Chapter 5: Morning at the Booking Office
Cassandra had watched the tape eleven times before Saturday was over, and the twelfth time she watched it at one in the morning with the lights off and her phone in her hand, thumb hovering over the delete button she had promised no one she would use. Minute nine was still there. She scrubbed back to it again. The figure-four locked in, Rylee's boot slapping canvas, and Bastion's face underneath all that chaos, calm as a man reading a timetable. She pressed pause on his expression and sat with it in the dark, and the screen dimmed against her wants, and she let it.
Across town, in a smaller apartment with a radiator that knocked like a rude neighbor, Rylee had the same feed open on a laptop propped against a cereal box on her coffee table.
She had showered twice. It hadn't taken, in the sense that mattered. Her hair was damp and her legs were folded under her on the couch and the highlights package was playing her own loss back at her in glossy league edit, all slow motion and bass drops, the figure-four, the hand check, the ropes.
The edit cut to the ropes. There she was, bent over the top, arms threaded, suspenders swinging, and the editor had chosen, professionally, to linger. The broadcast audio was intact. Her own voice said deeper and the editor had not muted it, because the league's editors believed in authenticity, and the comments underneath the clip believed in it too.
Her phone buzzed. She knew who it was before she looked.
"Door's unlocked," Rylee called, because the knock had come thirty seconds later, exactly as predicted.
Dez Marsh came in carrying a paper bag that smelled like a diner had committed crimes in it, and she filled the doorway the way she filled every doorway, big and grinning and carrying a six-pack against her forearm like a baby.
"You look terrible," Dez said warmly. "Beautiful, but terrible. Hungover?"
"Choked out."
"That'll do it." Dez set the bag on the coffee table, right next to the cereal box, and looked at the laptop. The clip was on the ropes. Of course it was. "Oh, we're watching it. Great. I brought wings for this exact occasion."
"I'm studying tape."
"You're studying tape in a sports bra at two in the afternoon with the curtains closed." Dez dropped onto the couch hard enough to bounce Rylee off the cushion. "Give me the laptop. I want to see how they cut your ass."
"You've seen the match."
"I saw the match from a bar with a bad angle and a guy talking over the finish about his fantasy football league. This is different. This is cinema." She pulled the laptop onto her knees and scrolled. "Okay. League edit. They gave you a whole slow-mo package on debut, that's respect. Usually jobbers get a freeze frame and a sad trombone."
"I wasn't a jobber."
"You were booked as one. There's a difference and you know it better than anyone." Dez hit play. "Here we go."
Rylee watched her own sprawl, the thing she had spent two years sandbagging, finally loose and real on a pay feed, and felt the old pride and the new one at the same time. The edit cut from her sprawl to Bastion's read. Her left knee. The figure-four. On the small screen her tap looked almost elegant.
"Okay, that's clean," Dez admitted. "That's a clean loss. Nobody's going to clip that and laugh. They're going to clip that and study it."
"They're going to clip minute nine and do other things with it."
"Minute nine," Dez said, with the reverence of a woman toasting a saint. She scrolled down to the comments. "Do you want to do this the healthy way or the fun way?"
"Fun way. Read them."
Dez cleared her throat like a news anchor. "First one. FirefighterRyFan: quote, she stayed in the ropes ON PURPOSE, watch her hips, she wanted it, end quote. Two hundred and six likes."
"That's true, though."
"I know it's true, that's why it's funny." Dez kept scrolling. "GoldPipingOfficial has, let me see, six hundred and twelve members now, up from what, sixty after your debut? No, sixty was after his debut. You're a growth industry, Rye."
"Wonderful."
"Here's a thread. Thread title: did anyone else hear the fourth wall break at nine forty. Nine forty what?"
"Nine forty is when his hand came around front." Rylee said it flatly, watching her own face on the screen do what it had done, the flush climbing, the eyes going. "First wall he broke was my spine."
Dez made a low whistle and kept going. "User named PitViper77 says: she's a sandbagger, look at Phoenix tape, she's better than this. Reply from someone named Jo: she's not sandbagging anymore, he took the sand out. Eight hundred likes."
Rylee snorted. "Jo's right. That's the annoying part."
"Jo's always right, it's her whole personality." Dez pulled a wing out of the bag and pointed it at the screen. "There's a comment here with a timestamp. Timestamped comments. They're doing scholarship on you."
"On us."
"On him, mostly. You're the terrain." Dez scrolled. "Listen to this one. User SuitsAndBoots: I have watched this finish forty times and I still don't understand how he got her shorts off with one hand while holding her hair. Physics. Someone explain the physics."
"I could explain the physics."
"I don't want the physics, I want the drama. Tell me the drama." Dez cracked a beer and handed it over. Rylee took it and drank, and the cold of it went down through her like an honest fact.
"The drama is I lost on purpose to get there and still wasn't ready for it," Rylee said. "There. Drama delivered."
"You didn't lose on purpose."
"I lost on the phone call. The tap was real, the choke was real, he earned all of it. But I booked myself into it knowing how it could end." She tipped the beer. "I stood in the ropes, Dez. I want that on my grave. She stayed in the ropes. Knew what was coming and stayed."
Dez was quiet for a second, which for Dez was a standing ovation. Then she scrolled again and her whole face lit up like a slot machine.
"Oh. Oh, Rye. There's a compilation."
"No."
"There's a compilation. User posted it at nine this morning. Title: every sound Rylee Calloway made on a hot mic, ranked. Ranked, Rye. They ranked you." She clicked it before Rylee's hand could cross the couch, which was a strategic error on Rylee's part, because her hand did not actually cross the couch. It stayed wrapped around the beer.
The compilation was three minutes long. It had chapter markers.
"They gave it chapter markers," Dez said, awed.
"I can see that."
"Chapter one is the sprawl gasps, chapter two is the figure-four, chapter three is, and I quote the marker, the rope section." Dez's thumb hovered. "Do I play chapter three?"
"You're going to play chapter three."
"I'm going to play chapter three." She played chapter three.
The audio was her own voice, isolated, mixed a little too forward by some anonymous editor who deserved a raise and a restraining order. The rope creak. The wet. Her saying deeper the second time, when the word had stopped being a request and become a prayer. And underneath it, faint, his voice saying there she is.
Rylee listened to herself with a professional's ear and a woman's pulse, and the two of them did not agree on how to feel about it, so she felt both, and drank her beer, and let the radiator knock.
"They ranked it," Dez said when it ended. "Number one sound of the night. Beat out Bea's whole service match. You got sound of the night on a loss."
"Story of my Phoenix years with better production values."
"Rye." Dez set the laptop aside and turned on the couch, wings forgotten, and her grin softened into something more dangerous, which was Dez being sincere. "Real question. Not fun question. What's the plan? Because I know you, and you're not lying on this couch at two in the afternoon because you're sulking. Sulking Rylee goes to the gym and breaks bags. This is planning Rylee. Planning Rylee has a tell, she does this thing with the towel."
Rylee looked down. She was, in fact, still wearing the shower towel around her neck like a scarf. She pulled it off and threw it at Dez's head.
"Rematch," she said.
"Obviously. How?"
"That's the problem." She pulled her knees up. "Calloway cancelled two bookings yesterday with one phone call. Starla's challenge. Cassie's clause. Both gone, both legal, both filed, and he waved a hand and they evaporated, because the man owns the folder. And I'm his niece. I have exactly zero independent leverage. My next booking goes through the same office that just proved it doesn't care what's filed if he doesn't like the optics."
"So you go around him."
"With what? I used my one secret call. He knows now. The whole drawer's open, there's nothing left to trade."
Dez chewed a wing and thought, which she did loudly, with her mouth. Then she swallowed and pointed the bone at Rylee like a barrister.
"You're thinking about it wrong. You're thinking like a fighter with a record. Stop. Think like a fighter with a story."
"Explain that like I'm a jobber."
"You're not a jobber anymore, that's the point, congratulations. You're the woman who booked her own loss and loved it. Six hundred Gold Piping members and counting, sound of the night, a compilation with chapter markers. The fans are not following Bastion. They're following whatever happens around Bastion, and right now you're one of three women orbiting him, and the other two were both standing front row last night and neither of them was sitting down by minute nine. I watched the crowd feed. I know what I saw."
Rylee's stomach did something. "Starla and Cassie."
"Starla and Cassie. And word out of the parking structure is they left together to see Doris this morning. Nine a.m., supposedly, sharp, both of them dressed for war." Dez licked her fingers. "So the question isn't how do you get a rematch. The question is what happens at the booking office in eighteen hours, and whether the Calloway name gets you in the room before the dust settles or after."
"He cancelled Starla and Cassie. He'll cancel me too."
"He cancelled a challenge and a clause. Nobody's cancelled what you are." Dez tipped her bottle. "You're the niece who took his assignment and lost beautifully. He can't cancel you without saying why, and the why is embarrassing. Meanwhile the two women he actually stiffed are going to be in Doris's office at nine o'clock with a photocopied form and murder in their eyes, and Doris keeps that form in a drawer, and Doris loves a line that sells itself."
"Doris loves nothing. Doris loves paper."
"Then bring her better paper." Dez reached over and pulled the laptop back. The clip was paused on Rylee's face at minute nine, mouth open, wrecked, and Dez looked at it, then at Rylee, then back at it, doing the comparison openly and shamelessly. "The face matches. Good. You've still got your edge."
"I've got nothing. I came in eleven minutes and I'd do it again tonight."
"That's what I'm saying." Dez leaned back, stretching her boots up onto the coffee table next to the cereal box, big and easy and certain. "That's your leverage, Rye. Not a clause, not a form, not an uncle. Every woman in that orbit wants him and every one of them is pretending they want something else. Starla wants the rematch, Cassie wants the photos deleted or not, whatever her angle is this week. You're the only one who told the truth on a hot mic. Deeper. On the record, on the tape, chapter-marked. That's worth more than a filing fee."
Rylee sat with that. Her phone was on the arm of the couch and the clock on it read 2:14 and the morning was coming whether she planned for it or not.
She picked up the phone. She opened the thread with her uncle, typed three words, and looked at them for a long moment.
"You're texting Calloway," Dez said.
"I'm texting Calloway."
"What's it say?"
Rylee turned the screen so Dez could read it. I want a seat at the table tomorrow.
"And if he says no?"
"Then I show up anyway." She deleted the draft and typed nothing, and put the phone face down on the towel. "He'll say no and I'll show up anyway. That's the Calloway way. Grandpa did it with the whole territorial board in seventy-four, allegedly."
"Allegedly."
"Allegedly." She took a long pull of the beer and set it down and looked at the laptop, at the paused compilation, at her own ranked and chaptered undoing. "Nine a.m. Starla, Cassie, Doris, that form, and probably four hundred pages of Cassie's lawyers. And me, the niece with no clause and no challenge and one beautiful loss."
"You forgot the sixth person in that room," Dez said.
"There's five seats at most in there."
"There's you, Starla, Cassie, Doris, and a photocopied form. And in every one of those five things, in the form and the clause and the challenge and whatever Cassie's got in her folder and whatever Starla's got behind her smile and whatever you've got under that towel, there's the same guy." Dez grinned. "He's the sixth seat. He's every seat. And nobody at that table gets to the seventh slot, which is him in the ring, without going through the rest of the chairs."
"Dez, that's the worst metaphor I've ever heard and you mixed two of them."
"It's still true." She reached into the bag for the last wing. "So. Are we doing your hair for war, or what?"
Rylee laughed, finally, a real one, short and rough, and it felt like the first honest thing her body had produced since the shower. She reached over and closed the laptop with a click that shut up the league edit, the compilation, all six hundred and twelve members of the Gold Piping, mid-comment.
"Nine a.m.," she said. "Doris's office. I'll bring coffee."
"Black. Doris does black, she told Roxy black, everybody knows the latte thing."
"See, this is why I keep you." Rylee stood, and her legs held, and the towel came off her shoulders and landed on the couch, and she headed for the closet where her ring gear hung, turnout coat and boots and the dented red helmet, and she pulled the coat off the hanger and threw it over her shoulder like a woman dressing for a hearing she intended to win. "Wake me at seven. If I'm going to walk into a room with Starla Gates and Cassie Vale, I want to look like the second most dangerous thing in it."
"Second?"
"Second. I've seen the tape." She glanced back at the closed laptop, at the memory of minute nine folded inside it, and her mouth curved. "Eleven times. I was there and I've still watched it eleven times. But I tap to nothing but the finish next time, and I want it on the record, and I want it on the tape. Somebody in that office tomorrow is going to get exactly what she asked for."
Dez raised her bottle to her through the closet doorway.
"There she is," Dez said, and Rylee threw the helmet at her head.