"Do you know what you have," Dana said. "Tell me you know what you have."
"I have a video," Carla said, writing nothing.
"You have a story. You've got a story with legs. Forty-year-old—"
"Thirty-eight."
"Thirty-eight-year-old fencing coach, a woman, in a combat club, and the two biggest prospects in the building take turns being made to look like they're chasing a coat in a windstorm. And nobody touches anybody, Carla. It's clean. I can put it on television. I can put it in front of sponsors who run away from blood like it's contagious. My mother could watch this. My mother did watch this. She sent it to me with the caption, and I quote, finally a sport for sensible people."
"Your mother has excellent taste," Carla said. "What do you want, Dana?"
"A show," Dana said. "A real one. Not a demo. But before a show, I want to see your two boys, because the second act of this story is whatever is happening in that gym right now, and my experience is that what is happening in the gym right now is an argument."
She was right about the argument. The argument had been running since ten in the morning, in the spaces between training sessions, and it had the rolling, circular quality of a dispute that is not really about its subject. Marcus held court by the water fountain with the confidence of a man restocking his armoury. "Context," he told the room at large. "Y'all need context. The circle is nine feet. Nine feet is nothing. In nine feet, with no strikes, no level changes allowed below the waist—" He caught Tyler's eye. "Some of us were fighting with one and a half weapons. The rules are a muzzle. And she ran the whole three minutes. You cannot touch what won't stand still. In a real fight, somebody has to eventually—"
"Running is the event," Vic said, from the doorway, where he had been standing for longer than Marcus had been talking. "The event is staying on your feet inside the circle. If she had stood still, Marcus, it would not have been a demonstration of anything except anatomy. You might as well complain that a swimmer got wet."
"The circle is too small," Marcus said.
"The circle was too small for you to fit inside it with your partner," Vic said, "that part is accurate. I watched you attempt to occupy the same square foot of it for most of the second minute."
Tyler, who had said almost nothing all morning, who had in fact rewatched the video eleven times on his phone in the locker room with the sound off, spoke without looking up from retying a shoe that did not need retying. "She didn't just run," he said. "Running, you can cut off. We tried. She was somewhere by the time we got to where she was. It's different. It's—" He searched for the word and did not find a wrestler's word for it, and finished, with some reluctance, "She was early. To everywhere. She was early the whole three minutes."
"Early is a scheduling concept," Marcus said.
"Early is why you're in the video apologising to the furniture," Tyler said.
The room enjoyed that. Marcus absorbed it the way he absorbed everything, as material, and pointed a finger at Tyler in mock indictment. "Betrayed by my own tag partner. And you—" He turned the finger on the room. "It was a demo. Demo rules, demo pace. She knew it was coming. I did not know my own teammate was going to be stationed in my running lane like a traffic cone with feelings. There's a version of last night where Tyler Brooks is on his side of the circle, and that version ends different."
"The version where you're coordinated," Vic said.
"That is exactly the version I mean," Marcus said. "Give us five weeks of actually training together and a circle that fits grown men, and we touch her in the first round. I will sign something. I will sign it in pen."
He said it as a joke, or three-quarters as a joke, the way a man tests the depth of water with a laugh before he jumps. But Dana Whitfield was already in motion by then, and Dana did not deal in three-quarters. She arrived at the club that evening in person, which for Dana was the equivalent of a full military commitment, forty-six years old, silver-streaked, blazer over a fight-week tee, carrying a folder and the calm of a woman who has promoted cards in ballrooms, parking lots, and one memorable aquarium. She watched the end of the evening session. She shook hands with everyone. She asked Sabine, within the first five minutes, a question nobody else had thought to ask, which was: "What would you require?"