"Ma'am, sit down."
"I called the federation myself—"
"Sit down."
Tanya sat. She did not stop looking at him.
Gianna had not moved the whole time. Her hands were open at her sides. Her chin was level. She spoke quietly, and people in the third row leaned forward to hear it.
"I don't need your whole mat, sir," she said. "I just need my grip."
For a second, nobody said anything at all. Then Mason Clark started to smile. He said the sentence back to her one word at a time, like he was reading it off a wall.
"You just need... your grip."
"Yes, sir."
"Okay," Mason said.
And he reached out and took hold of her lapel.
The seam went first. Mason Clark had both fists in her lapel, and he pulled sideways and down the way a man opens a feed sack. The stitching at the left shoulder let go in one long tearing sound. It carried past the cage rail, past the bleachers, all the way to the back row where a boy stopped chewing his gum. The patch her grandmother had sewn split straight down the middle.
"Look at that," Mason said. "Falls apart in my hand."
Underneath, Gianna wore a long-sleeved training top, black, worn thin at the elbows. She did not cover herself. She did not step back. She stood there with the ruined gi hanging off one shoulder, and she let him hold the torn edge.