Chapter 5
Cross rolled his neck. "Everybody clear the mat."
Boots scraped concrete. The circle widened. The gym reorganized itself around the center mat the way gyms reorganize when something is about to happen that everyone wants to see and nobody wants to be too close to.
Olivia did not move.
Cross raised his hands slightly. "Last chance."
She looked at his feet. Then at his shoulders. Her eyes tracked the specific distribution of his weight between the balls and heels of his feet, the slight forward lean that a man his size develops as a default when he is preparing to move quickly, the fractional rotation of his right shoulder that preceded his power side's initiation even when he was trying not to show it.
She had watched him throw twelve different opponents over the previous three days from the observation bay. She had a notebook page of technical observations about his right-hand lead and the specific forward pressure that preceded it, which appeared consistently when he was performing for a room.
"When you're angry," she said, "you always lead with your right."
Cross froze.
The gym went completely still.
He lunged.
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His right arm came forward with the full force of a man who has decided that action will resolve what analysis has not, and Olivia pivoted inside the attack in the specific way that requires you to move toward the incoming force rather than away from it — the kind of movement that takes ten thousand repetitions to make instinctive and that looks impossible to people who have not done the repetitions. She caught his arm at the forearm, redirected the energy he had provided into the rotation she needed, and used the momentum he had generated to complete a throw that deposited him on his back on the blue combat mat with the clean, controlled sound of a large person landing on a surface that was designed to receive them.
He lay there.
