"She looks calm," one of the officials said, not quite quietly enough.
"She is calm," Barlow said. "Calm is the whole résumé. You'll see."
The rules reading was held in the centre of the ring at six-thirty, as the agreement required: both camps present, everything aloud. The referee was a licensed woman of sixty named Okafor — no relation to the reporter, a coincidence Tessa had already mined for a paragraph — with thirty years of cards behind her and a voice that made reading regulations sound like a form of weather. Three rounds. Two minutes each. Boxing only. Headgear to remain fastened. Scoring on clean punching, defence, ring control. Her instructions, her stoppages, absolute. "If I say break, you break. If I say stop, the evening stops. This is an exhibition for the young people of this port, and it will be an honourable one." She looked at Dane over the top of the paper. "Mr. Whitaker." She looked at Greta. "Ms. Lindqvist." She folded the paper. "Touch gloves when I bring you together. Not before."
The hall filled completely then, in the manner of a tide finishing. The youth programme kids had the front rows, in matching shirts, with a hand-painted sign that said GO MISS G in letters a metre high, which made Greta, when she saw a photograph of it later, sit down quietly for a moment. The champions' wall had been lit for the evening — Diane's doing — and the framed faces looked down the corridor of light toward the ring, and the blank space among them, that old unexplained gap, caught the light like a held breath.
Dane entered first, as the champion, as the home fighter, as the headliner-in-waiting, and he entered the way he had entered everything for three years: through noise. His music came down from the club's speakers at a volume that rearranged the air — a track with his own name folded into it, made by a producer in Portland — and the lights did the thing Rick had paid extra for, and his team came behind him carrying his belts, plural, held high on their shoulders like the relics of a young saint, and the crowd rose for him, most of it, and roared the way crowds roar for weather: with love, and with the reservation that weather is not theirs. He climbed through the ropes loose and beautiful and furious with readiness, bouncing on the canvas, turning a full circle with his gloves up, and The Weather was home, and the room was his, and Rick Sorensen at ringside had the folder closed at last, because there was nothing in it for this.
Then the music stopped.
It stopped the way Diane had arranged for it to stop, completely, with a small click in the speakers, because Greta had asked for no music, and had asked for it the way she asked for clause nine: once, plainly, in writing, as a condition — not out of modesty, particularly, but because she had walked toward rings to other people's music in another life and the music had always been Stefan's job, Stefan's choice, Stefan's joke at her expense more often than not, and she declined to have a stranger do his job badly.
So she came out of the corridor into the silence she had requested, and the silence did not hold, exactly — a hall of eight hundred people cannot hold silence — but it changed. It dropped. Footsteps on the concrete, hers, unhurried. The small sounds of a big room settling: a chair creak, a cough, the youth programme row shushing itself in whispers. She walked in a plain top and plain shorts with her hair pinned the way she pinned it for work, Barlow a half-step behind her with the stool and the towel, Freya at the corridor door with her hands pressed together under her chin, and she climbed the ring steps the way she climbed the ferry's gangway stairs, one at a time, without using the rail, and ducked through the ropes, and the room went — officials said it to each other afterward, and the tape bears it out — oddly, completely quiet, in the way of a room that has understood, all at once and without being told, that it is in the presence of something it has misjudged.