She broke into a run, hearing her father—a step behind her—shout something she couldn’t make out. She got five long steps down the hall and the merc came around the corner, effortlessly grabbing her arm as she tried to run past, interposing her calf between Natalie’s running legs, pulling smoothly at the arm, throwing her down with a tooth-rattling thud. The floorboards were pale wood with dark grain, and underfloor heating made them feel alive. All she could see was that grain, stretching to the baseboards. She waited for her wind to come back.
She got to her knees, her feet—the merc didn’t interfere or offer help, stood with that same disinterested attention that let Natalie know she was watching but wasn’t feeling. Natalie steadied herself on the wall, looked at her father, on the far side of the merc. He looked furious, and she realized he was furious with the merc, not her, because the merc had deserted her post, maybe slipping out for a piss, thinking Natalie would be complacent while having a come-to-Jesus negotiation with her old man. The merc had fucked up in front of the big boss. Natalie tried to read her face for the oh-shit expression of waiters and hotel managers when her dad wasn’t happy with them. She was cool. Natalie couldn’t help but admire her. It was twisted, but she felt solidarity with anyone her father planned on destroying.
“No tough-guys on the payroll, huh?” She spun on her heel to walk out of the house. It was stupid, but why not? The woman grabbed her shoulder in a way that gave her surprising leverage, spun her around with almost no force, though there was no way Natalie could stop it. Natalie shrugged at her hand, but the hand rode her shoulder with ease, rising and falling like a flag in a breeze.
“What are your orders, anyway? You said you could ‘incapacitate’ me. Would you beat me unconscious? Give me a secret nerve pinch? Got a taser hidden in your ninja-suit?” She took a long look at her father. He had mastered his expression and projected impatient boredom with his whole body.
“Let’s find out.” Natalie took three running steps toward her dad, who flinched minutely at the last moment. She stopped and spun, stared at the woman, then charged. One step, two steps—wham, on the floorboards, staring at the ceiling, noticing the LED recesses you could only see if you were supine. Her back hurt. She had the ghost sensation of a hand at her wrist, a foot at her ankle, the sense the woman had barely moved to throw her. It was the spirit of all those Sun Tzu-y martial arts: use the enemy’s strength against him. She giggled at the thought that she should take notes, figure out how to dismantle default by using its strength against it.
She stood. The woman stepped back a half step, weight forward, while her dad stayed at the corridor’s far end with his stern, disappointed mask on. It wasn’t entirely intact. There was a bit of worry Mr. Poker Face couldn’t hide. She leaned on the wall and took a couple breaths.
“Let’s make it best two out of three.” Her father’s face flickered, and there it was: fear.
She charged him. He didn’t flinch, but she saw he wanted to, and she turned around and before she could think, she ran straight at the guard, coming in low, like she was playing a platformer and was trying one approach after another to defeat the level’s mini-boss, hoping she didn’t run out of lives before she found the trick. Maybe if she came in low, she’d be harder to throw.
She wasn’t.
This time she jammed her elbow and her body was lanced by a white-lightning sear, making her suck air through her teeth. What was pain, anyway? Dis could feel pain or not, but it was an infographic, a slider you moved up or down. Her arm was hurt—something had been damaged—but the feeling of hurt wasn’t intrinsic. You could be hurt and feel nothing, you could be in immense pain without injury. Injury was in the elbow, pain was in the brain.
But it hurt.
She got to her feet more slowly, rubbed her elbow. She had paid more attention this time, had the impression that the woman had lightly touched her shoulders as she passed, did something to her that caused her weight to overbalance to the front, sending her face-first into the floor.
She breathed. Jacob scowled. She watched him painstakingly convert his fear to anger. Anger was fine. She was fucking pissed.
“Third time’s the charm.”
This time he grabbed her, but she’d been a walkaway, carrying heavy loads for the sheer pleasure of doing things with her hands, walking miles at a time, having long, unhurried, sensuous yoga sessions on the B&B’s lawn that made her strong and supple. He was a gym rat, attended by skilled trainers and a pharmacopoeia that gave him cut transverse abdominals like an underwear model and arms with lean triceps and strong wrists, and he could do an hour on the elliptical, but it was all for show, never used.
She shook him off easily. She thrilled to realize she could have flattened him as easily as the merc was knocking her out, run up one side of him and down the other. It had been years since her father had been physical with her, but she recollected his iron grip, how he could carry her out of the room when she was misbehaving, ignoring her squirming. Let him try now.
She tried for a low sprint pumping her arms for speed, though she knew she’d need to be fired out of a longbow before her speed was high enough to make a difference to the woman. She almost faltered as she drew near, some cowardly part of her not wanting to get the coming beat-down, and she killed that part of her with a blast of will, put on more speed.
Her head bounced off the wall on the way down, filling her vision with stars. She took longer to get up. She was dizzy. It had been a solid hit. Had the woman hurt her on purpose, to punish her for refusing to back down? Had her run-up just been better?
Her father went into the bedroom, she supposed to phone for backup, so she walked this time, turned around, stared at the woman, the two of them alone now save for the watching eyes.
She ran. Something was wrong with her balance, and she couldn’t get her wind. This time the woman caught her and turned her around, neatly canceling all her momentum as she did so. Natalie and she were face to face. The woman’s nothing-special face and small teeth were right there; her breath smelled of toothpaste. She had a booger up one nostril. Her eyebrows weren’t plucked, which Natalie hadn’t noticed, and had a bushiness that reminded her of Gretyl. She wanted to cry.
She tried to walk past, walked into the woman, was pushed gently away. She tried again. She was really dizzy. It had been a bad hit.
This woman wasn’t her enemy, she just had a job. Natalie didn’t care. She swung a wild roundhouse the woman easily sidestepped. Had she smiled a little? It was weird to be here, silent except for breathing, her father’s muttering from the bedroom. Wordless intimacy. She swung again. Again. If she’d had a gun, she’d have shot the woman, her father, herself. What does a walkaway do when she can’t walk away?
She gave up, arms dropping to her sides. Stalked into the bedroom. Her father was in the chair, looking disgusted, like she was pathetic. She supposed she was. What’s more pathetic than a walkaway who stops walking?