"Thane—"
"You fight with her ferocity," he says, flat, factual, like he's reading something off a page. "It's the first thing I noticed about you. I didn't know what to do with it."
The training room is very quiet. Outside, the academy sits in lockdown, and the silence it produces is a different quality than the usual morning quiet. Denser. Like the building is bracing for something.
"That's why it bothered you," I say.
"Everything about you bothers me," he says, and there's no cruelty in it this time, just exhaustion with himself. "That specific thing bothered me the most."
I pick up the sparring pad from the floor where it's fallen and hold it out to him. "Then we're even. You bother me too."
His mouth does something it rarely does, a brief shift that's almost not a smile and then deliberately isn't. He takes the pad. "Defensive sequence. I'll call the strikes. You block."
"Fine."
"Left."
I block left.
"Cross."
I turn into it, catching the pad against my forearm.
"Overhead."
I raise my guard, but he's faster than I account for, and the overhead is a feint. The real strike comes low, and I catch it wrong, and the impact sends me back two steps.
"That's going to keep happening," he says, "until you stop trusting the called strike and start reading my body."
"You just told me to block when you called it."
"I lied." He raises the pad again. "Now you know. Read my body. Don't listen to what I say."
"The most honest relationship advice I've ever received," I say, and he actually lets the almost-smile land this time before it's gone.
We run the sequence again. And again. He feints three more times, and I catch two of them, which feels like progress until he catches me wrong-footed on the third and I end up sitting on the floor with no clear memory of how I got there.
"That," he says, standing over me, "would have been a kill shot from anything with actual claws."
"Thank you," I say, from the floor. "That's very helpful."
"Get up."
I get up. We go again.
It's another twenty minutes before I catch the feint cleanly enough that he has to step back to avoid my counter. He stops, and his posture shifts, subtle, a settling, like a concession he wasn't planning to make.
"There," he says.
"Was that a compliment? I can't tell."
"Don't push it, Fairmont."
I'm about to push it anyway, because I apparently have no self-preservation instincts where Thane Valorix is concerned, when the alarm sounds.
It's not the standard lockdown tone that's been cycling through the corridors since dawn. This one is lower, running at a frequency that resonates in the stone walls and in the floor under my feet, a subsonic warning that I've never heard before but understand immediately in the way that certain sounds bypass thinking and land directly in the body.
Major breach. Lower levels.
