Selah woke him at seven by dropping his boots on the floor next to his face.

"Combat training," she said. "Beck’s running Class Z through the outdoor ring today. You’re not skipping."

"I wasn’t going to skip."

"You were going to ’check on something’ and come back after."

She was right, so he didn’t answer that.

He pulled on his boots and checked the system out of habit.

[DING! — Soul integrity: 76%. Recovery in progress.]

Two points back overnight. His body was slow but it was working.

Grimm lifted her head from the floor, checked the room in both directions with her sealed eyes, and stood up.

She still hadn’t spoken. The silence had been going on for almost twenty hours now and it had a texture to it, a specific weight that sat at the back of his skull where her voice usually was.

He knew she was there. He just couldn’t hear her.

"Ready?" Selah asked.

"No," he said, and stood up.

◆◆◆◆

The outdoor ring was a packed dirt circle behind the third building, big enough for two pairs to spar at once with a viewing rail around the edge.

Class Z showed up in ones and twos because that was how Class Z did everything.

Hansel Jay came in eating something out of a paper bag and nodded at Soren.

Two girls from the back row who he knew from the novel would be dead by Chapter thirty-eight sat on the rail and talked to each other.

Beck was already there with a stopwatch and the expression of someone who had stopped being surprised by this group.

"Pairs," Beck said. "If you don’t have one, find one. You have thirty seconds."

Selah was already at Soren’s side.

"You’re with me," she said.

"I know."

"Don’t let me go too cold."

"What does that mean."

"The sprite." Selah looked at her hands, where the frost pattern was different now, more integrated, less like a trait she carried and more like something she was made of. "When I start pushing, she pushes with me. I don’t know yet where the line is."

"So you might freeze my arm off."

"I should freeze your arm off."

Beck blew the whistle.

Soren had not sparred anyone in his previous life, and the body he was using had Soren Kane’s muscle memory, which was nothing, because the original Soren Kane had spent the last six months before the ceremony lying on a couch.

This was going to be educational.

Selah threw the first strike, a straightforward frost jab at his shoulder, and he stepped back and it clipped his arm and the cold went through the sleeve and bit into the skin underneath.

Not frozen. Just very cold.

"Move," she said.

He moved.

The second strike he actually read, because he’d watched her spar once in the novel and remembered the way her weight shifted before she committed, and he got out of the way and put his hand on her wrist on the way past.

She looked at where his hand was on her wrist.

"You read the shift," she said.

"Yes."

"Nobody reads my shift."

"You drop your right shoulder half a second before you commit."

She tried to pull free and he let her go because holding on would just burn him.

"Do that again," she said.

"You want me to tell you your tells."

"I want to know if you can actually do it twice."

He could, and he did, four more times over the next twenty minutes, and by the end her strikes were harder and colder and he was taking more of them than he was reading because she started hiding the shoulder drop, but the exercise was doing something useful because she was starting to find the line she’d been worried about.

She didn’t freeze his arm off.

She came close twice.

Beck came by at the forty-minute mark and watched them for a minute without saying anything.

"Kane," he said.

Soren stopped.

"You have no technique."

"I know."

"You have decent instincts." Beck made a note on his clipboard. "Six sessions with the basics track before you work with a sparring partner again. You’re going to get someone hurt."

He walked to the next pair.

Selah tilted her head. "Decent instincts."

"From Beck that’s a full compliment."

"It is."

She was breathing a little hard and the frost on her knuckles was slowly going back to the faint pattern it lived at when she wasn’t pushing.

Grimm sat at the edge of the ring with her muzzle pointed at Soren’s back the whole time.

She hadn’t moved once during the session.

Every time he’d taken a hit she’d gone a little more still.

He glanced at her now and she turned her sealed eyes toward him and he felt the pressure of her attention, warm and absolute and completely silent.

[DING! — Tamer has completed first combat session. Physical conditioning attribute: updated.]

[DING! — Note: Bonded beast [Grimm] suppression effort increased during session. Soul Friction aggregate held at 22%. Tamer is advised to acknowledge bonded beast directly.]

He walked to the edge of the ring and crouched down in front of her.

She pressed her nose into his chest.

"I’m okay," he said quietly, so Selah couldn’t hear. "I know you wanted to come in. Good call staying out."

She put her paw on his knee and kept it there.

He scratched behind her ear and felt her lean into it. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

He needed to hit Rank E and he needed a plan for what happened when Cole came back and he needed to figure out who had assigned Cole in the first place.

He needed to do all of that without letting the three women he was now somehow responsible for kill him or each other.

Selah dropped down next to him on the dirt and looked at the ring where the other pairs were still going.

"Who’s Joan Sawyer," she said.

"Head of the academy’s thermal monitoring department."

"The investigator last night wasn’t from thermal monitoring."

"No."

"Who sent him."

"Someone who’s been watching me since before we got here."