Rood | Page 8

to grab my arm."
Fed grabbed his brother's wrist. Tonx's smile widened, and he gently put his free hand on top of Fed's. "It's easy," he said. He slipped the fingers of his bottom hand on top of Fed's and pressed softly.
"FUCK! YOU! BITCH!" yelled Fed, falling facedown on the concrete floor in front of Tonx's shoes. Tonx was laughing, doubled up against the wall holding his belly. The door behind him opened and the Chinese girl from earlier looked down at them. The floor she stood on was a foot higher than the floor of the hallway, thick blue mats covering its surface. She looked at Tonx and then down at Fed, now on his knees pressing his wrist between his thighs, tears welling up in his eyes.
"Tried that shit-ass nikyo on your brother, Tonx?" she asked. She turned toward Fed. "Don't worry about it, man. Your brother's the biggest wuss we got on the mat. Stick around and you'll see him get his."
Tonx reached a hand up and let her haul him through the gap, his hand lingering against her hip as he stepped in. "Hey there sweetheart" he murmured. "You dissing my nikyo?"
"Your nikyo ain't shit, baby," she murmured back, hopping down into the hallway and helping Fed to his feet. "Give me that," she said, grabbing his hand and pushing gently against the inside of his wrist with the ball of her thumb. She ran her fingers up his arm, pushing deeply into the muscle. Fed felt his arm relax, the pain dissipate. "One of the rules is, 'you break it, you fix it,'" she informed him. "So I guess this means your brother owes me."
She still smelled like smoke, and up close Fed noticed she was about his height. He pulled away, his cheeks hot, mumbled a thank-you as he scrambled up into the room. He heard her chuckling softly behind him.
The room was roughly forty feet square, no windows. Bare concrete bore witness to a poor job done steaming off wallpaper and paint, tiny knobs of colored polyplasticines clinging here and there. The blue mats covered the entire floor, and two plain white doors stood on either side of the far wall. There was a low shelf on Fed's right with a little picture of an old guy and a huge scroll with a single Japanese character splashed on it hanging above. Fed flipped on his goggles, scanned the scroll and ran a query, got a quick answer.
"Love" the scroll said. Fed wrinkled his nose.
"What's this?" he asked Tonx.
"You mean the kanji?" Tonx asked, waving his hand at the scroll. "It's Ai, means love. Aikido is called the art of love. Kind of funny at first, but it makes sense once you've been doing it a while."
He swung around, his arms taking in the whole room. "This is our dojo - it's actually the back of the shop. We've got practice later, you can try it out. But first I want to show you something."
"You going to show him your fishies, Tonx?" asked Cass, letting her hair down and pulling it up again into a ponytail.
"Yeah" said Tonx, turning to give Fed that familiar half smile. "I'm going to show him my fishies."

Chapter #5
Tonx's room was a simulacrum of the one they had shared at their Mom's place. A futon sat on a frame covering the majority of the floor surrounded by a dense layer of clothing, printouts, discount reference books and bits of electronics. One wall was covered in gorilla racks, sturdy industrial-grade shelving. A thick data cable snaked out from a pair of rack-mount computers; pizza-box-sized systems Tonx had paired up to handle the throughput required for the VR he used to manipulate his bio work. A black plastic helmet of the same make as the one in the shop hung from a hook nailed into the wall over the bed, the data cable attached via rubber bands to nails in the wall.
What got his attention, though, were the tanks. The gorilla racks contained at least a dozen fish tanks of varying sizes. Each had a big metal canister like a coffee dispenser next to it, spiked metal sensor arrays protruded from each into the tank it accompanied. Tonx had glued recycled LCDs to the front of each tank and wired them to the canisters. As he watched, the displays cycled through a string of numbers and acronyms that meant absolutely nothing to Fed.
Tonx settled onto a stool in front of the shelves and thumbed on a strip light over one of the tanks. As Fed watched a fat goldfish swam into view over the blue pebbles covering the bottom of the tank. Tonx snickered.
"Watch this" he said.
He pulled out two film canisters from next to the tank, one white, one black, and