10:23 AM | Training Room
The room was too big and too cold and smelled like old wood and somebody else's effort.
Hardwood floors that would have been impressive under normal lighting, all rich grain and careful polish, looked faintly sinister under the emergency LEDs, which cast everything in the particular amber of a building running on spite instead of mains power. The mirrored walls threw the space back at itself infinitely, reflections receding into reflections until the room appeared to contain several additional training rooms that Adrian had no interest in visiting.
Equipment lined the perimeter: weights, heavy bags, mats stacked in the corner, and then a section along the far wall that Adrian had mentally categorised as things I'm not asking about and moved on from.
Some of that equipment looked like it had been designed by someone who'd decided restraint was a suggestion.
Aveline stood in the centre with her arms crossed and her posture doing its usual impression of a very expensive spirit level. She looked at Yuki the way you look at a project you've been assigned and are choosing to approach professionally.
"Yuki. Front and centre."
Yuki stepped forward. She was trying to look calm and mostly succeeding, except for her hands, which had not received the memo and were doing a quiet, restless thing at her sides, touching her own fingers, adjusting her sleeve, the small unconscious fidgeting of a nervous system that had a lot of feelings about the current situation and nowhere constructive to put them.
She's scared, Adrian noted from his position against the wall where he had placed himself with considerable strategic intention. She's scared and she's not going to say so because Aveline is right there looking like she personally invented the concept of composure.
"We covered fundamentals previously," Aveline said, her voice flattening in that way it did in here, the voice of someone transmitting information rather than having a conversation. "Grip. Stance. Basic defensive positioning. Today we move to practical application."
She walked to the equipment locker. Every movement she made in here was economical in a way that made your own body's general wastefulness feel quietly highlighted. She pulled out two training knives.
One rubber pale, almost flesh-colored, the surface slightly tacky under fluorescent light. The kind of rubber that was designed to feel wrong in your hand, designed to remind you it wasn't real even as it moved like it was.
One wooden — darker, heavier-looking. The wood was dense, oiled until it gleamed. Real weight in it. Real consequence. Both were weighted correctly, balanced like actual blades, both entirely convincing as objects that could significantly ruin your day if someone knew what they were doing.
She handed the rubber one to Yuki without ceremony. The transfer was quick, no buildup, just: here.
The rubber was warm from Aveline's hand. Yuki noticed that immediately — the heat of it surprising against her palm.
"Show me what you remember."
Yuki took it. Adjusted her grip, thumb along the handle, wrist straight, not strangling it, and settled into a defensive stance. Feet shoulder-width. Knees soft. Knife at mid-level. The careful posture of someone concentrating very hard on standing exactly as they'd been told.
Actually not bad.
Aveline circled her.
Slowly. With the unhurried patience of something that doesn't need to rush. There was a quality to that circling, the assessment in it, the calm calculation, that made Adrian's shoulders tighten in sympathy. Being on the receiving end of Aveline's full attention was not a comfortable experience. He knew this personally and recently.
"Adequate foundation. Grip pressure is right. Stance is stable, but you're loading your back foot—your forward movement will be half a beat slow." She stopped directly in front of Yuki. "Attack me."
Yuki blinked. "Sorry?"
"Attack. Simulate hostile engagement."
"I don't want to hurt you."
Aveline's expression did not shift in any direction that could be read as reassuring. "You won't."
She says that, Adrian noted internally, with the absolute serenity of someone who has never once had to consider that as a real possibility.
"Attack," Aveline said again. No impatience. No urgency. Just the flat certainty of someone who had already decided how this sentence ended and was waiting for the rest of the conversation to catch up.
Yuki lunged.
She committed to it, knife driving forward, body behind it, genuine effort, and it was a real attempt. The kind of attack that would have landed on anyone who wasn't—
Aveline sidestepped. Two inches, maybe three, with the unhurried ease of someone stepping around a puddle they'd spotted from a distance. She tapped Yuki's extended wrist with two fingers as she went past.
Yuki's momentum carried her forward into empty space.
"Dead. Wrist exposed on the extension. I disarm or counter-strike. Your choice becomes my options." She reset to neutral. Just a woman standing in a room. "Again."
Yuki went again. Faster. More committed.
Aveline deflected with one hand, swept Yuki's leading leg, and Yuki stumbled two steps sideways.
"Dead. Your balance belongs to whoever takes it." A pause that lasted exactly as long as it needed to. "Again."
Again, Adrian thought.
And again. And again. The word dropped into the room like a metronome, regular, relentless, no warmth in it but no cruelty either. Just the mechanical patience of someone who understood that repetition was the only technology that actually worked and had made her peace with that a long time ago.
Yuki attacked. Aveline countered with whatever minimum response the situation required—a deflection, a redirect, a sweep, occasionally just a step. Nothing wasted. Nothing excessive. Named the error. Reset.
Attack. Counter. Name it. Reset.
The room filled with the sound of Yuki's feet on hardwood, her breathing getting shorter and harder with each round, the rubber knife connecting with nothing but air, and Aveline's voice arriving every few seconds like a door closing.
Dead.
Dead.
Still dead.
Yuki's jaw was doing something tight and complicated by the fourth round. The flush on her face had graduated from exertion to the specific shade of someone who is frustrated and embarrassed and going to keep going anyway because stopping would be worse. She wasn't quitting. Adrian clocked that and filed it somewhere that felt like it mattered.
She's not quitting.
But she was also getting better, which was the part Aveline didn't comment on and Adrian watched with the quiet satisfaction of noticing something before it was announced. Her movements got cleaner, less setup, less of the I am about to attack you that beginners broadcast two seconds before they move. Better balance. Attacks that required fractionally more of Aveline's attention to address.
Fifteen minutes in, Yuki's rubber knife caught Aveline's shoulder. A glancing touch, there and gone, real.
Aveline stopped.
Looked at her shoulder. At the spot where rubber had made contact.
"Better."
Two syllables. Flat. Factual. Not great job, not well done, not any of the words a normal person would reach for. Just the bare acknowledgment that improvement had occurred and she had registered it.
Yuki beamed like she'd won something significant.
She kind of has, Adrian thought, watching it take over her whole face.
By Aveline's metrics, that's a standing ovation.
11:07 AM
"Your learning curve is steeper than I expected," Aveline said, stepping back. She said it the way you'd note an interesting structural detail. Factual. "You retain movement patterns well. Better than most untrained people."
Yuki was still catching her breath, hands on her knees, hair coming loose. "Thanks."
"It's an observation."
"I know. Still taking it."
Something happened at the corner of Aveline's mouth. The very first movement of a smile, caught itself, reconsidered, declined to fully commit.
Close, Adrian noted.
That was almost a human thing.
"Continue repetition. Practice builds muscle memory, not thinking about it." She turned to Adrian with the smooth efficiency of someone closing one tab and opening another. "Defensive grappling. Teach her basic holds, wrist control, breaks and counters. I'll observe."
Adrian pushed off the wall, rolled his neck, which produced a sound that probably indicated something he didn't want diagnosed, and walked over. He and Yuki worked through it: wrist grabs, arm bars, simple escapes, the foundational vocabulary of what to do when someone has decided to use your body against you and you have opinions about that. Aveline watched with her analytical eyes tracking every movement, stepping in occasionally to adjust form with brief, impersonal touches, repositioning an elbow, correcting a foot angle, and then stepping back without comment, the way you'd adjust a machine and move on.
Time moved differently in here.
The cold was still present, the mansion's structural, ambient cold that lived in the walls and didn't leave, but the physical work pushed it to the edges. The fireplace in the adjacent room contributed something warm through the open archway. The emergency lighting had stopped feeling sinister and started feeling normal, which was probably its own concerning development.
Normal, Adrian thought, watching Yuki work through a wrist escape for the fourth time.
This feels almost normal.
We are trapped in a blizzard with a woman who shot me in the face approximately twelve hours ago and is now correcting Yuki's elbow angle, and this feels almost normal.
I need a therapist. Several therapists. A therapist and a strong drink and possibly a career in something that doesn't involve any of this.
12:34 PM | The Shift
The water break arrived the way good things do in bad situations, quietly, without ceremony, almost suspiciously welcome. Aveline produced bottles from somewhere, distributed them with the brisk efficiency of a quartermaster, and said nothing else.
Yuki slid down the mirrored wall until she was sitting against it, rolling her shoulders, face flushed. The particular satisfied exhaustion of someone who has spent two hours being repeatedly killed in training and has come out the other side of it feeling, improbably, okay.
"You're a good teacher," she said to Aveline.
It came out like a confession. Like she'd surprised herself with it.
"Thank you." Aveline said hesitantly, like an AI model learning a new word for the first time and then learning how to actually use it.
Adrian stared at the ceiling.
Yuki laughed. Small and genuine, the kind that escapes before you decide to let it, warm in the specific way warm things are warmer when the room has been cold. The sound of it filled the space and stayed there for a moment.
Something shifted in Aveline's expression. Barely. A fractional loosening around the eyes, some microscopic adjustment of the mouth's set. Not a smile. The ghost of something that had considered being a smile and remained ambiguous.
She's in there, Adrian thought, watching.
Whatever she actually is, something's in there.
Yuki was watching too, the careful sideways attention of someone trying to map something that kept moving. Always watching. Trying to find the join between the woman correcting her elbow angle and the woman whose eyes had done that thing when she'd killed. Trying to decide if they were the same person or two people sharing a body and taking shifts.
Maybe both, Adrian thought.
Maybe that's the answer and it's worse than either option alone.
Yuki stood, rolled her neck, picked up the training knife with the easy confidence of someone who'd spent two hours getting comfortable with the weight of it. Turned it once in her hand, natural, unthinking. The rubber was warm again — still holding body heat from being gripped so many times.
"I think I'm getting the hang of this," she said. Pride in it. New, earned, not apologising for itself.
"Competence is developing," Aveline said. High praise. Standing ovation.
Yuki's grin widened. Just slightly. The way it does when you've been doing well and the small, stupid, very human part of you decides to test how far that extends.
"Maybe," she said, and the grin had an edge to it now, testing, curious, the grin of someone poking a thing to see what it does, "maybe I could actually take you down."
Silence.
Adrian's water bottle stopped moving.
The quality of the silence changed.
Aveline's head tilted.
Slowly. The precise, deliberate angle of something that has registered unexpected movement and is deciding what to do with that information.
Her eyes settled on Yuki, and the room's temperature dropped in the specific way that has nothing to do with actual degrees, the way a room gets colder when the attention of something dangerous swings toward you and your body knows it before your brain has finished the sentence.
"You sure about that?"
Oh, Yuki. You were doing so well.
The warmth of the last thirty minutes, the water bottles, the laugh, the almost-smile, didn't drain from the room. It evaporated. Gone between one second and the next, like it had been on loan and the loan had just been called in.
Yuki's grin faltered at the edges. Not much. But she'd committed now, and backing down would cost more than pushing forward, and some part of her had already straightened her spine about it.
"I mean, I landed a hit earlier. I've been doing pretty well. Maybe I—"
"You landed a hit," Aveline said, "because I let you."
The sentence arrived quietly and landed like something dropped from height.
"What?"
"Every attack you've made today, I calculated before you finished the setup. Every opening you exploited, I created it. You've been operating inside a controlled simulation." She stepped forward slightly. "Not combat."
The words arrived one at a time.
Yuki's face cycled through several things in quick succession, embarrassment first, the hot immediate flush of it, and then anger, and underneath both of those something quieter and worse: the hollow feeling of realising the ground you thought you were standing on wasn't ground.
"So I haven't actually improved—"
"You've improved significantly." No softening. Just fact, delivered at the same temperature as everything else. "Baseline was zero. You're marginally functional now. That's measurable progress." A pause. "Against untrained people? You'd have a chance. Against me? Still helpless."
Yuki's jaw set.
"Prove it."
Adrian straightened. "Aveline—"
Her hand came up. Palm out, in his direction, without her eyes moving from Yuki. The hand that said I have received your input and I am not incorporating it at this time.
He stopped.
She needs to see it, part of him recognised, the part that had watched Yuki's careful observation of Aveline all morning. Hearing it isn't the same. She needs to know what she's actually dealing with.
The other part thought: this is going to be horrible to watch.
Both parts were correct.
Aveline looked at Yuki for a long moment with those pale, assessing eyes. Then she walked to the equipment locker.
Pulled out a wooden training knife. The wood was dark, dense, weighted like the real thing. Properly weighted. Edges that weren't sharp but could cause real damage with sufficient conviction and time. The kind of thing that would leave bruises. The kind of thing that would teach lessons.
She handed it to Yuki without ceremony.
The wooden knife was heavier than the rubber one. Yuki felt it immediately the difference in mass, in solidity. It felt real in a way the rubber never had. It felt like something that could do harm.
"You'll use this."
Yuki took it, adrenaline already climbing. Her hand wrapped around the grip — the wood slightly worn, smooth from use. "What are you using?"
Aveline reached into her jacket pocket.
Produced a black marker.
Held it up between two fingers.
Pop.
The sound of uncapping it was sharp in the quiet gym. Just a small sound, but it landed like a statement.
"This."
Adrian opened his mouth.
"She has a weapon," Aveline said, before he'd decided what to put in it. She held up the marker with the serene reasonableness of someone explaining something perfectly logical. The cap was still in her other hand — a small black cylinder. "I have a pen. Full-contact sparring. Every mark I make represents a lethal strike. Throat, heart, femoral, subclavian. She lands the knife, it counts. Real damage."
Yuki stared at the marker. Then at the wooden knife in her hand, which suddenly felt very heavy. Very real. The weight of it shifted from training tool to actual weapon in the span of a second.
"That's not fair. I could actually hurt you with this."
"Correct. Which means if you land a hit, it's valid." Aveline's expression was closed and flat and entirely without performance. "But you won't."
"Why a marker?" Adrian asked, the thing that had been nagging at him finally surfacing. "You have training knives. Rubber ones, wooden ones. Why not use one of those?"
Aveline paused.
Just a fraction of a second. The pause of something asked a question from an angle it didn't expect.
Something crossed her face, too fast to name, there and gone, the reflection on water after a stone's been thrown.
"I hold something sharp, I don't guarantee restraint," she said flatly. "Muscle memory takes over. Can't guarantee I'd hold back."
She doesn't trust herself, Adrian thought.
With anything that has an edge, even a fake one, she doesn't trust what her hands would do.
He looked at the marker, held loosely in her fingers. The deliberate looseness of it. The specific, careful way of holding something she'd decided to be gentle about. Like if she held it too tight, something might break.
Yuki had gotten there too. He could see it on her face.
"You're being careful with me," Yuki said quietly. Not a challenge. Just naming it.
Aveline looked at her for a moment.
Said nothing.
Which was, Adrian had learned, its own kind of answer.
She shifted into a ready stance. The comfortable, fluid readiness of someone who stopped having to think about it years ago, weight balanced, nothing wasted, utterly and terrifyingly at ease. The marker was still in her hand — just a writing instrument, just ink and plastic, looking absurdly small against her form.
"Whenever you're ready."
Yuki's knuckles were white around the wooden knife.
Adrian stepped back. Gave them the room.
I should stop this, he thought, and stayed where he was.
She needs this, he thought, and hated that he was right.
So he stood against the wall and waited for the lesson to arrive in the language that actually stuck.
12:37 PM | The Demonstration
Stay balanced, Yuki thought, moving left, knife up. Don't overextend. Watch her centre mass, not her eyes, eyes lie, bodies don't.
Aveline stood across from her with the marker held loosely, like a cigarette. Like something that didn't matter.
Just waiting. Like she had all the time in the world. Like Yuki with a knife was a situation that would sort itself out eventually if you gave it a moment.
One hit, Yuki thought. Just one. Just prove—
She lunged. Everything she had. The knife driving forward toward centre mass, committed, no hesitation.
Aveline moved.