Page 47 of Legacy Elite

"Badly."

I go at him harder.

He puts me down again.

"Still dropping it."

"I heard you the first time."

"You didn't."

We go again, and again, and it's about the fifth time down that I start noticing things I'd rather not notice.

He never uses more than he needs. Not once. He could end every exchange in half a second and instead he takes the exact amount necessary and no more — and when I go down, his hand is always somewhere I don't see it, taking the worst of it out of the fall.

He gives me the beat I need to get my feet back. He doesn't make it obvious. If you weren't down there you wouldn't see it.

And when I finally fix the shoulder — when I get through and actually catch him on the ribs, and he grunts — he doesn't say good.

He just steps in faster.

That's his version of it. That's what it means when Soren thinks you can do something. He makes it harder and says nothing.

I get an arm across and he turns it, and his hand closes around my wrist, and warmth goes straight up my arm — quick, bright, entirely unhelpful.

I yank free.

"Hands."

He looks at me.

"We're sparring," he says.

Right. Yes. Obviously.

We go again.

Ander's on the edge of the ground.

I notice him somewhere around the eighth time I hit the mat, standing over by the equipment shed with a bag over his shoulder like a man who finished his own session twenty minutes ago and has not left.

Of course he is. The whole campus wants to see whether the extinct wolf performs on command; why should the Great House resident miss out.

Then I go down again, and when I look up, he isn't watching me.

He's watching Soren.

I don't know what to do with that, so I file it with the other things I don't have time for and get up.

"You're thinking," Soren says.

"I'm fighting."

"You're thinking about fighting." He circles. "You did the same thing with Voss. You stand there and you inventory yourself. Is it happening? Is that heat? Was that something?" He comes in and I block it and he was never committed to it anyway. "You're asking permission."

"From who?"

"I have no idea," Soren says. "That's the problem."