Chương 27: 13.Breathing Blood in Heavy Gravity 13-2

"Oh? You've finally decided to acknowledge that I'm a prodigy?"

"No," she said.

"You're more like a stray dog."... Shit. I'd heard a version of that from Karl already.

"So," I narrowed my eyes, "do you instructors have standing meetings where you debate which stray animal category I belong to?"

"Stray dog isn't an insult," Mira said, unmoved.

"It's because you have one quality." She reached out and tapped the racked thermal fusion rifle with one knuckle.

"Once you bite onto something, you don't let go." I looked at her and didn't answer right away. That line was annoying. Because it was accurate. Not the kind of accurate that makes your blood run hot. The kind of accurate that feels like someone quietly writing your nature into an official report. I settled for a single dismissive sound.

"Is that a compliment, or a procurement memo for the Federation?"

"Not mutually exclusive."... Great. Another one who was honest in the most aggravating possible way. Mira tucked her hands back into her coat pockets and tilted her head at me.

"You have one more problem."

"I'm charging by the diagnosis now. One hundred per session."

"You let your emotions set the pace," she said.

"The moment you want to prove something, your body moves before your brain does."

"I don't—""You do." Clean. No hesitation.

"That last fragment—the one that nearly hit your visor—you shot it beautifully," she said.

"But right before you pulled that trigger, what you were thinking was I need to hit this so she can see it, not this is the shot I need to take right now." I opened my mouth to argue. Not a single word came out.... Fuck. She was right. There had been a moment—one specific moment—where I was genuinely thinking I need to hit this one so she can see it.

Having that thought pulled out and laid flat in front of me felt exactly like someone had reached into my skull, extracted that stubborn little knot of pride, pinned it to a board, and labeled it with cold clinical precision: Excessively competitive. Prone to overheating. Thanks so much. I looked away, fixing my eyes on the weapon rack across the room, and hauled my voice back to something functional.

"So you're telling me to calm down?"

"No," Mira said.

"I'm telling you that temperament like yours—used right—makes you fast. Used wrong, it gets you killed fast."

"That sounds like the back of a self-help book."

"Then you've been reading terrible books." I almost laughed. Not because she was funny. Because this woman's venom was consistent. Not the loud kind—not bluster or volume. Every line landed exactly where you were still pretending you were fine, and none of it was wrong. That kind of person was dangerous. Also deeply annoying. And what was more annoying still— I was starting to understand why she was Mira. I exhaled and looked back at her.

"So to summarize," I said, "you're saying I'm not bad, except my brain is broken, my temper is broken, and if I don't fix both, I'll die quickly?" Mira nodded.

"More or less."

"Wow." I clapped once.

"You really know how to build a healthy student-teacher relationship." The corner of her mouth moved again. A fraction more visible than before, but still barely there.

"Likewise," she said.

"You're one of the most gifted students I've met at hearing compliments as personal attacks."

"One of?"

"The ones ahead of you are dead." Two seconds of silence.

"... That's a terrible joke."

"I'm not joking." Right. Federal education. Thorough as advertised. I looked at her, caught somewhere between wanting to laugh and wanting to roll my eyes. The feeling was strange—like encountering a blade you didn't like but couldn't deny was genuinely sharp. Mira was still looking at me. Still cold. But something had shifted from when I'd first walked in—that initial let's see if this kid is worth my time appraisal had dialed back slightly, replaced by something else.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. Not warmth. Don't get ahead of yourself. More like— You've earned the right to keep being fixed. I finally shrugged, and my shoulder immediately punished me for it.

"Alright, Instructor Mira," I said.

"You're toxic as industrial runoff, but I'll grudgingly admit you're more of a teacher than you look." She raised an eyebrow.

"And you take a hit better than you look."

"Thanks. That didn't make me feel good at all."

"It wasn't meant to." We looked at each other for two seconds. Then one of us looked away—I couldn't tell you which one moved first. But in that moment, something shifted. The air stopped being purely one-directional—instructor bearing down on recruit—and became something more complicated. Mutual friction. Mutual low-grade irritation. And a shared, unspoken acknowledgment that neither of them was dealing with a waste of time. That kind of dynamic was inconvenient. It was also the kind you remembered.

Mira picked up the data pad from the console and tossed it to me without ceremony. I caught it. Looked down. Today's hit record. The accuracy wasn't pretty. But it was a lot better than the first half. The last few shots were almost respectable. I stared at the numbers, and my mouth moved before I could stop it. Mira noticed.

"Don't smile yet," she said.

"Tomorrow the wind goes to 200." I looked up at her.

"Do you actually hate me?"

"No." She bit down on a fresh cigar and lit it with a small, unhurried flame.

"I just hate wasting good material."... Fair. That was more useful than most things people said to make you feel better. I tucked the data pad under my arm and turned toward the door. I was almost through it when Mira called after me.

"Hoshino." I turned back. She was standing under the cold white lights—short hair, cybernetic eye, cigar, dark grey shooting jacket. Still entirely the kind of person who should be on the cover of a Do Not Attempt This at Home warning poster.

"Before class tomorrow," she said, "ice your shoulder." I paused.

"Is that you caring about me?" Mira exhaled a slow breath of smoke.

"No," she said.

"I just don't want a wrecked shoulder making me waste an entire session recalibrating your stance from scratch." There it is. That was exactly right. That was exactly the kind of thing the Mira I'd known for less than a day would say. I made a noncommittal sound, pushed the door open, and walked out. My mouth, entirely without my permission, pulled up at one corner. Just slightly. Just enough to be annoying. Shit. Looks like I was actually starting to meet people on this miserable planet. Terrible people.

Impressive people. Sometimes both at once. The first thing I felt when I got back to the dormitory wasn't exhaustion. It was absurdity. Genuine absurdity. I had spent the day in a high-gravity training facility being systematically dismantled by two different lunatics in two different disciplines. One was responsible for slamming me into walls. The other had handed me a thermal fusion rifle that weighed like a warship component and taught me how not to shoot my own face off in a metal storm.

And now I'd swiped open my door and walked back into this—this showroom. Warm lighting. Long sofa. Full information wall. Floor clean enough to film a recruitment ad on. And that minibar I'd noticed yesterday and had been professionally ignoring ever since. The Federation had a real talent for this. First they beat you half to death.

Then they put you in a private room nicer than a unified command headquarters, so that while you're icing your bruises, you can also sit there wondering whether you've accidentally been kept by some eccentric billionaire with questionable hobbies. The answer was obviously no. I knew exactly what this was. Not comfort. Maintenance. High-grade consumables get stored in cleaner containers. That's all. I dropped my gear by the sofa and went to the bathroom to check the damage. Right shoulder: worse than this morning.

What had been general redness was now a full bruise—someone had taken a dull purple brush and dragged it from my shoulder socket down past my collarbone. Karl's contributions from earlier hadn't faded yet. Mira had added her own layer on top. Between the two of them, my upper body looked like a minimalist disaster map. I stared at it for two seconds and arrived at a sincere conclusion.

"... I hope you both get joint pain when you're old." I pulled a medical cold pack from the refrigerator and pressed it against my shoulder.

"Hss—" Excellent. Another proof of life, duly noted. It wasn't the comfortable kind of cold. It was the kind that made your shoulder contract on reflex and helpfully replay every single recoil impact from today. I held the cold pack in place with one hand, opened Mira's hit record on the data pad with the other, and folded myself into the sofa in a posture somewhere between recovering soldier and someone whose life had been structurally bent out of shape. The light-screen came up. Hit rate. Reaction time.

Muzzle deviation. Wind-field prediction error. Recoil suppression stability. Every line listed out with polite, impersonal precision, like a very courteous verdict. The early numbers were honestly ugly. I looked at the first stretch of the record and nearly laughed at myself. Zero. Zero. Zero. Deviation. Error. Delayed. Early. Barrel drift. Insufficient recoil control. Congratulations. A curated highlight reel of Federal failure. But the further down I scrolled, the more the numbers actually changed.

Not a miraculous leap. No chosen-one montage where the gifted girl achieves enlightenment and starts hitting everything. Just a real, incremental climb. One hit. Then three. Prediction error narrowing. Barrel recovery getting faster. And the last few shots—flagged in red by Mira. I stared at those red marks for a few seconds. Annoying. Genuinely annoying. Because I knew exactly what they meant, better than anyone. It wasn't luck.

The rifle hadn't suddenly developed a conscience and decided to stop using my shoulder as a stress toy. Mira hadn't quietly dialed the difficulty down when I wasn't looking. I had actually—started to learn. That fact was more irritating than getting hit. I pressed the cold pack harder against my shoulder, leaned back into the sofa, and let out a long slow breath toward the ceiling.

"You actually let her push you forward." I didn't say it very loudly. Like I was afraid that speaking it out clearly would make something embarrassing officially true. I didn't like this feeling. Not because progress was bad. Because I knew too well what progress meant here. In a normal school, progress meant better grades. In a normal military academy, it meant getting closer to a real posting.

But in a Federal special operations camp, progress meant exactly one thing: You were starting to look more like what they wanted. I looked back down at the record. Those curves, gradually stabilizing across the screen—they were a little beautiful. Also a little nauseating. Like someone had taken everything broken about me, everything stubborn and overcompensating and knocked loose in the First Special Operations Unit, and put it through grinding and polishing, and then looked up satisfied and said: Oh.

This material isn't bad. I raised one hand and covered my eyes. Cold pack still on my shoulder. Body fully absorbed by the sofa. I want to die. Not literally. The kind of I want to die that means: I genuinely wanted to tell this entire system to go to hell, and it went ahead and taught me something useful anyway.

It was like despising a teacher—finding them caustic and brutal and about as gentle as a wire brush—and then getting your exam back and realizing everything they drilled into you was exactly what was tested. Mira was that kind of person. Toxic. Cold. Every word aimed like a scope. Not a single sentence designed to make you comfortable. But the discomfort wasn't about humiliating you. It was about dragging you out of the useless instincts you'd been hiding behind. I understood that. Which made it worse.

I pulled my hand away from my eyes and looked sideways toward the bar. The minibar was still there. Low light. Bottles sitting quiet. Quiet in the way that said: Hey. Rough day, huh. Want something to take the edge off your brain for a bit? I swallowed.... No. This was textbook temptation design, and the Federation had absolutely done it on purpose.

They knew exactly how much a fourteen-year-old with a swollen shoulder and an instructor's commentary on loop in her head would want to soak her brain in something soft for ten minutes when she saw a fully stocked bar. I stared at it for three seconds. Then looked away with great dignity.

"I didn't see that." I said it again. As if repetition helped. In the end I got up and grabbed a cherry cola from the refrigerator instead. The tab cracked open with a clean snap, and the carbonation hit with a small burst of therapy that had more practical value than the Federation's entire commendation system. I took a sip. Cold, sweet, faintly irresponsible. The good kind. Right. Civilization hadn't completely collapsed. I settled back onto the sofa, can resting on my knee, and kept reading the record.

The last line was a handwritten annotation. Mira's. Reaction adequate. Temperament runs hot. High plasticity. Wastes ammunition. Increase pressure tomorrow. I stared at that line for two seconds. Then I laughed—just once, short and involuntary.

"... Shit."