Walt looked at his clipboard as if the name might have changed since the phone call. "Kieran Holt," he said.
The room made a sound. It was not quite a cheer and not quite a whistle, but it had both in it, the sound a small gym makes when a name it has mostly seen on screens is suddenly going to be standing on its own taped seams. Rowan felt Tess, still lying on the mat in front of her, go still in a way that had nothing to do with drilling.
"Kieran Holt," Tess said. "As in, the scramble highlight that lives on the internet. As in, wins submission only tournaments by moving like the floor is electrified."
"That is the one," Walt said. "Twenty eight, black belt, regional champion, coming up from Portland for the weekend because Nadia knows his coach's sister or owes somebody a boat, I did not ask. Marcus Doyle coaches him and will be with him. They will do the main demonstration, Kieran and one of ours, format to be agreed, friendly and controlled, I have said it twice and I will say it a third time to the newspapers if anyone asks." His eyes traveled the room, doing the coach's arithmetic of availability and temperament, and Rowan, who knew that arithmetic, felt her stomach tighten in a way she did not examine. "I have not picked ours yet," Walt said. "So nobody campaigns. Campaigning is cardio and I will make you do it outside."
After class, while the mats were being wiped down in the long, meditative ritual that ended every night at Saltline, Tess followed Rowan to the bench with two water bottles and handed her one with the air of a lawyer presenting evidence. "You," she said.
"I am not campaigning," Rowan said. "Campaigning is cardio. Outside."
"You heard him. Demonstration. Controlled. Against a speed champion. In front of forty folding chairs and the fire marshal. Who in this room is the demonstration of control? Describe her. Dark curly hair. Works with old men and kettles. Has a brown belt and the personality of a lighthouse."
"I have the pace of a lighthouse," Rowan said. "He is not coming to Greyhaven to roll politely with the slowest brown belt in Maine. He is coming to be filmed doing the thing he does, and Nadia is selling chairs on the promise of it."
"Harold's fund is selling the chairs," Tess said, more quietly. "And Nadia is too smart to promise a circus. She promised a contrast. That is what she told June's cousin, who told June. Speed against, and I quote, the other thing. Everybody in town already knows who the other thing is, Rowan."
Rowan looked out through the tall windows at the harbor, where the lights had come on along the wharf and the fog was rebuilding itself for the night shift. She thought about the demonstration the way she thought about everything, from the end backwards. She imagined the room full, the folding chairs, Margaret's book and Harold's cardigan if his daughter brought him, which she would, because the mobility fund had his name practically written on it in Walt's square handwriting. She imagined a young champion who moved the way she had once moved, before the sound in the gymnasium in Bangor, and she felt two things at once and was honest enough, after nine years, to name them both. The first was fear, plain and useful. The second was a small, steady interest, like the first boat light moving in the fog, because the question of what her slow game actually was, when it was not protecting a knee or teaching a lesson but simply meeting the fastest thing in the room, was a question she had been carefully not asking herself for a long time.
"Ilya is coming Saturday," she said, mostly to change the subject.
Friday at the clinic was Harold's second session of the week, and he arrived with news, delivered before he had even taken off his coat, that he had crossed his kitchen on Thursday evening, alone, while Margaret was on the telephone in the other room, and had made the kettle sing without touching the counter until he arrived at it. He reported this the way a man reports weather he personally arranged. Rowan made him describe it three times, where his eyes went, where his weight went, what his left hand had done with itself on the journey, which turned out to be hovering at his side like, in his words, a seagull deciding whether to land, and then she set up the bars and made him do the harder thing, which was to walk slower than he had walked at home, because success at home had a way of making patients ambitious in the clinic, and ambition, unaccompanied, was how people fell in bright rooms trying to repeat a triumph at twice the speed.