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punish ment just as Chip dismissed the class.
    “Not bad for an old broad,” Chip told her as the other students bowed to him before filing out of the studio.
    “You’re not my sensai once we hit the parking lot,” Zae warned, a wicked twinkle in her black eyes. “I’ll show you what an old broad can do, kid.”
    “I’d hate to be the attacker who ever tried to take you on.” Chip chuckled. “He wouldn’t know what hit him.”
    “A hundred and forty pounds of pure African- American wildcat,” Zae stated. “A hundred and thirty-nine if I take off my earrings.”
    Clutching at her lower back with one hand, Zae bowed to Chip and then limped into the lobby.
    “So you signed up,” Zae said, greeting Sheng Li’s newest student with a brief hug. “Good. You’ll like it here. Let me show you where the locker room is.”
    Zae led the way, still limping.
    “Are you okay?”
    Zae cast a sly glance toward the studio before drop ping the limp. “I’m fine. I just wanted Chip to feel bad for giving me the squats, the little punk.”
    “You weren’t supposed to be talking in class.”
    “Who are you?” Zae asked, pitching her voice higher. “The dojo monitor? Honey, please.” She smirked and swung open the locker room door.
    “Are the lockers assigned, or—”
    “Shh!” Zae hissed sharply, stopping before they rounded a tall stand of black lockers. She crouched slightly, leaning forward to get her left ear as close as pos sible to the voices coming from the other side.
    “I’ve got spaces open at Witness Protection, Fugitive, and CI,” said the first voice, a low soprano with a nasal quality.
    “What’s ‘CI’? . . .econd, deeper female voice asked. “Confidential informant,” another voice provided. “What would a confidential informant be doing in Webster Groves?” asked someone else.
    “Gian used to be in the Marines,” the first voice said quietly. “He was Special Forces. Who knows what kind of people he’s connected to. Maybe the new girl was sent here by the government to spy on him.”
    “Gian was awarded a Purple Heart,” someone said. “You make it sound like he’s G. Gordon Liddy.”
    “He could be, we don’t know. Same as we don’t know anything about his new student.”
    “I’ll put five bucks on Witness Protection. She seems like the type.”
    “How so?” asked a new voice.
    “She comes into the library every week and checks out a dozen books. She reads everything—mysteries, self- help, essays, the classics—but she seems to like romance best. And she always returns her books on time.”
    “So that makes her a criminal in hiding?”
    “No. It’s just that she seems to make a point not to be noticed. She’s seen me every week since she moved here last year, but she never says more than hi and thank you.”
    “It’s her name that gets me,” said a new voice. “When she came into the bank to open an account, I was like, ‘What kind of name is Cinder White?’ It sounds totally made up.”
    The women laughed, and Zae moved into view from her listening post. But before she could speak, Cinder herself quieted the women. “When I was born, my eyes were so dark that my mother thought they looked like cinders. That’s where my name comes from. Is there any thing else you’d like to know about me?”
    Most of the women guiltily looked anywhere other than at Cinder as they collected their belongings and scattered, but one of them opened her mouth to speak. A scathing look from Zae made her close it.
    “I’d better get home,” the soprano, a tall, thin woman who resembled a stork in her blindingly white gi , said uncomfortably. She curled a sheet of paper in her hand. “Gotta make dinner for the kids.”
    “Yeah, us, too,” another woman said, slinging her gym bag over her shoulder.
    “ Y’all oughta be ashamed of yourselves, betting on somebody like that,” Zae chastised.
    The stork halted in her tracks and slowly turned. “I got your text message