Then the lights shifted, only slightly, the way they had been rehearsed to shift, and the evening arrived at the reason for its posters. The total on the board stood at six thousand three hundred and forty, and Nadia, at the edge of the mat with her clipboard held against her chest like a shield, was seen to close her eyes for exactly one second, in thanks or in arithmetic. Walt Finch took the microphone and gave the crowd the facts without decoration, the cause, the total, the rules of the house, and then he gave them the names, and the hall made a sound that Rowan, in the corridor, felt in the floor of her feet before she heard it with her ears.
She came out first, because the challenger comes out first, in her plain gi and her brown belt tied slowly that morning and not retied since, exactly as Ilya had told her, and she walked the short distance to the mat the way she walked the clinic hall at Harold's side, a neighbour and not a fence, present and unhurried. In the front row she saw Harold sit straighter, cane across his knees, the paper sign folded now in his lap, and she saw him mouth two words at her which she chose, and would always choose, to believe were good luck, though they may well have been educate him. Tess, behind the clinic block, had both hands pressed flat over her own heart, as if holding something in. Rowan bowed at the edge of the mat, stepped onto it, and went to her mark, and the hall, obligingly, roared her into a silence she could stand in.
Kieran came out to a roar of his own, bigger and brighter, the champion's welcome, and he earned his part of it honestly, crossing to the mat at his famous pace and then, notably, slowing at its edge to bow with the same care she had shown, before stepping up and taking his mark across from her. Marcus Doyle stood at the corner with the ice ready and the plan made, and his face, for once, was not arranging itself for cameras. Kieran rolled his shoulders once, carefully, the full prepared motion, and settled. He looked across the distance at Rowan Ellis, the woman he had called too slow on television in a sentence he no longer believed, and something in his expression, seen by the front row and by nobody with a camera in time, was not contempt and was not quite respect yet, but was the beginning of both men and women recognising, too late to withdraw and exactly in time to begin, that the contest in front of them was real.
Owen Tate stepped between them then, into the centre of the mat and the centre of the evening, and raised one hand, and the hall, remembering Nadia's promise and his, began to quiet. He recited the rules in the voice that did not need to shout, each one given its own weight and its own pause. The contest would run its full time unless it was finished cleanly. A tap, with the hand or the foot, ended everything at once. A verbal submission ended everything at once. His hand, his voice, ended everything at once, and no one would argue with any of the three, on the mat or off it. Pressure would be released the instant a submission was signalled, and he would be watching for the signal before he watched for anything else. If he said stop, they would stop, wherever they were, however close it felt. If he said break, they would break and return to the marks. These were not decorations. They were the whole agreement, and the contest existed inside them or it did not exist at all.
He looked to Kieran, and received a nod. He looked to Rowan, and received a nod. He stepped back to the edge of his ground, his hand still raised, and around the hall the last sounds settled and went out, a programme folded, a chair stilled, Harold Benson's cane resting silent across his knees, until the quiet Nadia had asked for on Thursday stood complete in the room, and two grapplers waited inside it, on time.