The morning bell went off and Ren was already looking at it.
He had been looking at the ceiling for about three hours. At some point in there the ceiling had gone from dark to grey to a thin pale that he had watched happen in real time, one slow shade at a time, because his body was not interested in sleeping and his brain was not interested in arguing with his body. That made two nights. The alcove cot creaked under him every time he shifted his weight, and he had shifted his weight often enough to know the creak had a rhythm now.
He sat up. His shoulder still itched. He pulled his shirt on and stood.
The student in the bunk nearest the alcove was chewing something. He had been chewing it since before the bell. It was one of those dense grain bars the canteen put out at first-light service and it made a wet flat sound against the roof of his mouth that went on and on. Ren listened to it for about four seconds and then decided the chewing was going to be a thing he was going to be annoyed about for the rest of the day. Fine. Great.
He followed Group Seven out to the training ground.
The instructor was the same woman from yesterday. Same clipboard, same professional nothing in her face, same dark coat with the faint Iron Veil trim on the cuffs. She stood at the head of the line and waited for Group Seven to sort itself into rows.
"Today's drill," she said. "Unranked sparring. Group Seven only. Coin-flip pairings. Half-strength practice strikes. Two-minute rounds. One point per landed contact."
Ren's stomach did a small, ugly thing.
The rest of the line was murmuring in the quiet way a cohort murmurs when it is waking up to the possibility of failing in front of people. Ren was not murmuring. He was running through the inside of his own skull trying to find the rehearsed version of this.
There was not one.
'Great,' he thought. 'Perfect.'
His plan, the plan he had spent two nights not sleeping to refine, was to produce nothing. Sparring was not producing nothing. Sparring was taking a hit from another living person, staying upright, and not bleeding in a way anyone could read. He had not rehearsed for a hit. He had rehearsed for a silence.
The instructor was already flipping coins down the line.
His pair was a wiry kid from somewhere west of here, mill-town posture, hands that had done work but not this kind of work. The instructor read the card.
"Toma Vess. D-provisional." She did not look up. "Ashwick. F-provisional. Ring two."
Toma bowed to him. Polite, too deep, a little nervous around the eyes. "Good luck," he said.
"Yeah," Ren said. "You too."
Ring two was a flat circle of packed dirt about four meters across. They stepped into it. Toma put his hands up in the stance the manual diagrammed and Ren mirrored him because he had read the same diagram. The instructor stood at the edge of the ring with her clipboard. Her pen was in her left hand.
"Begin."
Toma circled. Ren circled the other way. Toma's feet were faster than Ren's. That was fine. That was information and also exactly what D-provisional feet were supposed to look like against nothing.
Then Toma stepped in and hit him.
The strike came in at half strength, a flat open hand driven into Ren's shoulder with the weight behind it that a D-provisional kid could put behind a half-strength drill hit. It connected clean. Ren felt the impact go in through his shirt and into the meat of his shoulder.
And then, a half-beat after the hit had landed, something under the skin answered it.
It was not a flare. There was no light. There was no sound. It was a very small stiffening at the point of contact, and from the point of contact a thin outward pressure that moved through the muscle in a ring and stopped about two fingers away from where the hand had hit. It took less than a second. Ren felt it happen in his own body and did not know what it was.
His shoulder ached. It ached exactly as much as a half-strength drill strike on the shoulder should. It did not ache as much as a direct hand-strike on bare muscle should have.
Toma rocked back.
He was not looking at Ren's face. He was looking at his own hand. Something about the impact had been wrong in his hand, and his hand was telling him about it, and he did not have words for what it was telling him. His mouth opened slightly and then closed again. He stepped back to the center of the ring.
The instructor made no mark on her clipboard.
'What,' Ren thought. 'What just. What.'
Round one continued. Toma landed one more contact on his forearm in the last thirty seconds and that one felt normal, or almost normal, or something that Ren could not tell from normal because he did not have a baseline for what his own shoulder was supposed to feel like anymore. The round ended. Toma: two. Ren: zero.
Round two.
Toma came in faster this time. He had recalibrated around whatever his hand had told him in the first round and the recalibration read on his face as confusion plus determination. He was not being hostile. He was curious, and careful about being curious.
The combination came at Ren's ribs. Two strikes, the first a feint and the second the real one, and the real one landed under his left arm on the short ribs.
And this time Ren felt it coming.
It was not the strike he felt coming, it was the answer to it. A quarter-second before Toma's hand made contact with his side, something in his own body tightened on its own, a small braced weight that moved from somewhere inward out toward the skin of his ribs, and the strike landed into that brace and did less than it should have. The quarter-second warning was a thing Ren had not asked for and did not understand. His body had told him about a hit that had not yet happened.
'No,' Ren thought. 'No. No no no. No.'
Toma blinked. His hand came back and he looked at it again. He did not say anything. He stepped away and reset. He had now hit Ren four times and three of the four had not felt right in his hand.
The instructor's pen had not moved.
That was the thing Ren could not stop looking at. Her pen was still in her left hand and the clipboard was still in her right and the pen was not touching the paper. She was not writing down the match score. She was watching, in that flat professional way of someone whose job was to measure, and she was not writing anything at all.
'Whatever she's not writing down,' Ren thought, 'is going to be louder than whatever she is.'
Round two ended. Toma: three. Ren: zero.
Round three was short.
Toma scored once more, a clean tap on the shoulder that did whatever it did. Ren could no longer tell which hits were going through and which ones were being met, and he had stopped trying. He was just trying to stand and breathe and not do anything he could see himself doing. When the instructor called time, the scoreboard was Toma four, Ren zero, and on paper Ren had lost cleanly.
He stepped out of the ring. His legs worked. His shoulder ached at exactly the level a shoulder should ache. His ribs were fine. His knuckles had a scrape on them from when he had caught his balance against the packed dirt in round three and the scrape was already drying.
The instructor moved to the next pair without looking at him.
That was almost worse. She had not looked at him and she had not written anything down and the absence of both of those things sat heavy in Ren's chest and did not move. He walked toward the back of the line.
Toma fell in beside him on the walk. He walked with Ren for about five paces in silence. He was deciding whether to say something.
"Good round," Toma said.
"Yeah."
Three more paces.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine," Ren said.
Toma did not look at him. He looked at his own hand again, the one that had done the hitting, and he flexed the fingers once. "You felt weird," he said. He said it flat, nothing loaded into it.
"Probably tired," Ren said.
Toma accepted the answer. He was not ready to call it a lie yet. He nodded and fell a step behind and did not say anything else.
At the back of the line, Dask was watching him.
Ren caught the look the moment he slotted into his place. Dask was three groups over, standing with Group Two, and his eyes were on Ren and his eyebrows had the exact angle of a question that had not been asked yet. Ren did not answer the eyebrows. He faced forward.
The student standing next to Ren at the back of the line had a small stain on his training jacket, right at the collar. Purple-dark. Looked like ink. Ren noticed it because his brain had run out of useful things to think about and had decided ink stains were the next priority. He spent about three seconds wondering how you got an ink stain on your collar and then the thought dissolved because it did not matter and he was tired.
Above the training ground, the theory hall windows overlooked the ring. One of them was open. In the frame of the open window there was the angle of a person standing slightly back from the sill, and at the height of that angle there was the dark rectangle of a notebook she was writing in. The figure was not looking down at the pages. She was looking at the ring. At ring two.
Ren looked at the back of his own hand.
The scrape on the knuckles was already closed. The shoulder ached at a level that was a lie his body was telling on his behalf. Whatever had happened to him in the ring was in his body now and he did not know what it was or how to turn it off or whether he could turn it off, and a Group Seven kid had felt it through his own hand, and his instructor had not written it down, and Dask had seen something when Ren walked off the ring, and somewhere up in a theory-hall window a girl he had never spoken to was putting a mark in a notebook about it.
'Produce nothing,' he thought.
It was a bitter little line and it did not help.
The instructor called the next pair up. Toma stood two places ahead of him, not looking back. His hand was still flexing. Ren watched the hand flex and wondered how many people Toma was going to tell before the sun went down.