The Musashi Flex Read Online Free

concentration. Position One.”
    Shaw nodded. “Yes, Baba.”
    Shaw slid his feet into the pose, right forward, left back, parallel and square with his shoulders, knees slightly bent. He kept his back straight, circled his hands so that his left was low, in front of his groin, and his right just under his chin, both clenched into tight fists. He took a deep breath, expelled half of it slowly, and began the dance with an imaginary opponent. Later, Baba would have him hammer the hydraulic bag, the wooden man, and dance through the small forest of hanging bleakballs. And if it went well, maybe Baba would show him a new combination. But he had best concentrate on his form, first. If he messed that up, Baba would walk away, and that would be that.
    As much as he respected the old man, he also hated him. Once he had learned what Baba had to teach him, Shaw was fairly certain he was going to have the old bastard killed. Not only would that keep anybody else from learning Baba’s tricks, it would be personally most satisfying . . .

3
    In the run-down section of Madrid the locals impolitely called Ciudad de las Putas, Cayne Sola crouched behind a recycling bin where the two fighters couldn’t see her. The bin was heaped full of scrap plastic, mostly clotted food containers and beer bottles gone alcoholically fragrant in the summer sun. Not the most pleasant combination of odors, though she had smelled worse. She was, as usual, a little excited and a little afraid, but not so much so that she wasn’t doing her job. The two men were only ten or twelve meters away, the holoproj pen-cam she had quik-stik-mounted on the bin’s rim fed its narrowcast digital sig to the loup mounted on the left lens of her shades, and she had a fairly good view. Even if they happened to see the cam, they likely wouldn’t mark it for what it was.
    The cam, with one of the new photomutable-gel lenses, was voxax-controlled by a wireless patch mike on her throat. The whole system had cost her three months’ pay. She subvocalized the words “medium-wide angle,” and got a better shot.
    The larger of the two men was very big, pushing two meters and probably over a hundred kilos; despite that, his moves were lithe, almost snakelike, as he circled his hands up and down, back and forth, forming and re-forming strange, hypnotic gestures that looked to her almost as if they were some kind of sign language.
    The smaller man, who was exceedingly fair, nearly an albino in his paleness, though he had jet hair and eyebrows, laughed, and said, “You don’t really think that old kuji-kiri weave is going to work on me, do you, Al?”
    “Who knows? You could be almost as stupid as you look.”
    She had always found that part interesting—that these guys knew each other well enough to joke, but that they would fight until one or the other was too injured to go on. Or was dead.
    Pale chuckled and circled to his left, his right side forward. Snake—that would be Al—moved an equal amount to his left, keeping the distance between them identical, not quite close enough to cover with one jump. It was an exacting dance, the intricacies of which Sola was only beginning to be able to see, even after almost two months of investigation. It was like watching chess or maybe Go between two masters; each step, no matter how small, had meaning. A misplaced foot, and the response would be fast and maybe deadly.
    Snake shuffled forward a hair, then back.
    Pale held his ground, his hands raised in front of his chest. Neither man had weapons. She was glad of that. They bled enough when it was fists and boots and elbows; with weapons, it was much worse.
    Sola looked at the blinking diode on the loup’s heads-up display. Still green, so the batteries were good for at least another hour, way more than enough time. It wouldn’t do to run out of power in the middle of recording—that had happened during a duel on Mtu last month, and she’d missed some spectacular footage. She