The Space Between Our Blade

One spot left

By the time Ivy got to homeroom the next morning, the story had already grown a second head.

"I heard you beat him six-zero," said a girl she didn't know, sliding into the seat beside her like they were already friends. "Someone else said four-two. Someone else said you used, like, an illegal move."

"It was five-three," Ivy said. "No illegal moves. He's just not used to losing."

"He's never lost. Not here, anyway." The girl said it with the particular relish of someone who'd been waiting years for a piece of gossip with real teeth in it. "Ella Marchetti tried to beat him freshman year and cried in the bathroom for like a week. You didn't cry."

"I didn't cry," Ivy agreed, and let the conversation die there, because she'd learned a long time ago that being the new girl with a story attached was a currency that spent fast and left you owing more than you'd earned.

She caught sight of Lex once, in the hallway between second and third period, flanked by two boys from the team who were talking with their hands in the specific animated way of people retelling something they hadn't actually witnessed. Lex wasn't talking. He was looking at his phone, jaw set, and when his eyes flicked up and caught hers across the hall, he held the look for exactly one second longer than a stranger would have — not hostile, not friendly, just aware of her in a way that made the back of her neck go warm — before he turned and said something to the boy on his left that made them both laugh.

She told herself it didn't matter. She had bigger things to worry about than whether Alexei Volkov found her irritating or interesting, and increasingly she suspected those were the same thing to him anyway.

Home was a fifteen-minute bus ride and an entire universe away from Kingsley's quad and its stone-carved buildings.

The apartment was small — two bedrooms, a kitchen that doubled as a dining room, a window unit that fought a losing battle against the heat every summer and the cold every winter — but it was clean and it was theirs, and Ivy had stopped being embarrassed by it sometime around freshman year, when she'd finally understood that the embarrassment had never been about the apartment at all. It had been about the gap between what her family used to have and what they had now, a gap she couldn't see the edges of because no one had ever told her how it opened.

Her mother was at the kitchen table when she came in, papers spread out in front of her — the diner's books, probably, or the endless correspondence with the insurance company that never seemed to actually resolve anything. Marina Sokolova looked up, and for just a second, before her face arranged itself into its usual warm, tired welcome, Ivy caught something underneath it. Something that looked almost like fear.

"How was the first day?" her mother asked, in Russian, the way she always did at home, like English was a coat she took off the second she crossed the threshold.

"Good." Ivy dropped her bag by the door. "I made varsity. Beat the captain in my first practice bout."

Her mother went very still. "Volkov?"

Ivy blinked. "You know him?"

"I know the name." Marina's voice had gone careful, measured, the tone she used when she was choosing every word like it cost something. "Big family. Rich. It's a common enough name."

"Not that common, apparently, since there's a whole building at school named after them." Ivy dropped into the chair across from her, reached for an apple from the bowl between them, and didn't miss the way her mother's hands had gone still over the papers, pen hovering, not writing. "Mama. Is something wrong?"

"No." A beat too long, same as Coach Orlova's the day before, and Ivy filed the coincidence away without quite knowing why it mattered. "I'm glad you made the team, dorogaya. Your father would be—" Marina stopped herself, the way she always did whenever his name came close to the surface, like there was a wall built somewhere behind her ribs and she'd learned exactly how close she could get to it before it hurt.

"He'd be what?"

"Proud," Marina said, too fast, too smooth, and went back to her papers before Ivy could ask anything else.

Ivy let it go. She'd learned that too — that some doors in her mother's memory didn't open no matter how many times you knocked, and that the kindest thing to do, most days, was to stop knocking and go set the table instead.

Coach Orlova called an all-team meeting before practice the next afternoon, which was unusual enough that even the seniors looked uneasy filing into the salle.

"I'll keep this brief," she said, once everyone had settled onto the benches. "Nationals qualifying happens in five weeks, at the regional invitational. Historically, Kingsley sends two fencers — one épée, one saber." She paused, and something in the pause made the room go very quiet. "This year, the Federation's cut regional allocations. We get one saber slot. One."

The reaction rippled through the team immediately — a dozen quiet conversations breaking out at once, and Ivy felt, rather than saw, several heads turn in her direction, and several more turn toward Lex.

"I know what everyone's thinking," Coach Orlova said, raising her voice slightly to cut through it. "So let's not pretend otherwise. Sokolova and Volkov are, as of this week, our two strongest saber fencers, and by a significant margin. One of you is going to Nationals. The other one isn't."

Lex hadn't moved. He sat with his elbows on his knees, watching Coach Orlova with an expression Ivy couldn't quite read — not anger, not yet, something more like a man watching a door he'd assumed was permanently open start, very slowly, to close.

"Starting today," Coach Orlova continued, "you two are training together. Same sessions, same drills, paired bouts every practice until qualifying. I want you pushing each other into the ground, because whichever one of you walks out of that invitational with the spot is going to need every inch of ground you can find between now and then."

"Together," Lex repeated, flat.

"Together." Coach Orlova's eyes moved between them, something unreadable in her face — not quite warning, not quite hope. "Problem, Volkov?"

"No problem." He said it lightly, but his eyes had already found Ivy's across the salle, and there was nothing light in them at all. "Should be interesting."

"That's one word for it," Ivy said, before she could stop herself, and a couple of kids nearby laughed, quick and surprised, and Coach Orlova's mouth twitched in something that might, in a different woman, have been the beginning of a smile.

They didn't speak again until the end of practice, when the team had mostly cleared out and it was just the two of them and Coach Orlova's assistant coiling extension cords by the equipment closet.

Lex was unlacing his jacket when Ivy passed him on her way to the locker room, and he said, without looking up, "For the record — I don't need Coach's help beating you."

"Funny. Yesterday's scoreboard says otherwise."

"Yesterday was a fluke." He finally looked up, and there was something almost curious under the arrogance, like he was working out a math problem he couldn't quite make add up. "You've got good instincts. Untrained ones. Someone taught you the basics and then you built the rest yourself, which is either impressive or reckless, I haven't decided which."

It was, unsettlingly, closer to the truth than anything else anyone at Kingsley had said to her yet, and Ivy hated that he'd gotten there in one practice when it had taken her mother seventeen years and counting to say almost nothing about it at all.

"Careful," she said. "Almost sounded like a compliment."

"Don't get used to it." He shouldered his bag, and for just a second — brief enough that she could've imagined it — something almost like a real smile crossed his face before he smoothed it back into the careful, controlled mask he wore like a second uniform. "See you tomorrow, Sokolova. Six a.m., before you ask — Coach wants us here before regular practice starts."

"I'll be here."

"I know," he said, already walking away. "That's what worries me."

Ivy watched him go, gear bag over one shoulder, campus lights catching gold in his hair as he crossed the quad toward whatever waited for him at the end of it — a car, probably, with a driver, in a life so far from her own two-bedroom apartment and diner shifts that it might as well have existed on a different planet.

One spot, she thought, picking up her father's old saber, feeling the familiar, worn grip settle into her palm like it had been made for her hand and no one else's. Let's see who wants it more.