20 – Angles
"Your thumb is wrong."
Tashigi had his wrist in one hand and Shigure's handle in the other and she was showing him the reverse-grip transition for the third time because his thumb kept drifting to the wrong side of the guard. The morning training session had moved from group drills to paired technique work and Tashigi had volunteered to demonstrate the grip before Kael could partner with anyone else, which meant he was standing in the weapons yard with his hand extended and Tashigi's fingers adjusting his thumb position with the focused precision she brought to everything involving swords.
"The reverse grip locks when the thumb wraps under. If it wraps over, the blade rotates on impact and you lose the cutting line." She moved his thumb. Her fingers were warm and sure and she was looking at his hand, not his face, and her glasses had slipped down her nose and she hadn't pushed them back up because both her hands were occupied.
"Like this?"
"Almost. The transition is-" She shifted Shigure's handle into his palm and her fingers slid across the inside of his wrist.
She stopped.
Her fingertips were on the soft skin where his veins crossed, the place where a pulse lived close to the surface. She'd brushed it moving the handle and now her fingers were there and her face was going pink. Starting at the ears. The ears always went first with Tashigi.
"Sorry, I- the transition is from the top, you rotate-" She pulled her hand back and adjusted her glasses with both hands and finished the sentence looking at the ground somewhere near his left boot. "Rotate the wrist and the thumb catches the guard."
"Show me again?"
She showed him again. This time she held his wrist from the outside, fingers on the back of his hand, nowhere near the pulse point. The adjustment was careful and deliberate and the space where she wasn't touching was louder than the place where she had been.
He'd been cataloguing these. The blanket on his shoulders in the common room, weeks ago. Her weight against his shoulder when she'd fallen asleep over the regulations handbook. How she said "Vance-san" with the slight emphasis on the honorific, different from how she said anyone else's name. Her fingers on the inside of his wrist.
"Better," she said. She was still pink. "Try the full transition. From standard to reverse and back."
He tried it. The thumb caught on the second attempt. Tashigi watched and nodded and her glasses were back in place and the color was fading from her ears and neither of them mentioned the wrist.
Isuka was in the advanced ring at midday, alone.
Kael was coming back from the conditioning track with his towel over his shoulder when he saw her through the open gate. She was running a combination he hadn't seen before. Rapier work, all hers, and the sequence was fast and angular and built around a feint pattern that doubled back on itself so the final thrust came from an angle the opening footwork had already dismissed.
She'd built this. She'd taken the footwork Tashigi had corrected, the probing doctrine they'd discussed at the mess hall table, and the angle work she'd been drilling since the first week, and she'd assembled them into a combination that was hers. The rapier moved through the pattern and her feet were precise and her weight transfers were clean and her arm was a straight line on the thrust and the bandage on her cheek caught the sun when she turned.
She was beautiful when she fought.
Her jaw was set and her vermilion hair was stuck to her temples with sweat and her shoulders were sharp inside the uniform shirt and the rapier extended in a line from her hand through the blade to the point. He'd known this since the folders were wrong in the sand. Now he was thinking it with his whole brain instead of just the back of it.
She finished the combination. Lowered the rapier. Turned toward the water bench and saw him in the doorway.
"What."
"Nothing. Your footwork's better."
"I know my footwork's better." She looked at him. Directly. The brown eyes, the bandage, the jaw still set from the drill. "You were watching."
"I was walking past."
"You were standing still."
He didn't have an answer for that. She was right. He'd stopped in the doorway and his towel was over his shoulder and his water was in his hand and he'd been standing there watching her fight and he didn't have a reason he could say out loud.
"The combination is good," he said. "The feint pattern. The doubled-back angle. Did you build that?"
Her jaw loosened. A fraction. "Tuesday. It needs work. The third transition is slow."
"I didn't see a slow transition."
"You weren't looking at the transitions." She turned away and picked up her water from the bench. The back of her neck was red. The flush started at her hairline and went down below her collar and she was drinking water and her back was to him and her neck was red and she hadn't told him to leave.
He left anyway. His towel was damp on his shoulder and the midday sun was hot on the training yard and the image of her in the ring, rapier extended, jaw set, stayed in his head clear and complete as he walked.
The corridor between the main training hall and the administrative wing was busy in the afternoon. Recruits moving between sessions, officers heading to briefings, a supply cart blocking the passage near the junction where someone had left it at an angle that forced everyone to squeeze past.
Gion came from the opposite direction. Heels on tile, Marine coat on her shoulders, Konpira at her hip. She'd been running the group Observation session that morning with four students, Kael among them, and the session had gone well enough that she'd ended it early.
She passed him in the corridor. As she passed, two fingers touched his shoulder. Right shoulder, through the uniform fabric, two seconds. Her fingers pressed against the cloth and he could feel the warmth and the slight callus at the base of her index finger where the sword handle wore the skin.
"Good work in the group session today," she said. She kept walking. The heels clicked away down the corridor and the coat shifted on her shoulders and she turned the corner toward the administrative wing without looking back.
Kael stood in the corridor. The supply cart was still blocking the junction and a recruit was trying to move it and failing because one wheel was stuck. Another recruit was helping now, both of them pulling at the wrong angle.
He'd watched the group session. He'd watched her with all four students. She'd corrected Toma's stance with a verbal instruction. She'd redirected Ensign Kahara's focus with a pointed question. She'd told the third student, whose name Kael couldn't remember, to adjust his breathing.
She hadn't touched any of them.
He'd checked. He'd been running back through the hour in his head since the session ended, cataloguing every interaction. She'd touched one of four and it was him and he was aware of what that meant and he kept cataloguing anyway.
He kept walking. The recruits got the cart unstuck. The corridor smelled like floor polish and the afternoon light came through the windows in long rectangles and the place where her fingers had been was still warm through his shirt.
The mess hall was full at dinner. Kael sat at the table with his tray and his fish and his low expectations regarding the fish. Tashigi sat to his left, close enough that her elbow occasionally touched his when she reached for her tea. She was angled toward him by maybe fifteen degrees, not facing him directly but leaning in his direction, and she'd been doing this for weeks now and the angle was getting smaller.
Isuka sat across from them. Closer to the table's center than her usual spot, which put her knee closer to his under the table than it needed to be. Her tray was barely organized, and she was eating fast and not talking and her eyes moved between Kael and her rice and Kael and her rice.
"The carbon content in Shigure is wrong," Tashigi said.
"The carbon content in Shigure is fine," Kael said.
"It's listed as 1.2 percent in the Meito registry. That's too high for the blade flexibility I measured last week. The steel should be brittle at that content but Shigure bends under stress without fracturing, which means either the registry is wrong or the forging process introduced-"
"It's a magic sword, Tashigi."
"All swords have metallurgical properties, Vance-san. Even Meito blades obey the physics of-"
Isuka reached across the table and took Tashigi's fish.
"Hey-"
"Tax."
"For what?"
"Listening to the carbon content speech. Kael's fish is next if she gets to the crystalline grain structure."
"I wasn't going to-" Tashigi paused. Adjusted her glasses. "I was going to talk about the crystalline grain structure."
"Tax," Isuka said, and took Kael's fish.
"That's extortion."
"That's efficiency." She ate his fish. "Now she has to talk about something else."
Tashigi's ears were pink. She was looking at her empty fish space and her mouth was working through a response that kept not arriving. Kael ate his rice before Isuka could claim that too.
At the officers' table across the mess hall, Hina sat with a glass of wine and her cigarette holder and her narrow eyes. She was watching the table. Tashigi leaning fifteen degrees. Isuka closer than required. Kael in the center with no fish and a metallurgy lecture he'd been rescued from.
Hina lifted the wine glass. Her lips moved against the rim. A sentence, maybe two words, spoken to the glass and nobody else. The narrow eyes moved from the table to the window and stayed there and she drank and the smoke from the cigarette holder drifted toward the ceiling and whatever she'd said to the wine glass stayed between her and the wine glass.
The mess hall clock showed seven-fifteen. The fish was gone. The metallurgy argument had resumed at lower volume because Tashigi couldn't stop thinking about the carbon content and Isuka had run out of fish to steal. A recruit two tables over dropped his tray and the mess hall went quiet for a beat and then loud again when he picked it up and the evening continued.
Kael sat in his chair and ate his rice and Tashigi was to his left leaning fifteen degrees and Isuka was across from him closer than required and Hina was at the officers' table watching from fifty feet away and somewhere in the officers' quarters Gion was doing whatever Gion did in the evening and the place on his shoulder where her fingers had been was still warm and the place on his wrist where Tashigi's fingers had been was still there and the image of Isuka in the ring was still in the front of his head and the rice needed salt.