He did not escalate the conversation to Master Whitaker. He was not sure how to explain what he had seen without it sounding either like an exaggeration or like a complaint, and he wasn't certain which category it fell into.
Earl Harris had been watching from near the supply room again. He had seen the entire demonstration, and he had seen what Dylan missed. The second evasion, the arrested leg sweep, the precision of the pull on both counter strikes. What Nia had shown the class was maybe 40% of what she was capable of.
She had calibrated her response perfectly, technically impressive enough to be clearly skilled, but measured enough to avoid making a statement she hadn't been asked to make. She was controlling the reveal. Harris thought about this with quiet appreciation. He thought about her grandfather, whom he had never met, and the lessons that had produced this particular quality of self-possession in a nine-year-old girl.
He went back to his cleaning and did not say anything. From the far end of the bench in the changing area, later that evening, Ryan said to Ethan, "The national showcase is coming up." Ethan was pulling off his sparring pads. He didn't look up.
"Showcase needs a good undercard, Ryan continued. Drama. Something to give the crowd something to talk about. Ethan still didn't look up.
"What if she ends up matched against someone real?" Ryan said, "Kyle, maybe. Kyle would handle it in 60 seconds. She'd fall apart the moment she's against someone who isn't pulling every punch."
There was a pause. "She'd embarrass herself in front of everyone," Ryan said, "and that'll be the end of it." Ethan considered this. He thought about the way Nia had slipped Marcus's punch.
Both times, different directions, perfectly clean, and the thing he didn't want to examine too closely stirred again. He pushed it down. "Talk to Marcus," he said, meaning the assistant instructor Marcus, not the boy from the sparring drill. "Get her on the board for the showcase."
Ryan smiled. That night, Nia sat on the edge of a bed in her aunt's spare room, her phone pressed to her ear. "I found a dojo," she said. Her grandfather's voice was warm and unhurried on the other end of the line.
He always sounded like that. Like there was nowhere else he needed to be and no reason to rush anything. "Is it a good one?" he asked. "I don't know yet," she said honestly.