"Good," I say.
She drops my wrist. "Don't patronize me."
"I'm not." I turn the wrist so she can see it, the two fingers still ghosted on the skin where she grabbed. "You went for the right point. The grip's the problem — you haven't got the hand size to lock it, which means I can pull back through." I reach over, take her hand — slowly, so she sees it coming — and bring it up. She goes rigid but she doesn't step back. I give her credit for that. "You need to use the whole forearm. Not just the fingers. Hook it here — " I tap the heel of her palm, " — and rotate your body into it instead of pulling away from it. You're fighting my strength. Don't. Fight my angle."
She looks at where I'm touching her hand, then at my face. "Again."
"Again."
She does it again. I feel the difference immediately — less in the grip, more in the rotation, her body swinging through the motion rather than stacking up against mine — and this time my arm shifts, just a fraction, just the ghost of a redirect.
"Better," I say, and I mean it, which is maybe what catches her out because the narrowing in her eyes changes quality. Stays suspicious but adds something.
"What's the point," she says, "when I can't actually move you."
"You're not trying to move me. You're trying to change what I can reach." I step back, give her the full clearing between us. "Threat management. You can't win a straight contest against something my size. What you can do is control where my handsare, create a gap, and then run." I pause. "Do you know how to break a hold?"
"Depends on the hold."
Honest answer. More accurate than most people give — most people say yes and then it turns out they mean they once saw someone do it, or they've thought about it in theory. Herdependshas the sound of someone who has tested this.
"Show me." I reach out and close my hand around her upper arm — loosely, not a real grip, but the shape of one. "Break it."
She doesn't think about it. She brings her elbow down and inward, hard, and it's exactly right — sharp angle, committed, no hesitation — and the motion would have worked if I had the usual bone structure and the usual pain response in my elbow joint. As it is, I barely feel it.
She knows immediately that it hasn't worked. I see it in the jaw.
"Your instincts are good," I say. "The problem is you've been practicing on humans." I release her arm. "On someone my size, that motion needs to go further. The joint doesn't torque the same way — you need to overextend it by about this much —" I demonstrate on my own arm, showing the angle, "— or you're just applying pressure I can absorb."
She watches me demonstrate with the focus of someone memorising, not just observing. I notice she's filed everything I've said so far — I can tell because she hasn't repeated the same mistake twice, which is faster than almost anyone I've trained.
"Why are you teaching me to fightyou?"
She says it bluntly. Not accusatory — no heat in it, just the flat question of someone who wants the motive named directly.
I scratch the back of my neck. The honest answer is: because you're spending all your energy being the thing that stands between everyone else and the dark, and someone should tellyou how to actually do it instead of letting you burn yourself up on willpower alone.
But that's too much to put in her hands yet. So I give her the closest true thing instead.
"Because Stonevein's not dead." I drop my hand. I'm not worried about them, but she is. I might as well give her a target. "We hurt them. We hurt them hard. But they're not gone, and if they come, they're not sending humans." I look at her evenly. "You need to know how to fight what might actually show up."
Something crosses her face — quick, gone fast — and then the usual line of her expression sets back in. She nods once. Moves her feet back into the stance.
"Go again," she says.
So we go again.
I don't go easy on her. It becomes clear, in the first fifteen minutes, that easy would actually be an insult — she has the instincts of someone who has been in genuine danger, not sparring-danger, and if I'm soft about it she'll clock it and the whole thing will collapse. She has no tolerance for being managed.
What she does have is speed, and it is spectacular. I catch myself, the third time she slips a grip she shouldn't have been able to slip, making a noise that might have come out of my mouth at a normal volume.
I bring it down. Fast.
She doesn't flinch — she's already gone past the point where she flinches at noise, or maybe she started past it — but she stops. Looks at me.
"You did that on purpose," she says.
"I can be loud," I say carefully. "I forget sometimes." Which is not entirely true, but the true version —I was surprised and I liked what I saw and I get loud when I get interested— is notsomething I need her processing right now. She's working. Don't interrupt the working.
