Page 29 of Legacy Elite

Fine.

I get up.

She's better than me. She's cleaner than me, she's faster than me, and she has been doing this since she was six. What she has never once had to do is fight someone who doesn't care about looking stupid.

So I stop trying to trade with her.

I eat a hit to get inside — a real one, ribs, it's going to be spectacular tomorrow — and once I'm in there I'm not leaving. Shoulder, hip, both hands on one arm. She tries to reset the distance because everything she knows depends on distance, and I don't let her have it, and I ride her all the way down to the mat and put my weight where it needs to go.

She holds out longer than I expect.

Then her palm comes down twice on the floor. “You got lucky, bitch,” she whispers.

I let go and sit back on my heels and I am breathing like a broken machine.

The arena makes a noise. Somebody says my name. I can feel Torres smiling.

"Miller."

Voss.

"Yes?"

"Your left guard is still terrible."

"I won."

"I noticed," he says, and walks off to shout at somebody else.

Natasha is on her feet before I am. She wipes her mouth with her wrist, picks up her wraps, and goes, and the look she gives me on the way past is the one I'll be thinking about later.

Soren hands me a towel without comment.

Leadership and Governance is on the second floor of the history building.

I arrive four minutes late, sweating, with a split lip, a bag over the shoulder that hurts and a set of ribs that have started to ache.

Professor Celeste Faris is standing at the front in dove grey with her hair up, and looks at me the way you'd look at something tracked in on a boot.

Nobody at this academy has ever had to be told that Natasha is her daughter.

You can see it from the door. Same jaw. Same trick of going completely still before speaking. Natasha inherited the face and about a third of the discipline, and I have now, in the space of one afternoon, been put on a mat by one of them and marked late by the other.

Oh, I think, sitting down. Right. That's where she gets it.

Faris starts the moment I'm in a chair, without acknowledging that I've arrived.

"You have been given five categories," she says. "You will spend this year believing they are five different subjects. They are not. Each of them is the same subject applied at a different distance from the person it affects."

Sophia writes that down. Sophia never writes anything down.

She takes us through the term. Over two centuries of governance since the war. The structure of the Council and where it came from. The places where House law and local custom fit together and the considerably larger number of places where they don't.

It is, I have to admit, more interesting than last year, when we spent nine weeks on founding myths.

It also lines up with my rotation so neatly you could use it as a ruler.

"Miss Miller," she says, as the room empties. "A moment."