Ilka's Numbers

The duty board outside Cinder Hall's ring room was a slab of slate the size of a door, chalked over so many times the surface had gone the gray of old rain, and Dorvan had walked past it a hundred mornings without reading it as anything but wallpaper. He read it now. Two lines, in Márta's blunt capital hand: BODROZSA — SPARRING REASSIGNED. BODROZSA — RING TIME 3RD BELL.

He had a meat pie in one hand, still warm through the paper, bought at the corner stall as the whole excuse for being here before his own morning's work. He didn't set it down. He just stood there reading the board the way he'd read Kerenyi's kept notice yesterday, and the words lined up the same way a lock's pins lined up when the tension wrench finally found the right turn: not identical, but built by the same hand.

Scheduling conflict. Resolved by seniority precedent. That was what the copy in his pocket said, word for word, about a fighter named Zoltész Kerenyi who hadn't placed in eight months. The board in front of him didn't use those exact words. It didn't need to. Reassigned and 3rd bell were doing the same job with less paper — moving a fighter's time and partner without ever saying whose decision it was, or why.

Third bell was the hour after opening and before the paying crowd came in to watch anyone work. He'd have called it luck of the draw, once. He knew better now than to call anything luck without checking first.

"You're going to stand there and let it go cold," Ilka said from the ring room doorway, toweling sweat off the back of her neck with a rag that had been white sometime in the last decade. "Or is the pie for Márta. Tell me now so I don't hope."

"It's for you." He held it out. "I ate on the way."

"You didn't." She took it anyway, because arguing about whether he'd eaten had never once won her anything, and bit into it standing in the doorway with the unhurried appetite of someone who'd already put in two hours of work before most of the city was awake. "You're early. You're never early."

"I wanted to see you before the crowd got in."

"Liar." She said it without heat, the way she'd point out he had his boots on the wrong feet. "You wanted to see something. You've got the look."

He'd learned, across four dead mornings and this fifth living one, that there was no version of lying to Ilka that didn't cost him more than the truth would have, except that the truth would cost him everything, so he lied anyway, and hated exactly how easy it had gotten. "Wanted to see you win your sparring rounds. That's all the look is."

"Mm." She didn't believe him. She never entirely believed him anymore, and the not-believing had stopped announcing itself with a raised eyebrow and started sitting quiet behind her eyes instead, which was worse, because it meant she'd decided arguing about it wasn't worth her breath yet. "Well. No rounds to win. Bálint's out."

"Out."

"Reassigned." She said the word with the specific flatness of someone reciting an official notice she'd stopped being angry about around the second time it happened to someone she knew. "Márta got a note this morning. Some conflict with the seniority rota — Csermák's owed makeup time from a bout he covered for old Tabár back in the spring, and apparently this was the week it got cashed in." She shrugged, one shoulder, a fighter's economical shrug that spent no more motion than the sentence needed. "So I've got Renner instead, who hits like a question mark, and I've been bumped to third bell so Márta can run Bálint's makeup session in the good hour."

Dorvan kept his face where he'd put it before she started talking. "That's the whole story? A note?"

"That's the whole story. It's a gym, Dorvan, not a court. Notes happen." She took another bite. "It's not the first time I've drawn the short session this month, if that's what you're circling."

It was exactly what he was circling, and hearing her say it out loud — casual, unbothered, already filed under things that happen to the gym's most inconvenient success story — put a small cold weight behind his sternum that had nothing to do with the Circle's binding and everything to do with how good she'd gotten at absorbing small unfairness without noticing the shape it made. He thought of the three-part signature he'd built out of six strangers' ruined seasons: a loud win, a clean reassignment, a buried next chance. Ilka's last upset win against a ranked favorite had been six weeks ago. He did the arithmetic without wanting to.

"How many times this month," he said. "The short session."

"Why are you counting?"

"I'm not counting. I'm asking."

"You're asking like you're counting." She set the pie down on the bench, half-eaten, and looked at him the way she looked at an opponent's stance before the bell — reading weight distribution, reading which foot would move first. "Twice before this. Same excuse, near enough. Somebody's owed makeup time, somebody's got a conflict, and it's always my slot that gives. I noticed. I didn't think about it, because thinking about every small thing that goes against you in this business is how you end up too angry to fight straight. Márta says pick your fights outside the ring same as in it. I picked not this one." She paused. "Until you showed up before dawn with a meat pie and a face like you already knew the answer before I told you."

He said nothing fast enough that the nothing itself was an answer, and he watched her clock it.

"That's the third time this week you've done that," she said. "Known something before it happened. You did it at the Tell — you had that ledger page out before Halmasy finished his first sentence, and I watched your face, Dorvan, I watch faces for a living, and you weren't guessing, you were confirming. Like you'd read the whole thing off a card somebody handed you weeks in advance. And now you walk in here at an hour you've never once shown up at, asking about my sparring rota like it's a crime scene."

"Ilka—"

"I'm not finished." She wasn't loud. She never got loud when it mattered, saved the volume for the ring where it had a use. "I'm not going to ask you what you do at night. I stopped asking that a long time ago, because I decided I'd rather not know than know and have to do something about it. That was my choice, and I'm not walking it back." She picked the pie back up, took another bite, chewing while she watched him, making him wait through it the way she made an opponent wait through a feint. "But I'm not stupid, and I'm not blind, and I am done pretending I haven't noticed you carrying something around that's shaped exactly like knowing my fights before they happen."

The ring room behind her had gone quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet when the people in it have started listening without turning around; Renner was very intently re-wrapping already-wrapped hands by the far post, and somewhere past him a bucket dripped into a basin at a rate too steady to be anything but someone's excuse to keep standing still.

"What do you want me to say," Dorvan said, and it came out rougher than he'd meant it to.

"I don't want you to say anything, right now. I want you to hear this part." Ilka stepped in close enough that the rest of the room stopped being able to hear her, which was its own kind of mercy, one she was extending to him and not to herself. "I'm not asking you to lie to me. I'm asking you to stop being careful about it where I can see you doing it."

She held his eyes a second longer, long enough to be sure it had landed.

"Say something," she said. "Or don't. But don't stand there deciding which lie costs less. I'll know which one you picked."

He opened his mouth on nothing, because she was right, and because the only true answer was the one thing he couldn't say to her without handing her the Circle along with it. What came out instead was smaller than either. "Third bell's the quiet hour. Nobody watches third bell."

Ilka went still in the particular way she went still before she hit something. "Say that part again."

"I didn't mean anything by it."

"You never do." She picked the towel back up off her shoulder, wrapped it once around her knuckles, and looked at him the way she looked at a fighter who'd just told her exactly where he meant to throw the next punch. "Nobody watches third bell. Remember you said that."