Chapter 74: I Actually Had To Study For Once And It Turns Out I’m Bad At It?!

The training yard at six in the morning was empty except for Soren and a practice dummy, and the dummy was winning.

He’d thrown the same opening four times.

Four times his body had moved before he decided to move, the old reflex, the one that had always landed because he’d already seen it land.

Four times the dummy’s counter-arm swung through where his head used to be, except his head was still there, because the reflex had been built on knowing and the knowing was gone.

He sat down in the dirt.

[DING! — no preview available.]

The system gave him that now? Helpful.

Soren didn’t sit there long.

The reflexes weren’t his. That was the thing he kept circling.

Every clean move he’d ever made in this world had been a memory of watching the move work, played back through his arms.

He’d never learned to fight. He’d learned to remember fighting.

So the equipment was wrong but the operator was new.

He broke it down on the back of his hand with a stick in the dirt.

What he had: range sense, a read on which beast countered which, a year of watching real tamers up close.

What he didn’t have: the ability to know the next half-second before it happened.

That was a hole. Holes got filled.

He stood up and threw the opening a fifth time, slower, watching his own arm instead of the dummy.

It was bad but it was his.

◆◆◆◆

Selah found him an hour later and corrected his stance by kicking his back foot six inches to the left.

"Wider," she said. "You fall over if someone breathes on you."

"Noted."

"Again." She watched him drop into it, then her hand was on his shoulder, pressing the blade of it down, and frost spread out from where her fingers sat.

"Lower the shoulder."

"You’re touching the shoulder you’re telling me to lower."

"So I can feel when you cheat." Her hand didn’t move. The frost-flowers stayed a second longer than they needed to. "Again."

Soren went again. The flowers melted where they’d bloomed.

◆◆◆◆

Maren’s idea of teaching was to hit him until he stopped getting hit.

"Hands up," she said, and came in close, way closer than a sparring partner needed to be. "You drop them, you eat my fist."

Soren got them up.

She got inside them anyway, a palm against his chest, and froze there, because being that close to him was the goal she’d given herself.

"You’re red," he said.

"It’s hot out here." It was six-forty in the morning and the sun wasn’t fully up. "Hands up!"

Maren backed off and came in again, and her ears were flat and her face was worse than before, and she covered it by hitting him in the ribs, which he should have blocked, which he didn’t.

"Better," she lied.

◆◆◆◆

Yara trained him in the dark, which meant she made him fight without his eyes.

She dropped a shadow over his eyes, total black, no weight to it, and told him through the bond to feel the room instead.

Soren hated it.

He was bad at it, so bad he walked into the wall.

This is how the rest of them move, she said, circling him as the wolf. By what they sense, you used to skip past sensing because you already knew. Now you sense or you lose.

"You’re enjoying this."

I’m enjoying that no one else can touch you out here.

The shadow tightened a degree when Maren’s name crossed his mind, which it had, by accident.

Who taught you that grip on your ribs.

"Maren. An hour ago."

The shadow went very still.

Then it eased, because Yara had decided to be reasonable.

Fine, she can teach you to take a hit. I’ll teach you to not be there for it.

He learned to find the wall before he hit it. Small win.

◆◆◆◆

Dani didn’t make him fight at all.

She sat him down across from her and made him watch her instead.

"You can’t see the future anymore," she said. "Nobody else can either, and they still win. You know how?"

"They read the person."

"They read the person." She leaned in.

The moth-bond between them hummed, the quiet frequency that had tied her to him without the Bureau ever seeing it.

"I can lend you a piece of that, You watch the shoulders, the weight, the breath before the move, the tell is always there, the cheat just let you skip finding it."

She walked him through a recording of a match, pausing it before each strike, making him call the strike.

He missed the first six. He got the seventh and the ninth.

"There," she said. "That’s not magic, that’s work. You’re going to hate how much work it is."

"I already do."

◆◆◆◆

The four of them tried to schedule him and the schedule collapsed by noon.

Selah had him for footwork at one.

Maren had booked the same hour for "contact," which she would not define.

Yara declared the evening hers on the grounds that the evening was always hers.

Dani pointed out, accurately, that he could not be in three places.

"He trains with me first," Maren said. "I called it."

"You called it over my hour," Selah said, and the air in the yard dropped four degrees out of her skin without her deciding it had.

"Both of you are loud," came through the bond, from the shadow under the bench, where the wolf had been the whole time. "He’s tired, he trains with whoever lets him sleep after."

"That’s me," all three of them said, which settled nothing.

Soren left them to it and went back to the dummy.

◆◆◆◆

That night he lay on the bed too sore to do anything but lie there, and it was better than it had been in weeks.

[DING! — Soul integrity stabilizing. Earned effort registered.] [DING! — Obsession Index: Selah 62/75. Maren 47/75.]

Small numbers. He’d earned those the same way he’d earned the technique, in hours, with his hands.

Selah was already on her side of the bed pretending to read.

Maren had found a reason to be in the room.

Yara was a weight against his back, wolf-warm.

Something scratched.

It came from under the floor near the door, a wet digging sound, and then a small dark snout broke up through the gap by the baseboard, sniffed once, and zeroed in on the half-eaten roll on Soren’s desk.

The mole took the roll.

Maren screamed.

Selah threw a knife of ice that missed.

The mole dove back through its hole with the roll in its teeth, completely unbothered.

Soren didn’t move from the bed.

"Leave it," he said. "or It’ll be back!"