"I said leave it."
He came out slowly. He was giving away eighty pounds and six inches and four years of being told he was the best thing in three counties. He circled her left, then right, hands up, feinting, testing, refusing to commit. Gianna turned with him and did nothing at all. She kept the window at her back. Twice he stepped into the glare and blinked, and twice he stepped back out of it.
"Come on!" somebody yelled. "Do something!"
Mason did something: he dropped his level and drove straight in with all of his weight behind it. It would have put a man his own size into the cage rail.
She let him come. Gianna caught him around the waist as he arrived, both arms, her forehead against his chest. She turned her hip into him. She did not so much throw him as let the floor arrive early.
Mason Clark went over her hip and landed flat, and the whole mat drummed with it, and two hundred pounds of regional champion bounced once.
She did not stay in front. She was behind him before he stopped moving. Her right arm came under his jaw; her left hand closed on her own bicep. She drew her elbows together and rolled him onto her, and his legs kicked twice at empty air.
The wall clock hit fourteen seconds.
Mason's hands were on her forearm. Then they were not on anything.
Gianna let go instantly. She slid out from under him and turned him onto his side. She tipped his chin. She put her palm flat on his ribs to feel them move. They moved. She sat back on her heels beside him, and she started to shake.
The camera on the desk had a clean angle on all of it: an 18-year-old on her knees on the red mat, hands trembling in her lap, her palm on the ribs of the man who had torn her grandfather's gi open, waiting to feel him breathe. That frame went further than the throw did.
"Tanya," she said. "Now."
Tanya Burke was on the mat in three strides, already checking Jake first, then Luke, then Mason, talking to each of them in the flat, calm voice of somebody who did this for a living.