Talia planted her feet.
The front kick landed square and hard, sending Audrey backward into the snow. She went down and stayed there. Paige stopped moving forward.
So did Talia.
The fight was over.
She did not chase them, did not stand over Audrey, did not celebrate for the phone cameras that had suddenly appeared from every direction. Instead she turned away and dropped back to her knees beside the spilled fish. Her hands were trembling badly now, partly from adrenaline and partly because the freezing water inside her clothes had become almost unbearable.
A junior biology student named Owen Mercer came running to help.
Together they scooped the surviving fish back into the tub and then lowered them into the ice hole one by one. Two of them were already too still. Talia watched them and felt something in her stomach twist harder than it had during the fight.
Campus safety arrived within minutes.
The physical fight had lasted under half a minute.
The story behind it had been building for almost a year.
Talia Brooks had transferred to Ashford University the previous fall from a public university outside Baltimore. She was twenty years old, Black, serious without being cold, and one of those students professors trusted early because she never confused confidence with noise. Her interest in environmental biology had started with water, then narrowed into freshwater ecology, fish populations, and the question of how damaged urban ecosystems could be made livable again. When she won the Mason Environmental Fellowship, which covered most of Ashford’s tuition and secured her a place inside Professor Ethan Shaw’s aquatic research lab, Ashford became financially possible.
Her parents were comfortable but ordinary.
Angela Brooks worked as an accountant for a healthcare company. Her father, Raymond Brooks, taught high-school history and had the kind of patient voice that somehow made difficult information feel survivable. Nobody in Talia’s family had buildings named after them, and if she wanted to attend a university like Ashford, she needed merit, funding, and luck to line up in the same direction.
Her grandfather Leon had given her the first part long before the other two existed.
He was the one who taught her to fish, to dress for bad weather, to recognize the difference between patience and passivity, and to understand that being outdoors did not belong to one class or one kind of person. The ice-fishing rig Talia used that Saturday was partly built from things Leon had shown her over years of winter mornings around Maryland reservoirs. The custom chair, the drilled hole, the insulated tub, the way she moved around frozen water—none of it was performance.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
Audrey noticed that early.
Their first real exchange had come after an environmental-policy seminar when Professor Shaw asked Talia to describe a summer project she had done on urban stream contamination. Talia spoke for maybe three minutes. After class, Audrey asked how she had landed in Shaw’s lab, and Talia explained the fellowship.
Audrey smiled.
“One of those access fellowships?”
Talia asked what that meant.
“You know,” Audrey said, “programs trying to bring in different kinds of students.”
“What kind?”
Audrey’s smile never moved.
“Transfer students.”