Two weeks out.
The reset was at 0.218.
Not 0.21 — Jin-ho had been precise about 0.21, the specificity of a man who had done the math rather than estimated it — but 0.218 was close enough that Vael had stopped thinking about the number and started thinking about the fight, which was either confidence or the specific freedom that arrived when preparation had gone as far as preparation could go and the rest belonged to the room and the man across it.
Raza said 0.218 was sufficient when Vael stopped thinking about the number.
Jin-ho said 0.21 was the target.
Vael said nothing and did twenty more reps.
Nadia called on Monday.
She asked for the gym rather than a phone call — the specific request of someone who had information that needed a room rather than a signal. She arrived at eleven, in the mid-morning quiet after the first session had finished and before the afternoon one started, and she sat at Raza's desk across from Raza with Vael on the bench and Jin-ho on the mat doing his ground transitions because Jin-ho didn't stop training because someone had arrived with news.
She opened her folder.
"Raymond Cho's Singapore operations," she said. "Three underground venues — Geylang, Tanjong Pagar, one in Jurong that moves location every six weeks. We've been watching all three for the past ten days." She turned a page. "He's been active. More active than usual. Payments moving between accounts we've flagged, personnel moving between KL and Singapore more frequently than the normal circuit pattern." She looked up. "He's preparing something."
"For the fight," Raza said.
"Around the fight," Nadia corrected. "The distinction matters. Cho isn't stupid enough to do anything inside Marcus Tan's venue — cameras, security, legitimate oversight, my Singapore liaison has eyes on every entrance. He knows that." She turned another page. "What concerns me is the forty-eight hours around the fight. Before and after. When you're not inside Tan's protected space."
"Where specifically," Vael said.
"Three points of exposure," she said. "Your hotel, the route between the hotel and venue, and the post-fight period when security is reduced and attention is scattered." She looked at Vael directly. "You personally are the exposure point. Not the fight itself. You outside the fight."
"Me as leverage against Mei Lin," Vael said.
Nadia held his gaze. "Yes. Or as a message to Mei Lin. There's a version of this where Cho doesn't need you physically — he just needs you hurt enough, publicly enough, that the message is clear." She paused. "I'm not telling you this to frighten you."
"I know," Vael said. "You're telling me because you prefer honest answers to comfortable ones."
Something moved in Nadia's expression — the brief unguarded thing he'd seen once before in her office when he'd asked about Encik Faiz. Recognition. That specific sentence had a home.
"Yes," she said quietly. "Exactly that."
She turned another page.
"I've made arrangements for the hotel," she said. "My Singapore liaison is handling it — security personnel, floor access, travel routes between the venue. The before and after are as covered as I can make them with the resources available." She paused. "The thing I can't cover is what I don't know Cho is planning. He moves fast, one hard move, and he hasn't made the move yet."
"He's waiting," Jin-ho said from the mat.
Everyone looked at him.
He'd stopped his ground transitions. Was sitting on the mat with his legs crossed, looking at Nadia with the flat comprehensive attention he usually reserved for fight footage.
"He's waiting to see if the fight gets confirmed," Jin-ho said. "Cho doesn't waste resources on events that don't happen. Until the official announcement from Tan's promotion, he doesn't fully commit the move." He paused. "When did Tan announce."
"Friday," Vael said.
"Then Cho has been committing since Friday," Jin-ho said. "Ten days of preparation. Whatever the move is, it's been running for ten days." He looked at Nadia. "What changed in your surveillance data ten days ago."
Nadia looked at him for a moment — the same recalibrating look Tan had given Vael in the gym, the look of someone adjusting their picture of who they were in a room with.
She looked back at the folder. Found a page.
"Personnel movement from KL to Singapore," she said. "Two individuals. Not fighters — logistical, administrative." She looked up. "One of them has been flagged before in connection with Victor's circuit. His name is—"
"Park Doo-shik," Jin-ho said.
Nadia looked at him.
"You know him," she said.
"From the circuit," Jin-ho said. "He's not administrative. That's what he looks like. He's a fixer. Victor used him for arrangements that needed to not exist on paper." He paused. "If Cho has sent Park Doo-shik to Singapore ten days ago, the move isn't about intimidation. It's about something specific that needs not to exist on paper."
The gym was very quiet.
Raza's pen had stopped moving.
Nadia looked at Jin-ho with an expression that was making a rapid decision.
"I need everything you know about Park Doo-shik," she said.
"I know enough," Jin-ho said. He stood. Crossed to the desk. Sat in the chair beside it — not across from Nadia, beside her, the position of someone who had decided they were on the same side of the table. "How long do you have."
"As long as it takes," Nadia said.
Raza looked at Vael.
Vael looked at Raza.
The silent conversation of two men who had just watched Jin-ho walk across a gym and sit beside a government investigator and begin sharing eight years of information that he'd been carrying alone, and who both understood simultaneously that this was the other thing the Singapore card had given him — not just the forward direction, but somewhere to put the weight of what he'd been carrying while he faced backward.
Raza picked up his pen.
Opened the notebook.
Looked at Vael.
"Training," he said. "Leave them to it."
They trained for two hours while Jin-ho talked to Nadia in the corner.
Not distracted training — the body had learned by now to carry two things simultaneously, the physical and the parallel, the session and the awareness. Pattern E into the Monsoon reset, the combination Raza had designed specifically for Mak's body shot trigger, the guard returning to reset-ready between each repetition without Vael consciously choosing it.
0.217.
The number arriving on the last repetition, timed on Raza's watch, not announced immediately — Raza wrote it in the notebook and closed the notebook and said: "Lunch."
"What's the time," Vael said.
"0.217." Raza looked at him. "And lunch."
Vael looked at the notebook. At the closed cover.
"Jin-ho said 0.21," he said.
"Jin-ho says a lot of things," Raza said. "He's usually right. He's also usually operating from a perfect model of a situation rather than a real one." He put the pen in his pocket. "In a real fight, against a real opponent, under real pressure, 0.217 and 0.21 are the same number." He paused. "The difference between them is eleven milliseconds. The difference between winning and losing is not eleven milliseconds. It's what you do with the window you have."
Vael looked at him.
"That sounds like something you've been saving," he said.
"I have been," Raza said. "For when the number stopped mattering and the fight started." He turned toward the door. "Now the fight has started. Leave the number here."
At one PM Jin-ho finished with Nadia.
She packed her folder. Stood. Looked at Jin-ho with the expression she'd used on Vael in her government office — the one that landed between professional gratitude and something more personal that she kept in a room with a locked door.
"This helps," she said. "Significantly."
"Good," Jin-ho said.
She looked at Raza. Then at Vael.
"Park Doo-shik is the move," she said. "Not the whole move — he arranges the conditions for the move. The actual move is something he sets up rather than executes himself." She paused. "Knowing he's there changes what I'm looking for. It narrows the field." She closed her folder. "I'll be in Singapore three days before the fight. My liaison will have eyes on Doo-shik from today."
She moved to the door.
Stopped.
Turned back.
She looked at the gym — at the bags, the mat, the mechanical timer, the clouded window, the plywood board with Mak's name on it and the columns of technical notes and awareness drills. She looked at it the way people sometimes looked at a room when they were committing it to memory.
"Encik Faiz loved this sport," she said. Quietly. Not to anyone specifically — to the room. "He used to say that fighting was the most honest thing two people could do. No politics. No performance. Just the truth of what you were made of." She paused. "He'd have liked this gym."
Nobody said anything.
Some sentences didn't need a response. They needed room, and the gym gave it.
She left.
Jin-ho sat on the bench for a while after.
Not his ground transitions, not the mitts, not any of the productive activity that filled every other minute he spent in this building. Just sitting. The specific sitting of a man who has given away something he'd been holding for a long time and is getting used to the lighter weight of the space it occupied.
Vael sat beside him.
Didn't speak.
Jin-ho looked at the door Nadia had walked through.
"Eight years," he said. "I knew things I thought didn't matter because the circuit wasn't the kind of place where information went anywhere useful." He paused. "It turns out useful places exist. I just hadn't been anywhere near one."
Vael looked at the door.
"You've been near one for a while," he said. "You just didn't know it yet."
Jin-ho considered that.
"The gym," he said.
"The gym," Vael said.
Jin-ho was quiet for a moment longer.
Then — unexpected, without announcement, there and gone in two seconds like a thing that had been waiting for years for the right conditions to surface — he smiled.
Not the almost. Not the controlled almost-smile Vael had catalogued twice before. The actual thing, small and genuine and clearly unfamiliar on a face that had kept it somewhere internal for most of twenty-nine years.
Two seconds.
Gone.
Jin-ho stood. Went back to the mat.
Started his ground transitions.
Vael sat on the bench and watched him and thought about what it meant that Jin-ho had smiled in the gym — this specific gym, on this specific afternoon, after giving away eight years of carefully carried weight to a detective who had needed it — and understood that some things bloomed slowly not because they were reluctant but because they needed exactly the right conditions and had been waiting patiently for those conditions to exist.
Some things, he thought, were worth waiting for.
Even when the waiting was the hardest part.
Especially when the waiting was the hardest part.
That evening he texted Mei Lin everything Nadia had found.
Then he called her because the text wasn't sufficient and some things needed a voice.
She listened. Asked three precise questions. Then was quiet for a moment.
"Park Doo-shik being the setup man rather than the move itself," she said. "That means we won't see the move until it's already in motion."
"Nadia knows what to look for now," he said.
"Yes." A pause. "It's still a faster timeline than I'd like."
"Two weeks," he said. "Then it's done."
"Two weeks," she said. "Then it's done." She was quiet again. "How's the reset."
"0.217," he said.
"Jin-ho said 0.21."
"Raza said 0.217 and 0.21 are the same number in a real fight."
A pause. He could hear her thinking — the specific quality of her silence when the strategic mind was running something.
"Raza is right," she said finally. "The difference between them is the kind of number that matters in theory and stops mattering the moment someone is actually trying to hurt you." She paused. "When did you two start disagreeing."
"We don't disagree," Vael said. "Jin-ho says 0.21. Raza says it doesn't matter. I say 0.217 and I'm done thinking about the number."
"And what does Faris say."
Vael looked at the ceiling fan.
"Faris says seventy-five percent and then goes back to the bag," he said.
She laughed.
The full laugh. Unmanaged. Three seconds.
"Faris," she said, "might be the wisest person in that gym."
Vael thought about that.
"Don't tell Raza," he said.
"Don't tell Jin-ho," she said.
He smiled at the ceiling.
Two weeks.
He could carry two weeks.
He had somewhere to stand.