Kest smiled at me, not her regular dismissive glance, but a beaming smile like she was excited to see me. Unfortunately, it made me trip over my chair because I was too busy grinning like a big dork to watch what I was doing.
“Crazy when chairs get in the way like that,” Rali joked.
“Ha ha.” My face burned. At least I hadn’t spilled my plate. I put a lot more focus than necessary into taking the chopsticks out of their wrapper so I didn’t have to look at Rali. “I’m just kind of stuck on the fight right now. Not really paying attention to anything else.”
“I grin whenever I think about improving my status in the rankings of a large impersonal organization, too,” Rali said, but he was already inspecting my plate like he didn’t care enough to follow up on the disbelief. “You should’ve tried some of the frybread. The guy who makes it infuses the oil with his own version of Calming the Spirit Sea. Also six different spices. It’s delicious and good for the jitters.”
“I’m not that worried about the fight itself,” I said. “It’s the Spirit cloak. Biggerstaff won’t let me count it as a win unless I figure out how to hide my attacks—which I still haven’t managed.”
“You probably won’t get a win against the Nameless, with or without the Spirit cloak,” Kest said. “We all saw his technique from the tournament. It’s fast and flawless. There’s nothing to exploit in it.”
“Yeah.” I picked up a thick piece of bacon and used it to push at some eggs.
Rali elbowed me in the arm. “Nobody can say for certain what will happen. Not even Metal Spirits who think they know everything.”
“She’s got a pretty good point, though,” I said. “With that kind of speed, I can’t rely on a submission technique like Dead Man’s Hand.”
“Which is good because that type of move was never meant to be a submission technique,” Rali said.
“If I can slow him down or even stop him, though, maybe I can get the upper hand.” Something I’d thought at the tournament came back to me. “Dude looks like he’s made out of glass. If I can get inside his swing, maybe I can break something before he nails me with one of those hammers. At the very least, I can take away some of the power from his shot.”
Kest’s eyes lit up. “That’s true, his strength is actually his weakness. If you can exploit that, you could win.”
“‘His strength is his weakness?’” Rali repeated, staring at her. “Who are you, and what did you do with my twin?”
“Mineral and ore Elemental supertypes are rigid, but that same rigidity creates natural breakage planes and temperature intolerances,” she said. She held up her metal stick arm and wiggled the fingers. “That’s why something like cinnabar is so valuable. Rolling silver doesn’t have the same weaknesses as every other Metal.”
My HUD buzzed with a friendly reminder from the Heartchamber’s automated scheduling system: Your match is scheduled for one hour from now. Absence will be recorded as a forfeit loss. Your current record is 0 W-0 L.
The jitters amped up in my stomach. “Rali, have you read the cloaking book?”
He shook his head. “But I have read Ten Lightning Strikes Against the Hero six times since we found it, and I’m anxiously awaiting the day you read it and want to discuss it.”
“Maybe later.” I shifted in my seat. “Do you think you could take a look at Cloaking Your Level and Spirit Affinity and see what you think? Kest and I tried to get the cloaking going last night, but we couldn’t figure it out.”
As soon as I said that, I felt like I’d told Rali about the handholding and everything.
Apparently Kest was thinking along the same lines, because she hurried up and blurted out, “There’s not much on the hyperweb about cloaking. That’s what we were doing, searching the hyperweb. Well, I was. Hake was fighting the ferals. Obviously.”
Rali shrugged. “Probably because the Confederation wants to know what everyone’s kishotenketsu is doing all the time. Cloaking would interfere with their checking up on us.”
I relaxed a little at the subject-change, and so did Kest.
“We get it, you’re a cool nonconformist rebel,” she said. “It’s more likely that they don’t want criminals to hide their attacks.”
“Let me see the book,” Rali said. “I’m not a criminal—yet—but I’ll take a look.”
Kest got the jade slip out of the storage ring and handed it over.
While Rali read, I tried to eat normally. It felt like I was moving and breathing all weird. Rali probably wouldn’t even care if he found out about me and Kest, but I still didn’t want him or anybody else to know. Right then, it was like something only Kest and I had, and I wanted to keep it that way.
I glanced up at Kest again. She smiled at me, this time small and secretive like we’d gotten away with something. Maybe she wanted to keep everybody else out of the loop on it, too.
After a few minutes, Rali handed the book back to her.
“Well, I can see why Kest didn’t like it, all those analogies and talk about feelings, but Hake, you’re usually better at trusting your gut than this. This reads like it’s similar to when you find a vein for cultivating.”
“Yeah, I don’t know,” I said. “I tried about a thousand ways, but I couldn’t get it. I know there’s less than an hour before my fight, but do you think you’d be cool giving me pointers while I fight some ferals?”
That wasn’t much time, but I’d seen Rali figure out Spirit-related problems in way less.
“Sure.” He picked up his walking
