# Chapter 59 — Four Marks
The door opened before I got to it.
Aya pulled me off the step and into her arms with my bag still on my shoulder.
"You walked from the station."
"There's no bus after ten."
"There's a phone after ten." She let go of me and took my right hand out of my pocket. "Ryo."
"It's nothing."
"Sit down."
She cleaned the split knuckle at the kitchen table and taped it up. Then she put rice in front of me. She didn't ask me one thing about the arena, and I ate two bowls while she stood there with her arms folded.
"Your father had the little television out on his bench," she said. "He turned it up when you came out of the tunnel."
"Did he say anything after?"
"He hasn't finished anything since." She took my plate. "He's still out there. Go on."
---
The workshop smelled the way it always smells. Oil, dust, hot metal off the lathe.
Ren was on his stool with a radio in pieces in front of him. He looked up over his glasses when the door went.
"You're taller."
"It's been five weeks."
He moved a coil of wire off the second stool. "Sit."
I put Drago on the bench between us. Ren wiped his hands on the cloth over his knee, spun Drago flat under the lamp, and watched him come to a stop.
"Tip's worn."
"On the inside of the point. I know." I had the whole thing ready on the way over. "It stuttered on the crack in that floor. If the tip had been new I think it holds the line and we win. So I want you to turn me a new one. There are blanks in the drawer."
"No."
"Dad."
Ren stood up, took the metal bowl out from under the bench, and put it on the floor between our feet.
"Launch."
"It's one in the morning."
"Then be quiet while you do it."
I loaded him and launched. Drago dropped in clean and took the outer edge of the bowl.
"Now finish it," Ren said.
I turned him in. Drago came off the wall, leaned into the last stretch and drove through the middle.
Ren crouched down and made a pencil mark on the rim of the bowl, on the exact spot where Drago had left the edge.
"Again."
I launched again. I finished again. He made a second mark.
Four launches. Four marks.
I could have covered all four of them with my thumb.
"How many finishes have you done this year?" Ren said.
"Forty. About."
"Forty." He sat back down. "That's what wore your tip flat. Not the crack."
"So Lui knew where I was going."
"He didn't need to know." Ren put the pencil behind his ear. "He only had to wait there."
I stood and looked at the four marks for a while. My ears had gone hot.
Then I loaded Drago again.
"Other side," I said.
The launch was fine. Everything after the launch was not. Drago came out of the turn leaning the wrong way, went in slow, missed the middle by half a hand and rode up the side of the bowl.
I tried it again and it came out worse. On the fourth try I got the angle right and lost half his spin doing it.
Ren didn't say a word through any of it. When I stopped he leaned down, picked Drago out of the bowl, wiped him on the cloth and put him back in my hand.
"Good," he said. "Now you know what your five weeks are for."
"That was terrible."
"Yes." He pushed his glasses back up and turned the radio round. "So was your first launch out on that field, and I had to watch that one too."
Aya put her head round the door and looked at the pair of us and the bowl on the floor. Ren was back at his bench before she got a word out. I went.
I had my hand on the door frame when he said my name.
"Ryo."
"Yeah."
He didn't look up. "That white haired boy. After the battle he came round the stadium and stood in front of you, and the referee stopped walking."
"His name's Lui."
"What did he say to you?"
"That he doesn't take gifts. He wanted to go again right there, on the broken floor."
Ren put the screwdriver down.
"He won and he asked you for another one," he said. "So tonight he's somewhere doing what you just did in that bowl. Go to bed."
---
I was out on the field at six with the grass still wet.
My stadium was where I left it. Wooden frame gone grey, metal sheet inside dented all over, grass grown back over the worn rings around it.
I put my feet in the flat spot I made when I was seven. Then I moved them, put my weight on the wrong foot and launched from there.
It was bad. I picked him up and did it again.
By eight I had the notebook open on the grass next to me and a page of numbers in it. Finishing the old way, I hit the middle every time. Finishing off the other foot, I lost a third of his spin on the way in and arrived at half weight.
'The angle's fine on paper. I just have to think about it, and thinking costs me half a second.'
*Then think faster,* Drago said.
"You could try being encouraging."
*I could.*
At ten Aya came out with a plate and a bottle of water and waited at the edge of the grass until I walked over to her.
"Your hand is bleeding through the tape."
"That's the launcher."
She took my wrist, pulled the tape off and did it again with the roll from her apron pocket, tighter this time.
"Does your team know where you are?"
"Valt does."
"Only Valt." She pressed the end of the tape down. "So the other three walked out of that building and found an empty seat."
I ate the bread.
"They won a trophy last night," she said. She picked the plate up off the wall. "Somebody should be with them while they're still happy about it."
By one o'clock I had launched a hundred and forty times.
The finish off the other foot still felt like writing with my left hand. Every clean one cost me spin. Every fast one went back to the old lean without asking me first.
I sat down in the wet grass with Drago in my palm.
'Five weeks of this and all I'll have is the same finish, done badly, off the wrong foot.'
*Lui beat us with a strike we did not know he still had.* The layer went warm against my hand. *Stop rebuilding the one he has already watched eleven times.*
I sat there and looked at the stadium for a long time.
Then I got up, walked round to the far side of it and put Drago into the wall of the bank instead of into the floor. Hard, high up, near the rim.
He climbed. He got two thirds of the way round the wall, ran out of speed and dropped off it sideways into the middle.
"Okay," I said.
I did it again. He came off the wall early and hit the frame.
Third try, he made it the whole way round the wall and I had nothing ready for what came next.
Valt goes up a wall like it's a road. I've stood two metres away and watched him do it. He doesn't think about it either, and until yesterday I thought he only did it for the cameras.
My phone went off in the grass while I was digging Drago out of the frame.
It was Rantaro. A photo of the poster in the club room, our five names down the side and his dragon in the middle with the wings drawn twice. Somebody had put a speech bubble next to my name that said GONE TRAINING, LEAVE CAKE.
Under the photo: *there is no cake left*
I put the phone face down in the grass and launched again.
By six my right arm had gone heavy and the light was going flat over the field. Out of about two hundred launches, four of them had come off that wall still fast and still pointed at the middle.
Four out of two hundred. I wrote the number in the notebook and sat looking at it.
Yesterday it would have been nought.
The workshop door went behind me. Ren came across the grass with his hands in his coat pockets, stopped a couple of metres back and watched me put six more up the wall. He didn't say anything about any of them.
The sixth one came off the wall clean and drove through the middle at a lean I have never used in my life.
"Hm," Ren said.
"That's the one."
"That's one out of six." He held his hand out and I put Drago in it. He turned the tip up under his thumb and looked at the worn flat on the inside of the point. "You're fighting that tip as well as fighting him."
"You said no new tip."
"Last night you wanted a new tip so you could tell yourself the old one lost you the final." He put Drago in his coat pocket. "Now you want one that hasn't learned your habit. That's a different job."
"How long will it take?"
"Come out after breakfast." He was already walking back to the house. "Bring the notebook. And put something on that hand before your mother sees it again."
I stayed out on the field until the light went, with the launcher in my hand and nothing to launch.
Then I went in. The workshop light was still on behind me at midnight.