I stood perfectly still behind Erich, staring at the screen. The funny thing about equilibrium is that you don’t realize how much you rely on it until something comes along and yanks it out from under you. Somewhere in front of me, he was leaning forward, typing on the keyboard, little clicks adding up to something, or nothing, at the moment, I really didn’t care. I barely felt Gobi’s hand on my shoulder.
“I am sorry, Perry. Your father-”
“Yeah.” I turned, or at least my legs decided to, taking the rest of me along for the ride. Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking about it meant thinking about it, and it didn’t take too much thought to realize how easily Paula could have used my dad the way she’d used me, as a way of gathering information about Gobi, and earning his trust, until eventually he’d leave himself and his family vulnerable. I tried to imagine my dad resisting Paula’s advances-I wanted to visualize him pushing her away, saying how wrong it was, she was dating his son. How he could never do something like that. There was wrong, and there was wrong, and there was this.
But I knew him too well.
And Gobi did too.
I tried to make my voice as calm as possible. “How much more time until you can pinpoint where this was sent from?”
“Not much longer,” Erich said, clicking in a new set of commands and watching the screen flash back at him. “They’re somewhere in western Europe. I’ll have the location soon. We may have to wait a few more minutes.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Now I really do want to hit something.”
The plank in Gobi’s hands was three inches thick and just wide enough for me to picture my dad’s face on it. I watched it turn into Armitage’s, then Paula’s, then back to my dad’s, then a screwball combination of the three. I curled my fingers into a fist. With every second I waited, I could feel the desire to lash out and punch it building up inside me, all the way from my shoulder down my arm until it had formed a buzzing electrical current.
Erich stood next to me, his voice patient and unhurried. “With tae kwon do,” he said, “the key is to focus on a point beyond your target, so that you are actually punching through it. In order to break that board, your hand will have to be traveling about thirty feet per second when it makes contact. Think of your fist as a bullet fired from a gun. Visualize it passing through the board. Are you ready?”
I nodded, checked my stance, and made a fist, cocking one knuckle out slightly like he’d shown me. I could feel the blood pounding in my temples. Putting all the force of my body into the punch, I swung at the block of wood. There was a sharp thwack as my knuckles smashed into it, and a bright bolt of pain ricocheted back up my arm to my shoulder, where it erupted into a throb of pure agony. I doubled over, clutching my hand and trying not to pass out or pee myself.
“You are not focused.” Erich’s voice floated in from far outside the pain. “Anger is not focus.”
“Yeah,” I managed. “Thanks.”
“Check your pulse.”
I put the fingertips of my good hand to the side of my neck. It was throbbing almost too fast to count. I took deep breaths, willing myself to slow it down, until it was in the sixties.
“Try again.”
“No thanks.” I shook my head. “That plank is unbreakable.”
Erich looked at Gobi again, then set his feet parallel with his shoulders. An expression of absolute focus, almost serenity, came over his face. I saw him draw back and swing his fist directly at the plank.
The whole wall exploded in front of us.