She looked up. An older woman sat on a stability ball nearby, wrapping her own wrists in torn fabric. Her name was Delia. She had close-cropped gray hair, a scar across her left eyebrow, and arms that looked like braided rope.
Delia released the handle. “I chose. Every day. For years.”
“Sorry?” Maya said.
And somewhere in the fluorescent buzz and the screech of old steel, Liberty’s Legacy did exactly what it was built for. It held the weight of a girl learning to stand up—not against the world, but for herself.
It wasn’t a person. It was a trainer—a battered, silver-and-blue strength machine from the early 1990s. The kind with a stacked weight pin, a worn vinyl seat, and a cable system that screeched like a gull if you pulled too fast. Most members walked past it to the new plate-loaded equipment, the shiny levers with hydraulic whispers. But a few knew better.
“You earn it first, kid. Fifty pounds, slow and smooth. Ten reps. No jerking.”
