One
Persie
An arm slithered skillfully around my neck and squeezed. It might have been a tentacle suckered to my throat, for all the good it did me, trying to pry the thing away with desperate fingers. The pressure against my windpipe had the mark of an expert: not too much, not too little. The Goldilocks of headlocks. My eyes were beginning to bulge, inky spots dancing in my field of vision.
I knocked my fists against the arms that held me in a vise, tapping out.
As soon as I submitted, the pressure released and I slumped out of the headlock like toothpaste flopping off a brush, half-expecting my body to land with a similar splat as I collapsed sideways onto the lurid blue spring floor of the training room. I lay there in a fetal position, panting hard. I had three-months’ worth of bruises that could not even be soothed by the industrial-strength bath salts my mom had sent. Everything ached. The continued training had layered more strokes of mottled purple and blush atop the yellow remnants of my last battering.
“Getting better there, lass! Not so soon to tap out this time.” Marcel McCarthy stood and bowed at my defeat, and I tipped my head in return. I could hardly manage that, the blood still trying to find its way back into my skull.
“Thanks for… humoring me,” I croaked.
As instructors went, Marcel had fast become one of my favorites, despite the fact that I left his classes completely exhausted. The pain and fatigue were relentless, as Marcel’s martial-arts training was held three days per week, providing insufficient time to recuperate from the repetitive defeat. Fortunately, the Institute gods had been gracious enough to slot the class into the last period of the day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so I could immediately rush to my room and grimace under a shower. The hot water was my best effort to preemptively unknot all of the bodily cricks I’d have in the morning. Even Teddy, lord of the biceps and perpetual hogger of the gym’s weight machines, struggled under the strain of Marcel’s sessions.
Marcel snorted. “Nae humoring about it, lass. If you can’t beat ‘em, at least you can stay conscious.”
As the scholar of Martial Arts, Marcel was something of a walking paradox. Before we’d started these sessions, I’d expected to see some willowy, balletic guy who moved with the stealth of a tiger and had limbs that flowed like water. Instead, we’d been met by this brutish bouncer of a Scotsman. He weighed 250 pounds, easy, with a perfectly oiled ginger mustache that curved up like Salvador Dalí’s, and not so much as a memory of hair on his shiny bald head. And yet, he moved as gracefully as a gymnast, able to flip and somersault his hefty weight through the air as though he weighed nothing at all—though the aftershocks when he landed still rattled my teeth. That was the beauty of Marcel: he could’ve used his beastly force to floor anyone, but he didn’t. He preferred technique over muscle, style over brawling. He never let anyone leave the room feeling desolate, even if he did dole out penalties for those loitering at the bottom of the class… and I was usually one of them.
“Up you get, lass.” Marcel offered his hand and hauled me up so fast I almost got whiplash. “Right, then, since everyone else is licking their wounds, I’d say there’s only one of yez left. And dinnae forget, the quickest to yield gets the joy of sweeping the dojo. Currently, that’s—”
I lifted a limp hand. “Me. I know.” I glanced around the dojo as I caught my breath, well aware of how much of a pain it’d be to clean. This wasn’t my first rodeo. The dojo itself was a large studio of sorts, with high-beamed ceilings and paneled walls of pale wood and white canvas, as well as sliding partitions that could be drawn for small group practice. Green and red dragons coiled along the beams, adding a hint of the Far East, where most of our fighting styles hailed from. It was clean and minimalistic, aside from the bright blue spring floor, which had been installed to take the edge off harder landings.
“Ah, dinnae be so glib about it. One of these days, someone else’ll be at the bottom of the pile.” Something of a backhanded compliment, but he had a manner of delivery that made you believe the compliment part, no matter how impossible it seemed. Maybe, one day, I would scrape up to second-last. “So, who’s up?” Marcel asked.
Genie bounded into the center of the floor before I’d even vacated it. “I reckon I can take you, McCarthy.” (She wasn’t being rude—he’d asked us to leave out the honorifics of ‘Scholar McCarthy’ or ‘Sir,’ to bring a bit of equality to our training sessions. Marcel or McCarthy were fine by him.)
Marcel laughed with the entirety of his barrel chest. “Aye, the wee firecracker. I was wondering when you’d muster the plums after you botched that somersault on Wednesday. I thought you’d be in the Infirmary, seeing stars for a week.” He grinned mischievously. “Though I’ve got to say, you’d have had me if you’d not conked your bonce six ways to Sunday.”
“No clue what you just said,” Genie retorted. There was laughter from the rest of the ten-strong class. Since finding the Door to Nowhere and rescuing our fellow hunters, we’d earned our classmates’ respect, and they ours: Teddy Isherwood, Suranne Redmond and Gem Phillips (formerly the Ponytails), Colette Requin, Ayperi Khoury, Adrian Gunn, Pia Sund, and Dauda Jalloh.
It had been a lengthy road to reach this level of friendliness, especially for Genie. She hadn’t forgotten the way things had started, and she hadn’t let them forget their initial behavior, either. But she’d taken it upon herself to educate them instead of ignoring them, and she’d given them plenty of food for thought. Like when she earned the top ranking during our Arena sessions and they used to quip, “Well, you only won because you’ve got all that Atlantean juice in your veins.” They didn’t necessarily think they were saying anything wrong, but she’d called them out on the comment and explained the way it made her feel—as though she had no right to win, or that she’d somehow cheated because of what she was—and forced them to unpick the nuances in what they’d said and understand why it was more of a slur than they realized. Or when older students or graduates made a sly comment about her, or Atlantis, and our classmates stayed silent. She asked them, outright, why they hadn’t spoken up, and made them see that silence was almost as bad as hurling an insult. Slowly but surely, they’d realized the error of their ways and had begun to unlearn the judgments that had been instilled in them since birth. After apologies, the reading of Genie’s suggested texts, and vows to be better (plus, proving that they meant it by creating a no-tolerance policy of any anti-Atlantean sentiments), a truce had finally been struck. It was a good start.
“Aye, well, you should count your lucky stars—all them ones that were swimming round your noggin last time we met in combat—that I didnae come from Glasgow, else you’d still be figuring out what I was saying after I’d already wiped the floor with you.” He maneuvered into position, stepping behind a line of white duct tape at the far side of the room while Genie emulated him on the nearside, closest to where the class was watching from a safe distance.
It had been three months since our martial-arts training began, but six months had somehow raced by since the Door to Nowhere incident. Our classes changed up with every season, and as spring had turned into summer, we’d had two new classes piled on top of the old ones. Our schedules were now fit to burst. Five days a week, from eight in the morning until eight at night, we sprinted from one two-hour lesson to the next. We had half-hour breaks in the mornings and afternoons for studying, and a half-hour for lunch—or a trip to the Infirmary, depending on how the day had gone. And once the day was over, we usually had a stack of homework to plough through: essays, notes-studying, preparing for the next day’s sessions, that sort of thing. Most people tried to get some of that done in our study breaks, but not me.