7. The Mat #2
"So this is the kid." Tank's voice rolled across the room. He stripped his gloves and looked Caleb over with that calm, thorough read of his, eyes tracking face to shoulders to hands. "Ghost talks about you a lot."
Heat crawled up my neck. "I don't talk about him a?—"
"A lot," Irish confirmed from the rack. He'd given up pretending to lift. Just stood there grinning, watching it unfold like a show he'd paid good money for.
Caleb slid a glance my way. I found something fascinating on the ceiling.
"I'd like to see what you can do." Hawk's voice came from behind us.
I turned and there he was, in the doorway we'd just walked through, arms crossed, the gray in his hair catching the fluorescents.
He'd followed us from the main building without a sound.
"Ghost's report was thorough. But a report is words. I want to see it."
Caleb turned to face him. No hesitation anywhere in him. "Who, and where?"
"Tank." Hawk tipped his head toward the mat space at the center, where the heavy bag had been shoved aside and the rubber mats were laid out. "Start there."
I stepped back toward the wall. My brain was already splitting into channels, one tracking the spar about to happen, one running a low background worry about Caleb's bruises and Kai's warning to stop at the first wrong twinge, and one I was working hard to ignore, locked on the way Caleb peeled off his T-shirt and dropped it on the bench.
His torso was mapped in fading yellow-green, the marks from the pit and the corridor still there but dulled, and under them the muscle ran lean and hard, built from decades of kicking and grappling and core work that doesn't show until a man moves.
His shoulders were broader than the shirt had let on.
His stomach flat, the definition there without being put on display.
I was staring. I stopped. I stared again. I picked a rivet on the far wall and committed to it like my life depended on the choice.
Tank stepped onto the mat.
The room adjusted. Tank on a mat changes the gravity of a place. He was in a sleeveless shirt that showed arms most people only see carved into marble, and he crossed to the center slowly, taking his time, because nothing in the room was going anywhere until he was done with it.
"How do you want to run this?" Tank's voice stayed low and even.
"No kicks to the head." Caleb rolled his neck. "Everything else is fair."
"Works for me."
They squared up. Caleb low and loose, hands open at his sides. Tank wider, hands high, chin tucked behind them.
Tank threw a testing jab. Caleb slipped it, his upper body tilting two inches right while his feet stayed rooted, and Tank's fist sailed past his ear.
Then Caleb's right leg came up, fast, and the shin cracked into Tank's outer thigh hard enough that the slap of it bounced off the concrete.
Tank ate it, but his weight rocked, and his left side hung open for a fraction of a second.
"Oh, shit! That kick came out of nowhere!" Irish's voice pulled my eyes off the mat for a second. Beside him, Blade watched the spar with his arms crossed, saying nothing.
My eyes snapped back to the mat. Caleb took the gap with a straight kick to the midsection that drove Tank back a full step.
Tank's eyes narrowed. The warm-up was over.
Tank came forward heavy, combinations disciplined, each punch feeding the next.
Caleb moved through them like he'd been handed the combinations in advance.
Slipping, pivoting, threading angles that shouldn't have fit between Tank's fists.
When he couldn't slip he redirected. When he found an opening he was already inside it.
Caleb shot a body kick that folded Tank at the waist. Then a low sweep that made two-hundred-and-sixty pounds of man hop, followed by a spinning back kick that Tank caught on crossed forearms and still got shoved backward for.
"His kicks are insane!" Tyler had come forward on the bench, his water bottle forgotten in his hand.
"His everything is insane." Irish wasn't grinning now. He'd gone still and locked in, the way he watched an op.
Tank snatched a kick out of the air, trapped Caleb's shin against his side, and swept the standing leg. Caleb went down and rolled straight through it, back on his feet before Tank could close, coming up already throwing.
Hawk hadn't moved from the doorway. Arms still crossed. But the angle of his head had changed.
Tank put a hand up. "Alright." He was breathing harder than I'd ever heard him breathe in training. Working, not gassed. "I've seen enough. You're good."
"You're still standing." Caleb was slick with sweat, his breath coming quick. "That makes you tougher than most men I've sparred with."
"Most men you've sparred with don't weigh two-sixty," Tank responded, rolling a shoulder, still catching his breath.
"Fair."
"Someone else should take a round." Tyler looked around the room. "Different style. See how fast he adapts."
Irish pushed off the rack. "I could?—"
"Ghost." Hawk's voice cut through the air.
Every head turned to me. I'd been holding up the wall with my arms crossed and my head running its usual dozen directions at once, and at least five of those directions had been on the sweat sliding down Caleb's stomach and the way the fluorescent light sat in it, which was a distribution problem I was going to have to solve eventually, just not in the half-second after Hawk said my name.
"He got cleared this morning." I heard the words leave my mouth. "Kai told him to stop if anything?—"
"I'm fine." Caleb's voice cut across the room. Steady. Certain. His eyes found mine and the fire in them was the same fire from the medical bay, the one that had lit up when he looked at his own fist and told me he needed to train. "Let's go."
I sighed, pulled my shirt off and stepped onto the mat.
Caleb waited at the center, hands on his hips, sweat running down the side of his neck. He looked at me and something changed in his face. Not the wariness he'd carried into the round with Tank. Something sharper. His brown eyes narrowed.
"You fight different from him." A fact, not a question.
"Everyone fights different from Tank. Tank fights like a building came down on you."
His mouth twitched. Almost a smile. "So how do you fight?"
"You'll see."
We squared up. My stance was nothing like Tank's and nothing like his.
Blade had drilled me to fight from a place that didn't read as a stance at all, feet staggered, hands low, weight balanced so I could break in any direction without loading first. You couldn't call what was coming because there was nothing to call.
Caleb's eyes dropped to my center and lingered there. Reading me. Hunting the tells that would let him get ahead of my next move.
He wasn't going to find them.
He threw the first kick, a roundhouse for my left side, the same one that had rocked Tank back. I shifted right, half a step, and his shin cut clean through the space I'd just left and found nothing but air.
His eyes clocked it. He wasn't surprised. Just adjusting.
He threw a combination. Jab, cross, low kick, fast and stacked. I slipped the jab, turned the cross off my forearm, stepped inside the kick so his shin only grazed my hip instead of landing. Close. Closer than I let most people get.
"Stop moving." There was a growl under it now. His hands came up and he reset, bouncing on his toes, reworking the whole equation. "Stand still and fight me."
"Can't hit what you can't catch, huh?" I circled left, my feet silent on the rubber.
"Watch," Blade murmured from the wall. I caught it between exchanges and filed it.
Caleb came harder. A front kick I sidestepped.
A spinning backfist I ducked, the wind of it dragging across my scalp.
A low sweep I hopped and landed soft off.
Every time, I was gone before the strike arrived.
And every time, Caleb reset faster. Tighter.
His mind closing the gap between where I'd been and where I was going to be.
He was studying me. And fuck, he was fast.