She needed a witness. A real one. Someone credible. Someone who had no stake in the outcome. Who would report what they saw because that's what they did, not because she'd asked them to.
She thought about the campus. The patterns of it. The places people were and weren't.
She thought about the bench by the east entrance to Whitmore Hall.
The one where every morning, without exception, an older man sat with a folded newspaper and a travel mug of coffee.
She'd noticed him the first week. He was there before she left for morning training, and sometimes still there when she came back. Retired, clearly. He had the unhurried quality of someone with nowhere to be by any particular time.
She'd nodded to him twice. He'd nodded back. That was the extent of it.
She didn't know who he was.
She thought she might need to find out.
* * *
The confrontation came on Monday of the third week.
Reagan had known it was coming. She'd spent the weekend training and thinking, and building contingency around contingency.
Ray Dunbar had a word for this. He called it seeing the mat before you're on it. The ability to anticipate the geometry of what's about to happen. To already know, before the moment arrives, where your weight needs to be.
It was 11:20 in the morning, between classes. The main path from Whitmore Hall to the cafeteria.
Busy. The right kind of busy. Enough witnesses to matter. Few enough that the chaos of a crowd wouldn't obscure what happened.
Trent appeared from the left side of the path, coming out of a doorway that created a natural blind spot. Reagan had clocked this yesterday, when she'd walked the route three times.
He came in fast. Not running. Walking with purpose, at a pace that would produce some impact if he continued on his line.
Reagan kept walking. Normal pace, arms loose.
He cut in hard from the left shoulder. The kind of move that reads as I wasn't watching where I was going, if you're only watching casually.
Six people near enough to see. Maybe eight.
Reagan felt the geometry of it in the half second before it happened.
She did not speed up. She did not dodge, obviously. She adjusted her center of gravity by two inches to the right. Let her shoulder roll forward at the moment of contact. Absorbed the energy of the hit and let it pass through her, rather than catching it.
Trent had put his full weight into the move. He'd expected to hit a fixed object. What he hit instead was something that moved with him, and then wasn't there.
He stumbled forward.
Reagan was already two steps past him.
She heard him catch himself. Heard the pause. Heard him recalibrate.
This hadn't gone the way it was supposed to. She wasn't on the ground. She hadn't reacted. She'd just not been where he aimed.
She kept walking. She did not look back.
She heard him start to say something. She caught "Hey," and then he stopped.