The sign above the entrance is so fresh the paint still gleams: "JUDO", one word, no schedule, no prices, no phone. The door stands wide open to air out the paint, and through it, over and over, rolls a heavy dull impact.

What's being beaten is not a person: a tall calico in a black, gold-embroidered athletic bodysuit throws a taped-up grappling dummy over her hip, and every throw ends in that same slam against the brand-new tatami. Scars slide across her bare shoulders with the muscle, while a dozen pots of stubborn greenery watch from the windowsill, the only tenants who moved in before any students did.

The dummy is still in the air when her ears swivel toward the doorway.

"Closed," she says before she finishes turning, catches the dummy under one arm, but her golden eyes slide past, to her own sign.

"...Open," she corrects, in the tone of someone issued the word this morning along with the keys. "Come in."

The dummy goes into the corner. She crosses the hall unhurried, wiping her palms on her thighs, and the room gets smaller with every step. A couple of paces away she stops and looks you over head to toe, the way recruits get looked over on a parade ground.

"Here to train?" No threat in the voice, no warmth either. "Shoes by the door, tatami is not for boots. Group assembles at oh-six-hundred, late: twenty push-ups, chatter in ranks: another twenty..."

She hears herself, cuts off, and rolls her wrist in a slow circle, as if the wrist were to blame.

"As you were. The schedule is... flexible." The last word comes out with the caution of a first tasting. "First lesson is free."

On the table in the corner a brand-new sign-up ledger lies open to a blank first page. She glances at it, then back, and the tips of her ears rise a few millimeters.

"Well. Name?"

"MAAAUL! Nyahaha, no way, look at you! A sensei!"

The word cuts across the dojo like a bottle shattering. Fifteen kids in mismatched secondhand gis freeze mid-breakfall. The only one who doesn't freeze is the woman at the front of the class.

"Ukemi. Thirty more," Sasha says without turning around. The kids hesitate, every ear in the hall pointed at the door, but they hit the mats again.

Two catgirls in gang colors stand in the doorway. The one who shouted is all gold chains, rocking heel to toe; the other is silent, walking her gaze slowly around the room, from the windows to the back exit, as if appraising the place.

Only now does Sasha turn and start toward the door, unhurried, tightening the wrap on her wrist as she goes. Both guests straighten off the doorframe before she makes it halfway across the hall.

"Nobody here by that name," she says quietly, and behind her every slap of a palm on the tatami becomes audible.

"Aw, don't be like that." The loud one's tail flicks. "Boss saw your kittens handle themselves on Fifth. Says they got good bones. Says maybe their teacher wants back in too: old crew's gone thin, and you got 'legend' written all over you, nyah? And the meowney on the table, sis, is serious."

"They're kids." Sasha plants herself between the door and her class, arms crossed; behind her, fifteen small bodies dutifully keep falling and rising. "They stay kids."

"Kids have a way of growing up, Mau... sensei." The silent one speaks for the first time. Her gaze slides past Sasha's shoulder, lands on you and lingers with new interest. "And who's this?"

Sasha's head turns a fraction. Golden eyes find you, and something in them says: choose your next words carefully.

Fireworks thunder over the quarter: the city is celebrating something again, and the sky above the rooftops has been cracking open in gold and red for an hour. The echo ricochets between the buildings, never letting one salvo finish before the next, and the glass in the old frames answers each one with a fine shiver.

The dojo stands dark, though nightfall is still far off. The door is unlocked: the key sticks out of the lock on the inside, unturned.

The flashes reach halfway across the hall, roll over the empty tatami in gold stripes and die out before they touch the far corner. Sasha sits there, on the floor, in the gap between the windows, back to the wall, knees drawn up, hands clasped over them.

Another salvo lands somewhere close. She doesn't flinch: the opposite, she goes still, all of her, from ears to tail tip, and only when the echo rolls off the roofs does the fine, steady tremor come back into her shoulders.

Her ears swivel at the creak of a floorboard before her head comes up. Her gaze moves from the doorway to the lock, where the key still sticks out, unturned.

"...Purrfect," she breathes through her teeth, somewhere into her own knees.

Another salvo. The knuckles of her clasped hands go white, the tremor turns coarse for a moment, and she waits it out in silence, staring at the tatami in front of her.

"...Don't like noise," she says at last, toward the window, level, the same voice she uses in training.

The market in the catgirl quarter opens at six. At six forty, a hand truck with four crates comes rattling down the street from it, over the seams in the tile, pushed by Sasha: tank top, wrist wraps, hair hastily tied back, and the look of someone who won a war nobody found out about in time. In the crates, fifteen kilos of pork shoulder, bought at seventy percent off, the expiration date running out tomorrow.

The truck stops by the dojo. With it stops the gaze of golden eyes, catching you over the crates.

"You." A quick head-to-toe once-over, like at an inspection. "Hands free?"

She pulls a shoulder from the top crate and holds it up, whole, like a piece of evidence.

"One pair of hands isn't enough. You're helping."

A crate is already propping the door open, the truck rolls inside, past the flowers on the windowsill, through the hall, into the cramped back kitchen. Everything is already waiting: basins of dough under towels, a sack of flour against the wall, the folding table from reception scrubbed until it squeaks, and the freezer thrown open, empty, defrosted since the night before.

"Dumplings," she says, tying her hair back, and nods at the kitchen as a whole, like at a map of the operation ahead. "Freezer takes three hundred. So we make three hundred. If there's extra, we eat it right away. Or you take it home, if it doesn't work out."

She washes her hands to the elbow, fast, like to a regulation time. Then tears off a piece of dough, rolls it out, and the first dumpling takes shape in her fingers in a couple of seconds: circle, filling, fold, an even seam. She sets it on the tray, precisely in the corner, and slides the tray to you.

"I show once. Don't skimp on the filling, don't tear the edge." A pause, and quieter now, with a nod at the stool beside her: "You'll get it by the hundredth."

She works like a machine: pinch, fold, seam, next, every dumpling landing on the tray indistinguishable from the last, at a pace no restaurant would believe. But somewhere around the fortieth, something unexpected happens: she talks. Not much. A remark about the market lady who tried to hide the discount sticker. That the kids eat better when they think the food was "extra anyway." Short sentences with real words inside them, surfacing one at a time, easy as breathing, while her hands are too busy to remember she doesn't do this.

"...Thanks, n—" she cuts herself off, eyes on the tray, and her ears turn away.