“Whaddayou have hangin’ between your legs? A pair of ping pong balls?”
“I never opened my sack to look. You?”
“Motherfucker!”
“That’s enough!” A sultry voice cut short our argument. It wasn’t Rita.
Salvation had come from an unexpected quarter. I turned to see a bronze-skinned woman standing beside the table. Her apron-bound breasts intruded rudely on a good 60 percent of my field of view. She stood between us holding a steaming fried shrimp with a pair of long cooking chopsticks. It was Rachel Kisaragi.
“I don’t want any fighting in here. This is a dining room, not a boxing ring.”
“Just tryin’ to teach this recruit some manners.”
“Well, school’s over.”
“Hey, you were the one complaining about how miserable he looked eating your food.”
“Even so.”
Rachel glanced at me. She hadn’t shown the slightest hint of anger when I’d knocked over her cart of potatoes, so for this to have gotten to her, I must’ve been making quite the impression. A part of her probably wanted to embarrass anyone associated with Jin Yonabaru, widely regarded as the most annoying person on base. Not that I blamed her. I’d tripped the spilled potato flag, and now I’d tripped this one. The aftermath was my responsibility.
In a base dyed in coffee-stain splotches of desert earth tones, a woman like Rachel was bound to attract an admirer or two, but I’d never realized just how popular she was. This man hadn’t picked a fight with me over some company rivalry. He was showing off.
“It’s all right. I shouldn’t have said anything.” Rachel turned to face the looming giant and shooed me away with a gesture from behind her back. “Here. Have a shrimp. On the house.”
“Save it for the penguins.”
Rachel frowned.
“Doesn’t this runt have anything to say for himself?” He reached one big, meaty arm over Rachel’s shoulder and threw a jab.
I reacted instinctively. Subjective months in a Jacket had conditioned me to always keep my feet planted firmly on the ground. My right leg pivoted clockwise, my left counterclockwise, bringing me down into a battle stance. I parried his lunge with my left arm and raised the lunch tray in my right hand to keep the plates from falling, my center of gravity never leaving the middle of my body. Rachel dropped the fried shrimp. I snatched it from its graceful swim through the air before its tail could touch the ground.
The parry had thrown the guy off balance. He took two tottering steps forward, then a third, before tumbling into the lunch of the soldier sitting in front of him. Food and plates went flying with a spectacular crash. I stood, balancing my tray in one hand.
“You dropped this.” I handed Rachel the fried shrimp. The onlookers broke into applause.
“Fucking piece of shit!” The guy was up already, his fist flying toward me. He was stubborn. I had a few moments to consider whether I should dodge his punch, launch a counterattack of my own, or turn tail and run.
Speaking from experience, a straight right from a man who’d been trained to pilot a Jacket definitely had some bite, but it didn’t register compared to what a Mimic could do. This loser’s punch would be strong enough to inflict pain, but not a mortal wound, unless he got extremely lucky. I watched as he put every ounce of his strength into the swing. His fist went sailing right past the tip of my nose. He was neglecting his footwork, leaving an opening. I didn’t take it.
There went my first chance to kill you.
He recovered from the missed punch, his breath roaring in his nose. He started hopping around like a boxer. “Stop duckin’ and fight like a man, bitch!”
Still haven’t had enough?
The gap between our levels of skill was deeper than the Mariana Trench, but I guess that demonstration hadn’t been enough for it to sink in. Poor bastard.
He came with a left hook. I moved back half a step.
Whoosh.
Another jab. I stepped back. I could have killed him twice now. There, my third chance. Now a fourth. He was leaving too many openings to count. I could have laid him out on the floor ten times over in a single minute. Lucky for him my job wasn’t sending able-bodied Jacket jockeys to the infirmary, no matter how hotheaded they were. My job was sending Mimics to their own private part of Hell.
With each punch he threw and missed, the crowd cried out.
“Come on, you haven’t even scratched ’im!”
“Stop prancin’ around and take a hit already!”
“Punch him! Punch him! Punch him!”
“Watch the doors, don’t want nobody breakin’ this up! I got ten bucks on the big one!” Followed immediately by, “Twenty on the scrawny guy!” Hey, that’s me! I thought as I dodged another punch. Then someone else cried out, “Where’s my fried shrimp? I lost my fried shrimp!”
The wilder the crowd grew, the more effort he put behind his punches and the easier they were to avoid.
Ferrell had a saying: “Break down every second.” The first time I heard it, I didn’t understand what it meant. A second was a second. There wasn’t anything to stretch or break down.
But it turns out that you can carve the perception of time into finer and finer pieces. If you flipped a switch in the back of your brain, you could watch a second go by like frames in a movie. Once you figure out what would be happening ten frames later, you could take whatever steps you needed to turn the situation to your advantage. All at a subconscious level. In battle, you couldn’t count on anyone who didn’t understand how to break down time.
Evading his attacks was easy. But I didn’t want to trip any more unnecessary flags than I already had. I’d gone to a lot of trouble to shift my schedule, but if I kept this up the 17th would be in the cafeteria soon. I needed to bring this diversion to a close before they showed up.
I decided that taking one of his punches would waste the least amount of time. What I didn’t count on was Rachel stepping in to try to stop him. She altered the course of his right punch just enough to change the hit that was supposed to glance off my cheek into one that landed square on my chin. A wave of heat spread from my teeth to the back of my nose. The dishes on my tray danced through the air. And there was Rita at the edge of my field of vision, leaving the cafeteria. I would make this pain a lesson for next time. I lost consciousness and wandered through muddy sleep…
When I came to, I found myself laid out across several pipe chairs pushed together into a makeshift bed. Something damp was on my head-a woman’s handkerchief. A faint citrus smell hung in the air.
“Are you awake?”
I was in the kitchen. Above me an industrial ventilator hummed, siphoning steam from the room. Nearby, an olive green liquid simmered in an enormous pot like the cauldrons angry natives were supposed to use for boiling explorers up to their pith hats, except much larger. Next week’s menu hung on the wall. Above the handwritten menu was the head of a man torn from a poster.
After staring at his bleached white teeth for what seemed an eternity, I finally recognized it. It was the head of the body builder from the poster in our barracks. I wondered how he had made it all the way from the men’s barracks to his new wall, where he could spend his days smiling knowingly over the women who worked in the kitchen.
Rachel was peeling potatoes, tossing each spiral skin into an oversized basket that matched the scale of the pot. These were the same potatoes that had come raining down on my head my fourth time through the loop. I’d eaten the goddamned mashed potatoes she was making seventy-nine times now. There weren’t any other workers in the kitchen aside from Rachel. She must have prepared the meals for all these men on her own.
Sitting up, I bit down on the air a few times to test my jaw. That punch had caught me at just the right angle. Things didn’t seem to be lining up the way they should. Rachel caught sight of me.
“Sorry about that. He’s really not such a bad guy.”
“I know.”
