Blake stood up. He did it in one motion, athletic even in this, and he shook his arm out once more and rolled his neck and produced a smile that he held in place by main force while Eddie Krol materialised at his elbow with the towel and a bottle of water and a low stream of talk.
"—slipped, he came in on the wet patch by the edge there, did you see his foot, that's a demo gone wrong, that's not a—"
"There is no wet patch," Dee said, before she could stop herself, because she had mopped the mat herself at four o'clock and she knew where every inch of it stood. Then she wished she had not said it. It sounded like claiming something. She did not want to claim anything. She wanted, with a suddenness that was almost dizzying, to be back in the corridor with the cupboard where the mops were, where things were the size they were.
Sam stepped between the moment and its future with the practiced body of a referee. "Demonstration's over, folks," he announced. "Clean tap, both parties unhurt, thank you to our champion and thank you to Dee. There's juice at the desk and the heavy bag room is open for anybody who wants a look, and Jenna will be doing the falling-safely class in ten minutes in the back room, which I recommend to everybody in this building without exception." A laugh, a real one this time, loosened the room. People began, slowly, to become an open house again. But they did it looking back over their shoulders, and Dee, untying Jenna's borrowed belt with fingers that were less steady now than they had been on the mat, understood that the evening had divided itself into a before and an after, and that she was standing in the after, in a borrowed gi top, while two phones were already uploading her.
The clip was forty-one seconds long, which was thirty-four seconds longer than the event it contained, and by midnight it had been viewed, according to the number under it that kept changing while people watched it climb, more times than there were people in San Tomas.
It began with Simon's voice saying something about Copperline's own, which the poster of the clip had cut. It began properly with Blake's grin and his pat on the back of her hand, and the small, clear sound of Sam Whitaker saying go. It showed Blake dropping into his crouch like a man going down a trapdoor. It showed a woman in a borrowed white top taking one step that did not look like anything. It showed the champion of the region going over that woman's hip with the surprised, rotational grace of a gate coming off its latch, and it showed them landing, and it showed his hand coming across and tapping, twice, hard, and it showed her hands opening and letting him go so immediately and completely that several of the people who commented on the clip in the night used the word gentle, which made Dee, when she eventually saw the comments at two in the morning on the break room computer because she could not sleep and had come in early, feel stranger than any of the other words did. Then the clip showed Sam's hand coming down and Jenna's voice saying seven seconds, and it showed the mints going over on the desk, a tiny silver avalanche nobody else had remembered, and then it ended on Dee's face, half a second of it, not triumphant at all, just startled, with her hand out.
Underneath it, the person who posted it had written JANITOR SUBMITS THE CHAMP IN 7 SECONDS and NO THIS IS NOT STAGED and THIS IS IN NEW MEXICO, and the comments arrived like weather.
By eight o'clock the next morning Simon Greer had been telephoned by a sports desk in Albuquerque, a radio station in El Paso, and a woman who described herself, in a voicemail Simon played three times, as a segment producer, though she did not say for what. By nine, a reporter from the San Tomas paper was standing in the club's reception holding a notebook and asking the girl on the desk, who was nineteen and new, whether the janitor lady was available, and the girl, who had been trained by Dee to say that staff would be found rather than pursued, came and found Dee in the equipment room where she was repairing the stitching on a kick shield with a curved needle.
"There's a man who says he's from the Herald," the girl said. "He wants to talk about your fight."
"It wasn't a fight," Dee said.