But she was present, in a way she had not been able to be since October of last year. Since the phone call that changed everything.
She was fully here. On this mat, in this gym, in her own body. Her mother's ribbon in her hair. Her grandmother somewhere in the seats, watching.
She was here.
When the buzzer sounded, the crowd came back to itself all at once. A different sound than before. Not the predetermined narrative that had been loaded into the room that morning by a video on a phone screen. Something more complicated. Something that came from watching two people fight each other honestly, and not having decided in advance what it thought about that.
The judges conferred.
Mia stood in her corner. Foss handed her water. Said nothing. Sometimes nothing was the right thing.
The decision came back.
Split. Two judges to one.
Mia, by points.
She heard it and stood with it for a moment. Not triumph. The particular satisfaction of having done the thing you came to do, in the way you meant to do it, for the reasons you meant to do it for.
She walked to center mat. She and Dara touched gloves.
Dara leaned in. "Good fight."
"You too," Mia said. "You're the real thing."
"So are you," Dara said. She paused. "Your mother would have liked watching that."
Mia held those words for a second.
"Yeah," she said. "She would have."
What happened next did not happen loudly.
That was the thing Mia remembered most clearly afterward. She had half expected the aftermath to be loud. The way resolutions in films were loud, everyone watching the dramatic conclusion.
It wasn't like that.
She was at the edge of the mat, towel around her shoulders, when she became aware of a shift in the room. Not everyone. Not all at once. Just a change in the quality of attention. People looking toward the spectator section where Reese had been sitting.
He wasn't sitting anymore. He was standing, talking into his phone. And even from across the room, she could see that the easiness was gone. The quality that had been so consistent in every interaction she'd had with him, that unexamined confidence, was simply not there.
She looked to see what he was looking at.
A man she didn't know was standing near the entrance of the hall. Mid-50s, conservative suit, a lanyard with a Harrove administrative badge. He was talking quietly to President Aldridge, who had been in the audience. Aldridge was looking at something on a tablet the man held.
She didn't know what it was yet.
She found out 20 minutes later, when Foss found her in the cooldown area.