Chapter 49: Injured
Saturday morning. Burbank.
Sifu Yao's school had a small training room separate from the main floor — padded walls, a mirrored wall on one side, enough space for two people to work without interfering with the classes running next door. Suzy had unlocked it early and left them to it, which was her way of being helpful without hovering.
Meg was wearing full sparring gear: head guard, chest protector, forearm pads, shin guards, gloves. The equipment was professional quality and fit her well — Suzy had helped with the sizing.
Simon stood across from her in a lighter setup: shin guards and gloves, no chest protector, nothing on his head. The asymmetry was intentional.
"I want to be clear about what this is," he said. "I'm going to apply real pressure — not the kind you've been drilling against, but the kind where you have to actually respond. Your job is to survive, not to win. Surviving is the lesson."
"I understand," Meg said.
"One more thing." He held her eye. "The techniques that feel natural in solo drilling won't feel natural under pressure. That's normal. Don't try to force them. Use what comes. We figure out what came after, and that tells us what needs more work."
"Okay."
"Ready?"
She set her stance — better than it had been a month ago, the weight distribution more natural, the guard position instinctive rather than thought-out.
"Ready," she said.
Simon moved.
He was across the distance before she'd processed the decision to defend. His palm strike landed on her chest protector — controlled, but with genuine mass behind it.
She stepped back three steps and caught herself against the padded wall.
"Oof." She looked at him. "You didn't telegraph that at all."
"I won't," he said. "Real opponents don't." He returned to his starting position. "You're thinking. Don't think. React."
"I'm trying."
"Try less," he said. "Your brain is in the way. The mechanics are there — I've watched you drill them. Trust that they're there and let them come when they're needed."
She set her stance again. "Come on."
He came at her differently this time — slower approach, testing her response.
She moved to defend — not perfectly, the guard came up slightly late, but she redirected his arm before the follow-through landed cleanly.
"Better," he said. "What did you do?"
"I— I'm not sure. It just felt like the angle was wrong and I adjusted."
"That's the mechanics working without the brain interfering." He stepped back. "Again."
They ran this for two hours.
He attacked and she defended. He defended and she attacked. He corrected and demonstrated, and she drilled and tried again. The room got warm. The gear accumulated sweat. Meg's responses started coming half a beat faster around the ninety-minute mark, which was the sign that something had shifted from intellectual to physical.
At the two-hour point, he could see she was tiring — not done, but running lower. Her footwork had gotten slightly heavier, her guard had dropped an inch from its optimal position.
He brought a punch toward her head guard — a testing shot, not full speed, with enough telegraph that she should have been able to catch it.
She was a fraction too slow.
The punch connected with her head guard solidly.
She went down.
Simon was on his knees beside her before she'd finished hitting the mat.
"Meg." He got his hands on the chin cup of her head guard. "I'm taking this off."
She let him.
He got the guard off and looked at her. She was conscious, tracking, but her eyes had the slightly unfocused quality of someone whose inner ear had just received a significant input.
"How bad?" he said.
"Just dizzy," she said. "I'm okay."
He put two fingers under her chin, checked her pupil response. "Look at my fingers."
She tracked them. Slightly slow.
"We're going to the hospital," he said.
"Simon—"
"Concussion protocol," he said. "Non-negotiable."
He helped her to her feet, steadied her when she wavered, and kept his hand on her arm. He told Suzy on the way out — brief, informational — and had Meg in the Mustang in under four minutes.
The ER at Burbank Regional processed them efficiently.
Blood draw, CT scan, neurological assessment. The physician was direct: mild concussion, observation for twenty-four hours, discharge when symptom-free.
Simon looked at the itemized estimate when it came.
Twelve thousand two hundred and forty dollars.
Meg's insurance covered two-thirds. Simon looked at the remaining four thousand and change and made a mental note never to underestimate the forward momentum of an opponent who was running tired.
He paid the remainder without discussion.
They put Meg in a single room on the second floor.
She was sitting up in the hospital bed in a gown, looking more alert than she'd been in the car, the dizzy phase having mostly passed into the dull headache phase that was the concussion's second act.
Simon sat in the chair beside the bed.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Don't." She reached over and took his hand. "I wasn't tracking by the end and I knew I wasn't tracking, and I should have said something. That's on me."
"I hit too hard," Simon said. "I miscalculated where you were."
"You'll calibrate better next time." She said it practically. "And I'll recognize sooner when I'm done. We both learned something."
He looked at her.
"Should I call your parents?" he said.
Meg was quiet for a moment. "If my dad finds out you punched me in the head in a kung fu lesson—"
"I understand."
"He would lose his mind." She reached for her phone on the bedside table. "I'll call Veronica. She can cover."
"Is that a good idea?"
"Veronica is an excellent liar when the situation requires it," Meg said. "This situation requires it." She found the contact and dialed. "Don't worry about it."
Simon looked at the ceiling while Meg talked to Veronica in the half-careful language of two people running a story that was mostly true but strategically edited. The conversation lasted three minutes and ended with Meg looking satisfied.
"She'll handle my parents," Meg said. "She's telling them I'm at hers for a study session and staying the night."
"She didn't ask questions?"
"Veronica always asks questions," Meg said. "She just doesn't always say them out loud." She settled back against the pillow. "Can you get me something from the cafeteria? I'm hungry."
"What do you want?"
"Pasta if they have it. If not, whatever doesn't look like it's been sitting since Thursday."
"I'll go look."
Simon stood, picked up his jacket, and walked to the elevator.
The second floor corridor outside the elevator was a standard hospital hallway — the particular institutional quiet of a space that moved at its own pace regardless of what was happening outside it.
Simon stepped out of the elevator carrying the takeout bag from the hospital cafeteria — pasta did exist, which he'd taken as a small victory — and turned toward Meg's room.
A man came around the corner at a run.
Not jogging. Running. Looking over his shoulder.
He hit Simon with the full momentum of someone who hadn't registered that another person was in front of them.
Simon's training had planted his feet in the past year without him always noticing it — his base absorbed the contact automatically, shifting weight and distributing force rather than receiving it as a single point of impact.
He stepped back two steps. The man went sideways and down, sliding several feet across the polished floor.
The takeout bag survived.
Simon looked at it, then at the man.
A chain had come loose from around the man's neck in the impact. A pendant — and attached to the pendant, taped with clear medical tape, a small storage card. A micro SD card, approximately thumbnail-sized, with a serial number printed on it in small type.
Simon looked at the serial number.
The Intersect gave him something — fast, fragmentary, but enough.
A classification code. A file designation. A connection to a nuclear authorization protocol.
Simon stood completely still for exactly two seconds.
Then he looked at the man on the floor, who was already trying to get up.
"Hey," Simon said. The man looked at him with the specific expression of someone who was going to say something hostile. "Easy. You're in a hospital. You just hit me hard enough to knock yourself over." He crouched and picked up the chain. "You dropped this."
The man lunged for it.
Simon moved the chain back and stood up. "You want to tell me why you're running through a hospital corridor?"
"Give it to me," the man said, getting to his feet. His left leg wasn't tracking right — an old injury, or something that had happened recently. "Now."
"Or?" Simon said.
The man reached into his jacket.
Simon's assessment ran in about one second: the reach wasn't for a weapon — the motion was wrong for a draw. It was a cover instinct. The man was frightened, not aggressive. And frightened people in hospital corridors with nuclear authorization codes taped to their jewelry were a very specific category of problem that had Casey's name on it.
Simon stepped forward and swept the man's left leg — the compromised one — out from under him, redirected his momentum into the wall with enough control that he didn't hit it hard, and used the wrist restraint cable he'd spotted on a supply cart near the elevator to secure the man's hands to the cart's frame.
The man said several things.
Simon picked up the storage card, turned it over in his fingers, and called Casey.
The phone rang twice.
"Lewis," Casey said.
"I'm at Burbank Regional, second floor," Simon said. "I have a man zip-tied to a supply cart, and I'm holding what the Intersect is telling me is a nuclear authorization storage key." He paused. "How fast can you be here?"
A silence of approximately three seconds.
"Don't move," Casey said.
Simon heard the sound of a car door closing in the background.
Behind him, from somewhere down the corridor, he heard a familiar ringtone.
He turned.
Sarah Walker was stepping out of a room thirty feet away, phone in hand, looking down the corridor at Simon with the expression of someone who had just processed that two separate threads of their operation had converged in a hospital hallway without anyone planning it.
She lowered her phone.
Simon held up the storage card.
She walked toward him with the specific pace of someone who had been in this building for reasons he didn't yet know, had just encountered a situation she hadn't anticipated, and was now running the new math.
DING.
System notification, quiet and unhurried.
Simon filed it for later.
"Tell me everything," Sarah said, stopping in front of him.
"I was getting food for Meg," Simon said. "This man ran into me in the corridor. This fell off him in the collision." He held up the card. "The Intersect flagged it."
Sarah looked at the man secured to the supply cart. Looked at the card. Looked at Simon.
"Why are you in this hospital?" she said.
"Sparring accident," Simon said. "Mild concussion. Meg's in 214."
"Is she okay?"
"She's fine. She wants pasta."
Sarah absorbed the full picture — the card, the man, the pasta, the sparring, all of it — and made the specific face she made when the situation was more complicated than it needed to be but was nevertheless something she would handle.
"Good catch," she said.
She took the storage card and moved toward the supply cart to assess the secured man.
Simon picked up the takeout bag and walked toward room 214.
[500 PS unlocks 1 Extra Chapter]
[10 Reviews unlock 1 Extra Chapter]
Thanks for reading—reviews are appreciated.
P1treon Soulforger has 20+advance chapters