"Daddy," she said. "We have to go to the top."
"What?"
"She can't find anybody. She keeps looking at the top and nobody's there. We have to go up there."
"Rosie, it's—" He looked over his shoulder. The stairs went up and up, steep concrete steps between the sections, maybe forty rows to the dim railing at the very top of the arena. The second period was about to start. "We'll miss it."
"We won't miss it. We'll be up there. We'll be where she looks." Rosie was already climbing down off her seat, already moving toward the aisle with the sign in her fist. "Mama always sits at the top. It's a rule."
Tom grabbed his jacket and went after her.
He caught her at the bottom of the stairs and swung her up onto his hip and started to climb. The whistle blew below them for the second period. The crowd noise surged. He didn't look. He kept climbing. Twenty rows. Twenty-five. His thighs burned. He had climbed a hundred-foot transmission tower in a windstorm and come down without breathing hard, but that had been with his gear, with a harness and a lanyard and a rhythm, and this was just a man in his forties carrying a seven-year-old up a concrete mountain in a hurry, and his lungs were on fire. Thirty rows. Thirty-five.
"There," Rosie said, pointing. "That's her spot. That's where Mama sits."
It was the very last row, just under the concourse railing, in line with the corner of the mat where Ortega's chair was. There were three empty seats. Tom set Rosie down on the middle one and collapsed into the one beside it and looked down.
From up here the mat was a gold postage stamp under a white cone of light. The two girls on it were small as chess pieces. Tom could see the clock, the big red digits. Second period, fifty-one seconds left. Four to one, Castellanos. She must have chosen bottom and escaped. Dani was in front of her now, both of them on their feet, circling, hands snapping.
"How's she going to see us?" Tom said, breathless. "We're a mile away."
"She'll see," Rosie said. "She always knows where to look."
* * *
Dani could not feel her left arm below the elbow.
That was all right. She had wrestled with a numb arm before. Castellanos had spent the whole first period cranking it, and it would come back, and for now she could use it like a club, like something attached to her, which was good enough. What she couldn't do was think. Every time she tried to think, Castellanos was already moving. That was the thing about Mia Castellanos that you couldn't understand until you'd been on a mat with her: she wasn't faster than you, not really, she was just one step further along in time. She was always already where you were going.