Chương 18: Chapter 17

"Up," Vera said. I peeled myself off the mat for what had to be the tenth time and tried to recall which muscles were load-bearing. All of them. With Vera the answer is always all of them. Charlotte and I had been at it since the session started, grinding through partner drills in our training greys while Vera circled us like she was deciding which one of us to eat first. We started with a mirror drill, each one of us shifting our weight and the other matching it.

Charlotte led, and it felt like she moved more like a textbook with a grudge than a person. Clean footwork, picture-perfect guard, and every transition landing exactly where some manual said it should. Show-off. Afterwards I led, and I quickly found the seams under all that precision. Whenever I cut a new angle without telegraphing it, she answered half a beat too late, planting her stance and reasserting it before she trusted herself to move.

From my limited experience, it looked like while she was shown the forms, and taught how to exercise, no one had truly and properly fought with her. Strange, that. Vera caught it too. Her eyes ticked to Charlotte's foot, held there for a second, and then moved on. She didn't say a word, but when it came to Vera that was practically the same as screaming from the rooftops.

"Here, pads. Catch and redirect," she said.

"No blocking." She slapped the strike pad at us without rhythm or warning, from angles that had no business connecting. Charlotte deflected cleanly. When Vera barked "Change" and switched her style mid-swing, that half-beat of indecision surfaced again before it was gone. Then it was my turn, and I braced myself for the beatdown I had received last time.

But, against my expectations, when Vera loaded a feint at my ribs I managed to read the hint in her shoulder before her hand even extended, and stepped off to the side. The pad hissed through empty air. Watch the core, not the hands. It had only taken a dozen concussions for the lesson to stick. A ghost of something almost approving crossed Vera's face. She tossed the pad onto the rack.

"Alright, time to spar. Nothing above the collarbone, and stop at the tap. Grabs and throws are allowed. Keep going until I say stop." Sparring Charlotte was a completely different experience from going up against Vera. With Vera before I was only ever a punching bag, subjected to a one-sided lesson, since there was nothing I could teach her. With Charlotte though, it turned into a conversation, the whole room narrowing down to include only the space between us.

Charlotte came at me with a combo she'd clearly had drilled into her by someone; a jab, a feint, and a strike. It was so clean and precise that I could practically feel the grooves it had carved into her habits, and that was the only reason I managed to slip past, turn my hip into her, and push a hand flat against her waist to steer all the force past me. She spun out light on her feet and came back around, neither of us stepping back as fast as we should have. My hand was still at her waist.

Her breath was warm and close, and Void above, her eyes... It took an immense amount of self control to step back into my fighting stance.

"Again." We went again, and again, and somewhere in the middle of it Charlotte slipped behind me when I whiffed a takedown, and clamped onto my back, piggyback style. My half-second of distracted appreciation of the new sensations was enough for her to wrap her arms around my neck and squeeze. This better not awaken anything in me. I tapped. Ouch, I am going to feel that one for a few days. My fault for struggling in a choke hold I guess.

Vera walked to the center of the mat and looked at us, hands crossed, one tapping her chin.

"Alright. Charlotte, you lean on your Spirit too much. You're used to walking into a room and letting it do the talking, and it usually works, so you've stopped consciously trying to notice things you really should. Tonight you mostly performed rather than fought. You wore it like a coat, but a real fight won't care how good the coat looks. There, what matters is whether you can feel the moment, how the flow changes and shifts, and how to let go of the wheel, when manual control will just get you killed.

I don't know who was your teacher, but it seems they were more interested in teaching you about how to look pretty in front of a crowd, rather than how to survive in a fight. Well, at the end at least you were a bit more fluid, but you still have a long way to go. Fix it, or I will inscribe it onto your gravestone when it fails you." Charlotte's jaw tightened, but she nodded.

"Understood."

"Jax. You wait for certainty, but there is no such thing as 'certainty' in battle. You read the flow better than you've any right to, but instead of capitalizing on it, most of the time you wait to double check instead of trusting your instincts, and that little pause was enough for Charlotte to exploit, despite her rigid way of fighting." Her eyes pinned me in place.

"See it, trust it, and move. In that order. Don't let your brain meddle with what your body already knows."

"Sounds easy," I sighed.

"No. But it is necessary." She shrugged into her jacket.

"And for your information, the first graded sim has been moved up. Maren pulled it ahead of the syllabus for some godsforsaken reason. Treat every session between now and then as preparation. Having fun is all well and good, but it won't let you graduate." She swept a look over the two of us, and at the charged air we were both pretending wasn't there, and walked out. The door cycled shut behind her. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"She's terrifying," Charlotte breathed.

"You get used to it." I rolled my screaming shoulder.

"Mostly." — The corridors had shifted to their late-hour setting, the overhead strips dimmed to a low amber, the stone floor cool through my boots. You know, I never really thought about the logistics of bringing stone up to a space station. Must have been expensive… The place was dead quiet, and our footsteps carried ahead of us and echoed off the high ceilings.

Charlotte's collar was dark where she'd sweated through it, and my left shoulder was already drawing up plans for a bruise with my body's complaints department. A few more paces in Charlotte broke the quiet, her voice playful.

"You still owe me a rematch."

"I do. I've been a terrible host about it."" Terrible," she agreed.

"So settle it tonight. My room. No Vera, no Lysara nagging us, no afterparty pouring drinks down our throats and thinking up new ways to torture us." A sideways look.

"Nobody to interrupt us this time~""Of course," I said. Instantly. Maybe a little too fast. I gulped. The pleased little breath she let out made heat rise up to my cheeks. Smooth, Jax. Real subtle. The rest of the walk was mostly quiet, broken once or twice by the backs of our hands brushing, close enough to feel the warmth coming off her skin, neither of us closing that last centimeter. I felt very jittery. Coward, the voice offered. I didn't have a counterargument.

Her room was a simple affair, not much different from mine except being two floors up, and having a tad bit more personality. It was small, but I could see the amount of effort put into it. A narrow bed made with more care than mine ever got, a desk with a second chair already pulled up alongside the first like she'd already planned for company, and a shelf of actual physical books that I stared at for far too long. Back in my sector, I'd maybe see a paperback once a year, and the cost would be astronomical.

For whatever reason, that some called a conspiracy, no trees grown outside a select few worlds could be used to make paper. It simply didn't bond properly. There was also a potted plant on the sill that, on a closer inspection, was plastic. Which made sense, space stations had strict rules about that kind of stuff. The overhead light was off, leaving just the desk lamp to throw a low warm circle across half the room. I caught the corner of something soft and fluffy shoved down behind her pillow.

Charlotte followed my eyes and quickly nudged it the rest of the way out of sight with two fingers, smooth as a feather, her eyes not leaving my face for a second.

"I didn't say a word."

"You were about to." I smiled. I wasn't about to condemn another for having plushies. It's quite cute though.

"Shower's through there. You go first. You smell like the floor of Vera's gym."

"Weren't you in that same gym?"

"And I'm being gracious about letting you go first. Don't push it." Ninety seconds of rationed hot water and three minutes of cold later, I came out almost feeling human again. Showering, especially after one of Vera's sessions, felt like a genuine religious experience. Charlotte tossed me a gray folded shirt without looking up.

"I have a few of those to sleep in since they are comfortable and big, so it should fit you. And no, you're not keeping it." It fit, more or less. I dropped into one of the desk chairs wearing her shirt and my pants, listened to the water run on the other side of the wall, and tried very hard to think about nothing at all. It worked. Of course.

I definitely achieved a state of thoughtlessness, and was not imagining the water on her naked body, or her sleeping in the shirt she just gave me, wearing nothing else underneath. She came out in a loose casual shirt of her own, the kind that slid off one shoulder and had clearly been chosen to make my eyes fight a losing battle to stay on her face. Her silver hair was down and looked slightly darker due to the dampness.

She winked, and sat cross-legged into the chair across from me, flicking the game up on her ICI. Emperor above, was she beautiful. I focused on making sure no stray body parts performed unsanctioned blood transport. Considering her smirk, I'm pretty sure I failed, but I pretended otherwise.

"Standard map?"

"Yupp."

"It won't be so easy this time. I've been studying~""Can't have you losing a second time," I chuckled.

"I don't intend to lose at all," she corrected, grinning, and started the match. The board bloomed to life between us, a low hologram over the desk, a generated coastline, gold resource nodes and thick fog over each other's territory. Usually, you'd play a board like this with just thought input through the ICI, clean and instant, the way any sane person does it. Charlotte reached into the projection and started moving her tokens by hand instead.

Slow, and entirely unnecessary, she leaned into the light every time to do it, her eyes coming up to hold mine a beat longer than needed. It took quite the effort to pay more attention to the game than to her. She came out swinging, forward settlements early, building fast pressure before her economy could really pay for it, and gambling on claiming some of the more far out resource nodes.

I built the careful way, the way that in my last game drove Philip up a wall, but I managed to execute maybe seventy percent of it… because the other thirty had wandered clean off the board. Her hair fell forward again, she tucked it back without looking, and I almost lost a node due to the line of her neck. You are commanding an economy. Focus. The economy can wait, said the voice I kept pushing down. This time I didn't slap it.

The moves got slower, and less and less of that had anything to do with the game itself. She pushed a unit too deep, I took it, and instead of letting the system automatically delete the unit through her ICI she leaned all the way across the desk into the hologram to lift the piece off by hand, close enough that I caught the small exhale she let out, close enough to appreciate the way her cheeks dimpled from her smile, if my brain had been booting properly. Neither of us sat back. After that the game devolved.

One would make a play, and the other would make a move that was completely unrelated.

"That settlement's undefended," I said.

"You noticed my settlement."

"I notice a lot of things."

"Do you~" Her head tilted, the slow flush that had been climbing her throat already reaching her ears.

"Name three."

"You have a cute nose, for one." She chuckled, and my own face went up like a flare just from watching her. The whole little room felt like it sat a good ten degrees warmer than the climate control swore it was. Those things were always faulty anyways. By the time the game wound down, the map was half-played, multiple units were abandoned mid-thought, and neither of us had even mentioned finishing it. Or the hour. Or me heading back down to my own bed.

Charlotte's hand had come to rest near the edge of the projection, her fingers spread just inside the lamp's reach. A few centimeters from mine, I very not-idly noticed. Up past the towers the station's dome held the void at bay, and the stars poured their cold clean light down through it and in through her window, falling over the desk and the unfinished game, and the two of us on either side of it. The walls had gone quiet. The corridor outside had gone quiet. My pulse was decidedly not quiet.

Her breathing even more so. Neither of us broke the comforting blanket of silence draped over us. I blinked, and a small gasp escaped me as her lips suddenly locked onto mine.