Marcus, alone in the circle with her for three long seconds while Tyler came around, decided that patience had been tried and had been found wanting, and chose instead the oldest argument a big man owns. He rushed. Not carelessly: he covered his rush with a feint at her left, a slap of his big hand toward her shoulder to fix her on that side, and drove his whole mass across the circle at the space on her right. It was the right idea executed at the wrong address, because Sabine read the feint the way readers read large print, stepped into the slap rather than away from it, slipped inside his reach where his length became a debt he owed, and flowed past his hip as he committed, and Marcus Webb, two hundred and forty pounds travelling at the speed of conviction, found in front of him not a thirty-eight-year-old fencing coach but his own partner, Tyler Brooks, re-entering the circle at exactly that moment on exactly that line, and the two of them met with a sound like furniture colliding, chest to shoulder, and staggered apart holding each other up like dancers who had forgotten the steps.
The room erupted. It was not cruel laughter, or not mostly; it was the helpless noise a crowd makes when physics tells a joke. Tyler got a hand under Marcus's elbow and kept him on his feet out of pure wrestler's reflex, and Marcus, winded, red-faced, delighted in spite of himself because he had never in his life been able to resist theatre, shouted at the ceiling, "She's doing it on purpose!"
"I am doing everything on purpose," Sabine said, from the centre of the circle, where she now stood because the collision had delivered the whole floor to her. "That is the definition of the sport."
Ninety seconds gone. The clock ran. The men took their places again with the careful dignity of people reassembling after an accident, and something had changed in the way they looked at her, something the crowd could feel even if it could not have named it. The grinning was gone. Marcus's jaw was set. Tyler was watching her feet now, only her feet, with the total attention he usually saved for opponents in finals, and they came at her in the back half of that second minute with a genuine and growing respect, which made them more dangerous and, in a way she would explain later, much easier. Respect made them honest. Honest movement has grammar, and Sabine Renaud had spent a lifetime reading grammar.
Tyler cut left. Marcus sealed right. She half-stepped toward Tyler, inviting the shot, and when it came it came beautifully, low and fast and committed at the correct moment, and her retreat was two small steps instead of one large one, so that he arrived at the end of his shot a half-beat before his hands expected company, and in that half-beat her weight had already shifted and she was gone off his shoulder line, and his hands found the ghost of her shirt and nothing else. Marcus, reading the miss, abandoned the gate and came straight down the middle for the double touch, both hands, certain, and she dropped her hips and turned her torso as he reached, presenting him the narrow profile of a fencer in line, so that his right hand hit her ribs with one palm only, reaching, the left hand two inches short of purchase as she spun out along his arm, and Vic, who did not miss such things, called it before the crowd had finished gasping.
"One hand! One hand is a story you tell later! Play on!"
"I had her!" Marcus roared.
"You had a rib," Vic said. "She has several. Play on."
The clock showed forty seconds, and then thirty, and the last half-minute of the three was the finest thing that happened in Bayou City Combat Club that year, though almost nobody in the room could have broken down afterward exactly what they had seen. The shouting stopped. Marcus and Tyler stopped calling to each other entirely, stopped performing, stopped planning out loud, and in the silence they finally, briefly, became what the demo had asked them to be all along: a single organism with two bodies. Tyler drifted to her blind side without a word. Marcus timed his advance to Tyler's drift without looking at him. It was real coordination, arrived at through embarrassment and exhaustion, the genuine article, and it brought them closer than anything else had. Tyler's first hand touched her sleeve as she turned. Marcus's drive cut her retreat to a corridor one step wide. For one suspended second the circle was exactly the trap the chalk had promised: two men, one woman, no door.