She rolled under the hook. The roll was the thing itself, the thing from the slowed clip, the thing Barlow had frozen on a screen in the archive and sat before in silence: her shoulder turning the punch away the way a breakwater turns water, without contest, without drama, converting force into weather that passed her by. And on the end of the roll, almost as an afterthought, as a full stop is an afterthought to a sentence, her left hand tapped him — tapped, scored, no more — on the ribs, and she was gone again, two small steps, an angle he would have to solve all over again.
He pressed. Of course he pressed; pressing was his grammar, his whole public language, and he had a prediction lodged in him like a splinter — second round, he had said, at a table, into microphones, and the first round was the place where predictions begin to be built. He cut the ring the way coaches teach it, herding, feinting with his shoulders, doubling the jab. It was good work. Greta, even while she dismantled it, registered the quality — the feet were honest, the balance real, the hands fast in a way that could not be faked or bought. He was not a fraud. He had never been a fraud. He was a gifted young man doing the best work he knew how to do, and for a full minute that work bought him almost nothing: a jab that found her forearm, a hook that found the top of her headgear as she rolled beneath it, a right hand that found the exact square of canvas where she had been standing when he decided to throw it.
Her counters were few and she kept them few on purpose. Barlow's instruction, repeated across nine dawns, had been a paragraph of its own: You do not need to win the round every second. You need to win it in sentences. So she boxed in sentences. A slip, a step, a jab of her own that arrived on his guard and once, cleanly, on his forehead as a punctuation mark. A roll, a touch to the body. A pivot that turned his rush into a small embarrassed journey to the ropes, from which she allowed him to return, unhurried, unhit, because this was an exhibition and because her whole life in this sport had been a refusal of cruelty. The Wall of Gothenburg had never been a destroyer. The old reports, which Tessa had been reading all week and quoting at breakfast, said the same thing in the language of the time: she did not beat opponents down; she made the ring smaller and smaller for them until they were standing in a room the size of their own mistakes, and then the bell saved them, or she did.
The crowd was changing. Anyone who has cleaned a hall after an event knows crowds the way sailors know weather — by smell, by pressure, by the feel of it on the skin of the room — and Greta, without looking up from her work, felt the change arrive. The laughter drained out of it first, the spectacle-laugh that had seasoned the opening minute. Then the chanting for Dane, which his team tried twice to start, thinned and lost its footing, not from disloyalty but from arithmetic: people cannot chant finish him, finish him at a man who has not been touched. What replaced it was quieter and far louder. A held breath, renewed and renewed. The small involuntary sounds people make at witnessing precision — the oooh that is not excitement but recognition. In the front rows the youth programme kids had forgotten their sign entirely; a boy of fifteen stood with the corner of it in his fist, watching her feet, actually watching her feet, the way Barlow had told the whole club nobody under thirty did any more.