Training | 3:17 PM
The marker ink from Yuki's demonstration had dried on the hardwood near the far wall. A thin dark line, barely visible from where Adrian stood, but he kept finding it anyway — the floor's quiet record of how that had gone.
He made himself stop looking at it.
His grip tightened on the training knife. The wooden handle had gone slick with sweat, the wood grain still visible underneath but darkened by moisture, and his palm was doing that thing where the sweat made the grip feel alive in a way that wasn't helping anything.
Aveline stood in the centre of the room. Not in stance. Just standing, the way she always stood — like readiness was something she'd decided on years ago and never reconsidered. Her weight settled across both feet, balanced, the marker loose in her right hand like it was something she'd picked up by accident and was still deciding what to do with.
She was watching him.
One good hit, Adrian thought. Forced his breathing to even, the cool air of the training room hitting his lungs, settling. Just one. Just prove the point is possible.
He feinted right.
She didn't react. Didn't adjust her weight, didn't track him with her body — just let her eyes do the work, catching his movement the way a security camera catches motion, recording it, noting it, finding it unremarkable.
He committed.
Drove forward with everything he had left, blade arcing up toward her jaw, fast, fully dedicated, the kind of attack that didn't leave anything in reserve because reserve didn't matter if the first hit didn't land—
Aveline's hand came up.
CRACK.
The marker met his knife mid-strike with enough force that the impact rattled up his arm like electricity, and the training knife spun out of his grip and clattered across the floor somewhere in the direction of completely inaccessible.
Adrian's arm was still ringing with the vibration of it.
"Dead," Aveline said. "Your knife hand is gone."
"I'm not dead yet."
It came out without planning, without permission, his chest heaving, adrenaline making decisions on his behalf, and it landed in the room and stayed there — a statement that meant something, that crossed some line he hadn't known was there.
Aveline stopped.
Her head tilted. The specific angle of something that has registered an unexpected variable and is reassessing its entire model in real time.
Something moved across her face — there and gone so fast he might have imagined it — not quite interest, not quite amusement, something sharper than both, something that looked almost like respect but colder, cleaner, without the warmth that usually came with it.
"Interesting," she said.
She lowered the marker.
"Hand to hand, then."
He didn't wait for her to reset. Rushed forward, fist driving toward her chin, no technique behind it, no strategy, just raw aggression and the specific logic of if I stop thinking I might catch her before she can think about catching me, and it was a terrible plan but it was the only plan he had and his body was running on adrenaline and desperation—
Aveline ducked.
Not away from him. Into him. Slipped inside his guard before the swing had completed its arc, and her hand snapped around his wrist like it had always been going to be there, like the space where his wrist was had been waiting for her hand to occupy it, and she twisted with the mechanical precision of someone following an instruction manual, using his own momentum as the mechanism.
Pain shot up his arm. White-hot. Immediate. Specific.
The kind of pain that had opinions about his life choices.
He grunted. Threw his elbow backward.
Blindly. No thought behind it, pure desperation, the move of a body making its own decisions while the conscious part of him was still processing the wrist thing—
It connected.
Not hard. Nowhere near hard enough to matter, but it connected with her ribs, and the lock released, and Adrian wrenched himself free and dropped low and drove forward, aiming for her midsection before she could reset her weight—
Aveline's forearm came down like a structural element falling out of the sky.
The impact stopped him cold. Rattled his teeth. The room tilted sideways for a half-second, his vision swimming with the specific quality of that's going to mean something tomorrow, and he could feel the shape of the fight becoming clear: she was letting him use up the options one at a time. Patiently. Watching him find each wall.
Fine.
He pivoted. Feinted low, felt her weight shift, fractionally, to answer it — and then sprang upward with everything he had left, a haymaker, committed and ugly, the kind of swing that only works once in a lifetime if your opponent is briefly distracted and you're very lucky and—
Aveline dropped.
Not a crouch. A fall, controlled, deliberate, her shoulder hitting the mat as her legs swept forward in a long, devastating arc that caught both of Adrian's ankles at the apex of his jump, at the moment when he was committed and had nothing left and couldn't do anything about it—
His world tilted.
He hit the mat face-first with enough force to drive every scrap of air out of his lungs in one complete and undignified expulsion. Stars. Actual stars. The kind he'd always assumed were metaphorical but apparently were very much not.
Before he could push himself up, before his brain had finished catching up to the information that his face had just made contact with hardwood, cold fingers closed in his hair.
His head snapped back.
Neck exposed. Every pulse point available. The exact position he'd watched Yuki end up in forty minutes ago, and experiencing it from the inside was substantially worse, substantially more educational, substantially more real than observing it from the wall.
The marker pressed against his throat.
Cold tip. Wet with ink. The slow, deliberate drag of it, left to right, unhurried, deliberate, the same motion she'd used on Yuki, with the same patience, and Adrian lay there and felt it happen and couldn't do anything about any of it.
"Dead," she said.
Soft. Final. The word that ended arguments.
Everything went quiet except for his breathing, which was doing its considerable best to catch up to the rest of his nervous system.
Aveline released him and stood in one smooth motion, like she was getting up from a chair she'd chosen to sit in briefly and hadn't found particularly interesting. Like the entire fight had been a small administrative task she'd completed between other things and was now finished with.
"You improvise better than Yuki," she said, in the tone that belonged in this room — clinical, not warm, just stating fact into the cold air. "The elbow was genuine. Instinct, not training. Harder to predict." She looked at him on the floor with the expression of someone reviewing results, someone assessing inventory. "The ending doesn't change."
Adrian pushed himself up slowly.
His face was doing something hot and complicated that had nothing to do with the mat burn. The marker ink dried on his throat, cold, matter-of-fact, the record of the outcome written on his skin, and he didn't touch it.
"You overcommit," Aveline said, watching him find his feet with the patience of someone who had all the time available. "You telegraph two seconds before you move. Weight shift. Breath. A thing your eyes do when you've decided something." She paused, considering. "You also assume I have patterns. I don't. Not the kind you can read."
She extended her hand.
Adrian looked at it.
Stood up on his own. His legs shook and he let them, because there wasn't much he could do about it and pretending otherwise would just add something else to the list.
"You lasted longer than most would," Aveline added. The afterthought quality of something she'd decided to include because it was accurate, not because she was managing his feelings about it. "That counts."
Adrian wiped sweat off his face. Tasted blood where he'd bitten his cheek on the way down. "How long?"
"Forty-three seconds."
Christ.
"Yuki lasted twelve."
Adrian exhaled slowly. Stood very still for a moment, taking careful inventory of that information and deciding what it meant. Forty-three seconds against her. That was something. It didn't feel like something — it felt like getting demolished in the most efficient way possible — but it was.
Aveline turned away, collecting the training weapons with the efficiency of someone who had a system and found deviation from it faintly offensive. The marker, the knife, the rig — each one placed back where it belonged, in its spot, everything in its order.
"Adequate for survival," she said, not looking back. "Not for winning. But survival is what matters in the field. Winning is a bonus. Don't confuse them."
She headed for the door, the temperature seeming to drop as she moved away, like she was pulling the warmth with her.
"Basement. You both need firearms."
Basement Range | 3:40 PM
The shooting range smelled like cold concrete and old gunpowder and something metallic, the specific sharpness of air that had been regularly disturbed by things moving very fast. Paper targets hung at intervals down the lane, scarred veterans of previous sessions, their surfaces expressing the room's history in small dark punctures — bullet holes like acne scars, like the targets had lived hard lives and were still standing.
Someone used this room a lot. Someone came down here regularly, alone probably, in this basement beneath the mansion, and put rounds into paper until something felt better or at least felt different.
Adrian filed that information in the folder with everything else.
Aveline handed Yuki the Glock without ceremony. No preamble. No explanation. Just: here.
"Feet shoulder-width," she said. "Dominant foot back. Knees slightly bent — you're building a structure, not standing at a bus stop."
She repositioned Yuki's fingers with clinical precision, adjusting the support hand, the thumb, the specific geometry of a grip that worked rather than one that merely held the weapon. Her hands were cold — Adrian could see the goosebumps rising on Yuki's arm where Aveline's skin made contact.
"Arms extended," Aveline continued. "Slight bend at the elbows. Don't lock them out. Locked elbows fight the recoil instead of absorbing it."
She stepped back, giving Yuki space, the room suddenly larger without her in it, the air warmer.
"Breathe normally," Aveline said. "Exhale. Then squeeze, not pull. Pulling torques the barrel. Squeezing keeps it straight."
Yuki's hands were trembling with the dedicated energy of someone who had been handed something that had made its intentions very clear and was only just accepting that this was happening.
She exhaled.
Squeezed.
BANG.
The recoil came through her arms like a shockwave with a personal grievance, and she flinched violently, stumbled half a step backward, and produced a sound that was most accurately transcribed as a sustained noise of distress mixed with surprise.
"Again," Aveline said, over the ringing in the room.
Of course again, Adrian thought from his spot along the wall. Again is the only language she speaks.
Yuki raised the gun on shaking arms. The barrel wavered, tiny movements, her body arguing with her decision to be here.
BANG.
She flinched. Eyes squeezing shut completely involuntarily, the betrayal of a nervous system with opinions, and the shot went somewhere that was definitively not the target. The bullet hole appeared in the wall three feet to the left of where she was aiming.
"I can't—"
"You're anticipating the recoil," Aveline said. Not impatient. Just identifying the problem with the same tone she used to say your elbow's at the wrong angle. "Stop trying to brace for it. You cannot brace effectively. Trying makes the flinch worse. Let it happen. Absorb it after."
On the third shot Yuki's grip slipped. The gun kicked back hard, nearly flew out of her hands, and Aveline moved.
Just like that. One moment she was standing three feet away, the next she was right there, stepped in behind Yuki and closed her hands over Yuki's trembling fingers. Cold. So cold. Precise. The grip of something that didn't shake, that had never shaken, that found the concept of trembling faintly theoretical.
She repositioned everything. The geometry. The angle. The specific deliberate structure of a grip that meant something, that was built to survive what came next.
"Tighter," she said. Her voice had dropped, not softer, but closer, calibrated to the proximity, to the fact that she was standing directly behind Yuki now, her hands covering Yuki's hands, her cold wrists touching warm skin. "Here, and here."
Yuki had goosebumps going up her arms that had nothing to do with the temperature, which was saying something given that the temperature was doing a lot.
"The gun doesn't fight you if you don't fight it," Aveline said, still close, still speaking directly into the space near Yuki's ear. "It's not a struggle. It's an agreement. You control it, or it controls you. There's no middle ground."
Yuki swallowed. Hard.
"Breathe," Aveline said. "Exhale. Imagine it's a BB gun. Plastic. Nothing. Just a sound."
Yuki breathed. Her whole body was shaking but she breathed, and exhaled, and squeezed.
BANG.
The bullet clipped the target's outer ring. Nicked it. Barely made contact, but made contact, and Yuki made a sound that was completely different from the previous sounds. Higher. Surprised. Genuinely, unguardedly pleased with the fact that her body had done what she'd asked it to do.
"I hit it."
"Good," Aveline said. She released her. Stepped back. The cold went with her, and the temperature in the room seemed to normalize slightly. "Ten more. Same rhythm. Exhale, squeeze, absorb."
By the tenth round the flinch had reduced to a twitch. Her stance had stopped fighting itself. Her arms ached with the specific fatigue of muscles that had been asked to do something new repeatedly and were planning to submit a formal complaint tomorrow morning, but her grouping was clustering, beginning to mean something.
She lowered the gun. Her hands were still shaking but differently now — the shake of exhaustion, not fear.
"I think I'm getting it," she said.
"You're adequate," Aveline said.
And that meant something, Adrian understood, watching Yuki's expression shift. That was Aveline's version of encouragement. That was as close as she got to saying you did well.
Aveline handed Adrian the gun and stepped back. Kept her distance. No physical corrections. No repositioning. Just crossed her arms and delivered instructions with the clipped efficiency of someone who had assessed that he didn't need the same scaffolding Yuki did.
"Stance," she said. "Fix it. You're loading your right side. Shift your weight left. Elbow in. Sight alignment. Breathe."
Adrian's first shot hit the inner ring.
His second was closer to centre. By his fifth he'd found something — the exhale-and-squeeze of it, the way the gun stopped being a separate object and started being an extension of a decision he'd already made. It felt like muscle memory, like the NPU range sessions he'd done twice a month for three years were all living in his hands now, doing their quiet work without being asked.
"You've shot before," Aveline said. Not a question.
"NPU training. Two hundred rounds a month, mandatory."
"It shows."
She watched his grouping develop, watched him settle into the rhythm of it, watched him find his centre, and didn't say anything else. Just watched. Assessed.
His final grouping sat in the centre rings, clustered, competent, the work of someone who knew what they were doing without being exceptional at it.
Aveline collected both weapons without comment. Checked the chambers. Secured them back in their cases with the care of someone who believed in maintenance, in things being in good working order, in the importance of tools that could be relied upon.
"That's enough for today," she said.
Indoor Pool | 5:00 PM
"You're both a mess," Aveline announced, looking at them with clinical detachment. She was standing in the doorway of the pool area, and the steam rising from the water made her look slightly unreal, slightly less present, like she was something the humidity was trying to dissolve. "Marker ink. Sweat. The specific hollowed-out quality of people whose bodies have been through several things today."
She walked to the pool edge. The steam curled around her as she moved, clinging to her, not making her warm — nothing could make her warm — just making her visible.
"The heated pool," she said, gesturing at the water. It glowed from beneath, underwater lights throwing rippling patterns up the tiled walls and the glass ceiling, where the last grey light of the blizzard afternoon pressed down like something with weight. Steam fogged the upper air, thick enough that Adrian could barely see the far end of the pool, barely see where the water ended and the air began.
"Heat increases blood flow," Aveline continued. "Reduces inflammation. Your muscles will recover faster." She turned to look at them. "You need to recover. I need you functional."
She turned toward the hallway. "One hour. Dinner at six. Don't be late."
Then she was gone, leaving only the smell of her — something clean, something cold, something that didn't belong in the warm damp air of a pool room.
The water was genuinely, almost offensively warm. Adrian sat on the edge for a long moment with his feet in it before conceding and sliding all the way in. The heat hit his muscles like a second nervous system coming online, like every fiber he'd asked to do something today was suddenly being told it was okay to relax.
Yuki was floating on her back with her eyes closed, her dark hair spread out around her in the water like she was drifting in the ocean instead of a heated pool in a mansion basement.
"Oh my god," she'd said, when she'd first lowered herself in, her voice pitched high with genuine discomfort and genuine relief. "Oh my god. I thought my arms were going to detach. I thought that was happening as a medical event. Like actual detachment."
Now she was quiet. Drifting. The rise and fall of her breathing barely visible above the waterline.
Adrian touched the marker line on his throat without meaning to. The ink was fading, water working at it in long, slow strokes, but the line was still there — thin, dark, the physical record of forty-three seconds written on his skin in someone else's handwriting.
"You okay?" Yuki asked, one eye opening.
"She killed me. Twice, technically."
"She got me too." Yuki's voice went quieter, the water's acoustic doing something to it, making it sound like it was coming from very far away. "When she drew it across my throat, my brain just decided it was real. Before I could stop it. Completely, totally decided that I was dead and there was nothing I could do about it."
"I know. I saw."
"And she smiled." Not a question. She'd heard him say something about it in the training room. "When she was doing it. What did it look like?"
Adrian was quiet for a moment. The water lapped against him, warm, patient, persistent.
"Real," he said, finally. "That was the bad part. That's what got to me. It wasn't a tactic. It wasn't for our benefit. She wasn't performing. She just… liked it. Actually liked it. Enjoyed it the way most people enjoy a good meal or a warm drink. Just. Enjoyed the fact that she could do that and we couldn't stop her."
Yuki floated in silence.
"She's teaching us though," she said, eventually. Not defending exactly. Just holding both things up in the same light and looking at them together, trying to figure out what they added up to. "She's keeping us alive. She's showing us things we need to know. That has to mean something."
"Her hands are freezing," Adrian muttered. He kept coming back to it. The specific wrongness of the cold, colder than the room, colder than anything that was also supposed to be alive and standing next to you. "Even in the range, just now. Even after everything. Even after the fire last night. It's not normal temperature. It's not even close."
"Yeah." Yuki opened both eyes and looked up at the glass ceiling, where the blizzard was still happening on the other side of the glass, still falling, still not stopping. "That's not a normal thing. That's not a person thing."
"No," Adrian agreed.
"So what is she?"
Adrian didn't answer.
Yuki splashed him lightly, the water catching what little light made it down into the pool, water catching the light in a brief arc before falling back to the surface. "Stop turning it over," she said. "It'll still be there to turn over tomorrow. Right now we're warm and we're alive and we're not getting our throats cut by markers. Those are all still true. Let them be true for an hour."
Adrian let himself float.
After a moment, the thinking quieted. Not stopped — it didn't stop, not really — but quieted, the way things do when your body is finally warm after being cold, when the worst of the day has passed into the category of survived rather than happening, when you're floating in water in a heated pool beneath a blizzard and there's nowhere else to be.
Forty-three seconds, he thought one last time.
Against her.
It counts, she'd said.
He decided to let it.
Kitchen | 5:52 PM
Knife. Carrot. Celery. Onion.
The rhythm was automatic, precise, fast. The knife moved in her hands like it had always lived there, like the blade knew exactly where to land and at what angle and how deep to cut. Precise half-moons. Uniform thickness. The kind of work that only comes from doing it the same way thousands of times.
She didn't look up from the cutting board.
Water boiling in a large pot. She adjusted the heat without turning around, some instinct telling her that the water had reached the right temperature, that it was time to reduce it, that the pasta would be next.
The onion made her eyes water. Just barely. Barely enough to notice.
She didn't wipe them away.
From somewhere down the hall, filtered through the mansion's walls and the storm pressing against the windows, laughter. Yuki's, probably. The unguarded kind, the kind that escaped when she forgot she was supposed to be afraid of things. When she forgot that the person cooking her dinner had literally dragged her across a training room floor and put a marker to her throat and smiled while doing it.
The sound reached the kitchen and arrived at the place where Aveline was chopping celery, steady, uniform, not pausing.
Her grip on the knife tightened. Just a fraction. Barely visible. Just enough that if someone was looking they would have seen it, but nobody was looking, so it went unnoticed.
She kept chopping.
The knife came down, down, down. The rhythm continuing. The work continuing. The sound of laughter continuing somewhere down the hall, and the sound of the blade continuing in the kitchen, two different rhythms, two different things, existing in the same space in the same moment.
Dining Room | 6:10 PM
Three bowls of soup. Bread. Butter. Water in glasses. The fireplace doing the work the heating system had given up on, casting the table in warm, unsteady light that made everything look slightly more liveable than it actually was.
The soup was good. Adrian could smell it from across the table — chicken, vegetables, something that had been built slowly, something that had been allowed to develop, to become more than the sum of its ingredients. Steam rose from the bowls in thin wisps.
Yuki ate with the focused efficiency of someone who had decided that manners were a post-survival concern and reprioritized accordingly. Fork to bowl, bowl to mouth, steady rhythm, no wasted motion.
"This is really good," she said, around soup. "Thank you."
"Mm," Aveline said.
Adrian watched her across the table. The way she ate with the same economy she brought to everything. No wasted motion. No pauses that weren't necessary. The soup treated as a logistics problem to be resolved rather than an experience to be had. Fork in. Swallow. Repeat.
"Why are you doing this?" Adrian asked.
Aveline set her spoon down slowly. Looked at him with the quality of someone deciding how much of an answer the question deserves and arriving at a very specific number.
"Doing what," she said.
"All of it. Training. Feeding us." He paused. "Keeping us alive when there are presumably easier options."
"Because you'll need it," she said.
"For what?"
"For what's coming."
Yuki's spoon stopped mid-air. The soup dripped back into the bowl in the silence that followed.
"What's coming?" she asked, carefully. Like she was approaching a dangerous animal. Like the words themselves might trigger something.
Aveline picked up her bread. Tore a piece off with the unhurried calm of someone delivering genuinely terrible news in the same register they'd use to discuss the weather. Her hands didn't shake. Her expression didn't change. She was just a person eating dinner, happen to be saying the world might be ending.
"If NPU doesn't secure the samples in time," she said, "if the enhancement serum and the antidote aren't retrieved before the infection spreads beyond current containment, society collapses."
She took a bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
"The apocalypse," she said. "Not a metaphor."
The dining room was very quiet.
The fireplace crackled. The blizzard pressed against the windows. Somewhere, in the darkness beyond the glass, the world continued to turn, unaware that three people in a mansion were sitting at a table and learning that they might not have much time left.
"You're serious," Adrian said.
"I'm always serious."
Silence.