The first exchange was sloppy. Lincoln threw a jab that Bear slipped easily, then ate a counter he should have seen coming. The impact snapped his head back, more surprise than pain.
“You’re telegraphing.” Bear reset, bouncing on his toes. “Try again.”
Lincoln shook out his shoulders. Came in again. Jab, cross, hook—technically correct, but the timing was off. Bear caught his hook on a forearm block and answered with a leg kick that buckled Lincoln’s stance.
“What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s twice I’ve hit you with the same kick. You always check it.”
Bear was right. He reset. Threw a front kick that Bear sidestepped, then overcommitted on the follow-up and caught an elbow to the ribs for his trouble. His lungs seized. He stepped back, hands up, trying to find his rhythm.
It wasn’t there. His body was in the ring, but his brain was upstairs, staring at a silent screen, like it had been for nearly four days.
Bear pressed the advantage—a level change into atakedown attempt that Lincoln sprawled on instinct. But the scramble that followed was ugly, all reaction and no strategy. Bear ended up in side control, then mount, and Lincoln tapped before the arm isolation was even locked in.
“Okay.” Bear rolled off him, sat back on the mat. He didn’t stand up. Didn’t reset for another round. Just sat there, breathing, waiting.
Lincoln stayed on his back, staring at the ceiling. The silence stretched.
Bear had always been good at this—knowing when to push and when to just be present. He’d done it when they were kids, when Lincoln’s brain would short-circuit from too much sensory input and he’d need to hide in a closet until the world made sense again. Bear would just sit outside the door. Not talking. Not demanding. Just there.
“There’s someone.” The words came out before Lincoln decided to say them.
Bear didn’t move. “Okay.”
“Online. On a…forum.” Lincoln sat up slowly, wrapping his arms around his knees. “We’ve been talking for two years.”
“Talking about what?”
“Everything. Nothing. Security vulnerabilities. Poetry. The nature of memory.” He paused, trying to find words for something he’d never had to explain. “She quotes literature. I correct her meter. We write in code.”
“Code like…programming?”
“Code like secrets hidden in sonnets. Messages embedded in mathematical sequences.” Lincoln picked at the tape on his left hand. “She appeared on a security forum two years ago. Took apart someone’s encryption like it was a Sunday crossword. I was…impressed. I said something about her methodology. She responded.”
“And you’ve been talking ever since?”
“Every night. Nine p.m. She types a greeting, I type a greeting. We exchange…things.”
Bear was quiet for a moment. “What kinds of things?”
“Ideas. Observations. Pieces of ourselves, wrapped in ciphers.” Lincoln heard how it sounded—strange, obsessive, impossible to explain to someone who lived in the normal world. “I know. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t have to make sense.” Bear shifted, drawing one knee up. “Two years is a long time. You know her.”
“I don’t know her name. Her face. Anything real.”
“You know how she thinks. How she writes. What makes her laugh.” Bear shrugged. “Seems pretty real to me.”
Lincoln didn’t have a response to that.
“So what happened?”
The question sat between them. Lincoln stared at the mat, at the grid of lines marking the training space, at anything other than his cousin’s patient face.
“She’s gone.”
