She was starting to see something she could work with, though. Kintz preferred to hit right-handed and his footwork was particularly clumsy when she pushed him back and to the left. The trick of course was to play off that weakness without alerting him to it. And to do that she had to stay outside, mix it up, keep him moving. And of course let him get in those sucker hits.
She drew him into the middle of the mat, dancing around him. He caught her on a lucky kick, missing her knee but momentarily catching her instep. It threw her off-balance just long enough for him to catch up with her.
They grappled, each of them trying for a grip, for purchase. He had caught her in an awkward position, and she felt him improving his hold, getting a wrestler’s lock on her. She planted a leg, grunting with the effort, leaned into him with her good shoulder, and threw him.
The flash of anger in his eyes was unmistakable, but he recovered his balance and his attitude quickly.
“Nice trick,” he said. “Guess you didn’t just sleep your way to the top.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Li answered, resisting the urge to stamp on his fingers.
McCuen and the others had drifted over, drawn by the thud of Kintz’s body hitting the mat. “If you think this is worth watching, you’ve got a lot to learn,” Li told them, and they drifted away again, looking embarrassed.
Kintz was pushing her now. He’d been doing his own weighing and balancing during the meet-and-greet sparring; now he was going after her bad arm with the fierce instincts of a street fighter. He was getting winded, though. She heard the faint whistle of constricting air passages every time he sucked breath. That was something, she thought, and ducked in under his guard, chancing a risky move.
Five years ago it would have worked. But she wasn’t as fast as she’d been five years ago. He caught her hip with a blow that sent her staggering, and in that fraction of a second’s hesitation, he had her. He went after her bad arm, and she struggled to keep him from getting a grip on it. When things sorted out, he had her in a neck lock.
When he spoke, his voice was so twisted by the effort of holding the lock on her that she didn’t at first register the sounds as words. Then she understood them and felt a cold rush of adrenaline course through her.
“I could snap your neck right now,” he said. “Who’d ever think it was anything but an accident? I could tell them you wanted to fight with safeties off, and you just shit ran out of luck.”
She tried to slip her hands under his arm and get the pressure off her neck, but he jerked at her hard enough to put the thought out of her mind.
“You think you’re special, don’t you?” he whispered. “Think you can just walk in and start poking sticks at people? Think we’ll all just jump to it? Right, Major? Whatever you say, Major?”
Li bent her knees, felt out Kintz’s balance, took a chance, and managed to throw him again.
“Piss off, Kintz. You and Haas. You are his errand boy, aren’t you?”
Kintz wiped his mouth, and his hand came away red. “You don’t have a fucking clue, do you?” he said. Then he was on his feet, and they were back at it.
She never figured out how he got by her the next time, but suddenly he had her. His right arm snaked out and caught her under the jaw. His left twisted her bad arm behind her back so tightly she felt ceramsteel grate and creak against cartilage. He lifted her onto her toes, using his height to deny her leverage. She felt his ribs pressing into her back, smelled sweat and cheap aftershave. She gathered herself, braced her feet, textbook fashion, and tried to throw him.
Kintz laughed. “That the best you can do, Major?” He was as solid as rock behind her. Or, more accurately, as solid as ceramsteel.
Adrenaline had kicked her internals on a few times already during the fight, and she had shut them off just as quickly. Now she turned them on and left them on. She twisted and strained, pushing protesting tendons and ligaments within a millimeter of breaking. Nothing budged. He had a solid grip on her, and even with her internals pushed as far as she could risk pushing them, he was just plain stronger than she was.
“The Corps isn’t juicing you guys like it used to,” Kintz said. “Or maybe you’re just behind the curve.”
He twisted her arm until her knees buckled and her vision shut down to a red-hazed tunnel.
“I know what you are,” he whispered, his breath hot in her ear. “I can buy half-bred cunts like you in every whorehouse in Helena. This isn’t Gilead. You don’t have an army to back you up here. And I’ll show you what that means if you don’t mind your nasty little digger business.”
Her first urge was to fight, driven by the massive dose of adrenaline her internals were shooting through her system. Then she thought it through and almost laughed at the ridiculous childishness of the situation. What the hell did she care? What point was there in damaging herself in order to not have Kintz be able to say he’d beaten her on the practice mat? She forced herself to go limp in his arms, waiting.
It worked, after a fashion.
“Stupid slut,” Kintz muttered under his breath. He let go of her arm, but as he did he slipped his foot in front of hers, almost sending her sprawling. Her internals kept her on her feet, but by the time she turned to face him he’d already crossed his arms and pasted his usual grin back onto his face.
She laughed, aware that her hands were shaking with rage. “That was fun. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”
“Sure.” Still grinning. “See you around.”
She stood in the middle of the mat, weight on her toes, and tracked him all the way to the door. She must have looked as shaken as she felt; before she could pull herself together, McCuen came and stood in front of her with a worried look on his face.
“Okay, Major?” She heard his voice through a haze of adrenaline, as if he were speaking from somewhere far away.
“I’m fine,” she said, running a dripping hand over her hair. “But that son of a bitch needs an attitude adjustment.”
The glory hole.
Light and silence. A fullness of space like the rush inside a conch shell. Pillars that were ribs leaping up into the wild geometry of the fan vaults, raising the roof of a living cathedral.
Li had last seen it in the dark and underwater. Now she was seeing it as the miners had seen it, as Sharifi had seen it. And Bella was right; it did sing. Li might not hear the music the witch heard, but her internals were going wild, overloaded by the quantum storm that raged in the glory hole’s gleaming belly.
There had been problems draining it. It had taken the cleanup crew much longer than expected to shore up the surrounding passages and run the pumps in. And for several tense days they had struggled to find an underground river, broken out of its banks by the fire and subsequent flooding, that kept refilling the Trinidad’s lower levels as fast as they could drain them.
The work went even slower because the miners, except for the pit Catholics, wouldn’t work the glory hole. It was a place surrounded by fearful superstition, as terrible to some people as it had been fascinating to Sharifi.
Something cracked and skittered away from Li’s foot. She bent, her headlamp raking the rough floor with shadows, and saw two glittering red eyes flashing back at her. She touched the thing and heard a little clack like the sound of two marbles kissing. She picked it up.
It was plastic. The kind of cheap, locally produced petroleum product that always cluttered up Compson’s markets. Two red marbles connected by a loop of black elastic. It was a Love-in-Tokyo, a cheap bauble to tie off a little girl’s ponytail. Li herself had worn one in some faded past in which she’d actually been a little girl with a ponytail. Reflexively, she pulled the elastic around her wrist and slipped the plastic marble through the loop. She heard the click as it fastened, felt the elastic bite into her wrist, the smooth pressure of plastic beads against her skin. A memory rose up out of the deep rift of her unconscious, fierce and precise, a child’s vision of night and fear.