The Space Between Our Blade

Six A.M

Ivy's alarm went off at 5:10, which meant she was on the 5:40 bus, which meant she arrived at Kingsley's salle at 6:02, breath clouding in the pre-dawn cold, to find Lex Volkov already there.

Of course he was. He probably lived ten minutes away in a house with heated floors, and even then he'd found a way to arrive first, like showing up early was just one more event he intended to win.

"You're late," he said, not looking up from where he was taping the grip of his blade.

"It's six-oh-two."

"Coach said six." He finally glanced up, and whatever he saw in her face made something almost like amusement flicker across his. "Relax, Sokolova. I'm messing with you."

"I don't know you well enough to tell the difference."

"Fair." He set the blade down and nodded toward the strip. "Warm up. Coach won't be in until six-thirty — some meeting with the athletic director. Which means for the next twenty-eight minutes, it's just us."

There was something almost unbearably intimate about an empty gym at six in the morning — the overhead lights humming, the whole vast echoing space usually crowded with noise now holding only the two of them and the soft percussive sound of their shoes against the strip as they warmed up in silence, each pretending not to watch the other out of the corner of their eye.

Ivy went through her footwork drills the way her father had taught her — advance, retreat, advance-lunge, the rhythm so old and familiar it lived somewhere below conscious thought, in muscle and breath rather than mind. She was aware, the whole time, of Lex doing the same ten feet away, and aware, in a way she resented, of how good he was to watch. Not flashy. Efficient. Every motion trimmed down to exactly what it needed to be and nothing more, like he'd spent years sanding away anything that wasn't useful.

"You do that thing with your shoulder," he said, apropos of nothing, breaking the silence without breaking his rhythm.

"What thing?"

"Right before you lunge. Small drop, here." He tapped his own shoulder without stopping his footwork. "Whoever taught you fixed almost everything else. Missed that."

Ivy's chest tightened, quick and unexpected. "Nobody taught me. Not — not really. Not recently."

"So you're self-taught." He said it slowly, working through it like a puzzle he found more interesting than he wanted to admit. "That explains a few things."

"Such as?"

"Such as why you fence like someone who learned the rules and then decided most of them were optional." He straightened, rolled his shoulder, and for a second the careful, controlled mask slipped just enough that she caught a glimpse of something almost like respect underneath it. "It's not a criticism. It's usually the fencers who follow the textbook too closely who are easiest to read. You're not easy to read."

"Careful," Ivy said. "Two compliments in two days. People might start talking."

"People are already talking." He said it flatly, none of the warmth from a second ago left in his voice, and Ivy realized, with an unpleasant jolt, that she'd hit a nerve she hadn't known was there. "Half the team thinks Coach is setting me up to lose on purpose. Building a story. Underdog beats golden boy, everybody loves it, makes for a good headline when the school's soliciting donations next year."

"That's not — I didn't ask for that."

"I know." He picked his blade back up, testing the flex of it against the floor, not looking at her. "Doesn't change what people are saying."

"What does your dad think?" The question was out before she'd fully decided to ask it, and she watched something close over Lex's face immediately, fast and total, like a door slamming somewhere behind his eyes.

"My dad," he said, in a voice that had gone very carefully neutral, "thinks I should already have this handled."

"Handled how?"

"However it needs to be." He pulled his mask down before she could ask anything else, which she understood, correctly, to be the end of that particular conversation. "En garde?"

They fenced for the better part of twenty minutes, and it was, without question, the best fencing Ivy had done in her life — not because she was winning, though she was, narrowly, three touches to two, but because for the first time since her father died, she was fencing against someone who made her work, who found the gaps in her technique and drove blades of doubt through them until she had no choice but to adapt, right there, mid-bout, faster than she'd thought she could.

He caught her with a beautiful, brutal riposte at 3-2, blade catching the overhead lights as it swept in, and when the light blinked red on her side, he pulled his mask off and there was something in his face that wasn't triumph, exactly. It was closer to relief.

"There it is," he said. "I was starting to worry you were actually as good as everyone's saying."

"I am as good as everyone's saying. You just got lucky."

"Maybe." He was almost smiling now, the real thing, not the careful practiced version from the hallway. "Same time tomorrow?"

"Wouldn't miss it."

Coach Orlova arrived at six-thirty exactly, took one look at the scoreboard still glowing on the wall panel, and raised an eyebrow at both of them without comment. The rest of the team trickled in over the next ten minutes, and the private, strange intimacy of the empty gym dissolved back into ordinary noise — lockers slamming, someone's playlist too loud from a phone speaker, Priya's voice cutting through the din as she stuck her head in the salle door on her way to a debate meeting.

"Sokolova! You survived the six a.m. death march, I see."

"Barely."

"Volkov didn't murder you in your sleep, I'm counting that as a win for the week." Priya's eyes flicked meaningfully between Ivy and Lex, who was three strips away pretending very hard not to be listening. "So. How was it? Truly. Don't sugarcoat it for my benefit."

"It was fine," Ivy said, which wasn't a lie exactly, just an incomplete truth, the kind she was getting uncomfortably good at telling lately.

"Just fine?"

"He's a good fencer," Ivy admitted. "Better than I expected. Doesn't mean I like him."

"Nobody said you had to like him." Priya's grin had gone sly in a way Ivy didn't fully trust. "I'm just saying, for someone who 'doesn't like him,' you spent a lot of that sentence talking about how good he is."

"That's not—" Ivy started, and stopped, because there wasn't actually a good way to finish that sentence that didn't sound exactly as defensive as she felt. "I have French Lit. I'll see you at lunch."

"Uh-huh," Priya called after her, entirely too pleased with herself. "See you at lunch, Sokolova. Tell Volkov I said hi."

Ivy didn't dignify that with a response, mostly because she was fairly sure her face was already doing something she didn't want either of them to see. She grabbed her bag, glanced once — just once, she told herself, purely coincidental — toward the strip where Lex was running drills with one of the sophomores, and caught him already looking back at her.

He didn't smile. He didn't have to. There was something in the look that did the work of a smile anyway, something that sat low and warm in her chest the whole walk to French Lit, something she spent the rest of the period trying very hard, and mostly failing, to talk herself out of feeling at all.

One spot, she reminded herself, for what felt like the hundredth time since Coach Orlova's announcement. He is the competition. That's all he is.

It was, she suspected, going to take considerably more convincing than that.