His body goes wide. My wings clip him as I pass. The carbide-tipped edges tear clean through the metal, and when I'm through, eight arms have become seven.

"'Course they'd send their dirtiest fighter," his voice chimes in through my comms. It buzzes high and sweet, and sticks like honey to my speakers. "You know this station's as good as gone, don't you?"

"It's nice to see you too, K," I whistle back. I've reached apogee, leaving his dead arm behind. It spins a path away from me towards the other side of the orbit, where he hangs away, dipping slightly behind the reactor's glow. No stalling, this time: by the time I get my bearings, his thrusters are already pulsing for a comeback.

I brace for a clean pass, spears-first into his mass. K learns quick, however. His palms are not the shape I recall. They tilt into the w-axis a second before I strike, and I find my spears wrenched out of their angle of attack, shafts locked into four of his fifteen remaining arms. I pivot in response along the length of his impact, swinging with the blow, and it sends me spinning with him, batonlike, out of the debris field's orbital plane.

His mistake, really. Now he's brought the fight into four-space, where my best angles shine. I break off my spears, spinning off around his mass, trapping him in a polyhedral cage of wings. No time to wait for him to move. I fold, snaring around his arms where the hydraulics meet the chassis, pinning him before he can react. His jaws snap at vacuum. With my remaining spears, I dig into the narrow of his spine, like peeling the shell of a mangosteen. It gives -- but just barely. A string of hydraulic fluid leaks from within.

His voice, dripping in my cockpit. "Don't break yourself, sweetheart. Once you're serious, you've already lost."

My grip tightens. "I'm serious. So make me."

He folds with surprising dexterity, turning my cage inside-out. The hardened spears snap. It was a fool's gambit, really, but I didn't think he'd fit through the gaps. I break away, bathing him in thruster burn, blinding him just enough to put some distance between us. He obliges in return. Now our bodies are in prograde, mine trailing his wake -- but crashing, not chasing, is what we're built for. So I take the lead, braking down towards the station's barycenter heart, pulling out on the far side, letting its gravity break my fall.

I commit, he commits. The opposite holds true. I break away, he breaks away, and the dance repeats anew.

This time, my weight works in my favour. At top speed, I reach him on his side of the light, bursting out from the reactor's flame. He doesn't see my shape as I slip through his arms to rake my wings across his back, tight across his open wound. He tries to evade -- swerving into w -- but that just screwdrivers the cut into additional dimensions, cutting four-way across his flanks. Hydraulic mist twinkles, arcing like a string of pearls.

He's exposed now, flailing in w, becoming all cockpit, all thrusters, all arms. I accelerate on the comeback, boosting into the fall, my body oriented just right to catch him on the tips of my wings. He panics, bending his body into four-vectors to tangle the blow. My wings sink in at odd directions, slip in others, miss completely on the rest.

I count the arms pierced by the strike. Four, five, six, seven. I count my remaining wings. Five, six, seven, eight. I brace, and plunge into him again.

In three dimensions, it looks like I have him in my folds; in four, he spreads out beneath me like a world. In three dimensions, I am broken in seven places; in four, I have merely bent myself to fit. My wings hold fast. Neither of us escapes. I could break him beneath me, or he could tear my frame apart.

If one commits, the other will. So neither of us does.

We come apart, origami-light, tumbling out the side of the station in a cavalcade of blood and bone.