The Hand came back on a Tuesday.
Three of them this time. Different corner of Hell's Kitchen, darker street, same sharp metal in the dark. Troy's ribs were still healing from the last visit and his stitches pulled when he dropped under the first blade and his Speed carried him sideways out of the second.
He broke one man's knee. Outran another. The third caught him across the forearm with a short blade before Troy put him into a fire hydrant hard enough to crack the casing.
He stood on the sidewalk with blood on his arm and water spraying from the busted hydrant behind him and his phone in his hand before he'd decided to reach for it.
The number was six digits. No name. He'd memorized it without meaning to.
She picked up on the third ring.
"This is Troy. You said they'd come again."
"Where."
"43rd and Tenth. Three. One's down. Two ran."
Silence. He heard her breathing. Steady, measured, the breathing of someone who controlled everything including the expansion of her own lungs.
"Chinatown. Lotus Dragon Dojo. One hour." She hung up.
The dojo was above a fish market on Mott Street. The stairwell smelled like brine and old sweat and the door at the top was unlocked, which felt like a trap and probably was.
Inside: open floor, heavy bags along one wall, weapon racks on the other. Wooden training dummies with peeling lacquer. Fluorescent tubes overhead, half of them dead, the rest buzzing with a frequency that lived in Troy's molars. Nobody at the front. No lights in the office. The sign on the street had said CLOSED and the lock had been picked so cleanly the owner wouldn't know until morning.
Troy walked to the center of the floor. Checked his phone. Forty-seven minutes had passed since her call. He was thirteen minutes early and he was pretty sure she was already here.
"You can come out," he said. "I know you're watching."
Nothing.
He turned in a slow circle. The weapon rack. The heavy bags. The office door, half-open. Shadows layered on shadows and the buzzing of the fluorescents covered any footstep softer than a normal person's.
Elektra was not a normal person.
The strike came from his left. He caught the movement in his peripheral, a blur of dark hair and dark clothes, and his Speed kicked in and he turned and her palm was already there. It hit him in the sternum. Not full force. She could have punched through his guard and cracked bone. This was a shove, a test, and it knocked him back three steps and told him everything about the gap between what she could do and what he could survive.
He caught his balance. She was standing where he'd been, feet shoulder-width apart, hands loose at her sides. Tank top, tactical pants, bare feet. Her hair was pulled back. The scar on her collarbone from the Hand fight was pink and healing and she wore it like it was nothing because to her it was nothing.
"You're slow," she said.
"You were hiding in the ceiling."
"I was standing behind the heavy bag." Her expression didn't change. "You should have checked."
He rubbed his sternum. The hit was going to bruise. Already the ache was spreading across his chest in a way that promised color by morning.
"The men who came tonight. How many were there before you called."
"Three. I handled it."
She looked at his arm. The cut was shallow, the bleeding mostly stopped. She pressed two fingers alongside it and he flinched and she didn't notice or didn't care.
"You handled one. You outran two. You took a cut from the third because you dropped your guard after the first exchange." She'd read the fight from a wound. "You're stronger than you look. But you fight like someone who learned last month."
He'd been in this body for six weeks. The Speed was at 6, the Strength at 5, and both of those numbers had meaning in the system and no meaning at all in a fight with someone who'd been trained to kill since she was old enough to hold a blade.
"Teach me."
She hit him.
Palm strike. Solar plexus. Fast enough that his Speed registered the movement and his arms started to respond and his body started to turn and none of it mattered because she'd already finished the strike before his defense was halfway up. He doubled over. The air went out of him in a hard cough and his vision swam and his knees wanted to buckle and he locked them.
"Lesson one." She watched him straighten with no apparent interest in whether he managed it. "Guard your center."
The first time was a hip throw. His Speed let him read the setup and his Strength let him brace against it and none of that mattered because she redirected his brace into momentum and used his own resistance to swing him over her hip and onto the mat. The dojo floor was thin padding over concrete and his shoulder blade hit the seam between two mats and the impact sang through his skeleton.
The second time was a leg sweep. Simple, textbook, the kind of move he should have seen. He didn't see it. His ankles went out from under him and his tailbone hit the mat and she was standing over him looking bored.
The third time was a joint lock that started as a wrist grab and ended with his face on the mat and his arm behind his back and her knee between his shoulder blades. She held it for three seconds. Long enough for his system to register the contact. Long enough for him to feel the heat of her body through the thin fabric of her pants where her knee pressed into his spine.
She let go. Stood. Walked three steps away and waited.
He got up. Everything from his collarbone to his belt was one continuous bruise and his wrist wouldn't close all the way and his ego was somewhere under the mat.
"Again," he said.
Her jaw unclenched. A millimeter, maybe less. Her mouth had been a flat line since he'd walked in and now it wasn't.
"Again," she agreed.
An hour.
She taught by hitting him. She showed a stance and if he copied it wrong she hit the part that was wrong until he fixed it. She demonstrated a block and when he got the angle right she attacked with the move the block was designed for and when he failed to block it she reset and did it again.
She didn't correct him with words. She corrected him with contact.
Guard too wide, her fist found the opening. Weight too far forward, she hooked his ankle and dumped him. He kept leaving his chin up and she cracked her palm across his jaw twice before he learned to tuck it.
Troy learned fast. The system helped. Every fight, every spar, every physical interaction was data that fed into something larger, and his body was adapting at a rate that no normal human's should. His Speed let him read her movements earlier each round. His Strength let him absorb hits that should have dropped him. And a new instinct, the system tracking it in real time without naming it, let him start to predict the rhythm of her attacks before they arrived.
She noticed.
Halfway through the hour she threw a combination. Jab, cross, low kick. He blocked the jab, slipped the cross, checked the kick. Textbook. She'd shown him each piece twenty minutes ago and he'd assembled them into a defense without being told.
Her eyes narrowed. She threw the same combination again, faster. He blocked the jab, slipped the cross, checked the kick again. The margins were thinner but the result was the same.
She changed the pattern. Jab, feint, elbow. He ate the elbow. Stars, copper taste, his lip split against his teeth. She backed off and let him recover.
"You learn fast." She said it flat, stripped down, each word weighed before she spent it.
"I'm motivated."
"Motivation doesn't explain your progress."
She was looking at his feet. Then his hands. Then his face. In the cage fight and in the alley she'd looked through him like he was furniture. Now her eyes were tracking him. Her head tilted two degrees to the left and her weight shifted onto her back foot and both of those were things he only knew because she'd just spent an hour teaching him to read body language.
"What are you," she said.
"A guy who doesn't want to get stabbed again."
"You moved faster than you should. Three weeks ago you had no training. Now you're defending combinations. That isn't possible." She paused. "Unless you're enhanced."
"I'm not a mutant."
"I didn't say mutant."
They looked at each other across six feet of mat. The fluorescents buzzed. Troy's lip was bleeding down his chin and he could feel it dripping onto his shirt and he didn't wipe it because reaching for his face would break eye contact and breaking eye contact with Elektra Natchios felt like a mistake he'd only get to make once.
"I'm something else," he said. "I don't have a good explanation yet."
"You will." Not a question.
She came at him. No warning, no stance change, just movement. But this time it was different. The earlier rounds had been instruction, controlled, her pulling every hit to teach instead of injure. This was closer to real. She threw a knee strike toward his ribs and he twisted sideways and her shin caught his forearm and the force of it rattled his teeth. She followed with an elbow and he ducked and she caught the back of his neck in a clinch.
Her forearm across the back of his skull. Her body against his side, pressed flush, and he could feel the ridge of her hip bone through the fabric and the firm flat plane of her stomach against his ribs and her breath on his neck, warm and steady, each exhale landing on the skin below his ear. She smelled like clean sweat and weapon oil. His system spiked. The LP bar jumped in precise increments, the kind of gain he'd only seen from sustained close contact with enhanced-tier women, and his body was responding to the proximity in ways that had nothing to do with the system and everything to do with the fact that Elektra Natchios was wrapped around him from behind and her breathing was hitting the exact spot on his neck that made his pulse loud in his own ears.
He grabbed her arm and tried to break the clinch and she shifted her weight and took him down. Full body. Her legs locked around his waist from behind, her arm across his throat, and she squeezed with her thighs and his vision started to narrow at the edges.
He tapped. She held for one more second. Her thighs tightening. Then she released.
He rolled onto his back. Ceiling. Water stains. Dead fluorescent tubes. His throat raw where her arm had been and his ribs tender where she'd kneed him and his body buzzing in a way that was half pain and half a low electric hum his system was already trying to categorize.
He could still feel where her thighs had been. His waist, his hips, the squeeze that had nothing to do with technique. The spot on his neck where her breath had landed was still warm. He was half-hard and grateful for the dim lighting.
He was still on his back when she stepped over him. One foot on each side of his ribs. Standing above him, looking down. Her hair had come loose from the tie and a strand fell across her face and she didn't brush it away. Her chest rose and fell with the first hard breathing he'd seen from her all night and the tank top was dark with sweat, clinging, and from this angle he could see the outline of her sports bra and the lean cut of her obliques and the scar on her collarbone catching light through the sheen of sweat on her skin. She had a body that was built to end people and from down here it was the most dangerous view he'd ever had and he couldn't stop looking.
She looked at him on the floor. He looked up at her.
Her lips parted. Her eyes dropped from his face to his chest to the mat beside his hip and came back up. The flat professional stare she'd been wearing all night cracked at the corners and underneath it she was looking at him the way women look at men they're deciding about, and she let him see it.
Then she blinked and her face was flat again and she stepped back like he was a piece of equipment she was done using.
She stepped away.
"Same time tomorrow."
She walked to the weapon rack. Picked up a canvas bag she'd stashed behind the training dummies. Slung it over one shoulder. Walked toward the office door and the window behind it that opened onto the fire escape.
"Elektra."
She stopped. Didn't turn around.
"Thank you."
She stood there. Her back to him, the bag over her shoulder, one foot ahead of the other. The line of her spine visible through the tank top. The muscles in her shoulders holding tension that had nothing to do with combat.
"Don't be late tomorrow," she said.
The window opened. The window closed. She was gone.
Troy lay on the dojo floor for a while.
He stared at the ceiling. Same water stains, same buzzing fluorescents, same crack from the light fixture to the wall. He'd been looking at it between knockdowns all night.
His lip was swelling. The cut on his arm from the Hand had opened during the sparring and was bleeding sluggishly onto the mat. His sternum was a single continuous bruise from her first strike to her last, and his wrist was stiff where she'd locked it, and his throat was tender where she'd choked him, and the back of his neck was sore where she'd clinched him.
He was grinning.
He pulled out his phone and checked the system. The LP bar had moved. A steady measured addition, smaller than a night with Felicia but larger than the passive trickle from strangers. An hour of an enhanced woman's body pressed against his in twelve different configurations, each one filed by the system as data, each one filed by his body as a memory he'd be replaying in the shower.
Elektra Natchios. Affection tracker.
Previous: Hostile.
Current: Grudging Respect.
He stared at the words. Grudging respect. From a woman who'd trained with the Hand, who killed for money, who communicated through palm strikes to the solar plexus. Grudging respect was a love letter by Elektra's standards.
He closed the phone. Wiped the blood off his chin with the back of his hand. Got up from the mat, joints protesting, muscles already stiffening into tomorrow's regret.
Same time tomorrow.
He locked the dojo door behind him. The Chinatown street was quiet, the fish market dark, the sidewalks empty except for a delivery truck double-parked under a streetlight. His body hurt in twelve places and his system was humming with data it was still processing and somewhere in Hell's Kitchen Felicia was asleep in his bed with her hair on his pillow and the word "possessive" on her tracker and somewhere on a fire escape Elektra was moving through the dark toward wherever she disappeared to when she wasn't teaching him how to get hit.
Felicia was going to smell the sweat on him and see the new bruises. She was going to ask.
He walked home. His lip bled the whole way. He didn't wipe it.