None of the facts had changed, but facts exist in relation to other things, and the thing they had been in relation to the certainty that he was the best, the most impressive, the one worth watching had been thoroughly complicated. He trained harder the week after the showcase than he had trained in months. He came in early on Tuesday before the main class and worked combinations alone on the heavy bag at the back of the hall. He stayed late on Thursday drilling footwork patterns on the main mat long after the other senior students had gone home.
He pushed into sequences he had not challenged himself with in a while, working the edges of his own technique with an intensity that several of the other black belts noticed and said nothing about. Ryan noticed. He noticed everything. On Friday evening, after the late class had cleared out, Ryan sat with Ethan on the bench in the equipment room.
The building was mostly empty. The fluorescent lights above them flickered slightly at the far end of the hall, the way they always did in the last hour before the building closed. "You've been thinking about it all week," Ryan said. Ethan pulled off his sparring pad and set it on the shelf.
"I've been training," he said. "That's not training," Ryan said. "That's something else." Ethan was quiet.
"She's 9 years old," Ryan said. And his tone was difficult to read. It was somewhere between a comfort and a provocation, and it landed closer to the provocation end. "A title at 9 doesn't mean anything about what happens when she trains with someone who's been doing this for real.
Someone her own size and development. You know that. I know that," Ethan said. "So, what's the problem?"
Ethan set down the second pad and looked at the shelf without seeing it. "The problem," he said slowly, "is that she's not surprised by anything. You throw something at her and she's already" He stopped. "You saw it.
She's already thinking about what comes after what you threw. I've been fighting for 5 years and I've met maybe two people who do that. Both of them were adults. Both of them were instructors."
Ryan was quiet. "She's 9," Ethan said, and unlike when Ryan had said it, there was no reduction in the statement. It was simply something he was trying to understand. There was a silence.
"So, train harder," Ryan said at last. "You're bigger, you're older, you have more experience, and you have more time to develop. That still counts for something. It counts for a lot.