He practiced for the rest of the day.
The courtyard behind the property had become his space for it, the same small stone square where he had started running forms in the early mornings before Reynold was up. Nobody came back there. The stable hands used the side entrance and the household staff had their own routines that kept them elsewhere, which meant he had it to himself in the way that mattered, without an audience.
He worked through the breathing technique from Coran's manual for three hours in the afternoon. Inhale to a count of four through the nose, hold for two, exhale slow and controlled through the mouth, and during the exhale direct attention inward, to the sense of something circulating that was not air. Coran's manual described the target sensation as warmth without heat. Albert understood the description well enough and could produce nothing resembling the experience, which was the gap between reading a thing and doing a thing that every manual in every discipline he had ever encountered contained.
He kept working.
By late afternoon his lower back was complaining about the posture requirements and three hours of sitting and breathing had produced only the ordinary sensations of sitting and breathing.
He stopped for dinner, ate mechanically while reading the striking technique manual, went back to the courtyard after, and tried again until the light failed and Reynold appeared at the rear door with a lamp and the expression of a man who had stopped asking questions about young master's behavior and was now simply documenting it.
He went inside and sat on the edge of the bed with the first manual open on his knee, thinking about what Coran had said. You cannot inscribe a channel for something you cannot sense. The breathing technique was the instrument calibration before the work began. Without it the striking technique was just physical motion with no connection to Ten.
He sat with that for a while.
Then he thought about the other thing Coran had said, about the body writing down exactly what you give it. He had spent three hours giving his body Coran's breathing pattern, a pattern he had no history with, no muscle memory of, no accumulated relationship to. He was trying to write on a surface that already had writing on it.
Albert had his own breathing technique. From six years of Republic military service, where the standard issue psychological toolkit for combat personnel included a tactical breathing pattern the trainers called box breathing and the soldiers called whatever they called it after enough deployments to develop opinions about the name. Four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out, four counts hold. A square. Mechanical, deliberate, designed to regulate the body during high stress situations, to keep the hands steady when the hands needed to be steady.
He had used it in the sulfur tunnels on Venus. In the ice passages on Europa. In the corridor at Vesta Station after the explosion, when his commanding officer was screaming under the support beam and Albert had two minutes to decide what to do with one leg and the wrong amount of adrenaline.
Every exhale he had pushed something out. Something that lived underneath fear, the baseline hum of a body that understood it was in a situation that killed people. He had never had a name for it. He had just known that when it left he could function, and when it came back he breathed again and pushed it out again, and that was how you got through the things that needed getting through.
He closed the manual, sat up straight, breathed in to a count of four, held it, and breathed out slow, letting the memory come with the exhale the way it always had. Not Venus specifically. Just the quality of attention those places had required. The narrow present-focus of someone for whom the next three seconds were the only seconds that existed.
The lightness came on the exhale.
A sensation like setting down something heavy that he had been carrying long enough to forget it was separate from himself. Every breath out the lightness spread further, moving from his chest outward through his shoulders and down his arms, and with it something else, a current that was not blood and not air, something present in him and around him that the breathing was surfacing the way reduced light surfaced sounds that had always been there.
He opened his eyes, breathed in, held, and breathed out again. There it was on the exhale, faint and real. The thing Coran's manual had called warmth without heat, which was an accurate description for someone else's experience of it. For Albert it came as lightness, a little more of it with every exhale.
He stood and moved into the opening posture of the Republic hand to hand system, the one his body dropped into by reflex when a situation shifted from almost dangerous to actually dangerous, weight balanced, hands up, elbows in, everything arranged around its center the way it had arranged itself a thousand times in training rooms and four times in situations that were not training.
He breathed out and threw a strike. Off.
He reset, breathed, and threw again, the motion finding its old shape, cleaner this time.
He reset once more, breathed in to four, held it, breathed out slow with the push, and threw the third strike from the exhale the way he had always moved from the exhale, after the decision and before the doubt.
Ten ran through it.
A thread, a first presence, something flowing through the channel of a motion inscribed across years of genuine use in situations that had demanded exactly the kind of precision and consistency the body needed to write something down permanently.
Albert stood still in the center of the room and thought about what had just happened.
The channels were already there. Six years of necessity had cut them into something deeper than this body's muscles, deeper than the body itself, and they had come with him when everything else was left behind. Coran's breathing technique had given him the ability to feel what was already carved, and when he moved through forms his hands already knew, Ten had somewhere to go.
He breathed out one more time and felt the lightness settle through him.
Then a thought arrived.
The Engine had converted a bronze coin's worth of value into force during the duel and nearly broken his arm in the process. That was the Engine working alone, running force through an unprepared body with no structure to receive it. But now there was structure. Thin, barely a thread of Ten moving through a single motion, but present and real.
He looked at his right hand.
He reached inward to the Engine, found the familiar warmth of it, and held a single bronze coin between his fingers. He aligned the exchange with the strike the way he had aligned it in the courtyard during the duel, except this time the Ten was already moving through the channel, and the coin's force had somewhere to go.
He breathed out, stepped into the motion, and threw the punch downward into the courtyard soil.
The ground cracked.
A clean split radiating outward from the point of impact, the compacted earth shifting in a brief shudder he felt through the soles of his feet. Small stones jumped. The courtyard wall's climbing vine trembled on its trellis. Dust rose from the split and slowly settled.
Albert straightened and looked at the ground.
The duel had nearly broken his arm. This had not. The force had moved through the channel of the motion and the channel had held, distributed through the Ten rather than concentrated against unprepared bone and muscle. The arm felt fine. His knuckles were sore in the ordinary way of knuckles that had hit something solid, nothing more.
He was still looking at the crack in the ground when the rear door opened.
Reynold stood in the doorway with a lamp in one hand and an expression that had departed entirely from its usual careful nothing. He looked at Albert. He looked at the cracked courtyard floor. He looked at the small stones that had scattered to the edges of the square. He looked at the vine still trembling faintly on the wall.
The silence lasted several seconds.
"Young master," Reynold said, in a tone that was several things at once and expressing none of them cleanly, "it is the middle of the night."
"I know."
"You have cracked the courtyard floor."
"Yes."
"The courtyard floor," Reynold said, with the precision of a man who wanted the scope of the damage clearly established between them, "which is shared with the property's foundation wall."
Albert looked at the crack. It had not reached the foundation wall. It was close, but it had not reached it. He decided not to mention this distinction because he suspected it would not be received well.
"I will have it repaired," he said.
"You will have it repaired," Reynold repeated.
"Tomorrow."
Reynold looked at the courtyard for another moment. Then he looked at Albert with the expression of a man who had fully accepted that his life had taken a direction he had not anticipated and was managing the acceptance with professionalism.
"Inside, young master," he said. "Please."
Albert went inside.
He washed up, set the two manuals on the desk, and went to bed, already thinking about tomorrow and how many repetitions it would take to deepen what had happened tonight into something reliable, and whether the crack in the courtyard floor was going to cost more to repair than the bronze coin he had spent on the punch.
Probably not.
Sleep came quickly. It usually did when the day had produced something worth keeping.