To her right, a young man crawled toward her with a terrible slowness, leaving a snail’s trail of shining red behind him. Blood bubbled from his lips, and there were tears in his eyes.

“Harry!” she cried and broke into a run.

CHAPTER 179

EAST TEXAS CONVENTION CENTER

LABORDE, TEXAS

Santoro dropped and pivoted to swing a vicious Muay Thai shin kick to the outside of my left knee, but I was already in motion with a cutting palm to his chin. Because I was pivoting, his shin hit my knee straight and bent, which did no damage but hurt us both. A lot. My cutting palm missed his chin because he was pivoting and banged off his forehead. The two blows buffeted us backward.

Pain meant nothing to Santoro, and it meant even less to me, so we closed again. Only slightly warier. We were evenly matched for speed. He was smaller and could move his whole mass more quickly; I had a longer reach.

He tried a stamp, missed my instep but mashed my big toe. But I crouched and twisted and drove a two-knuckle punch into the center of his quads. He hissed and chopped me across the side of the mouth with the edge of his hand. My lip split, and droplets of blood followed his hand like the tail of a comet.

I feinted with a low roundhouse kick but then tilted forward to try to put my thumb in his eye. He parried my shot and caught me under the arm with a short, chopping uppercut. It numbed my arm as he knew it would, and he tried to close on that side, but I pivoted in place and swung a spinning elbow at his nose. Santoro leaned into me to nullify the force of the blow, but I’m a big guy and I hit hard, so the sheer torsion I’d generated sent him stumbling sideways.

I tried to correct my balance and follow, but I was still at the end of a pivot, and by the time I’d shifted my stance, he was out of range and beginning to circle.

We played that cat game of walking in opposing circles for a few seconds, reading each other, waiting for the moment, stalking each other on the balls of our feet, knees bent, able to move in any direction. That’s how the pros do it. It’s what they try to teach students on the first day in the dojo. Don’t be flat-footed, keep your weight balanced, don’t root yourself to the ground.