Nadia, who had expected either a flat refusal or a price, closed the folder in front of her and gave Rowan her whole attention. Outside the office window the main room of the Saltline Grappling Collective was emptying after the evening class, students rolling up their belts, Walt Finch moving among them with a towel over his shoulder, correcting nothing, just watching the way he always watched when people thought the work was over.
"First," Rowan said. "The tap ends everything. Not the referee's hand, not a count, not someone deciding from the side that a hold was not really on. A tap, a verbal stop, a hand raised by either corner. Any of those, and it is over that second. Written into the bout agreement, and read out loud before we start, so nobody in the building can pretend later that they understood it differently."
Nadia nodded and wrote it down in her own hand, which Rowan appreciated. A typed promise could be edited. Handwriting on a page in front of you had to be crossed out in front of you.
"Second, medical checks. Real ones. Both of us, the week before and the morning of, by the clinic doctor, not by anybody's coach and not by a form we fill in ourselves. Blood pressure, joints, head, everything they would check for any other showcase bout. If either of us fails, there is no bout, and nobody calls the other one afraid. We shake hands in street clothes and the clinic still gets its night."
"Third?"
"All of the proceeds to Greyhaven Rehab Clinic. Not a percentage, not what is left after expenses that nobody can explain to me. Ticket money, the stream, the sponsors Nadia found, all of it accounted for on a sheet that the clinic can see. The clinic's name is on the night because the clinic is the point of the night. I work there four days a week. I know what a new parallel bar costs and I know how long Harold Benson waited for a Saturday appointment because there were not enough staff hours funded. If people are going to pay to watch the two of us, the money goes where it does lasting good."
Nadia's pen paused, not in objection, Rowan thought, but in calculation, and then it moved again, faster.
"Fourth," Rowan said. "No trash talk. Not from him, not from his coach, not from your marketing, not from me. No poster that makes one of us a joke. No clip cut to make the first demonstration look like a humiliation that needs revenge. You can say a brown belt and a black belt are meeting in a technical showcase. You can say we have different styles. You cannot sell it as a grudge, because there is no grudge, and I will not lend my name to inventing one."
She closed the notebook.
"If any one of those four cannot be met, I am grateful for the offer and I decline, and there is no hard feeling on my side and I hope none on yours."
For a moment Nadia said nothing. Then she turned her page around so Rowan could see what she had written, four numbered lines in clear capitals, and said that in nine years of putting on cards in Greyhaven she had been given lists of demands about lighting, walkout music, changing rooms, percentages and billing order, and that this was the first list she had ever been handed that was not about the person handing it to her.
"It is about the bout," Rowan said. "That is the same thing, done properly."
"Marcus Doyle will fight you on the proceeds," Nadia said. "Not on the tap rule or the medicals. He will say expenses are real, and they are. Hall hire, insurance, the officials. I cannot conjure those out of the air."
"Then let the expenses be listed first, in plain figures, agreed by the clinic before a ticket is sold, and everything after them goes to the clinic. What I will not accept is a vague remainder. Harold and people like him sit in that waiting room. They are not a remainder."
Nadia smiled, briefly and without softness. "You should have been a promoter."
"I should have been many things more profitable than I am. Ilya tells me profit was never the talent I was given."
That evening Walt walked her to her car, which he did when he had something to say that he did not want to say in front of a room. The October air off the water had the iron smell it got before the first real cold, and the car park lights made the puddles look deeper than they were.
"You gave her conditions," he said. "Did you mean them as a way out?"