Chapter 27: The School
Chuck found Simon near the Nerd Herd desk before Simon had finished clipping on his name badge.
"Hey." Chuck's voice had the specific quality of someone who had been rehearsing an opening. "I heard what happened. With the helicopter. I just — thank you. Again."
Simon looked up. "You don't need to keep thanking me."
"I know. I'm going to anyway." Chuck studied him. "You look terrible, by the way."
"I feel terrible." Simon finished with the badge and leaned against the counter. "Meg invited me to an art auction tomorrow night. Black tie. At the Hilton."
Chuck's expression shifted toward something approaching envy. "That sounds amazing. Dancing, champagne, art on the walls—"
"Chuck. I am eighteen years old. I work here." Simon gestured at the green polo, the fluorescent lighting, the wall of televisions behind him. "I have thirty thousand dollars in a savings account and seven hundred thousand dollars in a duffel bag in my storage closet that I can't spend without explaining where it came from. An art auction is not my natural habitat."
"Then why are you going?"
"Because Meg asked me." Simon said it simply. "And I don't like telling her no."
Chuck looked at him with the expression he used when something landed as both relatable and slightly sad. "I understand that feeling very well."
"Speaking of which." Simon tilted his head. "How are things with Sarah?"
Chuck's expression did something complicated. "Fine. Good. It's — complicated."
"She likes you," Simon said. "That's not complicated."
"It's very complicated."
"Chuck." Simon looked at him steadily. "I'm going to say this once. The things that make your situation complicated are real. I know that. But the fact that she likes you — that part's not complicated. Don't use the complicated parts as a reason to dismiss the simple parts."
Chuck stared at him.
"That's — actually useful advice," he said. "From you. On relationships."
"I have my moments."
"Did you just—"
Simon heard Sarah's voice behind him — the specific register she used when she was navigating between two modes — and turned.
She was standing near the entrance to the home theater section, dressed differently than her Buy More persona usually called for, which was a tell Simon had learned to read.
"Hey." Sarah looked between them. "Chuck — can I borrow you for a few minutes?"
"Of course." Chuck looked at Simon with an expression that conveyed roughly: you see what I mean, how am I supposed to read this.
Simon gave him a look back that conveyed roughly: she literally just asked to borrow you, read the room.
Chuck missed both of these and walked toward Sarah with the concentrated effort of someone trying to appear casual.
Casey materialized from the direction of large appliances and followed them into the home theater room, pulling the display curtain closed behind him.
Simon watched the curtain settle and turned back to the floor.
Another mission. He'd get the check-in XP tomorrow.
Saturday morning.
Simon was up at seven, which for a Saturday was either discipline or insomnia and this week it was both. He ate breakfast, changed into comfortable clothes, and drove across town to a neighborhood he'd been visiting regularly for three years.
The building was on a street in Burbank that had quietly become home to a cluster of martial arts schools, small restaurants, and specialty import shops over the past decade. Number 8347 was marked by a simple sign above the door — SIFU YAO'S SCHOOL OF TRADITIONAL KUNG FU — and a faded red door that had been painted the same color for as long as Simon had been coming.
He pushed it open.
Inside, the main training floor was in full session — twelve students ranging from early teens to early twenties, moving through a group form with the concentrated effort of people at different stages of understanding the same thing. The movements were precise and traditional: controlled, deliberate, connected to something old.
Leading them from the front was a woman about Simon's age — early twenties, athletic, wearing a black instructor's uniform with her hair pulled back. She moved through the form at half-speed, calling corrections in a voice that was even and authoritative without being harsh.
She reached the end of a sequence, blew her whistle, and called a break.
"Thirty minutes," she said. The students dispersed.
She crossed the floor toward Simon.
Suzy Yang was, among several other things, the daughter of the Chinese Consul General in Los Angeles — though she went by her mother's name and most people who knew her had no idea who her father was. She'd been running the school's intermediate and advanced programs since her predecessor retired, and she was considerably better at it than she let people assume.
She hugged him with the ease of two people who had been in each other's orbits long enough that the physical greeting was automatic.
"You're late," she said.
"By whose calendar."
"Mine." She stepped back and looked at him. "You look like you've been through something."
"Long week."
"The usual kind or the other kind?"
"Both," Simon said.
She gestured toward the bench along the near wall — the traditional position for conversations that weren't worth sitting formally for — and they sat.
"How's the school?" he asked.
"Growing." She said it with quiet satisfaction. "Interest in traditional martial arts has been going up for three years now. We've had a waitlist for the beginner course since March."
Simon had trained here from fifteen to seventeen — initially because he needed a credible cover story for the combat skills the System had given him, and subsequently because Sifu Yao had turned out to be the kind of teacher who changed how you understood things rather than just what you knew.
He'd graduated out of the formal curriculum two years ago. He still came back every couple of weeks.
"Your Cantonese is getting better," Suzy said. "You used a construction last time that I didn't expect you to know."
"I've been listening more carefully."
She nodded, accepting this. "Will Meg be here later?"
"She's getting ready for tonight. Art auction at the Hilton downtown."
Suzy paused. "The Consul General's charity event?"
Simon looked at her.
"My father's attending," she said. "With my mother. They invited me." She tilted her head slightly. "Are you saying we're going to the same event?"
"Apparently." Simon considered this. "That's — actually a relief. I was planning to spend the evening being ambient."
"Ambient?"
"Present but not contributing. Background decoration."
Suzy looked at him with the precise expression of someone deciding whether to find this funny or sad. She landed on: "Simon. You are eighteen years old with a helicopter license, a commercial driving record, three years of traditional kung fu training, functional Cantonese, and some kind of financial situation you decline to explain in detail. You are never ambient."
"I'm trying to build toward ambient."
"You're failing."
"I know."
She was about to say something else when the sound arrived — slow, rhythmic, the tap of a wooden cane on hardwood floor from the direction of the back corridor.
Both of them stood.
Sifu Yao came into the training room from the far door, moving with the careful economy of someone who had learned to treat his body as a resource to be conserved. He was well past seventy, slight, in a grey training uniform that had been washed so many times it had achieved a particular softness. His eyes were closed — not resting, just the default state. He navigated by sound and spatial memory and decades of familiarity with every inch of this floor.
He stopped in front of Simon and Suzy.
"I heard the door," Sifu said. His voice was unhurried, slightly accented. "Simon."
"Sifu." Simon bowed slightly — a genuine reflex rather than a performed one. "Good morning."
"It is." Sifu reached out and found Simon's shoulder with the accuracy that had always unsettled people who didn't know him. He patted it once. "You've been moving differently. Since last time. Something happened."
"A few things."
"Physical?"
"Yes."
"Were you hurt?"
"No."
Sifu considered this. "Then it was useful. Movement changes when the body learns something real. The form adapts." He released Simon's shoulder. "You should train today. An hour. Work through the third and fourth sequences slowly — you're rushing the transition between them. Have been for a year. It's time to fix it."
"Yes, Sifu."
"After that—" A pause. "Come sit with me. I want to hear about the week that changed your movement."
He turned and made his way back toward the corridor.
Simon watched him go.
Suzy was already looking at him with the expression she used when she found something both predictable and impressive.
"He noticed in under a minute," she said.
"He always does."
"Are you going to tell him everything?"
Simon thought about helicopters and armored trucks and a government database loading one percent at a time into his brain through a proximity mechanic that still defied rational explanation.
"The parts that matter," he said.
Suzy handed him a training jacket from the rack by the door. "Then go train. You'll be better for it tonight."
He took the jacket.
She was right. She usually was.
An hour later, sweating and somewhat more settled in his own body than he'd been that morning, Simon sat across from Sifu Yao in the small room off the main corridor that served as both an office and a place for conversations that needed quiet.
Tea arrived — Sifu poured it by feel, without spilling — and they sat.
"Tell me," Sifu said.
Simon told him. Not everything. But the parts that had been sitting heaviest — the responsibility of being useful to people in situations he hadn't planned for, the specific anxiety of knowing that the world he lived in kept escalating and that the people around him could be caught in the wake of it.
Sifu listened without interrupting.
When Simon finished, there was a long pause.
"You are afraid," Sifu said finally, "that your presence makes the people you care about less safe."
"Yes."
"But you are also afraid that your absence would make them less safe."
Simon hadn't quite articulated it that way. "Yeah. I think so."
"Then the question is not whether to be present," Sifu said. "The question is what kind of presence to be. Useful without being reckless. Visible without being foolish. Strong enough that proximity to you is an asset rather than a liability." He picked up his tea. "This is not a question that resolves. It is a practice. Every day."
Simon was quiet.
"The third and fourth sequences," Sifu said, returning to the practical without warning. "Show me the transition tonight when you return from your auction. I want to see where your body goes when your mind is elsewhere."
"I'm coming back tonight?"
"You will need somewhere quiet after that kind of evening." Sifu almost smiled. "Suzy will leave the door unlocked."
Simon looked at the old man across the tea table — blind, unhurried, navigating everything by means he'd cultivated over seven decades.
"Thank you, Sifu," he said.
"Thank me by fixing the transition," Sifu said. "That is sufficient."
[500 PS unlocks 1 Extra Chapter]
[10 Reviews unlock 1 Extra Chapter]
Thanks for reading—reviews are appreciated.
P1treon Soulforger has 20+advance chapters