They hit the mat together, hard enough that the sound of it went through the floor and into the soles of the front row's shoes, and even then it was not finished, because Blake Rennert had not been a champion for three years by being a man who accepted landings. He scrambled in the half second of the fall, twisting for his knees, reaching for an underhook, trying to turn the throw into a race he could still win, and it was here, in the part of the fight nobody put to music, that Dee Marenco did the thing she actually did better than anyone in the building. She did not chase him. She settled. Her weight arrived on him in the right order, hip, chest, shoulder, hands, each one a sentence finished before the next began, and his scramble ran into her the way weather runs into a coastline. He bucked and she rode it. He framed against her neck and she took the frame apart at the wrist, patiently, as if she were untangling something in a dark cupboard by touch. He tried to roll her through and found that rolling required a space she had not left anywhere in the arrangement.
Sam Whitaker circled them at a crouch, close enough to touch either of them, saying nothing, his whole fifty years in the sport gathered into his eyes. Later, people who had been there would argue about how long that final passage lasted. The clock had a number for it, but the people who watched it remembered it as longer, the way the important passages of things always are. Blake worked with everything he had, and he had a great deal, and each attempt cost him more of it and gained him less, until the attempts began to arrive further apart, and his breathing changed, and Dee, who had spent the entire bout being scored upon and doubted and pronounced lucky by degrees, adjusted her position by one final inch and took his arm out of the wreckage of his defences with both of her hands, gently, almost kindly, the way she took everything that was fragile and had to be handled properly.
She did not throw the lock on. She built it. Hip under the elbow, hands in their places, her body arranged around his arm like a piece of furniture assembled in the right order, and she looked at Sam, and Sam looked at her, and then she applied it the way Yusuf had taught her when she was a girl and the way she had taught it since: pressure as information, increased by degrees, with time in it for a man to make his decision. Blake Rennert made his. His free hand came down on the mat, once, twice, three times, fast and unmistakable, and his voice came with it, hoarse and clear enough for the front rows to hear: "Tap. Tap."
Dee let go instantly. Not quickly the way the eager let go, to show the crowd their sportsmanship, but instantly the way she had been taught letting go was the whole of the law, her hands open and away and her weight off him before Sam's hand had finished coming down between them. She rolled to her knees beside the champion of the region, who lay on his back with his chest heaving and his arm, the arm, cradled against his own body, and before she acknowledged the hall, or the scoreboard, or the roar that was arriving like surf, she said, "The arm. Tell me about the arm."
"It works," Blake said, winded, and flexed his fingers, and then, startled into honesty by pain and relief and the clean ending of it, laughed up at the ceiling. "It works better than the rest of me. The rest of me is finished."
"Then we finished it right," Dee said, and took his good hand when he offered it and helped him sit up, the two of them rising together out of the centre of the noise like people climbing out of deep water.
Sam raised her hand. It hardly needed doing. The hall was on its feet in a single piece, and the sound was not the sound the crowd had made for points or for spectacle; it had something ragged in it, something personal, as if everyone shouting had just been privately forgiven for a small opinion they were ashamed of. Carla was crying without embarrassment. Jenna was crying while still holding the pencil. Yusuf Adeyemi stood with his cane forgotten against his chair and his head up, and if his eyes were wet he had earned the right not to explain them. Eddie Krol turned around and shouted something incoherent at nobody and then sat down hard on his own stool as if his knees had retired.