Chapter 45 | Both Wives Training Kai Not To Get Hurt Anymore

Chapter 45: Chapter 45 | Both Wives Training Kai Not To Get Hurt Anymore

He thought about the ice pack four days ago. The kitchen layout memorized in advance.

He thought: ’She prepares for things that might hurt me. Quietly. Without telling me until the preparation is complete.’

Something moved in his chest that he did not have a name for and was not going to look for one right now.

"When can we start," he said.

She held up one finger.

One minute.

She stepped back into her room.

He heard the audio reader settings being adjusted. A frequency he could feel more than hear. His Resonance Echo picking it up before his ears did.

It was not a sound exactly. More like a texture in the air. A shift. An oscillation at the exact threshold between physical sensation and hearing.

’That’s it,’ he thought. ’That’s what I’m looking for in the dungeon.’

The door opened again.

Mira stood in the doorway with the audio reader producing the frequency and her whiteboard in her other hand.

She held the board up.

Tell me when you feel it shift.

The oscillation changed. A slight drift in the pattern. Two centimeters to the left in the way he was reading it through the Echo.

"Left," Kai said. "Two centimeters."

She wrote: Correct.

The oscillation shifted again. Right this time. Higher by a fraction.

"Right," Kai said. "Higher."

Correct, she wrote.

She ran the pattern for twenty minutes. He called each shift. He got the first four correct. The fifth he missed by half a centimeter. The sixth he called before the shift completed which she marked as early but directionally correct.

By the twentieth minute he was calling all of them.

She turned the audio reader off.

She wrote: You’re ready.

He looked at the board.

He looked at her.

"Thank you," he said.

She held the board.

She wrote something slowly.

She held it up.

Both of us in the dungeon with you. You just don’t know it.

Kai read it.

He read it again.

She lowered the board.

She closed the door.

He stood in the hallway.

’Both of us in the dungeon with you,’ he thought. ’You just don’t know it.’

He stood there for a moment longer than he needed to.

Then he went to the couch and sat down and pressed his palm to the cushion and did not think about Mira’s voice saying the frequency. He did not think about Shira’s face at the window in the morning light.

He thought about run two.

He was not entirely successful.

======

Evening.

After dinner. After the dishes. After Mira had gone to her room.

Shira was at the table.

Kai sat across from her.

She had the physio sheet open. She was annotating something in the margin with the pen in her left hand. He watched her write and thought about the fact that her right hand was resting on the table surface and the index finger was pressing down very slightly without her appearing to notice she was doing it.

He did not say anything about it.

"Run two in three days," he said.

"I know," she said.

"The Resonance Echo," he said. "Mira calibrated the audio reader to the dust wraith interface frequency. I practiced reading the shift pattern for twenty minutes."

Shira looked at the physio sheet.

"She researched the frequency herself," Kai said.

Shira was quiet.

"She didn’t tell me she was doing it," Kai said.

Shira looked at her annotation.

"No," she said. "She wouldn’t."

Kai looked at Shira.

"You knew she was doing it," he said.

Shira said nothing for a moment.

Then: "She mentioned the combat records database. Two days ago."

"You didn’t tell me," Kai said.

"She wanted to tell you herself," Shira said. "In her own time."

Kai looked at the table.

’They talked,’ he thought. ’Shira and Mira talked about preparing me for the dungeon and coordinated it and neither of them said anything to me until each piece was ready.’

He thought about the morning tea Mira had made. Shira’s Gale Strike coaching. The kitchen layout memorized in advance. The frequency calibration today.

’They’re doing this together,’ he thought. ’Both of them. Quietly. Without making it into anything.’

He looked at his hands on the table.

He thought about how much that cost each of them. Shira whose pride made every small gesture of care a calculated risk. Mira whose silence was not distance but a particular kind of presence that worked differently from everyone else’s.

He thought about that for a moment.

Then he thought about something practical which was the strapping for his ribs before run two.

He was getting better at the redirect.

He was not entirely sure that was a good thing.

"Shira," he said.

She looked up from the sheet.

"The canyon dungeon," he said. "Forty-one minutes. I know it doesn’t change anything. But I think you should know that I think about it sometimes."

Shira looked at him.

"Think about what," she said.

"What you were," he said. "What you still are. Before anyone decided what you were worth after."

The room was quiet.

Shira looked at the physio sheet.

Her right index finger pressed down on the table surface and held.

Three seconds.

She released it.

She closed the physio sheet.

"Run two," she said. "Dust wraiths. Lead with the Resonance Echo reading. Don’t commit to the strike until the interface point stabilizes. It will oscillate for approximately one second before it holds position long enough to strike."

"One second oscillation before it stabilizes," Kai said.

"Yes," she said.

"Then strike," he said.

"Then strike," she confirmed.

She wheeled herself back to her room.

Kai sat at the table alone.

He looked at the physio sheet she had left on the table.

In the margin of the last page, in her careful left-hand writing, she had been annotating something.

He looked at it.

It was not physio notes.

It was the Gale Strike technical breakdown. Full mechanics. Every component she had been giving him in pieces over the past two weeks, written out in complete sequence for the first time. Clean. Organized. Detailed enough that anyone could follow it.

At the bottom she had written one line.

For when the Echo becomes the real thing.

Kai sat with the sheet in his hands.

He sat there for a long time.

Then he put it carefully in his notebook.

He pressed his palm to the table.

Both rhythms. Both present. Both settling toward sleep.

He went to the couch.

He lay down.

He looked at the ceiling.

’For when the Echo becomes the real thing,’ he thought.

’She wrote it down,’ he thought. ’She wrote it all down for me.’