"You are focusing too much on me," Liu said. "Loosen your mind, perceive everything."

I snorted. "Last time, Shi Fu, you were telling me to focus on your eyes."

"And in contemplation of the contradiction, your mind will approach the ideal."

Liu didn't smile much, but I had a feel for his sense of humor. Our one minute breather over, we lifted the padded gloves and closed again.

I took great care when I sparred with his other students. On top of ten years studying martial arts, my strength and speed had increased since I was bitten. I didn't want to break someone's jaw accidentally.

This was not a concern with Liu. Despite being older than me, he was startlingly quick and elusive. I got a real thrill out of landing more than a couple of blows on him in a sparring session like this one, where we were essentially boxing, limiting ourselves to punches.

It focused me. It helped force me to put everything else aside and concentrate on hitting that weaving target without picking up too many hits myself. That would be good at the moment-I could come back fresh to the problems of what to do before the colonel arrived on Monday.

Liu enjoyed it as well, usually.

He called an end after the next flurry of blocks and jabs. We'd worked up a sweat, but I had expected a couple more rounds.

"Come," he said, stripping his gloves and head protector off. He walked to the corner of the Kwan. "Follow me in the form."

He started to move through one of the standard forms. My body hitched onto the muscle memory and I flowed along with him without having to think about it.

"Good," he said. "The body is engaged. The small mind is engaged. The large mind can roam free." He sank into an asymmetric stretch. "And you can tell me what is bothering you."

"Huh?" I missed a move and had to catch up.

"You're never fully absorbed in the moment, Amber," he said, spinning on the spot and blocking attacks from imaginary a.s.sailants. "You always hold a little back. But today, you are holding a lot back. Why?"

We stepped back in sync. "I'm bothered by things at work."

"This is seldom so. What bothers people may be rooted in work or fed at work, but more often it is simply that it remains unresolved in the time spent at work." He crouched and came up smoothly on one leg, held it perfectly still. "What is work?"

I wobbled a bit, thrown by the question. "Everything I do when I'm in uniform."

"So all the rest is play."

I didn't talk to anyone, other than the colonel, about what I did for the army. I was living two lives and there was a sense of inevitability that they would cross. I'd dealt with stress and secrecy in Ops 4-10, but I'd had support from people in the same position. Here, I was alone. I had no one I could truly share with, let alone receive support from. Sure, I had help from the PD. Help appropriate for a rookie doing her job.

There wasn't any play. It had all but disappeared into the colonel's work, exercise, eating and sleeping. I didn't want to lie to Liu.

My balance went to h.e.l.l, and I had to bring my foot down and move into the next sequence of moves early. d.a.m.n. I came here to stop thinking about these things.

He sighed.

"Sit," he said, folding down into a half lotus. I copied him.

There was a small cla.s.s doing exercises at the other end of the Kwan, leaving us alone.

"I enjoy you attending this Kwan," he said and paused. "But I am worried for you."

"Shi Fu?"

"Your training in the army has given you such control. The Western world calls this 'iron control.' You use this to completely hide things deep inside." He held up a hand to stop me from interrupting. "But iron can rust. Iron can become brittle. There are angers and forces buried in you that will find their way out. If they do this by themselves they can destroy you."

Liu could sound obscure at times, but we'd never had a conversation like this before. With anyone else, it would have just been embarra.s.sing. But Liu seemed to be talking to something inside me that was taking note.

"Whatever it is, you cannot continue to do what you are doing," he said. "You must change. You will change; you have no option except how much you are in control of the change."

Well, what would he advise, if I told him everything that was happening?

Even thinking about it at a mundane level: should I become a PI? Cut myself off from what little support the police were able to provide me? At least then, I wouldn't be keeping things from them.

"Everywhere you hide your true self, you do damage, to yourself and to those you are hiding from."

Would he say I should stop seeing my family?

Liu watched me mull through what he'd said.

"If you wish, we will talk again, after sessions."

I nodded silently.

"For now, trust to your instincts more. Trust them against the rote learning that tells you that things must be so. You are more powerful than you think, if you let yourself be."

He rose suddenly. "Now, more sparring," he said.

"Boxing again?" I put my gloves back on, but he shook his head.

"Jujitsu, I think. Not with me. With Tullah."

"Who?"

"Me."

I turned to look and sighed. I was going to have to go back to being careful again. Tullah was shorter and slighter than me, and she looked as if she was still in college. She was some exotic blend of Chinese, but martial arts aren't braided into the genome, they have to be learned. Liu sometimes had me sparring against students who thought they had come a long way. A sort of salutary lesson against getting big-headed.

If she read my thoughts, she made no sign of it. Her face, partly covered by the head protector, was shiny and open. She moved well at least.

We squared off on the mats and I made a standard lunge. A feint, to see how quickly she got out of the way.

She didn't jerk back, she didn't move away. She moved in. Inside the span of my arms, she canceled any advantage of reach I had. My weight was too far forward, my center of gravity higher than hers, and she grabbed the collar of my gi, crouched and twisted herself, so that my momentum made me fall over her. Then she heaved and I was tossed in the air.

Luckily, all the necessary reactions had been burned into me. I tucked up and rolled right back onto my feet, coming back up ready for a secondary attack. Purely as a matter of form.

It was a good thing that kind of action had been drilled into me. Tullah was right in there, pressing home her attack.

Instincts took over and I caught her coming in off balance against my stable stance. I thumped her in the belly and then threw her over my hip.

She rolled neatly and bounced back onto her feet, just like I had, ready in case I was already coming in. I wasn't. I was standing there berating myself for being an overconfident a.s.shole.

"That was awesome!" she squealed. And came straight back at me.

Ten minutes later we were both dripping in sweat, and I'd been infected with her laughter.

But I had a date with Officer Knight, so I reluctantly put up my gloves in surrender.

She tossed her head protector aside and gave me a hug.

"Thank you so much, Amber. I can call you Amber, can't I? I've seen you practicing but Pa didn't want me to spar with you. I've had to go on at him for, like, ages."

"Whoa! Master Liu is your dad?"

"Yeah. He's pretty cool."

"Okay." I guessed I would call him pretty cool if I was nineteen years old and overfilled with exuberance.

"When are you coming back? Can we spar again?"

"Yeah, yeah, of course. Tuesday probably. I won't go so easy on you next time," I said.

Ha!

"Awesome."

I had a sudden thought. "And what if I sent someone to train with you? She might have a problem persuading her parents or her uncle to pay for coaching, but if she could just join in and see what it's like? Ask a few questions?" I said, innocently.

"Yeah, sure."

"Her name's Jo. I'll send you her cell."

"Okay. Thanks so much for today." She skipped away.

I grinned. Oh, that was evil. But they'd wear each other out instead of me.

I waved goodbye to Liu and went to shower.

It didn't escape me that he'd matched me up with Tullah deliberately and given me a message in one neat maneuver.

His earlier comments were replaying in my mind. Could he really see things inside me?

What if his message was about things going on deeper inside me? What if he was saying I'd be better off not fighting it, just becoming a vampire? Disappear into their world. All this c.r.a.p would just go away then. Life would be simpler.

What would it feel like, being a vampire?

I shut that thought down. Anyway, there was no way he could see stuff like that inside me.

Even at a surface level, he had certainly given me lots to think about, but Sat.u.r.day night on patrol wasn't going to be the place for it.

Chapter 13.

Sat.u.r.day's patrol with Knight was like any other Sat.u.r.day-the constant feel that things could become a riot with the wrong spark. The feeling of disbelief when they didn't.

I wasn't sure whether he'd worked through his anger, or he was just giving me another chance, but Knight acted as if the last shift hadn't happened.

He was on good form with his patter as we went from incident to incident. I heard things I hadn't heard before. Some of them were useful.

We were making our way back after a trip to the station to hand over an incompetent burglar, stoned out of his mind, when I turned onto 12th and an idea formed about checking out Werner Schumacher's sighting on Friday night.

"Y'know, it used to be that burglars were worth chasing," Knight was saying. "They were professionals. It gave you a sense of achievement to bring them in. Now the guy doesn't even notice us walking up behind him."

"I don't think he even knew we were at the station," I said. "It'll be fun for him when he wakes up in the morning." We drew level with the alley where the body had been found and I let the car slow. The traffic was light.

"It's quieter," I said.

"Yeah, well, learn to enjoy it," he said. "That might help keep you alert. Better than bored, careless and dead."

I nodded in time with the emphasis he beat out on the dash. I'd learned that lesson in harder schools than he had, where the gap between careless and dead was frighteningly small. Still, it was sound advice, the sort of thing a rookie would need to hear.

We pa.s.sed the Schumachers' shop. Werner had looked out and seen three men walking along here. From his description, the security camera I'd seen from the club, and the death of the man whose body we'd found in the dumpster, it was a reasonable a.s.sumption that they were the same group.

I didn't have proof and I couldn't talk it through with Knight, but we were in the right place and I could use the time to think about it.

They'd walked along here. They'd been wearing coats. Of course, they could have parked a car and walked the last bit. If they did that, how had they picked their parking spot? Why not park right outside where they were going? If they didn't want the car to be seen where they were going, how far would they walk? Where would they park that would make them feel it was safe?

"What's up?" asked Knight, finally.

"I'm practicing being a detective," I said. He knew which case I was talking about. "I heard that they've identified the vic and he shared an apartment backing onto the alley. I'm guessing he was dumped so his roommates didn't find him. The body might never have been found, or only found when it went to the dump."

"You know what Buchanan will think about you getting involved?"

"Humor me. Buchanan's not in the car with us. We're just kicking it around."

"Yeah? Okay, so he still wasn't killed in the apartment or the alley. He had to have bled out someplace else. Where? How did they get him back there?"

I knew an answer to that-he'd been bled out right in that apartment, but I wasn't about to share how that was.

"Not relevant at the moment," I said instead. "My point is, the three guys we have reported walking here at the right time are either suspects or need to be questioned."

Knight played along with it, but I could tell what he thought about the rookie trying to be detective.

"So," I said. "Three guys in coats. Where did they walk from?"