Cole's idea of training was, by any conventional measure, not training at all.
He spent the first three days of the countdown lying on the couch, phone propped on his chest, watching every piece of public footage of Marek Osei he could find — sanctioned duels, licensing exams, one grainy video from a school assembly two years back where a younger, skinnier Marek had lost a demonstration match and cried about it in front of forty classmates, unaware anyone was still filming.
"This isn't training," Reeve said, from the doorway, arms crossed, radiating the specific disapproval of someone who'd assumed there'd be more push-ups involved.
"It's better than training."
"You're watching a guy get his ego crushed at fourteen."
"I'm watching a guy build his entire fighting style around never letting that happen again." Cole paused the video. Pointed at the screen, at a young Marek's stance, feet too far apart, shoulders squared like a wall going up brick by brick. "See that? That's not technique. That's armor. He's been building the same wall since he was fourteen and calling it a fighting style."
"So what do you do with that?"
"Knock on the wall. Politely. Ask him what he's actually protecting."
Reeve sat down heavily in the armchair across from him, phone forgotten in his lap. "You know that's insane, right? Everyone else prepares for a fight by getting stronger. You prepare by watching a guy's most embarrassing childhood memory on loop."
"Getting stronger's slow. Understanding someone's fast, if you're paying attention." Cole hit play again. "Besides. I'm already strong enough. Just nobody's figured out for what yet."
Reeve didn't have anything to say to that. He just watched, quietly, as Marek's fourteen-year-old face crumpled on screen for the third time, and something in his own expression shifted — not pity, exactly. Recognition. The specific ache of watching someone else's worst moment and feeling the shape of your own worst moments crowding in close behind it.
"You ever do that to my footage?" Reeve asked. Quiet. Not really joking.
"Don't need to. I've had front-row seats to your whole deal for six years." Cole didn't look over. Let the question sit lightly, the way you handle something you know is heavier than it sounds. "Doesn't scare me, though. For what it's worth."
Reeve didn't answer. Picked at the scab on his knuckle instead, the one that never fully healed, and let the video keep playing until neither of them needed to say anything else about it.
Ron Delgado lived four blocks from the corner store, in an apartment that smelled like microwaved soup and carpet cleaner, and he answered the door on the second knock with the specific over-brightness of a man determined to prove he was fine.
"Ms. Kessler." He didn't ask how she'd gotten his address. Dana had learned, over the years, that people rarely did — something about a Ministry-adjacent badge made most questions evaporate before they formed. "This about the incident?"
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
"Follow-up. Won't take long."
He let her in. The apartment was tidy in the aggressive way of someone who'd recently reorganized everything they could reach, as if enough order in the physical world might compensate for whatever had briefly come apart inside them. Dana sat where he gestured. Didn't take out a notebook. People talked more when they thought you weren't writing it down.
"How are you sleeping?"
"Fine. Great, actually." Ron smiled. It didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "Better than before, honestly. Isn't that strange? You'd think after something like that, you'd sleep worse."
"You'd think."
"I keep waiting to feel bad about it. The job, I mean. Fifteen years, gone, just like that." He picked at a thread on the couch cushion, the same small unconscious motion Dana had clocked in someone else recently, though she couldn't place who. "But I don't. I just — feel fine. Which feels wrong, somehow. Like I'm supposed to be devastated and I'm just... not."
"Do you remember what he said to you? The boy."
"Cole." Ron said the name carefully, like handling something breakable. "He said nobody remembers other people's bad days. Told me the windshield was the whole story, not me."
"And you believed him."
"I did. I don't know why. It's not even that clever a thing to say, is it? People say things like that all the time. Therapists say things like that. But when he said it—" Ron stopped. Frowned, like he was trying to describe a color that didn't exist. "It felt true. Not comforting-true. Actually-true. Like the fact had already existed and he just handed it to me."
Dana kept her face carefully neutral, the specific discipline of eleven years spent not letting a subject see exactly which answer had mattered most.
"Has anything else changed?" she asked. "Since the incident. Anything unusual."
Ron was quiet a moment. Looked down at his own hands, turning them over slowly, like checking for a mark that wasn't there.
"I don't dream anymore," he said finally. "Used to dream all the time. Work stuff, mostly — showing up late, forgetting the truck, that kind of thing. Since the incident, nothing. Just black. Like my head decided it didn't need to keep rehearsing the bad version of things."
That, Dana wrote down. Small, careful letters, in a notebook Ron hadn't seen her take out until just now.
"Is that bad?" Ron asked, watching her write.
"I don't know yet," Dana said, honestly, which was rarer for her than most people assumed. "That's rather the problem."
She sat in her car afterward for a long time, engine off, notebook open on the wheel, a can of the cheap gas-station soda she pretended not to like sitting untouched in the cupholder.
Full recovery. No residual instability. No dreams.
A Fracture that severe should have left scarring — psychological, sometimes literal, the resonance equivalent of a bone that heals wrong if nobody sets it properly. Ron's should have taken months. Possibly years. Possibly never, depending on how deep the original wound had gone.
Instead: nothing. Clean. Quiet. Fixed in the space of a single conversation on a sidewalk, by a boy the system couldn't classify, who talked about it afterward like it had cost him nothing at all.
That's not comforting, Mr. Vale, she'd said to him, in Halden's borrowed office, and he'd told her he wasn't trying to comfort her.
Dana believed that part, at least. She just wasn't sure yet what he actually was trying to do.
She started the car. Didn't drive anywhere immediately, just sat there another minute, watching Ron's building through the windshield, the same kind of glass that had cracked from the inside a week and a half ago and now sat perfectly, unremarkably whole.
Third one this year, she thought, though the number in her own private accounting had already climbed higher than the Ministry's official file admitted. Fourth, if you count what I'm not supposed to count yet.
She pulled the folder from the passenger seat. The one with the photo Cole had almost seen, three streets over, through a window he shouldn't have thought to knock on.
Looked at it a long time.
Then she put the car in drive, and didn't look at it again the rest of the day, because some questions you carry around a while before you're ready to actually ask them out loud.
[End of Chapter 10]