Go home. Savannah went home. She called Quinn and gave him the full accounting, the reporter, the union call. Fitch's response. He listened without interrupting.
The union is going to try to run a parallel narrative, he said. Make it about a disgruntled member with a personal grudge rather than a pattern of misconduct. It's standard. It buys time and muddies the public record in case the review board decision gets appealed. It won't work.
Savannah said there there are three of us. I know, but they don't know about Cassandra Vale yet. When they find out there are three witnesses, the narrative shifts. That's why Sandival needs to move faster than they're expecting. Is he going to?
I talked to him this afternoon. He's moving the hearing timeline up. He got authorization today. A pause. Savannah, the gym.
What about it? Garrett called me tonight. Ror came in this afternoon after receiving the notice. He didn't train. He just came in, talked to a few people, left.
She understood the implication. He's working the room, shoring up support before the hearing. Yes, and Garrett's nervous. He doesn't have the spine Fitch has. Quinn's voice was careful, not critical.
A statement of operational fact. I think we need to go in together on Saturday. Open Matt, be visible. Let the room see that we're still there. She thought about it.
Her instinct was to agree. And her secondary instinct was to examine whether that was sound or whether she was just tired of being careful and patient. She examined it. She decided it was sound. Saturday, she said.
Okay. She slept better than she'd expected to. Well, Saturday open mat started at 9:00 a. m. They arrived separately. Quinn first, Savannah about 10 minutes after.
The room was more full than usual, which meant word had gotten around. 12 people on a Saturday morning was three more than the typical turnout. And the energy in the room had the particular texture of people who were present because they wanted to see what would happen, not because they wanted to train. Garrett was behind this desk. He looked at Savannah when she came in and then looked at something else immediately, which was all the information she needed about where he'd landed.
She changed her shoes, stretched, found a space on the mat, and started working through entries by herself. Quinn was across the room doing the same thing and they didn't acknowledge each other directly because that wasn't unusual and they were not going to make the morning about theatrics. For the first 45 minutes, it was just training. Then Dale Ror walked in. He wasn't supposed to be there.
He was suspended pending review, which didn't technically prohibit him from entering a private gym he was a fee paying member of, but which created a specific kind of tension when he came through the door with his gear bag and signed his name at the front desk with the ease of someone who had decided to make a statement by acting like nothing had changed. Garrett signed him in. Nobody in the room said anything out loud, but the matt noise dropped, and the quality of the silence was different. Dale changed his shoes, warmed up. He didn't look at Savannah directly, which was deliberate in the way that avoiding someone at close range in a small room is always deliberate.
He rolled with Theo, who should have known better, but was a 20-year-old who didn't yet understand the cost of aligning yourself with the wrong person for social reasons. Savannah kept training. She was working with a woman named Beex, a former collegiate wrestler who'd been at Irongate for a year and had no investment in the room's politics. They drilled a guard recovery sequence she'd been refining for 3 weeks, and Savannah kept her focus on her own movement and her own timing. She was mid-rep when she heard Dale's voice, addressed to the room at a volume that wasn't quite raised, but wasn't quite not.
It's interesting, he said, standing up from his role with Theo. How some people think filing complaints is the same thing as having a case. Nobody responded. The room pretended not to hear. He kept going. or how they think getting a few bureaucrats involved means they understand what actually happened.
Quinn didn't stop what he was doing. He was in the middle of a positional drill with an older guy named Steph and he finished the rep before he stood up. He picked up his water bottle. He walked to the center of the mat in a line that put him between Dale and the half of the room where Savannah was working. He didn't raise his voice.
Dale, he said, "You're talking about a witness in an active proceeding in a room full of people who might also be called." He paused. That's not a good idea. Dale turned to look at him fully for the first time that morning. Something moved through his expression, an assessment, the process of deciding how to categorize the threat. Quinn had seen that look on a lot of faces in a lot of situations, and he knew what it meant.
Dale hadn't fully mapped him yet. He'd identified him as a problem, but he hadn't identified the shape of the problem. I'm making conversation, Dale said. Among members, among witnesses, Quinn said. Some of them a beat.