Page 61 of Ghost’s Awakening

He was breathing hard. So was I. I stood over him with my hands still up, because you didn't drop them until the man on the floor told you he was done, and the lock I'd ended it with was still burning in my forearms where his weight had fought it. He'd fought it well.

He lay there and looked at the pipes.

"You're too good, kid." He told it to the ceiling. "It's obscene. Very flowery, though. Very disciplined. All that spinning." He lifted one hand off the mat and made a circle in the air. "My revenge for the kitchen mutiny is delayed. I want that on the record. Delayed only because I'm not fighting to kill."

"Neither am I." I offered a hand down. "If I was, you wouldn't have seen the flowery part."

He took it, and I hauled him up grinning, sweat in his copper hair, a red mark going purple on his arm where he'd landed.

"Fine. Whatever." He shook himself out and put his hands up. "On guard, kitchen usurper!"

The gym had quit being a gym by ten. Every mat in the compound had been dragged in here and laid edge to edge, the weights shoved to the walls, and the sound of bodies landing was the only talk. Blade walked slow circles through it, drilling takedowns and their counters.

The man in the flannel leaned on the wall by the door, and I'd learned his name in the first ten minutes, because Blade had called it across the room without looking and the man had come.

Logan.

The name found its place. Ghost's medical-bay stories. A ranch in Montana that Blade had torn open, and a man named Logan who'd gone through it beside him. Blade's partner, down from Montana for this. Every so often he came off the wall to move somebody by the hip or the wrist, and Anima's guard came up two inches after he touched her elbow. Peace wasn't the only language the man spoke, and in a room this full of the other kind, I was glad of somebody who spoke more than one.

Ghost was across the floor with Mateo.

The kid was taking a beating. A patient one. Ghost walked him through the same entry over and over and ended it a different way each time, and I knew what I was watching because Blade had told me an hour ago. He's green. When the wall comes down Thursday, he needs to already know what it feels like to lose a hold and not panic.

Thrown, and get up. Thrown, and get up. My gut didn't like it. Nineteen years old, maybe twenty, walking into that building on Thursday with a beer for a cover story, and I still wasn't sure he liked me. He was risking a lot for a man he hadn't decided on.

Then his eyes crossed the room and found mine, and he winked.

One eye, there and gone, and a smile came up out of me before I'd agreed to it.

That was when Ghost dropped.

He went under Mateo's reach so fast I only saw the finish, low, his shoulder into the kid's thighs, and then Mateo was in the air. All of him. Ghost stood up through the lift and turned, and Mateo went over his shoulder and came down flat on his back with a slap I felt through my own feet.

"Ufff." Everybody in the room made the sound at once, the noise a room full of fighters made when a body landed.

Mateo lay there. His eyes found the ceiling, then me, and I mouthed it at him across the room. Sorry.

He lifted one hand off the mat, middle finger up, and let it fall.

I turned back to Irish, who'd been waiting with his hands up and the grin back on, and set my feet.

Ghost talked the whole way back to his room.

"—and Mateo's good, he's going to be good, but he's green, he telegraphs the level change with his shoulders, that's why I threw him, he's got five days to stop doing it—" His hand did something in the air that was probably a shoulder. "—and you. Irish. He outweighs you, Caleb, and you put him down like a spare tire. Twice. Trenza said something in Spanish I'm not going to translate⁠—"

I let him run. My legs were loose and heavy the good way, the blood up and the head quieter, and I didn't need to talk.

My head hadn't left the hospital. It had only stopped shouting about it.

Church at two had taken five minutes. The whole club sweating straight off the mats, and the plan with one new piece in it. I'd give the signal. The Phoenixes would come through the walls. And now there'd be men and women posted outside the north face too, at the door only Ghost had seen, waiting in the dark for anybody who tried to leave through it. Especially the one who'd built it. A full raid, with a trap on the only back door.

I'd sat there wanting the door. I wanted to be the thing waiting in that alley when the big man came through it at a walk. But my place was the ring, under the hanging mic, and the word I was going to put into that mic while he listened would have to be enough. I'd been saving it a long time.

"—and the level change thing, I could fix that in a day if he'd just⁠—"

I pulled my shirt off over my head.

He stopped mid-word. I dropped the shirt on his chair and turned around, and he was standing in the middle of his own room with his mouth still open and his eyes on my chest, doing nothing to hide it.