"No."
"Good. Because she will meet them. Nadia is many things and one of them is thorough. When she wants a night, she builds it out of whatever timber she is given. She will build this one out of your rules and it will be stronger for it, and then there will be no door left for you to walk back through except the one onto the mat."
"I know."
"Do you want it, Rowan? Not can you do it. I settled that question in my own mind a while ago. Do you want it?"
Rowan thought about the clinic in the morning, about the ordinary nobility of helping a man stand between two bars and take a step he had been afraid to take, and about how that work never asked her to prove anything to a crowd. She thought about the first demonstration, which she had not sought, and about Kieran Holt's face in the seconds after he tapped, not angry so much as uncomprehending, as if a language he had spoken all his life had suddenly produced a sentence he could not parse.
"I want it done right," she said. "And I want it finished. If I refuse, it never finishes. It follows me into every class and every clinic shift. People will always be asking, politely, whether I could have done it again. I would rather know. He would rather know. That is not vanity, Walt. That is tidiness."
Walt laughed into the cold. "Tidiness. Ilya Sorin has a great deal to answer for. Go home. Ice that knee if it complains, and do not let Leo talk you into a speech."
Across town, in a smaller, brighter gym that smelled of new mats and citrus cleaner, Marcus Doyle read Nadia's email twice and then read the four conditions aloud to Kieran, in a tone that suggested he was waiting to be told which one to attack first.
Kieran, sitting on the edge of a treatment table with an ice pack he did not need balanced on his right knee for the look of the thing, listened with his head down.
"Proceeds to a clinic," Marcus said. "All of them, after listed expenses. She has appointed herself the conscience of the evening."
"Let her."
"The tap rule read out loud. As if we were planning something."
"Let her have that too."
"The no trash talk is a problem for reach, Kieran. You know it is. Controversy sells the stream. Quiet respect does not trend."
"Then it does not trend." Kieran looked up. "Marcus. I tapped to a brown belt in front of four hundred people and a camera. There is nothing I can say about her that makes that smaller, and if I try, I just look like a man shouting at a locked door. The only thing that changes it is the rematch. Book it on her terms. Every one of them."
Marcus studied him with the frank appraisal of a man who had coached the same athlete since he was nineteen and knew the difference between his pride and his judgment, even when Kieran did not.
"You are sure it is judgment talking?"
"It is the only voice I have left that I trust this week. Book it."
Marcus sent the acceptance that night, with one addition of his own that he did not consult Kieran about, because he knew it would be agreed to: both corners would have the right to stop the bout without explanation, and that right would be read out with the tap rule. He told himself it was good practice. He did not examine too closely the small, unworthy relief he felt at writing it, the relief of a man putting one more net under a wire he had helped to string high.
Nadia began, the next morning, to build a card the way other people built boats in Greyhaven, from the keel up and with respect for the weather. She booked the clinic's chief physician before she booked the hall. She had the bout agreement drawn with the four conditions in its first clause rather than buried in its last. She refused two sponsors, one because its logo would have required wording on the poster that broke the fourth condition, and one because, when she asked three plain questions about its payment schedule, she received four vague answers. She put Tess Gallagher against a visiting purple belt from Portland in a technical bout, because Tess was steady and watchable and would set the tone she wanted. She put two careful brown belts on before that, and a demonstration of falling safely, taught by Walt, at the very start, so that the first thing the audience learned that night was how to land without harm. When people asked her why a showcase needed a lesson in falling, she said that every good night taught its audience how to watch it.