Through the wall, muffled, he could hear the announcer, and through the corridor door's wired glass he had seen, an hour before, Kyle Rennick arrive with Frank Oduya and nobody else: no entourage, no camera, a kit bag and a face that had been doing its own training in public for three weeks. Kyle had caught his eye through the glass, once, and had not grinned, and had not looked away either, and had given him the small, level nod of a man acknowledging a colleague across a work site, and Tomas had returned it before he had decided to, and the exchange had cost neither of them anything, which Hector, told about it later, said was exactly the exchange's value. "Colleagues," Hector said, wrapping the last loop and testing it with his teeth. "That is new. Hold on to it. It is worth more than the other thing you two were, and it weighs less in the bag."
"Any last instruction?" Tomas said.
"Yes," Hector said. "Start sooner. Start smaller. Do not apologize for arithmetic. And if the moment comes that is not in the notebook, Tomas, you already know what it says. It says you tap and you go home to the pancakes, or he taps and he goes home to his life, and either way the lights go up on that path, and a seven-year-old sleeps through the whole of it in a safe house, which is how it should be, which is the entire point of every light we are putting up." He stood, and put both hands for a moment on Tomas's shoulders, and his hands were warm and completely steady. "Now. Let us go and finish this boring, public, well-counted thing."
The hall, when they came out, made the sound a hall makes when the thing it has been politely waiting through the undercard for has finally arrived, and Tomas walked the length of it between the rows of his own town, past the fund board and its fresh total, past Ben Tully on his feet and Okafor applauding with the briskness of a woman signaling a bus to depart, and he stepped onto the mat that other people's repaired hands had mended, and Kyle Rennick stepped onto it from the other side with Frank's hand briefly at his back, and the two of them stood apart on it, and the room began, on its own, to quiet.
Paul Lindgren came between them. He was forty-seven, a referee with twenty years in school gyms and regional halls and a voice built, Tomas had always thought, out of the same material as a good handrail: plain, and exactly where you reached for it. He looked at Kyle, and he looked at Tomas, and he gave the rules to the room as much as to the men, in the order Grace had decreed and in words that had been agreed before any of them had put on their shoes.
"Submission-only," Paul Lindgren said. "No striking. A tap, a word, or my hand ends this in the instant it happens, and whatever is on comes off in that same instant. Corners may stop it. I may stop it. Either man may stop it, at any time, for any reason, and no one in this room will think the less of him for it, because that is the rule under all the rules, and it is how everyone goes home." He looked at Kyle. "Understood." He looked at Tomas. "Understood." He stepped back, and his hand came up, and did not yet come down, and the hall, full to the doors with a town, with depot crews and coaches and the front row on its feet fallen still, went quiet all the way to its corners, the way a park goes quiet, the way a house goes quiet when a child in it is sleeping, and held its breath inside that quiet, and waited.
Paul Lindgren stood between them with one hand raised, looked once at Tomas Herrera and once at Kyle Rennick to be sure he had their eyes, and brought the hand down. "Grapple," he said, and stepped clear, and the sound the crowd made was not a roar at first but a single held breath let out all at once, as if the whole community hall had been waiting under water.