DC – I am Batman

Nobody saw her arrive.

He found out later that she'd been at the compound for six days before he got there. Six days of standing at the edge of the training yard with her arms crossed, watching students fall and get up and fall and not saying a word to anyone. The League students gave her six feet of clearance wherever she walked, the way you gave clearance to weather. They didn't bow. They didn't greet her. They just moved.

He saw her on his third morning.

Talia had him in the south yard. Sword work, no blades this time, just the forms with weighted sticks that bruised when you got the angles wrong. She was drilling him on transitions, the gap between the end of one cut and the beginning of the next, and the gap was where most people died so the gap was what she cared about.

"Faster. The hesitation is in your shoulder."

She was right. He was loading the shoulder a fraction too early, telegraphing the next form before the current one finished. He adjusted. She nodded once, which from Talia was a standing ovation.

That was when he saw her.

Standing at the wall where the yard met the main building. Arms crossed, weight on one foot, perfectly still. Tall and lean, but different from Talia. Talia had the braid and the sword and the posture of someone raised to stand in front of rooms. This woman had none of that. Short black hair, no jewelry, no weapon visible, clothes that were functional and dark and nothing else. Every person in the yard knew exactly where she was.

She was watching him.

His feet, his hips, the loaded shoulder, the adjustment he'd just made. Reading the whole thing.

"Who is that," he said, not really a question.

Talia didn't look. She already knew. "Sandra Wu-San. Lady Shiva."

He kept drilling. Lady Shiva. The woman who'd had a daughter with David Cain specifically to produce someone who could kill her someday, because she'd run out of opponents who could.

He knew that from a screen, in a life that didn't fit anymore. The woman at the wall was five foot ten and completely still and her eyes hadn't left him for four minutes.

His shoulder loaded wrong again. Talia caught it.

"Focus."

He focused. The stick cut air and his shoulder stayed clean and Shiva watched and said nothing.

She said her first word on the compound mid-morning on day six.

"No."

One syllable, from the wall, pitched to carry across the entire yard without effort. Talia stopped mid-correction. Two League students at the far end of the yard stopped mid-drill.

She pushed off the wall and walked to the center of the floor. The six-foot clearance opened around her like water.

"You." Looking at him. "Fight me."

Talia stepped forward. "He's not ready for you."

"I know." Shiva didn't look at Talia. "That's not what I'm testing."

He put the training stick down. Rolled his shoulders. His hands were already sore from the forms and his left wrist had a dull ache from the weighted drills. He stepped onto the open floor and she was already there, centered, arms at her sides, and the distance between them was about ten feet and ten feet until he remembered who was standing at the other end of it.

Forty seconds.

He led with orthodox technique. A jab to test distance, a cross to follow, footwork that Kirigi had drilled until it was automatic. She slipped the jab by a quarter inch. Didn't block it. Moved her head the exact distance required and no further. The cross went past her ear. She didn't counter.

He switched to feint sequences. Showed the jab, pulled it, went low with a knee. Showed the knee, pulled it, came back high with an elbow. Patterns designed to create false reads. She moved before each feint landed, not reacting to what he did but to what he was about to do. Her feet adjusted a half-second ahead of his decisions.

He abandoned technique. Just moved. Pure instinct, no system, the closest thing to honest fighting he had. A looping hook that came from the hip. A shin kick that was ugly and fast. A sprawling tackle attempt because nothing else was working and sometimes the worst idea is the only one left.

She read all of it. She moved at a pace that said she could go faster but didn't need to. She was reading his schedule off his muscles, already two lines ahead.

Open palm to his sternum. One strike, centered, and it wasn't hard enough to break anything but it was precise enough to put him flat on his back on the warm stone with the air gone from his lungs and his hands grabbing nothing.

Forty seconds. He counted later. At the time it felt like three.

He lay on the stone and stared up at the sky. Blue and far away. Breathed.

She stood over him. Looked down. Mouth closed. Dark eyes, cataloguing.

"Interesting."

She turned and walked back to the wall and crossed her arms and that was it.

Talia was standing at the edge of the floor. Her jaw was tight and her eyes were on Shiva and they weren't friendly.

He got up. His sternum hurt. The warm stone pulsed under his feet.

Next morning she was waiting for him in the south yard before dawn.

He didn't know how she knew he'd come. He hadn't told anyone. But when he walked through the archway into the grey pre-sunrise light she was already standing in the center of the floor, one eyebrow slightly raised, like she'd been curious whether he had the sense to show up.

"I don't teach. I'm making an exception."

She didn't explain why. He didn't ask.

Two hours. She took his fighting apart and started the demolition. The cascade reading technique. She called it that once, at the beginning, and then never named it again.

The idea was simple. The execution was impossible. Every movement starts as a chain of micro-tensions before the movement actually happens. Shoulder loads before the arm moves. Hip rotates before the foot steps. Breath changes before the exertion begins. Read the start of the chain, you see the punch before there is one.

"Here." She tapped his right shoulder. "This loaded before your jab yesterday. Thirty milliseconds. Enough."

She demonstrated on a League student who happened to be crossing the yard. Poor bastard. She called him over, asked him to throw a punch. He threw it. She tapped the spot on his shoulder where the tension started and caught his fist in the air six inches from her face. He threw four more. She caught all of them, each time touching the origin point on his body before the strike arrived.

The student went pale. She dismissed him with a look and he walked away faster than he'd walked in.

"Your problem," she said, turning back to him, "is that you read outcomes. You see the fist coming and you react to the fist. By the time you see it, the decision was made three hundred milliseconds ago. You're fighting history."

She had him throw punches while she called out the origin point before his fist left. Shoulder. Hip. Breath. Oblique. He threw a kick and she said "hip" before his weight shifted. He threw a combination and she said "shoulder, breath, hip" like she was reading a receipt.

Then she made him do it to her.

She threw slow punches and told him to watch the shoulder. He watched the shoulder. He didn't see anything the first eight times. The ninth time he saw it. A twitch in the deltoid, a tightening so small that calling it a contraction was generous, and it happened before her arm moved and it was the signal.

"Now faster."

She sped up. He lost it. She slowed down. He found it again. Sped up. Lost it. Slowed down. Found it. For two hours, back and forth, and by the end he could catch it maybe one time in five at full speed. Terrible. But one corner of her mouth pulled up about a millimeter, and he figured most people never caught it at all.

A gecko ran across the wall behind her and stopped in a patch of early sun. It did a push-up for no reason he could determine.

After, she extended her hand.

He took it. Her grip was dry and hard and she pulled him up from where he'd been sitting on the stone and didn't let go. Her thumb found the inside of his wrist. Clinical pressure. The pad of her thumb on the vein, steady, counting.

Close up she didn't smell like anything. No soap, no perfume, no sweat from two hours of work. Just skin and clean air. He'd gotten used to Talia's steel and jasmine. This was the opposite of that.

Her eyes were on his face but her attention was on her thumb. Then her eyebrows pulled together. A fraction.

"Your heart rate is wrong."

He looked at her.

"Too low for someone who just lost. Too low for someone who just trained for two hours." She was still holding his wrist. Still counting. "Sixty-two beats per minute. After sustained combat, a trained fighter sits between one-forty and one-sixty. You're at sixty-two."

She dropped his wrist. Quick. Like she hadn't expected the number.

"I heal fast," he said, because he didn't have a better answer and the truth was he didn't really have an answer at all.

"That's not healing. That's baseline." She looked at his wrist. "Again. Tomorrow."

She walked away. Short direct strides. The hair at the back of her neck was cropped close and the skin there was pale, a strip between the hairline and the collar of her shirt, and he was looking at it before he decided to.

On the balcony above, Talia stood with her hands on the railing. Her jaw was set and her mouth was a straight line and she was watching the corner Shiva had disappeared around.

He looked up at her. She didn't look down.

The gecko was still on the wall. It did another push-up. He had no idea what that was about.

He went to breakfast. Rice and tea and something pickled that he couldn't identify and didn't mind. His wrist still felt the pressure of her thumb, a phantom circle on the vein, and his pulse under it ticking along at sixty-two like it had never been asked to go faster.