"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."
She smiled. "You're more mature than you look."
"Not mature enough to stay out of trouble, apparently," I replied with a shrug.
People were always a little high—strung the day before a battle.
And guys were always looking for an opportunity to look good in front of a knockout like Rachel. The deck was definitely stacked against me, though I'm sure the face I'd been making hadn't helped the situation any.
"What are you, a pacifist? Rare breed in these parts."
"I like to save it for the battlefield."
"That explains it."
"Explains what?"
"Why you were holding back. You're obviously the better fighter." Rachel's eyes stared down at me intently. She was tall for a woman. Flower Line Base had been built three years ago. If she'd come to the base immediately after getting her nutritionist's license, that would make her at least four years older than me. But she sure didn't look it. And it wasn't that she went out of her way to make herself look young. The glow of her bronze skin and her warm smile were as natural as they came. She reminded me of the librarian I'd fallen for in high school. The same smile that had stolen my heart and sent me happily to work airing out the library that hot summer so long ago.
"Our lives should be written in stone. Paper is too temporary— too easy to rewrite." Thoughts like that had been on my mind a lot lately.
"That's an odd thing to say."
"Maybe."
"You seeing anyone?"
I looked at her. Green eyes. "No."
"I'm free tonight." Then she added hastily, "Don't get the wrong idea. I don't say that sort of thing to just anyone."
That much I knew. She'd brushed Yonabaru aside readily enough. For an entire week I'd heard complaint after complaint about the hottest woman whose knees were locked together with the biggest padlock. "It's a travesty in this day and age," he'd tell me. And I had a feeling it wasn't special treatment just because Yonabaru was who he was.
"What time is it?" I still had a schedule to keep.
"Almost three o'clock. You were out for about three hours."
1500. I was supposed to be training with Ferrell. I had to make right what I'd done in the last loop—the move that had killed Ferrell and the lieutenant. They'd died protecting me because I was showboating. I could still see the charred, smoldering family pictures Ferrell had decorated the inside of his Jacket with fluttering in the wind. A shot of him smiling under a bright Brazilian sun surrounded by brothers and sisters burned into my mind.
I didn't possess any extraordinary talents that set me apart from my peers. I was just a soldier. There were things I could do, and things I couldn't. If I practiced, in time I could change some of those things I couldn't do into things I could. I wouldn't let my overconfidence kill the people who'd saved my life time and time again.