Stale vinyl and cheap pine cleaner couldn't mask the stench of fragile egos. Ten guys in pristine black belts openly snickered at a scrawny fourteen-year-old drowning in an oversized loner gi. They assumed she was a victim. They didn't realize she was a national champion and entirely out of patience.
Fluorescent lights hummed overhead with a sickly, oscillating buzz, casting a jaundiced glare over the Coastal Athletics Martial Arts Center. The space felt less like a dojo and more like a repurposed tax accountant's office. A single wall of floor-to-ceiling mirrors reflected a sea of royal blue puzzle mats, most of them peeling at the interlocking seams, trapping decades of dead skin and dried sweat.
Holland Wright stood near the heavy bags, trying not to breathe too deeply. She was fourteen, though her slight frame and sharp, bird-like collarbones usually made people guess eleven. She wore a stiff, bleached white loner gi from the front desk's lost and found. The canvas was rough, smelling faintly of mildew and an aggressive industrial detergent, and the sleeves hung two inches past her wrists. She rolled them up, but the thick fabric kept sliding back down, scratching against her knuckles.
She wasn't supposed to be here—or rather, she wasn't supposed to be in this specific class. A scheduling glitch at the front desk, managed by a teenager who cared more about her acrylic nails than class rosters, had dumped Holland into the Thursday night advanced adult/teen sparring session. Her actual credentials—three consecutive national gold medals in full-contact Kyokushin, a black belt earned on splintering hardwood floors under a man who rarely spoke above a whisper—were packed in a cardboard box currently lost somewhere in the back of a moving truck on Interstate 40. Her mother had insisted she get out of their cramped, half-unpacked apartment.
"Go find a gym. Hit something. Stop pacing!" her mother had yelled, a vein throbbing at her temple, deeply hungover from the reality of a miserable divorce.
So here Holland was, wearing a white belt as stiff as cardboard, tied in a lopsided knot, standing on peeling blue foam.
Across the room, the advanced students were stretching. They were a collection of suburban predators, boys who peaked in junior high and grown men dodging their wives. The loudest among them was Trent Lawson. He looked about nineteen, built like a fire hydrant, with thick, sloping shoulders and a jawline hidden under a patchy layer of stubble. He wore a heavy black cotton gi customized with golden embroidery down the lapel, his black belt tied with arrogant precision.
Holland watched him without appearing to watch him. It was a habit born of a thousand hours of sparring. She cataloged his movements instinctively. He was demonstrating a spinning hook kick to a pair of younger, equally bloated blue belts. He grunted loudly with the exertion, snapping his heel through the air.
'He drops his left hand,' Holland thought, her brain automatically highlighting the mechanical flaw. 'He drops his hand. He plants his pivot foot flat, and he telegraphs the spin by throwing his shoulder first.'