Page 153 of Knottingley Ever After
His mouth opens. The small uncomfortable thing of a man trying, in real time, to find the precise professional sentence to recover the moment. His brow scrunches in the small wonder-of-the-private-thought he is trying to read off my face.
He does not, in fact, find it fast enough.
Because I am, in the same heartbeat, off the bench.
Yorkshire.
Mr. Tanaka’s small basement dojo behind the chemist’s on Brigg Lane, four nights a week for ten years.
Sankukai. First dan at eighteen. Black belt. The first lesson the man taught me, in the small careful unhurried Japanese-accented English of a man who had been teaching small angry English children to break themselves out of small angry English headlocks since the small private year nineteen-eighty-seven, was that the right strike is, in the small dry accounting of a fight, the strike you have already decided on before the body across from you has finished saying the small last sentence.
I have already decided on the strike.
Petrov’s nose, when my right hook connects with it, makes the small sharp wet wood-snap sound of cartilage giving along its long axis, and the entire small architecture of his face moves, for a precise half-inch, the wrong direction.
Blood. Immediate. The bright unmistakable cold-copper-iron blow of fresh arterial blood released from a recentlydisassembled facial structure, the entire small radius of the bench in front of him going a small unhurried scarlet.
Nobody moves.
Of course nobody moves. They have not, in their entire lives, seen a five-foot-five pink-haired Omega launch a Sankukai right hook into the face of a six-foot-two senior-collegiate Alpha who outweighs her by sixty pounds. The information set is, in this room, unprecedented.
Petrov, in the small belated wounded-bear-on-his-back-foot register, comes back up.
He swings.
I duck. Of course I duck. The strike at his elbow comes wide and high and I, with the precise small footwork I have been drilling four nights a week in a basement on Brigg Lane since I was nine, slip under it, hook a leg behind his ankle in the precise small inside-arc trip that Mr. Tanaka used to call the small unfair leverage of a small woman against a man who has not, in fact, been trained to expect the small unfair leverage, and Petrov goes down.
Loud.
The locker-room floor, on his shoulder, makes the small unsubtle noise of one hundred and ninety-eight pounds of senior-collegiate Alpha colliding with linoleum-over-concrete.
I am on him.
My right knee in the small bracket of his right hip. My left arm folded around the front of his throat. My right hand against the back of my own left wrist, in the precise small clean rear-naked-choke geometry that has, for ten years, been the precise small lever I am, on the small inner ledger, more comfortable with than any other lever in my martial repertoire. My body weight on the small bracket of his clavicle on his right side, the small unintended structural compression of which produces, against my own better judgment but for the smallfair accounting of his next-to-immediate misery, the precise unmistakable wet wood-snap of a clavicle going under load.
Petrov screams.
Properly. The full unmanaged primal scream of a six-foot-two senior-tier Alpha discovering, in real time, that the small pink-haired Omega he had a small bad-taste joke about ninety seconds ago has him in a small inarguable mechanical hold that is, on the small inner accounting of his own body, currently transmittinggame overto every part of his nervous system simultaneously.
“YOU,” I say, into the small wet ear of him, in the precise calm even voice of a goalie running a power-play penalty kill, “want to bash our coach’s Omega, who had the fucking balls to actually try to change this industry and who got fucking murdered for the small inconvenience of trying, and you want to make it sound, in the small dry locker-room dark humor of your small dry locker-room career, like he fucked up for fucking loving her and supporting her right up to the small moment she was fucking killed?”
Petrov is sobbing now. Properly. The full broken-clavicle sob of a man begging.
“Iris —”
“Beg, motherfucker,” I tell him, calm, the small private inner ledger of an Omega running on five years of cumulative archive-level rage. “And then you fucking apologize.”
Black belt.
Pinky’s a black belt.
Matteo, somewhere in the small frozen-room periphery of my awareness, has, in the past three seconds, taken in the small precise unmistakable Sankukai geometry of the hold I am running, and the small unmistakable conclusion has, on the small inner ledger of his own brain, surfaced.
“OH FUCKING SHIT,” Matteo yells, brightly, from the bench, “PINKY’S A BLACK BELT.”
Whether it is the announcement of the credential, or the small belated synthesis on every other adult-Alpha face in this room of the precise data point that, in fact, the small pink Omega in their locker room is, on the small inner accounting of a Yorkshire basement dojo, currently approximately nine pounds of body-weight-pressure away from killing the man on the floor, the small thick-necked locker-room atmosphere, in unison, breaks.
Everyone moves.
