Tanya Burke came to the edge of the mat with a bottle of water. "Honey, you don't have to do this. I'll drive you home right now."
"Can you do something for me?"
"Anything."
"Stand where you are, and don't come onto the mat until I say." Gianna took the water and drank two swallows. "Not for me. For them."
Tanya opened her mouth and then closed it.
Gianna handed the bottle back. She walked out to the center and stopped. Then she did something small, and only one person in the building caught it. The front wall was all glass, and at twenty past ten in September, the sun came through it low, flat, and hard. She turned herself around, one slow step at a time, until that light was behind her shoulders. Then it was in their eyes instead.
Martin Keenan noticed. He sat up in his chair. He looked at the sunlight, then at her bare feet, then at the way her weight had settled dead even between them. His hand came off the folder.
"Oh," he said to nobody.
Mason Clark lifted his chin toward Jake Dawson. "You're up. Don't take all day."
Jake Dawson came in low and fast, both arms reaching for her legs. It was the right shot. He had hit it a hundred times in that room against bigger men, and it had always worked. He got his head to the outside of her hip, and his hands almost met behind her knees. Almost.
Gianna's hips dropped and turned a quarter inch before he arrived. Her weight came down through his shoulder and stopped him there, folded over. His neck lay across the inside of her left elbow like something sat down on a shelf. She stepped her right foot back. She sat.
That was all of it.
The clock on the wall behind the desk had a second hand, and people watching the stream later would freeze it there: nine seconds.