In the men's changing room, Ben Calloway was having difficulty with his shirt.
He had pulled it over his head twice and twice become tangled in the same sleeve, because his mind kept returning to fourteen seconds. Fourteen. He could have lived with forty. He could have told himself a story about forty — about patience, about a veteran catching a wrestler in a bad exchange. Fourteen seconds had no story in it. Fourteen seconds was a doorway he had walked through face-first.
He yanked the shirt into place and sat down hard on the bench.
Jonas, by contrast, was radiant. He had changed in record time and then not left.
"She knew the entry," he said, for perhaps the fifth time. "Not suspected. Knew. She watched me do it in class — twice, she said — and then she just removed the floor from it. Did you see her hips? No, of course you didn't, you were still —"
"Jonas."
"I am not gloating."
"You are glowing," Ben said. "It's worse."
Jonas considered this fairly. "I am interested."
"You got caught."
"Beautifully."
Ben stood and slammed his locker, then winced at the sound and opened it again more quietly, as if the evening had installed a governor in him he did not remember requesting. He was not angry at Noor. That was the humiliating part, the part he turned over and over. She had not gloated, or rushed, or held the lock a fraction beyond his tap. She had helped him up. His embarrassment had no villain, which meant he had to carry it himself, in his own name.
"It was a test," he said.
"It was our test," Peter said from the end of the bench.
Peter had showered and dressed with his usual methodical care, but he had not put on his coat. He sat with his elbows on his knees, looking at his hands. Of the three of them, he was the one who had come closest, and somehow that made him the most quiet. He had felt the pass close. He had felt her yield that final inch and mistaken it for the end of her resistance. The mistake had been intelligent, which was why it stayed with him.
"We asked for it badly," he said. "Even with Helen's rules. We surrounded her first. You know that, don't you? Before the rounds. In the corner. Three instructors asking a new student to account for herself."
"She could have said no," Ben said.
"She did say she trained. We just didn't like the size of the answer."
Jonas stopped smiling. It was not that his delight vanished; it settled into something more durable. "She corrected an elbow," he said. "That's all she did. Maya's elbow."
"And we made it a referendum," Peter said.
Ben picked up his bag. Put it down. "I hate losing in my own gym."
"Yes," Peter said, without unkindness. "That may be the actual subject."
Outside, the car park was full of October cold. The warehouse's high windows glowed behind her, and the gravel held the day's rain in black mirrors. Noor crossed to her car with her bag over one shoulder and her keys already in her hand, an old habit from cities and from being a woman walking anywhere at night.
Her apartment was twelve minutes away, over the bridge and up a hill where the houses thinned out. She had taken the second floor of a converted farmhouse because it was cheap, quiet and available in August when she had needed to be gone from her old life more than she had needed to be comfortable in a new one. The landlord, an elderly man named Mr. Whitaker, lived downstairs and left tomatoes on her step in season.
She climbed the stairs by habit in the dark, because the bulb at the landing had been dead since September and she kept forgetting to buy one, and let herself into rooms that still smelled of cardboard.
Boxes stood along the walls in patient rows. KITCHEN, she had written on one, in the black marker hand of a woman who had believed, in July, that naming things would be most of the work. BOOKS — COUNSELLING. BOOKS — OTHER. WINTER. The bed was assembled. The table was assembled. The rest of the furniture existed in a state of negotiation between her and an Allen key she could not currently find.
Noor set down her gym bag and stood looking at the room as if it were a new student's guard: full of structure, nothing yet committed.