Page 28 of Takedown

"You drove me to a diner."

"Before. That was before. Post-hoc rules can't be applied retroactively, it's a basic principle of—"

"Rule three's gonna last a week."

"Rule three is load-bearing, Danny."

"Rule four," I said. "No feelings."

The radiators ticked. He looked at me. I looked at the water bottle. Somewhere upstairs, a door; Ramos, probably, starting his Saturday.

"Right," Grayson said. "No feelings. Naturally."

"None."

"A physical arrangement between drilling partners."

"Athletic," I said. "Basically cross-training."

"Cross-training," he agreed, and we sat there not looking at each other, both of us thinking about a diner and a covered bridge and an egg, and the lie sat on the mat between us, fooling absolutely nobody, not even the skull — and I want you to notice we made four rules that morning, and number them in your head, because this book is the story of each one dying, in order, and the order is the plot.

"Six a.m. sessions continue," he said, standing, offering me his hand — the hand, not the wrist, we'd graduated. "Setups still need work. That part was even true."

He pulled me up. Didn't let go right away. In the hard light his face was doing something undefended, something I was getting collector's rights to, apparently, and he said, quieter, the correctness gone:

"Monday. Four o'clock. Forty guys in the room, and I have to tie up with you and mean nothing by it."

"Yeah."

"How."

"Badly," I said. "We're gonna do it badly. Then we're gonna come down here at night and do this instead. It's a terrible system. It's the only one there is."

"Terrible system," he agreed, and kissed me once more — soft, brief, outside the moment, which broke about three of our four rules depending on how you scored it, six minutes after ratification —

and that's the truest thing I can tell you about the rules.

* * *

We got breakfast. Because it was Saturday, and we were nineteen and twenty, and we had just burned eleven thousand calories of adrenaline against a padded wall, and the dining hall opened at seven, and rule three — never outside the Pit — was, as I said, going to last a week. It lasted forty minutes.

Saturday at seven a.m., the dining hall belongs to a specific population: rowers, the devout, and the unhinged. We got a table by the windows where the early light came in gold over the quad — his world's lighting, the campaign lighting, and for once I didn't mind it, because I had a secret in my pocket that the light couldn't price.

He watched me load a tray like it was performance art. "That's six eggs."

"Season's over till January. This is the off-week. I've been eating like a monk since September."

"Six eggs, Danny."

"You told me to eat the egg. I'm eating the egg. I'm eating all its friends." I sat down across from him and pointed my fork at his tray, which held — I want this in the record — a grapefruit, black coffee, and one slice of dry toast, arranged like a still life. "And you're doing a bit."

"I'm not doing a bit."

"You said you'd watch me eat a grapefruit like a prisoner. You bought the grapefruit. For yourself. To eat at me. It's a bit."

"It's discipline," he said, and then ruined it completely by reaching over with his fork and stealing a whole sausage off my tray with the entitled fluency of a man whose family has been annexing things since 1791. He ate it looking at me. Daring me to invoke anything.

"Strategic sausage," I said.