Page 7 of Takedown

"Fuck it," I said. "Again."

By the end we were both bleeding a little — his elbow, my cheekbone — and soaked through, and the room had that sound I love more than music, forty guys breathing like surf. Halloran called it. We broke. And we stood there one second past the whistle, hands on knees, watching each other the way you watch weather coming over a ridge.

"Your double's a war crime," he said. First words since the mop schedule. Even his insults came out expensive.

"Your single's got a tell."

It landed. I watched him bank it — furious and grateful in the same blink — because underneath everything he was a wrestler before he was a Whitfield.

That was the first thing I ever liked about him. Took me a long time to admit there was a list.

He put his hand out again. Ceremony. I took it. His grip was a fact I felt in my back teeth.

"Every practice," he said, like a diagnosis. "All season."

"All season."

Neither of us let go for one second past correct.

In the locker room after, Miles dropped onto the bench next to me, towel around his neck, vibrating with the joy of a man who has just watched free entertainment. "So on a scale of one to ten," he said, "how much do you hate him?"

"Eleven."

"Yeah." He grinned at me like I'd said something else entirely. "That's what I figured."

"For the record," he went on, not moving off the bench, towel around his neck, apparently prepared to conduct the interview for as long as the hot water held out, "the last guy who wrestled Whit like he owed him money was a transfer who lasted one semester and cried in the sauna twice. You don't look like a sauna crier."

"I sweat efficiently."

"See — that." He pointed at me, delighted, like I'd confirmed a hypothesis he'd staked money on. "That is exactly the kind of thing a person says right before I decide I'm keeping him. Doc. Doc. You hearing this? New guy sweats efficiently."

"I'm reading," said the big calm one at 141, not looking up, page turning. "I hear everything. It's a curse."

"He hears everything, it's a curse," Miles confirmed, to me, as though translating a foreign delegation. "Aleks doesn't hear anything, he just knows. Reyes hears everything and files the report with nobody. Kirby hears things that haven't been said yet. Welcome to the switchboard, Kovac — you'll get used to it or you'll leave, and I'll tell you now, nobody's ever left." He said the last part like it was a joke and it landed like it wasn't, and then he was up and gone, hollering down the row about somebody's missing flip-flops as though a war had started.

I sat there with my cheekbone singing and thought, against my own advice, against the entire eleven-hour bus ride's worth of resolutions: goddamn it. I could get attached to these idiots. Which was the second dangerous thought I'd had in one afternoon, in a building I'd walked into that morning owning nothing but a plan to stay untouchable inside it.

I walked home telling myself the oldest lie in the building — it's the season, everyone's strung tight — and behind me in the empty room, Aleks drilled on through the dark, alone, and the Ledger sat open by the door with all its dead men watching, and up the hill the palace glowed, not knowing what it had let into the basement.

Eleven weeks to the wrestle-off.

That night I just knew one thing. I couldn't feel my own pulse anymore without feeling his grip inside it.

Chapter 4 — GRAYSON

Tuesday night, eleven p.m., the Pit, alone, half the lights on — and I'd been hitting the same takedown against the wall dummy for two hours because a steel-town scholarship case looked at me across a whistle and said your single's got a tell.

Flat. No charity in it. A scouting report from an enemy.

My best takedown. The one I'd thrown since I was twelve — drop under a man's hands, take his leg before he knows the exchange has started — and this boy watched it twice and found the flaw that every private coach my father ever hired was too well paid to mention: my lead hand dipped half an inch before I shot. A warning. A knock before entering.

Hour one, I was furious. Genuinely, expensively furious — I broke a wall clock with a tennis ball and paid facilities in cash.

Hour two, I killed the knock.

Friday practice, I got to find out if it stayed dead. We circled. His hands came up — work-scarred, tape gone grey — and his eyes were on my hands, because I'd taught them to be. Which was the trap.

I went without the knock.