Every day, I feel the wounds in my back healing and the muscles in my body transforming, lengthening. The sun tanning my skin nut-brown. I’ve seen quantum leaps in my fighting ability. Hand-eye coordination. Speed. Footwork. Reaction time. Range. I’m changing, evolving so rapidly it’s as if these abilities were always in me. Lying dormant. Waiting. Which Malik says they were.

I widen my stance and bend my knees. Plant my left leg forward and grip the sword with both hands. Right hand at the hilt and my left at the blade, to generate torque. Then I start swinging the blade again, pushing and pulling as I whip Ra down from high over my head. I slash diagonals, up from my left hip to right shoulder and down from my left shoulder to right hip, cutting an X in the air, concentrating the force of the strike on just the first two inches of the blade.

Faster! a voice commands in my mind. Akuji.

I bring the sword back horizontally to my right side, pointing the tip behind me, parallel to my hip…and then I whip it across on a horizontal plane from my right to my left, lethal-quick, raise it high over my head and then step forward and slam the blade down. The sword slices the air as though I’ve practiced these moves over a thousand days instead of three. Up. Down. High to low and low to high. Nothing tentative or faltering. A flow.

Akuji—elemental, pale as alabaster—leans on a jutting rock, one leg bent at the knee, watching me, slow clapping. Next to her, Malik and Vidhan.

Akuji pushes away from the rock face and draws her fighting sticks.

The air is sharp. My chest heaves. I watch her come.

We circle each other, maybe six feet apart. I feel the edge of the rock ledge behind me, a drop to certain death. The planes are toys below.

That was halfway decent, Akuji thinks to me. Now let us play for real.

She dances forward. Strikes.

Her fighting sticks scythe down and I manage to parry them with a cross sweep and leap back and out the way. She smiles, spins her weapons and we circle again. Her sticks are lethal, made from a wood that never chips or breaks. I’m beginning to think maybe they aren’t wood, they must be some type of metal. I watch her and steel myself for whatever comes.

Akuji steps up to the rock edge and glances over.

Some drop, that.

I look at the edge. A dead tree hangs over the precipice, clinging to the rock, its branches like arms clawing at the sky. Akuji watches me, waiting for a reaction. When I offer none, she feints forward and I skip sideways.

She attacks for real again, hard and fast. A bright flash of pain. I’m hit. On the shoulder. I stumble back, white-knuckled.