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So freaking surreal.
And now . . .
Now this.
Dahlia stood in the center of a clearing, wearing a blindfold around her eyes, holding a Sharpie in each hand. Red in her left, blue in her right. Instead of knives. It was day seven of her training. And her life had now become some kind of action movie training montage. Weird exercises that were part wax-on, wax-off and part Jedi mind tricks. She’d tried calling the old man “Mr. Miyagi” or “Yoda,” but instead of taking offense he’d merely told her to grow up. That stung. A lot more than she thought it would.
“Again,” said Mr. Church.
She heard his voice but couldn’t tell exactly where it came from. He was spooky like that. He made only exactly as much sound as he wanted to. He could vanish without her hearing him go, and could appear as if he’d teleported down from the Enterprise. Scary. Some Jedi mind tricks for sure.
In this exercise he circled her and would lightly touch her somewhere—shoulder, arm, calf—and based on that touch Dahlia had to react, determine the angle of his body to hers, and touch him with one of the markers. He wore a white boiler suit, like a Hazmat suit but without a mask. Any marks she made would reveal how accurate she was, how smart her choice of targets, how fast she moved.
So far she hadn’t made a single mark on him. Not a dot.
She tried to stretch out with her senses. To hear and smell everything. To feel changes in the air around her. Had his voice come from her left side and a little behind? She thought so and shifted her weight to jump that way.
When it came, the touch was on her right hip. A fingertip against her hipbone. Dahlia whipped around and slashed right and left with the markers, crisscrossing the air in overlapping patterns.
There was no resistance.
“Again,” said the voice out of nowhere.
Another touch. Another move, faster than before; really trying.
“Again.”
“Again.”
After ten more tries Dahlia stepped back, flung down the Sharpies, tore off the blindfold and spun around to find him. Church was directly behind her. His boiler suit was unmarked.
“This is bullshit,” snarled Dahlia.
“No,” he said, “it’s not. You’re getting better.”
She glared around. Eighteen members of her Pack sat in cross-legged silence around the edges of the clearing. A few were smiling, but no one was openly jeering. Neeko even gave her an encouraging nod.
“I can’t do this,” snapped Dahlia. “No one can. It’s stupid.”
Church’s face was hard to read, she’d learned that much over the last few days, but did she just see a flicker of something cross his mouth? A tightening, like a small wince? Was that disappointment or irritation? Or both?
Dahlia bent and scooped up the markers and held them out to the old man. “Okay, Yoda, you’re big on asking us to do these dumb exercises and play your silly games, but why don’t you show us how to do it . . . if it’s even possible at all.”
If she expected him to throw that back at her, she was wrong. Church nodded. “That is a reasonable request.” Then he added, perhaps a little unkindly, “One you should have asked before now.”
He waited while Dahlia pulled on a boiler suit, then allowed her to tie the blindfold around his head.
“Satisfy yourself that I can’t see,” suggested Church. “Otherwise this has no value.”
She tied it tight and peered at it until she was sure. The gathered members of her Pack exchanged some looks. More of them were smiling now, though she couldn’t tell if they were happy that the old man was going to get schooled, or because they thought Dahlia was setting herself up. Maybe a little of both.
The old man rolled the markers between his fingers and then shifted his grip so that they were more like scalpels in a surgeon’s hands than combat knives.
“Whenever you’re comfortable,” he said.
Dahlia began moving around him, creeping with utmost stealth. The boiler suit made soft noises, but she turned to Neeko and mimed clapping her hands. He grinned and began clapping with a rhythmic beat. The others joined in slowly, but soon everyone was smacking their hands together and the clearing was filled with so much noise that any rustle of the boiler suit was completely buried.
Dahlia leaned far over and tapped Church on the right rear shoulder blade.
