Chapter 89.
Four black-uniformed guards appear, laying down a mat that looks to be about the size that Zhi must have used for floor exercises in his gymnastic competitions.
Hannah, though, imagines it more as a boxing ring.
Just one without ropes.
She is on one side of the mat. Jack is on the other, not even wanting to look at her. Neutral corners, and he doesn’t want to come out of his.
Hannah walks over to him and puts out her hand.
“I am so sorry it’s come to this,” Hannah says. “With you of all people.”
Jack takes her hand—careful, like she’s made of glass.
“Not as sorry as I am,” Jack says. “I’ll try to go as easy on you as I can before somebody steps in and stops this stupid fight. I’m going to end this without hurting you.”
“You can’t promise that,” Hannah says.
Jack swallows. “Then I’m going to try.”
“If we were going to quit like Logan and Gabrielle, we would have done it already,” Hannah says. “Now we both have to do what we need to do.”
She turns and walks to the middle of the mat, waiting for Jack to join her when he’s ready. Hannah is taking slow breaths the way she has been taught as a way of calming herself.
But none of it helps to slow the crazy pounding of her heart.
She can hear her father’s voice inside her head now. The former policeman who became a self-defense trainer after retiring as a new way of protecting people. He is the one who made sure Hannah went through life as more than just a brain.
He had trained Hannah in self-defense from the time she started going to school, to the point where Hannah eventually believed she could have taught his courses herself.
“If you are about to be attacked,” her father would always remind her, “the first thing to do is create as much distance as you can. And be as loud as you can as a way of distracting your opponent.”
Then this, always:
“But if you determine that your life is truly in danger, mein Liebling, sometimes the best and only weapon is escape.”
Only she knows there is no escaping what is about to happen. She has to stand and fight, even if the opponent is Jack McHenry.
The Host joins them in the middle of the mat.
“Are you both ready?” he asks.
Hannah and Jack nod.
“Rules are simple,” he says, almost casual.
He gestures at the red buttons around their necks.
“A fight ends when someone is unable to continue . . . or when someone chooses to end their run.”
Jack’s eyes narrow. “So you’re not even pretending this is about skill.”
The Host smiles.
“Skill is part of it,” he says. “But will is the real currency.”
He steps back.
“Begin,” he says.
He takes a seat in a folding chair set against the wall, casually crossing his legs. The other competitors have already been escorted out of the ballroom. Hannah wondered, as she watched them leave, which ones she might see again.
“I really am so sorry it’s come to this,” Jack says.
He steps away from Hannah. Then he sighs almost sadly and raises his hands into a boxer’s pose and stance.
Hannah Wagner spins around—as taught—as soon as he does. She doesn’t square up like a fighter. She moves with problem-solver-style precision.
When she comes back around and is facing him again, she steps toward him. Then her right hand flashes out before Jack has a chance to react, and Hannah drives two fingers into his left eye—not a strike to injure, a strike to blind.
I’m sorry, too.
Jack staggers back a couple of steps, his hands going to his eye. But Hannah is already moving in, having been taught by her father to seize any opening, especially against a bigger opponent. She delivers a knee to his midsection, doubling him over and nearly putting him down.
He doesn’t go down.
The former Ranger gets some air into him, forces himself to straighten up, looking at Hannah warily now, as if she’s a stranger. He gives a quick shake to his head, gathering himself. Trying to shake off everything that has just happened to him.
“Okay, then,” he says. Hannah isn’t sure whether he’s talking to himself, or her. “Okay,” Jack says.
He reluctantly starts to draw back his right fist. But even after the blows Hannah has just delivered, he hesitates again, he still can’t force himself to deliver a blow to his friend’s face.
Jack changes his mind and bull-rushes her instead, getting his arms around her, lifting her into the air at the same time.
He squeezes so much air out of her in the process.
Just not all.
Hannah gets loud here.
As taught.
Even being bear-hugged this way by Jack, she screams at the top of her lungs, startling him enough that he weakens his hold on her. She drops her weight, twists out, and kicks the outside of his knee—not with full force, but with the angle that makes legs betray you.
Jack stumbles.
She follows that by yelling even louder than before, and spins again, coming around this time with a fierce, swinging kick to the outside of Jack’s left knee, both of them hearing a crack as she does.
Hannah ignores the sound.
He’s not Jack now.
Just her opponent.
Jack shakes off the pain in his knee and gets into a crouch, lowering his shoulder and driving it into Hannah’s stomach, putting her on the mat as he lands with all his weight on top of her.
Pinned this way, she can barely breathe.
“Stay down,” he says.
She looks up at him, seeing the sad and almost resigned look on his face: the same thing she saw in the shelter after Conner died. A good person trapped inside someone else’s rules.
The man she really has come to respect so much.
Both having found themselves in this impossible situation.
“I still don’t want to hurt you,” Jack says.
“Do . . . what . . . you have to,” she manages.
Once more, though, he seems to freeze, having no idea what to do now to end the fight.
For a second—one tiny second—he hesitates.
It gives Hannah the last opening she needs.
If Jack can’t bring himself to end this, she can.