5 – Three Tables
By the second week, Kael and Tashigi had a table.
It wasn't official. Nobody assigned mess hall seating. But by the third day of the first week they'd been sitting at the same table near the window on the east wall, and by the fifth day the other recruits had stopped trying to sit there, and by the second week it was just theirs. Tashigi arrived first because she woke up earlier. Kael arrived second because he didn't. His tray was always messier than hers. Her chopsticks were always aligned with the edge of the tray. These facts coexisted without comment.
On the third day of the second week, Isuka sat down.
She didn't ask. She put her tray next to Kael's, across from Tashigi, and started eating. Tashigi looked at Kael. Kael looked at Tashigi. Isuka ate her rice and didn't look at either of them.
"Morning," Kael said.
"Morning," Isuka said, without looking up.
Tashigi opened her mouth. Closed it. Adjusted her glasses. "Good morning, Isuka-san."
Isuka grunted. She ate fast. She finished before Kael was halfway through his tray and sat there drinking tea and watching the yard through the window with the same flat focus she brought to everything. When she finished the tea she stood up, bused her tray, and left.
The next morning she was there again. Same seat. She ate in silence and left before he was done. By the fourth day Tashigi had started talking to her, which was brave because Isuka's conversational style could charitably be described as reluctant. Tashigi asked about her rapier training. Isuka said "Drills." Tashigi asked where she'd learned the style. Isuka said "Marine outpost. East Blue." Tashigi asked if she'd ever considered supplementing rapier with a secondary weapon for close quarters. Isuka looked at her for the first time that morning, actually turned her head and focused, and said "Why."
Tashigi talked about Meito blade design and off-hand parrying for eight minutes. Kael counted because he had nothing else to do with his mouth full. Isuka listened to all of it and said "I'll think about it" and that was the longest sentence she'd produced at the table so far.
The routine settled. Mornings were drills. Kael trained hand-to-hand while Tashigi and Isuka trained blades in separate rings, Tashigi with the standard cutlass rotation and Isuka with her rapier in the advanced weapons section where the instructor had moved her after watching her work for two days. Afternoons Kael sparred with Isuka, which meant he lost three times and won once on a good day and lost four times on a bad one and the gap between his reads and his technique closed by millimeters that felt like miles. Tashigi watched from the fence most days, sometimes with the oil can, sometimes without, and occasionally she called corrections from the sideline.
The corrections were always right. Kael learned this fast. Isuka learned it slower but she learned it, and the fact that she listened to Tashigi when she didn't listen to the assigned instructors said more about what she thought of Tashigi's sword knowledge than anything she'd say out loud.
"Your back foot," Tashigi said on a Tuesday. "It's drifting. You're losing your base."
Isuka froze mid-drill. She looked at Tashigi. Tashigi pushed her glasses up and looked back. Steady. She knew this stuff.
"Show me," Isuka said.
Tashigi came through the fence gate, walked to where Isuka was standing, and adjusted her stance with her hands. Left foot here. Right foot back. Weight centered. She did it with the same sure precision she used in the armory, the clumsiness gone, and Isuka let her do it, which was new because Isuka didn't let anyone touch her stance.
"Better?" Isuka asked.
Tashigi stepped back and looked at the alignment. "Much."
Isuka drilled the corrected position for an hour straight without stopping. Tashigi went back to the fence and Kael sat next to her and neither of them said anything about the fact that Isuka had accepted a correction from a Chore Boy who was ranked below her in every metric except sword knowledge.
The mess hall served fish three nights a week. The fish was always the same fish. Kael didn't know what species it was because it arrived on the tray already reduced to a gray-white rectangle of protein that could have been any ocean creature or possibly several ocean creatures combined. One evening he picked up the rectangle with his chopsticks, held it up to the light, and said, "I think this one's still thinking about the sea."
Tashigi snorted. Tea came out of her nose. She grabbed a napkin and pressed it to her face and her ears went red and she was making a sound behind the napkin that was trying very hard to be quiet and failing completely. Isuka watched this happen with the expression of someone observing a weather event.
"Was it that funny?" Isuka asked.
Tashigi nodded behind the napkin, still making the sound. Kael ate the fish. It tasted like every other rectangle.
A senior recruit named Daren made a comment about Tashigi's glasses on a Thursday. Kael wasn't there. He heard about it later, from three different people, each telling a slightly different version. The consistent parts: Daren said something about her glasses making her look like somebody's librarian grandmother. Tashigi's face went tight and she adjusted the frames and said nothing. Isuka, who was sitting two tables away, stood up. Walked over. Said "Apologize." Daren laughed. Isuka hit him in the solar plexus, swept his legs, and had him on the floor with her boot on his chest before his tray finished clattering.
She didn't draw her rapier.
Daren apologized. Isuka walked back to her table. Tashigi started to say "You didn't have to-" and Isuka said "Eat your lunch" and that was that.
When Kael asked Isuka about it later she said "He was wrong" and went back to doing pull-ups on the training bar. She did them properly, without jumping. Kael waited for more. There wasn't more. That was the whole explanation. Daren was wrong, so she'd corrected him. If the correction involved his face meeting the mess hall floor, that was a natural consequence of being wrong in Isuka's proximity.
The showers were in the basement of Block C, separated by gender with a shared corridor between. Kael was walking back to his bunk one evening, towel over his shoulder, hair wet, when a shriek came from the women's side that was loud enough to echo off the tile.
He knew that shriek. It was Tashigi's panic sound, the one she made when her glasses came off unexpectedly, and it was followed by the distinct clatter of frames hitting wet tile and a splash that said the glasses had gone into the water.
He stopped. The door was right there. He was reaching for the handle before he thought about it, reaching because the sound was distress and people he knew were behind that door, and he was two inches from pushing it open when he registered where he was.
Women's shower. He was reaching for the women's shower door. In a military compound. Where that kind of thing ended careers before they started.
He pulled his hand back.
Isuka appeared behind him in the corridor. Towel around her neck. Hair damp. She looked at him, looked at the door, looked at his hand hovering in the air two inches from the handle. Her face didn't change. She walked past him, close enough that her shoulder almost touched his, and said, "Don't even think about it."
"I wasn't-"
"Don't."
She went through the door. He heard her say "Your glasses are by the drain" in a flat voice, and then Tashigi's "Thank you, Isuka-san, I dropped- they just- the soap was-" and then the sound of Tashigi fumbling with wet glasses and Isuka saying nothing because Isuka had already handled it.
Kael stood in the corridor. He had not been thinking about anything inappropriate two seconds ago but he was now thinking about the fact that Isuka had just walked through that door with wet hair and a towel around her neck and nothing else was certain, and Tashigi was in there too, and he was very aware of both of those facts in a way that was entirely Isuka's fault for putting the thought there by telling him not to have it.
He went to his bunk and did not think about it. Unsuccessfully.
The common room on the fourth floor of Block C had a table with a lamp and six chairs and a shelf of regulation textbooks that nobody read except the people who had exams. Evenings, most recruits were in the barracks or outside or in the mess hall for second tea. The common room was usually empty.
Kael found it during the second week and started using it to study the Marine regulations handbook, which was written in the driest possible prose and required total concentration. Tashigi joined him the second night, bringing her own books on blade metallurgy and a thermos of tea she'd gotten from somewhere. Isuka joined the third night without explanation, sitting at the far end of the table with a tactics manual and her rapier across her knees.
They studied in silence. Tashigi poured tea for Kael without asking. She poured tea for Isuka without asking. Isuka drank it without acknowledging it. These were the terms.
The night it happened, Kael had been reading about maritime patrol jurisdiction for two hours and the words had stopped making sense about forty minutes in. The lamp was warm. The chair was not comfortable but his body had stopped registering discomfort somewhere around page sixty. Tashigi was still reading, turning pages at regular intervals, occasionally making small sounds when she found something interesting. Isuka hadn't turned a page in a long time. She was either thinking or asleep with her eyes open, and with Isuka either was equally possible.
He put his head down on the textbook to rest his eyes. He'd close them for one minute. The page was cool against his cheek and the lamp was warm and Tashigi's page-turning was steady and rhythmic and the minute stretched.
He woke up to a blanket on his shoulders.
He didn't open his eyes right away. The blanket was thin, regulation Marine issue, and it smelled like the linen closet in the corridor, clean and slightly stale. Tashigi was still at the table. Pages turning. The thermos cap clinked softly against the thermos body as she poured herself more tea.
Isuka was still there too. He couldn't hear her but the weight of someone at the far end of the table was there, the chair not creaking because Isuka sat perfectly still, the kind of person who took up space without making sound.
Tashigi had put the blanket on him. He knew this without opening his eyes because Isuka wouldn't have. Isuka would have let him freeze, or told him to go to bed, or kicked his chair. Tashigi had found a blanket and draped it over his shoulders and gone back to reading.
He kept his eyes closed. The common room was quiet. The lamp hummed. Tashigi turned a page. Isuka breathed. Outside the window, the compound was winding down and somewhere a door closed and someone's boots went down a corridor and faded.
He fell back asleep. When he woke up the lamp was off and both chairs were empty and the blanket was still on his shoulders and someone had bookmarked his page. The thermos was capped and the tea was cold.