He came at her with intent this time rather than theatre, and the difference was visible to anyone who had ever watched boxing properly. The jab was real, meant to measure and to blind, and behind it the right hand travelled with his whole weight committed, his front foot planted hard on the canvas at the edge of her range. She slipped the jab by the width of a glove. She rolled the right hand off her shoulder the way she had rolled punches when the century was young, and for a half-second Dane Whitaker was exactly where a man should never be against a counterpuncher: past his own punch, weight forward, chin high, the whole of his momentum spent on air. Her answer was not a big punch. It had never been a big punch, in Gothenburg or anywhere else. It was a short left hook, thrown from the roll itself, no wind-up, no flourish, her hip turning the punch over as it landed clean on the point of his jaw. The sound it made was small. The effect was not. Dane's legs understood before Dane did. He went down the way tall buildings in old films go down, all at once and in sections, and sat heavily on the canvas with his gloves flat behind him and the lights of the Northgate Athletic Club swimming somewhere above the roar of the crowd.
Above the ring, on the club's big screen, the replay was already running, slowed to the same haunted frame rate as the clip that had started all of this, and the crowd watched the shoulder roll twice — once in the flesh, once in the ghost of it — and made the same sound both times, a sound with no mockery left in it anywhere. On the commentary table someone said the word counter as if it were new to the language. Freya lowered her hands from her mouth and found they were shaking, and she laughed once, startled, because the woman on the screen at half speed was twenty-four years old and a stranger and also, unmistakably, her mother, and both of those things were going to take the rest of her life to hold at the same time.
The referee was over him at once, glove up, counting in a voice trained to carry. One. Two. The crowd had come up out of their seats as one body, and somewhere in the front rows Freya Lindqvist had both hands pressed over her mouth, and Barlow, in Greta's corner, was very still, because he had waited twenty-seven years to see that shoulder roll end a punch again and he was not going to waste the seeing of it on noise. Three. Four. Dane blinked. The lights steadied. Five. He got one foot under him, then the other, and at six he was standing, clear-eyed, his gloves raised of their own honest accord, his expression not dazed but astonished, the particular astonishment of a man who has just been given precise information about himself. The referee looked into his eyes, wiped his gloves, asked him if he wanted to continue, and Dane said yes in a voice that surprised him with its steadiness. He was unhurt. Everyone in the building could see he was unhurt; he was already tracking the referee's hand with his eyes, already annoyed at the canvas, already himself. What had been knocked down was not the man. It was the forecast.