Manny had a rule about the week before a major fight.
He had never stated it directly. Rof had learned it the way he learned most things from Manny by watching the man operate and extracting the principle from the behavior. The rule was this: the week before a fight was not for building. It was for clarifying. Everything that needed to be built had been built. The week before was for finding out which parts of the structure were solid and which parts only looked solid, and reinforcing the ones that needed it before the fight revealed them to someone else first.
Manny had never said this out loud.
But Rof understood it now.
He was in the ring at six forty-three when Manny arrived. Not hitting anything. Just moving. Footwork only. The particular lateral movement Manny had drilled into him across eight weeks until it stopped being something he did and became something he was. Left, right, pivot, reset. Left, right, pivot, reset. The same way a man breathes without deciding to.
Manny came down the stairs, saw him, and did not say anything. He set his bag against the wall and wrapped his hands and watched.
For twelve minutes he just watched.
Rof moved and did not think about moving. That was the point. The moment you thought about the footwork it became mechanical. It became a thing performed rather than a thing inhabited. Manny had spent eight weeks trying to get him to the place where the body knew without the mind interfering and this morning Rof could feel that he was close to that place. Not there yet. Close.
Manny picked up the wooden stick.
He stepped into the ring.
He did not explain what they were doing. He never did. He tapped the stick against his own palm twice a sound like a clock and Rof raised his guard and they began.
Not sparring. Not combinations. Manny moved around him slowly, tapping the stick against whatever opened. The guard dropped two inches tap. The right elbow drifted tap. The left foot telegraphed a shift tap. Each tap was not punishment. It was information. Precise and immediate and impossible to argue with.
For forty minutes they did this.
By the end Rof's guard had not dropped once in seven minutes.
Manny lowered the stick.
He looked at Rof for a moment.
"The guard is not your problem," he said.
Rof waited.
"Your problem is here." Manny tapped his own temple with two fingers. "Not technique. Not physical. The moment Brynn Cole says the first thing. The moment it lands. There will be a half second where everything you have built wants to respond to it." He held Rof's gaze. "That half second is where he lives. That is his ring. Not the canvas. That half second."
Rof said nothing.
"What do you do in that half second," Manny said.
Rof thought about it.
Not the way a clever man thought about it. Straight through the middle of it.
"Nothing," Rof said.
Manny looked at him.
"Nothing," Rof repeated. "Not suppress it. Not answer it. Not even decide not to answer it. Just nothing. Let it pass through."
Manny was quiet for a moment.
He looked at the canvas beneath their feet. Old and discolored and marked by thirty years of serious things. Then he looked back at Rof.
"Yes," he said. Simply. The way he confirmed things that did not need elaboration.
He stepped out of the ring.
Rof stood in the center of the canvas alone for a moment. He looked at the ropes. At the particular sag of them at the corners. At the single bulb above that flickered slightly every four minutes with the reliability of something that had been flickering for years and intended to continue.
He thought about Brynn Cole.
Not about fighting him. About the man himself. The school photograph with the serious face and the very still eyes. Eight years of military. A commanding officer named Harlan who had found him before Rael did and told him what he was. A man who had made peace with his ability in a way that made him more dangerous than any of the others.
He thought about what it meant to make peace with what you were.
He thought about the white room. The photographs his father had found. Three visits. Three different days. A smiling boy with a gap-toothed grin sitting in a chair in a room with stark white walls, unaware of what was being done to him, unaware that nineteen years later he would be standing in a ring trying to undo the consequences of that smile.
He put his hand on the rope.
The rope was rough and slightly damp from use. Real and present and here.
He stepped out of the ring.
Silas arrived at eight.
He came down the stairs in his usual plain clothes, his usual unhurried pace. He looked at the ring and then at Manny and then at Rof. He had his water bottle and his hand wraps and the particular self-contained readiness he brought everywhere.
Manny looked at him.
Silas looked at Manny.
A moment passed between them. The first moment they had shared the same space. Two men encountering each other for the first time in the context of what they actually were rather than what they had been performing.
Manny extended his hand.
Silas shook it.
That was all.
They got to work.
The session was different with Silas present. Not because Silas was there to spar — Manny had not set it up that way. Silas was there to watch. To run his system against what Rof was doing and identify the gaps. Not maliciously. Precisely. Because Silas's ability at this proximity and this level of focus was the closest thing they had to a simulation of what Brynn Cole would see in the ring.
For ninety minutes Silas watched Rof work.
He did not speak during it. He sat on the stool at ringside with his water bottle and his hands loose in his lap and he watched with the particular attention that was his alone the attention of a man for whom watching was indistinguishable from calculation.
When Manny finally called a stop Silas stood and came to the ring apron.
Rof leaned against the ropes.
Silas looked at him for a long moment.
"Three things," Silas said.
Rof waited.
"When you're hit cleanly your left hand drops before you reset. Not far. Two inches. For approximately one point four seconds." He held up one finger. "Brynn will see it in round one and use it in round three when it matters most. He is patient that way. He collects information early and deploys it late."
Rof nodded.
"When you're thinking about something outside the ring your jaw shifts slightly right." Two fingers. "I have seen it three times this morning. I don't know what you're thinking about but Brynn will identify it as an intrusion and he will try to amplify it." He paused. "Don't bring anything into that ring that you can't afford to have amplified."
Rof looked at him.
"And third," Silas said. He lowered his hand. He was quiet for a moment. The quality of the quiet was different from the first two. "Your strongest moments this morning were the moments you stopped being Rof Leon and became only what was happening. Pure present. No history. No future. No name." He held Rof's gaze. "Those moments are invisible to Brynn's ability. He reads motivation and memory and identity. He cannot read a man who has temporarily set all three of those things down." He paused. "You did it four times. Each time lasted between eight and twenty seconds. In a three round fight you need to be able to hold it longer."
Manny was listening from the far corner. He said nothing.
Rof stood in the ring and absorbed the three things.
"How do I hold it longer," Rof said.
Silas looked at him.
"I don't know," Silas said. "My system does not generate that answer. It is not a pattern problem." He paused. "It is a faith problem."
The word sat in the gym.
Silas had said it the way he said everything factually, without affect, as the most accurate available descriptor. Not as a religious statement. As a precise identification of what the thing was.
Manny smiled. Small and brief. He looked at the floor.
Rof looked at the cross outside his shirt. He had worn it outside during training this morning for the first time. He did not know when he had decided that. He had just found it outside his shirt when he was warming up and had not put it back under.
He put his hand on it.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
They trained for another hour.
At ten thirty Manny sent them both home.
At the door Silas paused on the stairs and looked back at Rof.
"Leon," he said.
Rof looked up.
"The jaw thing." Silas held his gaze. "Whatever you were thinking about this morning. The thing that was making it do that." He paused. "It's not a weakness. But Brynn will try to make you believe it is." He held the gaze one moment longer. "Don't let him name it before you do."
He went up the stairs.
Rof stood in the empty gym.
He knew what the jaw thing was.
He had known since Silas mentioned it. The moment outside Vera's door. The two words. The light from inside behind her and her hand on the frame and her hair down and the particular feeling of something that was not yet named because it was not ready yet and he had respected that.
He did not examine it now either.
He picked up his jacket. He found his cross and held it through the fabric for a moment and then went up the stairs and out into the Philadelphia morning.
He walked home slowly.
He stopped at the corner of Morris Street.
He looked at the store.
He went in and bought eggs again. He did not think about why. He just bought them and put them in a paper bag and walked home.
His father was on the porch.
He saw the bag.
He said nothing about it.
Rof went inside and made eggs and brought them out and they sat together in the morning sun and ate without talking and the city moved around them and ten days sat in the air between them like a weight they were both carrying and had agreed without discussion not to mention.
His father ate slowly.
His hands were steadier than they had been a month ago.
Rof noticed that. He did not say anything about it. He put it in the place where he kept the things that mattered and did not need to be spoken.
After a while his father said without looking up from his plate. "The girl."
Rof looked at him.
"Which one," Rof said.
His father looked at him.
It was a single look. The kind his father deployed sparingly and precisely. The look of a man who had known his son for twenty-four years and found the question slightly amusing and was not going to say so.
Rof looked at his eggs.
"Ten days," Rof said.
"I know," his father said.
They finished their eggs.
The sun moved.
Philadelphia breathed.
Ten days.