Houston in late August did not so much warm up as commit. By nine in the morning the air outside Bayou City Combat Club had the weight of a wet towel left on a radiator, and the big roll-up door at the back of the hall stood open on a loading bay where the heat came in visible, shimmering off the concrete in slow, patient waves. Inside, the mats held the smell they always held โ rubber, disinfectant, old sweat worked down into the seams like a memory the building refused to give up โ and the industrial fans mounted high on the walls turned and turned and mostly succeeded in moving the hot air from one side of the room to the other, which the regulars had long ago agreed to count as air conditioning out of loyalty.
Sabine Renaud arrived the way she always arrived, through the side door at six forty, with her gym bag over one shoulder, her hair still damp from the shower at her apartment, and a paper cup of coffee that Carla Nguyen would confiscate on sight because outside drinks were not allowed on the mats and Carla enforced the rules of the club the way customs officers enforce the rules of small, serious countries.
"You are smuggling again," Carla said from the office doorway, not looking up from the tablet where the day's bookings lived.
"It is not smuggling if I declare it," Sabine said. "I declare it. Coffee. One. Mine."
"Declare it to the bin, coach."
Sabine drank the last of it standing over the bin, with the air of a woman performing a small and dignified funeral, and threw the cup away. She was thirty-eight years old and had lived in Houston for six years, and she still found the city's weather personally exaggerated, like a story told by a man who expects not to be believed. Lyon, where she had been born and where she had spent the first thirty years of her life, had summers. Houston had a position on the matter.
She changed in the small staff room that smelled of laundry detergent and the eucalyptus oil Priya Nair rubbed into her shoulders, and came out in her coaching clothes โ dark leggings, a club shirt with the sleeves cut away by her own hand because she hated fabric at her elbows โ and began the unglamorous liturgy of a Tuesday: mats checked, corners taped where the seams had lifted, the first-aid kit opened and closed, the water cooler filled. She did these things herself though she was no longer the newest coach and could have asked. A fencer checks her own piste. Etienne Fabre had said that to her when she was nineteen and already, secretly, one of the four or five best sabreurs in France, standing in a draughty salle in Lyon with her mask pushed up on her forehead like a welder's visor. You arrive before the room, he said. The room belongs to whoever arrives before it.
Her Tuesday footwork class began at seven thirty, which meant that by seven twenty the benches along the wall had begun to fill with the particular population of a footwork class at a fight gym: adult fighters who had been sent by their coaches, adult fighters who had been sent by their losses, and a small core of the converted who came because they had discovered, usually in the worst possible way, that everything they wanted to do in a cage or a ring or on a mat began below the knees and most of it ended there too.
"Feet first," Sabine said, when the clock on the wall reached the half hour and the room settled into the ragged semicircle of people pretending not to be tired already. "It is always feet first. I know. You have heard me. You will hear me again next Tuesday. A man who sells umbrellas does not apologise for the rain."
Marcus Webb laughed, because Marcus laughed easily when he was the biggest person in the room, which was essentially always. He was twenty-nine, six foot three in his bare feet, two hundred and forty pounds of heavyweight arranged with the cheerful confidence of a man who had been an offensive lineman before he had been a fighter and had never entirely stopped playing the first position inside the second. He had a good record and a better highlight reel, most of it built on a right hand that arrived like weather. His feet, Sabine had told Vic Anselmo in the privacy of the office, were two loyal dogs that had never been trained. They followed him everywhere and obeyed nothing.