"Light and easy, Blake. Show them the levels. Nice and light. It's a demo, give them a demo."
"Ready," Sam said. "Dee?"
"Ready," she said.
"Blake?"
Blake grinned at the phones. "Born—" he began, and Sam, who had refereed for nineteen years and had developed a professional allergy to speeches, brought his hand down between them and said, "Go," and the demonstration began.
What happened next took seven seconds, and it took the rest of the evening, and most of the following week, for everyone who saw it to agree on how it had been done.
Blake came in the way he had planned to come in, which Dee understood in the first half second, because planning was written all over it. He did not come to demonstrate a technique. He came to demonstrate a difference. He dropped his level in a sudden, flashy crouch that was lower than it needed to be, purely for the look of it, shot a hand at her lead ankle in a low single-leg entry that in his own sport would have begun a scramble, and reached across her body with the other arm for the far side of her borrowed gi, intending, she was quite sure, to run her backwards and put her down in some photogenic sprawling way and then stand over the lesson of it, smiling, while the phones got it all. It was an entry for an audience. It committed everything he had, all at once, in one direction, at a height of about eighteen inches.
She had spent three years of her youth being thrown by people who entered exactly like that, and three more learning not to be, and the old knowledge was not in her head at all by then. It was in her feet.
She did not retreat, because retreat would have given him the run he wanted. She stepped, instead, a short half-step in and across, not away, turning her hip into the space his dropped shoulder had just vacated, and she took his reaching arm at the wrist and the elbow as it came past her, the way you take hold of a door that is already swinging. Her other hand found the back of his collar. His weight, which he had thrown so generously forward and down, kept going in the direction he had chosen for it. She only helped it arrive. The hip throw that followed was not the big, wheeling, over-the-back spectacle that the young men with the phones had been hoping somebody would do. It was small. It was economical to the point of looking, later, on the video, like nothing at all. She turned, he went over the point of her hip as water goes over a stone, and because she had kept hold of his arm and his collar and because her feet were exactly where twenty years of habit had kept them, they did not separate and crash. They went down together, in order, under control, his shoulder and back taking the mat in a roll she guided rather than a fall she inflicted, and Sam Whitaker, who had been moving before Blake had finished his entry, took two fast steps in with his hand already raised.
But the landing was not the end of the shape. It was, for Dee, merely the shape arriving where she had expected it to arrive all along. Blake came down on his side with his arm extended in her two hands, still reaching, in a sense, for the demonstration he had planned, and she settled her weight, not on him, never on him, but beside him, knees pinching the arm above the elbow, her hands controlling the wrist, his arm straightening into the line of a classic straight arm lock as naturally as a key turning in a lock it had been cut for. She did not crank it. She did not lean. She simply occupied the position completely and correctly, the way a person sits down in a chair that has been placed for them, and waited the fraction of a second it took for Blake Rennert to understand where he was.
He understood. Whatever else was said later, and a great deal was said later, nobody who was in the room disputed that he understood at once. His free hand came across, open, and tapped twice, hard, on the mat, and then once on her shin, and he said, "Tap. Tap, tap," in a voice that carried in the sudden quiet better than his grin had carried all evening.