Chapter 69
Elena
The ribbon left my palm at 6:14 in the morning.
I watched it climb—six meters, maybe six and a half—the silk catching the training hall's overhead lights in a long, spiraling arc before the weighted end reached its apex and began to fall. My body was already moving before my eyes fully registered the trajectory, the three-and-a-half rotations completing themselves in the space between one heartbeat and the next, and then the ribbon was back in my hand, the tail whipping once against my wrist before I absorbed the landing.
My left knee buckled.
I stumbled two steps to the right, caught myself on the ball of my foot, and stayed upright.
For a moment I just stood there, breathing, one hand still gripping the ribbon handle while the other pressed flat against my sternum as if I could physically hold my heart in place. The training hall smelled of chalk and the particular kind of exhaustion that settles into the air after hours of repeated effort—something mineral and faintly sour, familiar enough that I'd stopped noticing it except in moments like this one, when everything else fell quiet.
"Petrova." Michel's voice came from the edge of the mat, neither warm nor cold, the tone she used when she was deciding whether something counted. "Again."
I turned to look at her. She was standing with her arms crossed and her stopwatch in her right hand, the same posture she'd held for the last forty minutes while the external coach worked the harness with me, adjusting the suspension angle, correcting the rotation axis, making me repeat the preparatory sequence until my shoulders ached from the resistance. The harness was off now. This last attempt had been solo.
"That was the first clean catch," I said.
"The catch was clean. The landing was not." She walked toward me, not hurrying, and crouched slightly to look at the position of my left foot. "You're landing on a locked joint. The knee needs to absorb, not brace. You understand the difference?"
"Like a spring," I said. I'd been telling myself this for forty minutes. Like a spring, like a spring. "Not a pillar."
"Exactly like a spring. The impact travels up through the ankle, through the knee, through the hip—distributed, not concentrated. You're concentrating it in the knee because you're afraid of the height." She straightened. "You're not afraid of the height."
"I know I'm not afraid of the height."
"Your knee doesn't know that yet." She glanced at the clock on the wall, then back at me. "Breakfast is in an hour. Twenty more before you eat."
Twenty. I looked down at the ribbon coiled loosely in my hand, the weighted end resting against the mat, and thought about the fact that my lower back had been tightening since the fourth attempt and that the harness bruise on my left hip would be spectacular by tomorrow morning. Then I thought about the way the ribbon had climbed in that last throw—the height, the arc, the precision of the catch—and something in my chest settled.
"Okay," I said.
She nodded once and walked back to her position at the edge of the mat, and I shook out my arms, reset my grip, and started again.
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By the time Annabelle appeared at the training hall door, I had completed seventeen of the twenty attempts with varying degrees of success. Three clean catches with acceptable landings. Four clean catches with the locked-knee problem Michel kept correcting. The rest were aborted mid-rotation or caught off-axis, each one followed by Michel's voice naming exactly what had gone wrong, which I repeated back to myself while I reset my position.
Rotation axis drifting right. Left shoulder dropping early. Grip too tight at the release point.
I knew these corrections the way I knew the bones of my own hands—intimately, tediously, with the particular frustration of understanding something in theory that the body had not yet accepted in practice. The three-and-a-half rotation throw was not new to me conceptually. I'd been working toward it for eight months. The problem was not comprehension. The problem was that my body still treated the extra half-rotation as a threat rather than a continuation, still braced for impact a fraction of a second too early, still didn't fully trust the height.
Trust the height. Easier to say at six in the morning than to mean.
I was mid-reset when I heard the door and glanced over to find Annabelle leaning against the frame with her training bag over one shoulder, watching me with the expression she used when she was trying to gauge whether the atmosphere in the room was safe for conversation.
"You're still going," she said.
"Two more." I turned back to my starting position, ribbon gathered in my left hand. "Michel's orders."
She came in and sat on the bench along the wall, setting her bag down quietly—she'd learned early that unnecessary noise during my training sequences made me lose count—and I heard the soft sound of her pulling out her water bottle while I ran the preparatory sequence again in my head. Height first. Trust the height. Spring, not pillar.
The eighteenth attempt was the best one yet. The catch was clean, the landing absorbed through the knee exactly the way Michel had been telling me for forty minutes, and I came out of the final position with my weight balanced and my spine straight and for one clear moment I understood, physically and not just theoretically, what she'd been describing.
"There," Michel said, and it was the single most gratifying word in the French language.
I did the nineteenth and twentieth at that same register, not perfectly—the twentieth catch came in slightly off-axis and I had to compensate with my wrist—but well enough that Michel's stopwatch hand came down and she said, "Breakfast. Be back at two."