Mark woke up in a room that was tidy but a little too neutral, as if it had been prepared for him only a few hours earlier.

  The blankets were heavy, made of a thick fabric that resembled wool but was less kind to the touch. The color hovered somewhere between beige and a tired gray, and the uneven weave gave the skin that faint prickling sensation that never quite turns into actual itching.

  The walls were smooth and anonymous, made of a pale material that was hard to name. There were no paintings, symbols, or other attempts at personality.

  The rest of the room was reduced to the essentials: a simple table, a stiff chair, a jug and an opaque metal cup resting on a small shelf.

  The awakening was traumatic in an almost oxymoronic way.

  A girl was standing next to the bed. She wasn’t tall. Quite the opposite, actually, rather petite, with a compact, full body, wide hips and a narrow waist. She wore a minimal black top that left her stomach bare and a dark skirt with a high slit that exposed almost her entire thigh. Her long dark hair fell straight over her shoulders. Her face was very regular and carefully kept: strong eyebrows, large dark eyes, full lips slightly parted. She had a languid, almost distracted expression, as if the situation were perfectly normal.

  She was feeling the bulge under the blankets with focused curiosity.

  “You’ve got quite a big cock, you know,” said Thuljas in her bright voice, the same one Mark had already found irritating the night before, when they had met at the restaurant.

  Mark jerked away quickly. She pulled her hand back.

  “Hey, w-what the fuck are you doing?” said Mark.

  “What’s wrong with you? Do you like men? You know there’s nothing wrong with that,” she said, slightly annoyed.

  Fantastic, Mark thought. Now I’m getting a lecture about homophobia from someone who lives in a world more backward than mine.

  The irony of it was almost remarkable.

  “In any case, training starts today. So, come on. Get to work.”

  But Mark was naked under the blankets, and he felt embarrassed while she stood there waiting for him to get up. On top of that, the only clothes he could wear were the ones from the previous evening, since he didn’t have any others. He remained silent.

  “Are you stupid? Get up, damn it.”

  He raised his eyes toward her, though not quite meeting her gaze. Her exuberance made him uneasy. Nahely was outgoing too, but in a different way, and above all she didn’t overflow with vitality like this girl did. If anything, Nahely sometimes gave the opposite impression, as if something about her lacked a certain depth, as though parts of her personality were only roughly sketched. Thuljas, on the other hand, overflowed with presence. The room seemed fuller simply because she was in it.

  He felt the pressure of this unfamiliar girl, and it made him uncomfortable. Eventually he found the strength to say something.

  “I’m naked.”

  “Are you embarrassed to undress in front of a girl? Are you a little virgin?”

  The sentence hit him like a barrage of stones.

  Thuljas sighed.

  “Fine, I’ll step out,” she said, her tone suddenly gentler. “Right, I almost forgot. I brought you some clothes. They’re more suitable than what you had for training, and besides, you can’t keep wearing the same outfit all the time. Obviously.”

  “I’ll wait for you out here. I swear I won’t peek through the keyhole.”

  She smiled. A smile heavy with lasciviousness.

  What the hell is wrong with this girl.

  Mark got up and began to change. The clothes she had left him were simple but practical: dark trousers made of a flexible, durable fabric, loose enough to allow wide movements, and a light sleeveless tunic made of a breathable material, something that vaguely resembled linen but softer. There was also a waist sash and a pair of low, flexible boots clearly meant for moving and running.

  While he was changing, he kept staring at the keyhole of the door, imagining one of the girl’s lively eyes peeking into the room. He moved to a spot where she wouldn’t be able to see him, right next to the door.

  When he was done, he stepped outside.

  She was there, leaning against the opposite wall of a fairly well-lit corridor. The light came from milky panels set into the ceiling, spreading evenly across the pale surfaces. The hallway was clean, almost sterile, with a few identical doors lined up along the walls. Thuljas stood with one shoulder against the wall and one leg slightly bent, as if she had been waiting like that for a while, perfectly at ease.

  Mark glanced to his left. Another door. He knew Antea was inside. And Nahely, whom, after the conversation at the house of Grem’s second wife, whose name he had completely forgotten, he now cared a little more about. Not because it had been a great conversation, but because she treated him with deep respect, almost reverence, and that secretly boosted his ego.

  “Your princess obviously isn’t coming with us, stallion.”

  “I figured,” Mark replied quietly.

  Thuljas pushed herself off the wall.

  Mark braced himself to be harassed. He took a small step back.

  “Relax, I don’t bite. I mean, I do if you want.”

  “I-I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  “Turn around!” she said suddenly, in an authoritative tone.

  “Why?”

  “Your training starts here. I’ll cling to your back so I can infuse you, through physical contact, with my… vital breath.”

  It sounded like she had just invented it.

  “What’s vital breath?” Mark asked seriously.

  “It’s… what allows us to go beyond the normal limits of the body, I think. Something like that.”

  There was something contradictory between what he had heard about mages and what that nymphomaniac was saying, but he neither had the courage nor the words to try to resolve the doubt.

  “Come on, turn around. Or do I have to do it by force? I’m your teacher!”

  Mark obeyed without wasting much time thinking about it.

  A moment later Thuljas jumped onto his back. She wrapped herself around him with disarming ease, her legs locking around his hips while her arms closed across his chest to keep herself steady. The contact was immediate and far more complete than Mark had prepared himself for. He clearly felt the girl’s body press against his, her soft chest resting against his back as she adjusted her grip.

  The warmth of her body passed through the thin fabric of his shirt almost without resistance, and the sudden closeness sent an awkward wave of arousal through him that he desperately hoped wasn’t too obvious.

  Thuljas, on the other hand, seemed perfectly comfortable. She brought her face close to Mark’s neck and inhaled slowly, as if trying to memorize his scent.

  “Mm.”

  To the right.

  They wandered down the corridor until they reached the stairs leading to the ground floor. The steps were wide and regular, lit by the same milky light as upstairs. The stairs were shallow and broad, built more for comfort than elegance.

  The ground floor opened into a much larger space. A common room spread out beyond the stairs, with a long table in the center, a few scattered chairs, and shelves along the walls holding utensils, containers, and objects whose purpose Mark couldn’t immediately guess. Everything looked used but not messy. The air smelled of warm food and metal.

  They crossed the room and entered the kitchen.

  Grem was inside.

  He was wearing only a pair of loose underwear, almost like shorts. Bare-chested. His long, slender body resembled a column of dark marble, almost magnetite-colored. He was magnetic even to Mark, though in his case it wasn’t seduction. It was more the immediate recognition of the charisma radiating from such a singular aesthetic presence.

  Grem was stirring something in a pan on the stove when he noticed them.

  Gas.

  They had gas stoves: a small array of metal burners set into a dark plate, with side knobs and tight blue flames emerging from perforated rings. Heavy metal pots and pans rested on top, their bottoms blackened from use.

  He made a face.

  “What the fuck are you two doing?”

  What? Mark thought.

  Thuljas climbed down from his shoulders. “We’re training,” she said, with a certain sincerity.

  “Training to do what?”

  Thuljas looked away. She stayed silent.

  Mark didn’t know what to say or do. It was a strange situation. Grem didn’t really seem angry. It didn’t look like he was scolding Mark, but it felt like he might start scolding Thuljas at any moment. After all, Mark himself had suspected that the whole “vital breath” thing was bullshit.

  Instead, Grem turned to Mark and smiled.

  “Careful. For a good dose of cock, this one loses her mind.”

  Then he looked at Thuljas.

  “And you, little slut, don’t make our new companion uncomfortable. What the fuck, didn’t I tell you that already or am I wrong?”

  He didn’t seem truly angry. He said it like a bit of theater, yet at the same time he sounded serious. Strange guy, Mark thought about him for the umpteenth time.

  “Alright, alright. But I like shaking up introverts a little. I can’t help it.”

  Grem ignored her. He walked over to Mark, who in the meantime had turned to look at a large map hanging on the wall to the right of the doorway they had come through. Grem draped his right arm over Mark’s shoulders as if they were friends and said:

  “Sooner or later you’ll have to spank her so she understands what you’re made of, big guy.”

  He towered over him by quite a bit.

  The word that defined the scene for Mark was cringe. Pure cringe, damn it. He wanted to be anywhere else while he stared at the map with Grem’s arm resting on his shoulders.

  There were many cities on the map, but none had names. Only a gigantic continent, shaped like a jagged pear, with the plump part at the bottom.

  “This is our world,” Grem said.

  He tried to imagine what Mark was thinking and got it completely wrong. Mark’s attention was clouded. The kind of mental fog that reduces you to something like a missing link between Rosenblatt’s perceptron and an ordinary human connectome.

  Unfortunately, Grem failed to really pull him back into the scene. It was a curious way to receive explanations.

  And get that fucking arm off me. Why are you all so disgustingly expansive?

  Grem pointed to a city in a green area of the map, more or less in the center but slightly to the south. The one they were in was among the largest marked. Three or four looked bigger, and about a dozen were roughly the same size, but considering how many cities appeared on the map, Anarchy was clearly a metropolis in that world.

  The ecological transitions on the map were strange. Mark didn’t notice.

  Grem kept explaining, but Mark wasn’t really listening. The words drifted past him without taking root. The only piece of information that managed to filter through the mental haze concerned current events: a war between Anarchy and the “Katherinian alliance network,” started by a kind of warlord Grem named: Micheal.

  That stirred him a little.

  He could have asked a few questions. But honestly, why the hell would he care about Micheal. He didn’t even know if it was the Micheal Antea wanted to see again. And in any case Mark had no desire to meet him: he remembered nothing about him, and the label of warlord didn’t promise anything good.

  He wouldn’t tell her that.

  When they stopped, they were suspended in midair, well above the tallest buildings in the area, as their upward momentum slowly bled away into an inexorable buildup of potential energy.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Below them the city opened up. From the angle at which his head hung, Mark could see Grem’s mansion, the place they had left only moments before. Turning his head the other way he recognized the restaurant and, all around it, a wide spread of buildings.

  Almost all of them were the same color: a yellowish beige that the night before had seemed dull and unremarkable, but that now, seen from above and in that light, took on a different quality. There was something hypnotic in the cleanliness of the lines, in the geometric precision of the structures. Everything looked calibrated, almost excessively perfect. And Grem’s mansion, among those regular forms, stood out with a certain majesty, like an aristocratic variation inside an otherwise uniform composition.

  Far in the distance, ahead of them, he caught sight of the palisade: a colossal wooden wall, taller than any building visible from where they were, slicing across the horizon and hiding the rest of Anarchy from view.

  Even farther beyond, rising in the distance, stood an enormous building. It was almost entirely black, its surface matte and brushed, like the metal of a blade just drawn from a forge. The structure was long and slender, thrusting upward with austere rigidity. There was something deeply unsettling about it: ugly in shape, threatening in its sheer presence, yet imperious, as if it claimed dominion over everything around it simply by existing.

  It was a sight Mark didn’t have time to admire for long.

  When they began to fall, and the outer surface of one of the buildings rushed up toward them, Thuljas did something he couldn’t even begin to understand.His stomach lurched into his throat. Instead of letting them drop to the ground, she redirected their trajectory at the last instant and hurled them toward the wall.

  She used it as a springboard.

  They bounced off violently, shooting toward the facade of another building, then another. The movement immediately became a frantic sequence, a pinball-like chain of impacts from wall to wall at an unnatural speed.

  The world began spinning around him like the inside of a washing machine.

  He couldn't even tell if he was screaming.

  Thuljas kept altering their trajectory with every collision, using the vertical surfaces to launch them forward again and again. Mark ricocheted with her from one building to the next at a speed that felt almost supernatural.

  It was nearly impossible to tell what they were leaving behind. And the few fragments of reality he managed to grasp as recognizable images slipped past so quickly that nothing remained in his memory, only brief flashes of shapes and colors immediately swallowed by the vortex of their motion.

  His heart was furiously arguing with his lungs, just as it had done at other times, in other sudden surges of adrenaline. But never, not even remotely, had Mark imagined he would find himself in a situation like this.

  The sense of wonder was like a bacillus crushed beneath the weight of terror. At first it remained compressed, almost inert. Then, as the rhythm of their motion stabilized, it began to open timidly.

  It happened right after an even more powerful leap than the first. Thuljas had managed it by using the crest of the palisade as a point of propulsion: a sharp push against the upper edge, followed by a violent projection into open space.

  From that moment on, they had cleared everything.

  No buildings, no towers, no structures interrupting their path. Only air ahead of them.

  And they were gliding.

  Not downward, but almost horizontally.

  It was as if the density of their nearly conjoined bodies, or perhaps the way gravity “read” them, had been redistributed in some peculiar way, enough to trick physics itself. The fall was there, Mark could feel it clearly in his stomach and in the tension of his body, but it was a compressed fall, distorted, stretched forward.

  They weren’t flying.

  They were falling very fast, but along a line that was almost straight.

  And it was profoundly unnatural.

  The arc should have been different. His instincts told him so without the need for formulas or reasoning. Even their speed didn’t make sense: with a leap like that they should have slowed, bent downward, lost altitude much more quickly.

  Instead they kept sliding through the air.

  Mark turned his head slightly and looked at her.

  That weird little woman obsessed with sex, the one he had mentally catalogued only a few hours earlier as a kind of amusing walking anomaly… was capable of doing all this.

  Respect blossomed inside him almost against his will, mixing with the unease that girl, with her brazen way of being and her strangely compelling attractiveness, had already planted in him.

  And along with respect something more primitive began to surface.

  A thread of fear.

  Because power, even when it appears with a smile or a playful tone, always carries something unsettling. Even when it is benevolent, power commands respect. And respect, more often than not, carries with it a small shadow of fear.

  Below them stretched Anarchy.

  The city was enormous, far larger than Mark had imagined. Even from that considerable height he couldn’t make out the full outline of the walls that surrounded it. He could only see fragments of them, isolated stretches emerging here and there among the roofs and taller structures, like pieces of a circumference too vast for the eye to grasp all at once.

  Turning his head toward the place they had come from, the Protectorate, he realized that the Gremian enclave was actually quite small compared to the city’s vastness. Yet taken by itself it was not small at all. It looked more like a self-contained town, one of those provincial German cities: compact, orderly, medium-small in size, perhaps leaning more toward small than medium, but still clearly a complete urban center.

  The contrast with what surrounded it was striking.

  Anarchy’s urban landscape was marked by irregular transitions. In some places the shift from one district to another was sharp, almost abrupt, as if someone had drawn an invisible border between two incompatible urban logics. In others the transition was gradual, blurred, as though one fabric of buildings slowly dissolved into another.

  There were peripheral zones made of densely built patches, compact and disorderly clusters that resembled the outskirts where they had first met Grem: blocks of buildings pressed close together, narrow streets, roofs packed tightly as if every available space had been filled without any overall plan, following a logic that felt almost organic, like spontaneous growth.

  These urban patches clung to more central areas that looked sordid and worn, yet clearly marked by a greater influx of resources of every kind. The buildings were larger, the streets wider, and here and there structures hinted at intense economic activity: warehouses, covered markets, inner courtyards full of movement, long rows of buildings with weathered but solid facades.

  It was a kind of dirty wealth, irregular and unevenly distributed. Not the clean, disciplined prosperity of the Gremian enclave.

  From that height it was possible to sense how the city had developed through successive layers. Districts that had grown without coordination had locked themselves into one another, forming an urban geography full of anomalies: blocks that changed architectural style within a few streets, grander avenues suddenly cutting through the city like scars, and then again poorer building fabrics, compressed and restless.

  The result was a living, uneasy urban mass, a mosaic of densities, functions, and social hierarchies woven together without ever quite settling into balance.

  And all of it flowed beneath them as they continued to glide.

  *

  They landed in a huge clearing.

  The open space stretched like a wide wound in the dense green of the forest surrounding it. The trees formed an almost perfect ring around the clearing, a natural wall of tall, dark trunks. The vegetation was very similar to that of the forest where Mark and Antea had spawned when they first arrived in that world: thick canopies, leaves with slightly unfamiliar shapes, and an undergrowth dense yet oddly orderly, as if nature there followed rules just a little different from those on Earth.

  The air carried the same damp, vegetal smell.

  For a moment Mark stood still, breathing.

  It felt as if an immense amount of time had passed since that moment in the forest. In his memory it had stretched out, layered with events, encounters, and information he had not yet truly absorbed.

  And yet only a little more than two days had gone by.

  A little more than three days.

  In that short span he had gone from being a half-hikikomori, half-depressed guy, someone drifting between his house and increasingly murky thoughts, to… something else. A mage, apparently. A mage who, however, knew almost nothing: neither about the rules of the world he had landed in, nor about how the powers attributed to him actually worked.

  And, perhaps even more unsettling, he seemed to know less and less about his own past.

  His memories were beginning to fray. They did not disappear completely, but they grew dim, distant, like photographs left too long under the sun.

  And now, within that knot of ignorance and confusion, there was her.

  Thuljas.

  His future trainer, apparently.

  She stood in front of him about ten meters away, in the middle of the clearing. There was a kind of theatrical confidence in the way she occupied the space, as if the clearing were a stage prepared specifically for her. She was dressed in a deliberately revealing, provocative way, and the way she carried herself only emphasized it: relaxed posture, direct gaze, a playful hint of challenge in her expression.

  She looked like she was enjoying herself.

  The contrast between the almost solemn atmosphere of the clearing and her brazen presence created something strangely magnetic.

  Thuljas took a few steps backward across the grass, widening the distance between them slightly, as if giving him room. Then she planted her feet firmly on the ground and lifted her chin.

  “Show me what you can do!” she shouted.

  Her voice echoed faintly among the trees.

  Mark stood there for a moment, his brain scrambling to figure out where to begin. In theory he was a mage.

  In practice, he had absolutely no idea what that meant.

  The only thing he knew how to do was use the psychokinetic whip.

  But even that was far from reassuring. Only once had he truly felt in control of that power. Just once. And the sensation he had felt then came back to him in that moment, vivid and unsettling.

  It had been an unnatural kind of mastery.

  It hadn’t felt like something he had earned. Quite the opposite: as if it had been a temporary concession, a brief providence that had taken pity on his unwarranted recklessness. On his counterfeit courage. On that peculiar kind of boldness with ulterior motives typical of someone who has absolutely no idea how to handle the responsibility in his hands but, by force of circumstance, must handle it anyway.

  And now there was this girl.

  So confident.

  So calm.

  Challenging him.

  Considering the way they had arrived there, Mark understood perfectly well that one of his attacks would probably do absolutely nothing to her. Not after seeing how she moved, with that absurd strength and that level of bodily control that seemed to ignore the rules of physics altogether.

  But did he really have a choice?

  After all, he had been dragged there.

  He had decided to stay with Antea in Grem’s company. No one had forced him. And this coercive training, which no one had openly mentioned before, was simply one of the consequences of that decision.

  Besides, in that group the novelty was certainly the two of them. But the true gravitational center, the main pole, the supreme attractor was Grem. And Grem seemed to have a rather egocentric personality.

  So yes.

  This situation was, in all likelihood, the least pleasant price to pay for choosing to stay.

  The problem was that Mark wasn’t against training. Quite the opposite. He wanted to become better at using his powers. Much better.

  He would simply have preferred to understand a few things first.

  For example: what exactly was magic?

  How did it actually work?

  What did training really consist of?

  Being thrown into it like this, without explanations, was frightening.

  “What are you waiting for, sweetheart?” Thuljas shouted from the other side of the clearing. “It’ll be night soon.”

  Stupid bitch.

  I’m afraid I’ll hurt myself, fuck.

  And try to be a little more original with your challenge lines.

  “Ah, to hell with it.”

  He didn’t slap his own face like some anime character. One can be ridiculous in a far more mediocre way.

  Instead he did something simpler: he forced courage into himself. He inhaled, exhaled, and shook off his hesitation.

  What could possibly go wrong, anyway?

  She’ll dodge. Or she’ll absorb the impact vector without effort and then explain how to do it better, right?

  What would be the point of fighting someone who’s ridiculously weaker than you? What could someone learn while being defeated without the slightest chance to resist or counterattack?

  He raised an arm.

  With an almost grotesque sense of pride he created a rheological field: a small region in which the air stopped obediently following the laws of ideal gases and acquired new properties. Viscosity. Memory. Directional resistance.

  Inside that space, air no longer behaved like air.

  It compressed without exploding, held its shape as if it possessed a fragile internal architecture, flowed only where it was guided.

  Within that field Mark was, without realizing it, taming faint Brownian motions and improvising temporary informational laws: conditions for improbable chemical bonds to form, fleeting yield thresholds, states of matter that had no real right to exist.

  The result was a small fluid, turbulent tangle.

  Badly engineered air.

  Anarchic air.

  His imagination was not precise enough for the rheological field to align with anything well defined, and so it produced something unstable, unruly.

  A small physical monstrosity.

  Mark clenched his jaw and released it.

  The pseudo-aerosol missile shot toward Thuljas.

  She didn’t move.

  Mark’s heart began to pound. He hoped the strike would reach its target, even though it was obvious she was completely calm.

  He wanted to see what would happen when it hit her.

  Maybe he had overestimated her.

  Maybe she had overestimated herself.

  But just as the pseudo-aerosol missile was about to reach her—

  she vanished.

  His ocular saccades barely caught the movement. A fragment, a discontinuity in space. Then they saw nothing at all: they only registered the displacement, something like blindsight.

  A moment later he felt something behind him.

  Two hands rested on his shoulders.

  Lightly.

  He turned abruptly.

  Thuljas was there, suspended in midair behind him. She did not simply seem still; she seemed to hover, with an alien grace, as if the air itself were cooperating with her.

  For an instant time seemed to clot after the jolt.

  Her hands rested gently, almost affectionately.

  And it was deeply unnatural.

  Something that had moved at that speed should have carried violence, friction, inertia. It should have betrayed the strain, the weight of the acceleration.

  But it hadn’t.

  She was there, motionless, with that serene, confident, almost cheerful expression. As if stopping after such speed were the most natural thing in the world.

  Then Thuljas removed her hands from his shoulders.

  The gesture was almost gentle, as if she were ending an unnecessary contact. But a moment later, still suspended in midair, her body reorganized into a short, perfectly coordinated motion. The rotation of her torso was minimal, the arm closing like a lever.

  The punch came.

  It hit him with almost feral power.

  The instant of terror was extremely brief. Mark felt a scream rising in his throat, a primal reflex about to burst out, but it strangled itself before it could escape.

  The blow landed.

  The world warped.

  It was not only the impact. It was as if reality itself had undergone a small local collapse: the air compressed around him, his stomach knotted, his vision contracted into a white flash.

  Then the tumbling began.

  His body shot backward without the slightest possibility of reaction. He rolled, bounced, perhaps struck the ground, perhaps not. The sequence dissolved into a chaotic blur of sensations.

  He did not know how long it lasted.

  He did not even know how he moved.

  Only that he was falling, spinning, being pushed away by an amount of energy his nervous system had absolutely no tools to interpret.

  For a moment he thought he was going to die.

  But the thought had no clear shape. It was more like a mental contraction, existence compressed into a tiny point.

  Then he almost lost consciousness.

  When awareness began to return, it did so slowly, as if someone were switching the world back on one circuit at a time.

  First came sound.

  The distant rustle of leaves moving in the wind. The blood rushing in his ears. His own uneven breathing.

  Then came the body.

  Pain arrived like a surface.

  Not an explosion, not a single impact, but something laminar. A diffuse, layered field spreading along muscles and beneath the skin.

  It was a new sensation.

  Thanks to an unusually deep proprioception, something he was experiencing for the first time, Mark could distinguish the differences between one stab of pain and another. Each micro-area of his body seemed to have its own separate voice.

  Here a muscular tension.

  There a torn fiber.

  Elsewhere a small joint shock.

  Pain was no longer a single indistinguishable block.

  It was a map.

  This had not happened during the fight with the first Grizzly-man.

  There the recovery had been different. Too different.

  It had been unnatural in the most disturbing sense of the word. The transition from excruciating pain to normality had been abrupt, almost arbitrary. As if an external force had taken hold of him, repaired him, and then placed him back on his feet.

  First the agony.

  Then ordinary cenesthesia.

  Then that sudden surge of furious anger that had erupted inside him, as if invisible strings were pulling him.

  As if he had been someone else’s puppet.

  Here it was different.

  Here the process seemed… natural.

  Extremely natural, in fact.

  And yet what was happening would clearly have been considered supernatural on Earth.

  But in the world they were in, the supernatural often coincided with the natural. The local laws were simply broader.

  For something to be truly supernatural there, it would have to break those laws.

  What was happening to his body did not seem to do that.

  Instead it seemed perfectly compatible with the physiology of a magical organism.

  Mark could clearly perceive what was happening.

  Micro-weldings.

  Tiny endogenous reconstruction processes.

  Tissues realigning.

  Microfractures sealing themselves.

  Muscle fibers weaving back together.

  It was not instantaneous healing.

  It was accelerated healing, but still progressive. And the most astonishing thing was that he could feel it.

  It was as if his nervous system had direct access to the repair processes.

  Every point of his body reported the state of the work.

  And hidden inside that perception there was something even more interesting.

  The feeling that he might be able to intervene.

  Not now. Not yet.

  He had no control over the process.

  But he sensed, with an almost physical clarity, that he could have control someday. That if he accumulated enough experience in the relationship between his conscious self and that accelerated reconstruction, he might be able to guide it.

  Divert resources.

  Accelerate one area.

  Slow another.

  Turn healing itself into a tool.

  As the pain slowly faded, Mark understood something.

  Maybe that was exactly the purpose of the training.

  Not becoming stronger immediately.

  But learning how to survive the process that makes you stronger.

  A sentence came back to him.

  “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.”

  Gibran.

  Never had that maxim felt so literally true.

  Pain was quite literally opening something inside him.

  The training continued.

  He could not say for how long.

  The sun slowly slid behind the line of trees, shadows stretched across the clearing, and the light cooled as the sky changed color.

  And each time it happened more or less the same way.

  Mark attacked.

  Thuljas vanished.

  Then the blow came.

  Sometimes a punch.

  Sometimes a shove.

  Sometimes an impact so precise that it briefly shut off his perception of the world.

  And every time his body collapsed.

  Then rebuilt itself.

  At first he noticed no improvement.

  Despite the effort, despite the desperate concentration with which he tried to do something different, his attacks remained clumsy, imprecise, childish compared to what Thuljas could do.

  But slowly he began to understand that the improvement was happening somewhere else.

  Not in power.

  In resilience.

  His body was learning to return to operation faster and faster.

  The recovery threshold shortened.

  The nervous system became clearer under stress.

  And finally, almost by accident, he made a small discovery.

  At first it was only a sensation.

  An anomaly in the way he perceived his muscles.

  Then it became clearer.

  Selective innervation.

  He still could not really control it, but he had understood that something like that was emerging in his body. He could isolate individual muscle districts and activate them almost independently from the rest.

  Like modules.

  Separate motor units.

  An arm could contract without dragging useless tension through the back. A shoulder could stabilize itself without stiffening the entire chest.

  It was as if the motor system were becoming more granular.

  More modular.

  Not efficient yet.

  But promising.

  When he realized it, lying on the grass of the clearing while his body completed yet another accelerated repair, Mark understood something.

  Maybe he was not learning how to fight.

  He was learning how to become a different kind of organism.

  While he was still recovering from the last physical beating he had taken, Mark opened his eyes and saw Thuljas approaching. The contours of the world had finally stabilized again, and the pain had receded into something more tolerable, like a disordered choir that had not yet found a common rhythm.

  She sat astride him.

  The gesture was natural, almost casual, as if there were nothing strange about the scene. As if a few minutes earlier she had not beaten him with almost surgical brutality, bringing him repeatedly to the edge of unconsciousness.

  There was a smile on her face.

  A bright, easy smile that seemed to belong to a completely different situation.

  “A Saiyan…” Mark said, staring at the sky beyond her shoulders. “I’m a fucking Saiyan.”

  “What?” she burst out laughing.

  Her laugh was surprisingly beautiful. Clear, full, almost musical. Even more surprising when compared to her usual voice, high-pitched and sometimes irritating.

  “I’m tired,” Mark sighed.

  His body was still a disorganized chorus of pain. Every muscle was sending its own signals, every joint seemed to have a different opinion about how wise it had been to endure that training.

  “I’d say so,” she replied. Then she tilted her head slightly. “Sorry. I may have gone a little too hard on you.”

  She said it with an almost guilty tone.

  “They told me to do it like this. It’s not my fault.” She paused briefly, studying his face with attention. “You don’t hate me, do you?”

  She actually seemed worried.

  The position she was in did not help Mark’s clarity of thought. Thuljas was sitting on him with her legs on either side of his body, as if she were about to ride him. The contact, the weight of her body, the warmth she radiated through her revealing clothes… all of it combined to create a strange sensation.

  Excitement arrived in a synesthetic way, almost as if it were an extension of the same heightened sensitivity with which he had just perceived pain. The two sensations intertwined in a nearly absurd way: the body healing, the body aching, and at the same time the body reacting to her closeness.

  They looked at each other.

  For a moment neither of them spoke.

  “How could I ever hate a beautiful girl like you?” Mark finally said.

  The moment the words left his mouth, panic exploded inside his head.

  What the hell are you saying, idiot.

  What kind of awful line is that.

  But Thuljas didn’t seem bothered at all.

  Quite the opposite.

  Her smile changed slightly. It became softer, almost tender. Her eyes stayed locked on his for a moment that seemed to stretch longer than necessary.

  Then she leaned down.

  The movement was slow, deliberate.

  And she kissed him.

  A passionate kiss, direct and without hesitation.

  Mark’s eyes widened.

  For a moment he remained completely still, his brain unable to decide what was actually happening. Then, almost at the same instant, his eyelids lowered.

  He let himself go.

  He returned the kiss.

  His first kiss.