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.A cooling-off period was best, where he could resolve things through punching gym equipment, and she could resolve them by working until her eyeballs fell out of her head.By the time she emerged from her lair her right hand had cramped into a claw.She had to messily gulp seventeen pints of water at the sink, because somehow she’d forgotten to eat or drink for about eight hours, and the whole world had a kind of fuzzy gray quality that probably wasn’t a good sign.And yet he was still in there.He was still in the middle of his cooling-off period, in a way that made her think cooling-off period was probably the wrong term.Slow death march sounded more appropriate, if she was being honest.If she’d just almost killed herself with a computer, he had to be on the brink of disaster in there.Unless he could just keep going and going forever.Maybe he was like a camel, storing massive amounts of denial in order to make it across his desert of feelings.Whenever his muscles started to fail, he simply shored them up with more refusal to face reality.Hey, it was possible.But it was also possible that he was going to kill himself to death with exercise.He’d already almost done it once.And though her efforts at helping him the last time had been pretty pathetic at best, she couldn’t help wondering if there was an approach that would work.Not berating him for failing to follow policy would probably be a start.And then once she’d done that, she could segue into something casual—maybe ask him if he fancied watching something on television.They had dehydrated pizza in their stockpiles, and soda that almost tasted like real soda.They could make a night of it and have some kind of movie marathon, like normal people.If he actually liked movies, and enjoyed pizza, and didn’t mind soda.She wasn’t really sure on all three counts, despite all efforts to glean what information she could about him.She’d sort of surreptitiously watched him from the kitchen the other day, when he’d actually picked up the remote and aimed it at the TV.But he’d just flicked it off Newsertainment and carried on with his business—a fact that told her absolutely nothing.No one liked to watch Newsertainment these days.If the flashing colors and constant threat level updates weren’t bad enough, the images of mutilated clones were.She didn’t know why they’d ever started that send in your pictures of captured rebels segment, but she did know how it made her feel.It made her feel as if someone were cranking a machine inside her, tighter and tighter and tighter until she could hardly stand it.It made her not want to go up there and do her job, if this was what her job led to.And most of all—it made her remember Sergei’s face when he’d looked at those endless sleeping beauties, all so perfect and impossible.Until someone caved their heads in for daring to run away or state an opinion or maybe just look at a human wrong.Did it bother Sergei that they killed clones for looking at someone wrong? She suspected it did, but wasn’t sure what she’d based that on.A change of the channel, a look of wonder, a flicker of his eyelids?That was all you really had to go on with him, and it made negotiating interactions hard.It made them impossible, in fact.She was still by the sink thirty minutes later, considering and discarding ways to get through to him.In the end she just had to erase all concerns from her head and go for it, as though that choice had gone really super well the day before.Instead of leading to something very like this—her in the doorway of the gym with her mouth faintly agape, and him continuing to punch things until they were pulverized to a fine paste.He didn’t even pause when she opened the door, or look up to see if she was an intruder intent on murder.He just kept on hammering at the enormous weighted bag in the middle of the room until the chains that tethered it started to creak and groan.Any second now and it was going to fly across the room.She could already see the bolts straining to keep it attached to the ceiling, and after a punch that looked like a fiery freight train actual dust appeared to sift down.Though it wasn’t the dust she was really paying attention to.She knew it wasn’t, and barely even felt bad about that.No one could have felt bad about staring at him, doing what he was doing.He probably needed studying, in the interests of medical science.People needed to know how his muscles made the shapes they were making, because certainly she’d never seen anything like it before.His biceps seemed to sort of roll as he delivered each blow.She could almost see the raw power in them flowing down his arm, before ending in a bone-shuddering blow.And his shoulders…oh she didn’t know what to do with his shoulders.They each had this little groove between bone and sinew, so unnoticeable on everyone else in the world but so stark and clear on him.She could have rested her chin on it.She wanted to rest her chin on it
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