Touch Two

They called it the Bond Season, and once I signed the papers, because in the end I signed them, there was never really another choice with my mother's life sitting on the other side of that decision, someone finally bothered to explain the rules to me properly. I signed on a Tuesday, alone in an office that smelled like old paper, and I remember thinking the pen felt too light for something that heavy.

Fifteen touches. That was the whole of it, at least the part they were willing to say out loud. Fifteen sanctioned bouts spread across the school year, each one fenced in front of the nine houses in that hidden salle below the dormitory, and each bout worth exactly one touch toward completing the bond. Win a touch, and something happens. Nobody would tell me what. Lose fourteen touches to zero, and apparently the bond simply resets itself the following year, with a new champion chosen to try again.

"So I could lose every single bout," I said to the woman in green, whose actual name turned out to be Coach Fontenot, "and nothing happens at all?"

"Something always happens," she said, which was not an answer, but was apparently the only kind of answer anyone at this school knew how to give.

My first sanctioned bout was scheduled for the following week, and I spent every spare hour training with Ilan, because the contract required the house to train its own champion, whether either of us wanted that arrangement or not. He turned out to be, without question, the best coach I'd ever had, patient in a way that made my years of self-taught mistakes finally make sense.

"You drop your shoulder before you lunge," he told me during our third session, tapping my shoulder lightly with the flat of his blade. "Every time. It's small, but a good opponent will see it eventually."

"You saw it the first night," I said. "That's why you kept missing me on purpose, isn't it. You were reading me."

He didn't answer that directly, which I was starting to realize was something he did a lot, deflecting instead of denying. "Fix the shoulder," he said instead. "It matters more than you think."

We trained on the roof sometimes, between the beehives, when the salle downstairs was busy with other houses. He never once raised his voice at me, even when I got frustrated with my own footwork and wanted to throw my blade across the stone. Once, when I nearly did exactly that, he just caught my wrist, gently, and said, "The bees don't like shouting. Try again, quieter this time." It worked better than I wanted to admit.

The night of the first sanctioned bout, the Under-Salle looked exactly the way it had that first terrifying night, candles lit, nine banners hanging, a crowd gathered along the walls that still somehow managed to feel like it wasn't breathing. My opponent wasn't Ilan this time. It was a smaller boy from a different house, someone whose name I never fully caught, fencing on Ilan's behalf because apparently the champion's actual bonded opponent didn't have to fence every single bout himself.

I won that first bout without much trouble, my new training already showing, and the crowd offered that same strange, silent approval they'd given before. Nothing happened afterward. No visions, no memories, nothing except Odile Brassard-Sang smiling at me from the front row like a proud parent at a recital.

"That one didn't count toward the fifteen," Coach Fontenot explained afterward, almost as an afterthought. "Only bouts fenced directly against Ilan count as sanctioned touches. Tonight was simply a formality, proving you could fence under our rules."

The real first bout came two weeks later, and this time, Ilan stood across the strip from me himself, unmasked by request of the houses, his expression unreadable behind the calm mask he wore even without wearing a mask at all.

"Don't hold back," I told him quietly, before the salute. "I need to know I actually earned whatever happens next."

"You'll earn it," he said, and something about the way he said it made my stomach twist with a worry I couldn't name.

The bout moved fast, faster than any of our training sessions, and I could tell within the first exchange that he was fencing for real this time, testing me properly instead of gently guiding my blade the way he had for two weeks straight. My arms already ached from the intensity of it, a different feeling entirely from the patient drills on the roof. I scored the first touch on pure instinct, a lunge I hadn't even fully planned, my blade finding his chest before either of us seemed to expect it.

The moment it landed, the world around me disappeared.

I wasn't standing on a strip anymore. I was eleven years old, standing in the middle of a city I had never seen in my life, tall stone buildings and cobblestone streets stretching out around me, holding the small hand of a boy who couldn't have been older than seven. He was laughing at something, tugging me toward a market stall stacked with oranges, and I felt a rush of love so strong and so unfamiliar that it didn't feel like mine at all, because it wasn't. It belonged to somebody else, somewhere else, a long time before I was even born, and I was simply borrowing it for a few impossible seconds.

Then the memory cracked apart like glass, and I was back on the strip, flat on my back, staring up at the bright overhead lights while someone somewhere was shouting my name, over and over, like they weren't sure I could still hear them.