Briggs stepped slightly closer, not touching, just reducing the space. “You should think about what you’re doing,” Derek said. “You should think about who you’re doing it to and what happens to people who try to make problems for certain kinds of people in certain kinds of places.” Ren looked at him steadily. “That sounds like it might be a threat,” she said. “It’s advice,” Derek said. “From someone who has been here longer than you have.”
She held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked at Briggs, who was close enough now that she could see the texture of his Harwick Athletics shirt. She looked at him with the same calm reading quality, the assessment of someone who is very clearly cataloging exactly what they are working with. Briggs shifted his weight. He reached out and pushed her.
It was not a massive shove. It was the kind of push that is designed to destabilize, to make a person stumble, to establish physically what has been attempted verbally. The kind of push that relies on the assumption that the person being pushed will respond with the instinctive uncoordinated scramble of someone caught off guard.
Ren did not scramble. What happened instead was this. As Briggs’s hands made contact with her shoulder, Ren’s body rotated, not away, into it and to the side. A movement so compact and precise that Briggs’s push, instead of connecting solidly, slid along her turning shoulder and found no resistance. In the same motion, her right hand came up and found his wrist, and she stepped inside his reach, and then she executed an o-soto-gari with the efficiency of someone who has done this specific technique several thousand times, which she had.
Briggs went down, not violently, not brutally, with the clean, controlled inevitability of a technique applied correctly to a situation that had presented itself. He hit the ground on his back, and the sound of it was sharp in the open air of the afternoon, and he lay there for a moment, looking up at the sky with the expression of someone who has just had their understanding of a situation revised very rapidly.
He was not hurt. She had made sure of that in the execution. The angle of the fall, the controlled release that cushioned the impact enough to leave him undignified but uninjured. He was however completely unable to stand up for approximately ten seconds. Ren took a step back. She looked at Derek. She looked at Colt, who had not moved and did not appear to be planning to. She adjusted the strap of her backpack on her right shoulder. “I’m going to class now,” she said.
She walked to the entrance of the engineering building. She pushed the door open and went inside. Behind her, she heard Derek saying something to Briggs. She did not stop to hear what it was. She went to class. She took notes. Her handwriting was perfectly even.
Seth was already in their corner of the library when she arrived at seven that evening. He had two cups of coffee from the library cafe on the ground floor, and he slid one across the table when she sat down. She looked at it, then at him. “I figured you’d need it,” he said. “Thank you.” She opened her notebook. She noticed him watching her with the particular expression he got when he was deciding whether to say something. “What?” she said.
“I heard about what happened outside the engineering building this afternoon.” She looked up. “How?” “Three people saw it. One of them is in my mechanics study group.” He paused. “She said it was the most technically perfect thing she has ever seen in her life. And she grew up watching Olympic judo with her grandfather.” Ren was quiet for a moment. “Was anyone filming?” she asked.