It didn’t take much. She kept pulling on the right fist until the arm hyperextended, and then she twisted her knees. It was just the gentlest motion. The snap wasn’t even properly audible. And he had turned off the arm—he didn’t howl, didn’t cry, didn’t throw up, just stood and spat on her.
“I’m gonna sue the shit out of you,” Angel told the boy. The boy said nothing. He just kept watching the scene play out. “Fuck you both,” Angel added, turning to Hwa. “Especially you, freak. Watch your back. Karma’s a bigger bitch than you are.”
He stalked away. Hwa watched him the whole time, and let her breath out when he was gone.
The boy held out a hand. Hwa could stand on her own, but she took it anyway. “Wow,” he said. “Weren’t you scared?”
“Not really. He’s just an asshole. Were you scared?”
He shook his head. “I don’t get scared, really. Not anymore. They fixed that part of me.”
Hwa snorted. She thought of the man in the shark cage outside Mistress Séverine’s studio. She decided that telling the kid about him would mean explaining too much. “Right. Well. That part of me is still broken. And I like it that way, because fear is useful. Fear tells us when to run. And running is what stops a fight before it starts. You want to defend yourself, you have to learn that, first.”
His head tilted. “So you still get scared?”
“Sometimes.” Hwa looked the kid over. A nice welt was already building on his shoulder. Angel had knocked him down but good. “But I have a trick for being scared.”
The kid brightened. “What’s the trick?”
“I imagine the master control room.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a rumour my brother—my half-brother—heard once. About a room that controls the entire city. Water, power, cameras, the whole thing. We spent a whole summer looking for it. So when I’m scared, I pretend I’m there. In control of things.”
The boy seemed to consider the possibility. He nodded. “That sounds like it could exist. Did you ever find it?”
“No, but we found other cool places. A whole abandoned floor. A secret way into an elevator shaft. Stuff like that.” Hwa rolled her neck until it popped. “Who hired that guy?”
“My dad. Sort of.”
“Your dad doesn’t know much about this town, eh?”
The kid’s smile broadened. “Not really. We’re new.” He pointed at himself. “My name’s Joel Lynch.”
Behind her, Hwa heard the gym door creak open. She knew who would be standing there before she turned around. She wasn’t quite sure how, but she knew.
“Oh, hi, Daniel,” Joel Lynch said. “This is, um … I don’t know her name.”
“Go Jung-hwa,” Daniel Síofra said. He sounded like he’d rehearsed the Korean pronunciation.
“Just Hwa,” she said. “My full name was too much for the kindergarten teacher.”
“She broke that guy’s arm,” Joel said. “She says he’s an asshole.”
A smile touched Síofra’s eyes but not his mouth. “Does she? What a shame. I suppose you’ll need a new self-defence teacher. And a new bodyguard, as well.”
Hwa looked at her class, standing outside the door. She glanced at the studio, and the kid standing expectantly under the cold lights. “You should spray down those mats on the floor and put them away, since you’re done here,” she said, nodding at the rack of crash pads and mats on the opposite wall. He got right to work.
“You must really want me for this job,” she said, when the kid was out of earshot. “Changing the gym schedule around like that, on such short notice. Just so I’d come here and see all this. It’s pretty manipulative, if you ask me.”
“I prefer to think of it as enterprising,” Síofra said. “Creative. Strategic. That’s the Lynch way.”
She watched the kid awkwardly move mats from one corner of the room to the other.
“You change the moods of cities?”
“It’s in the job description. Much of it is urban planning and design. But some of it is also communications. Optics.”
“Seems a long way off from personal security.”
“Hiring you, and not a skullcap or someone like Mr. Ramirez, sets a tone. I’m in charge of that tone.”
“So it’s just good PR.” Now she was certain he’d never seen her true face.
“It’s establishing a relationship. Between the company and the city. We promised to bring better jobs. This is one of them.”
He had an answer for everything. Hwa watched the infinite reflection of the two of them in the mirrors on either side of the studio. Every version of him looked wrong for the place, his gleaming blue silk suit too soft and too pretty for all the sweat and blood the cork floors had soaked up over the years. She gestured at the bare bones of the space, and a thousand of her made the same movement. “You couldn’t just have the bots in HR send me a nice note telling me all this? You had to come all this way yourself?”
“The company prefers us to follow up with prospects on a personal level. We’re a large corporation, but not a faceless one.”
Hwa didn’t believe that for a second. “And what if I still say no? What will you do next?”
He smiled. “I’ll find something you want, and give it to you.”