Vy did not sleep well that night. Not because she doubted what had happened to her, but because she understood, suddenly, how easily a true thing could be made to sound uncertain if it was left alone. In the morning she sat at her small desk with her notebook open and wrote down two rules for herself before she did anything else. She would not ask anyone to tell her more than they were willing to tell. She would not repeat anything she had not heard directly, or had not seen herself, as if it were confirmed. If she was going to look more closely, she would do it carefully, the way she approached a difficult technique: slowly, with attention to position, without forcing a movement that was not there yet.
Linh Dan sat across from her with coffee going cold between them and helped her make the list. What Vy knew firsthand was short and clear. She had agreed to a light, technical round. She had defended well. She had reversed Damian Cross for a few seconds, and the room had noticed. After that his pressure had changed. She had asked to reset. She had tapped, clearly, more than once, and the round had not stopped at the moment it should have. Ethan Blake had intervened. Those were facts she could stand behind without embellishment. Everything else, Linh Dan said, belonged in a separate column, for now: things heard secondhand, things inferred, things people feared might be true. Vy drew a line down the page and felt steadier for having drawn it.
The former student, when Linh Dan finally reached her, was not eager to talk, and Vy respected that hesitation as a kind of answer in itself. Her name was Thao Nguyen. She had trained at Bayview for a little over a year before she stopped coming, and she spoke to Vy only after Linh Dan asked, and only after Vy promised that nothing she said would be shared without her permission. They met in a quiet corner of a library, not at the academy, where Thao Nguyen could leave whenever she wanted. She kept her hands around a paper cup and looked at the table more than at Vy, but her voice was steady.
Thao Nguyen described a seminar, crowded, much like the one Vy had attended. She had been paired for a demonstration round, and for a brief moment she had escaped a front headlock and taken a better position. She remembered the small sound the room made, not mocking, just surprised, and she remembered how quickly the air changed. She said Damian had smiled, as if nothing were wrong, and then had pressed forward with a different kind of intensity. She had tapped with her free hand, firmly, against his shoulder, and had said stop. The hold loosened, she said, but not immediately. It loosened a beat later than it should have, long enough for her to understand that the delay itself was the message. Later, when she tried to explain to another student that she had felt unsafe, Damian had laughed it off in front of a small group and said new students needed to learn where they stood. She did not make a formal complaint. She told herself she might have misread the timing, that perhaps she was too sensitive, that a champion would not need to prove anything to someone like her. She stopped coming the following month, not with a dramatic exit, but with a series of excuses that eventually became true.
Vy listened without interrupting, and when Thao Nguyen finished, Vy thanked her and asked only one question: whether she would be willing, if there were ever a fair and formal process, to confirm what she had just said, in her own words, to the people responsible for deciding. Thao Nguyen did not answer immediately. She said she would think about it. She said she was not interested in becoming a story online, and she was not interested in revenge. She was interested, if anything, in whether the next woman who tapped would be believed the first time. Vy wrote that sentence down exactly, and underlined it twice.