Dana took it to the men the following night, in Vic's office, with the folder and without any varnish, and Carla, who was present because nothing in Bayou City was official without Carla, watched two professional egos receive the terms of their own rematch. The bigger circle, Tyler approved instantly: twelve feet, drawn on a proper mat in a ballroom, room to work. Three rounds of three minutes, Marcus approved: time to solve her, he said, time is all it is. The published rules, the state doctor, Vic with absolute authority, all of it fine, all of it waved through, until Dana arrived at the last item on the list she had written in her notebook in her own handwriting.
"Footwork class," she said. "Sabine's. Tuesdays and Thursdays, six a.m., both of you, five weeks, in the line with the regular students. Attendance is a contractual condition. The gala happens when the attendance happens."
The office went quiet in the particular way of a trap closing.
"She wants us in footwork class," Marcus said. "With the beginners."
"With the students," Dana said. "Some of whom are beginners."
"I am a professional heavyweight," Marcus said, to the ceiling, "and I am being sent to school by the curriculum."
"I'll go," Tyler said.
Marcus turned and looked at him with the outrage of a man ambushed by his own side twice in one week. "You'll go. You'll go to six a.m. footwork school with the—" He stopped. Tyler was not performing. Tyler was looking at the contract, at the place where his name would go, with the flat, considering expression of a wrestler looking at footage of a loss, and Marcus, who knew his rival better than he liked to admit, understood all at once that the spring contract slot, the one real prize either of them was chasing, had quietly walked into this room and sat down at the table. Because this was how it would be decided now. Not in the gala, or not only in the gala. Whoever went to the classes and became, in five weeks, the kind of mover who could stand in twelve feet of circle and solve Sabine Renaud, and whoever sulked, and joked, and treated the school as a penalty box, would stand revealed in front of every coach, promoter, and decision-maker who would watch the gala stream. The rivalry had found its arena. It was six o'clock in the morning, twice a week, in a line of beginners.
"Well," Marcus said at last, and picked up the pen, and signed with a flourish that used most of the page. "If he's going to school, I'm going to school. I'll be early. I'll bring the teacher an apple. I'll bring the teacher two apples, and she can pick which one of us gets credit for the better apple, which will be me, on the record, forever."
Tyler signed beneath him, small and neat. "You wake up at five forty-five for the first time in your life, you're going to be a religious experience about it, aren't you."
"I am going to be magnificent about it," Marcus said. "I am going to be so coachable it frightens people. Footwork. Watch. Five weeks from now I will be moving like a ballet with a record."
"Then we have a gala," Dana said, and closed the folder, and smiled for the first time that evening like a woman who had just been handed a season. "Ladies. Gentlemen. Somebody tell Sabine her class has two new students."
Later that same evening, after the office door had closed and the signatures were dry, Sabine found Priya waiting by the lockers with two cups of tea from the machine that made everything taste faintly of soup. They drank standing up, the way people do in gyms, and Priya, who had been quiet through the whole negotiation because she understood Sabine's business was Sabine's business, finally said what the front row had been thinking.
"You know they'll get better," she said. "That's the thing nobody's pricing in. Five weeks of actually training together, with you teaching them where their feet should be. They might really come and get you in the first round."
"Yes," Sabine said. "They might."
"And you asked for that. You insisted on it. Most people, forgive me, would have protected the trick."
Sabine turned her cup in her hands. Somewhere down the hall a heavy bag creaked on its chain. "There is no trick," she said. "There was never a trick, Priya. There is only the work. When I fenced, the champions I feared were not the ones with secrets. Secrets are heavy. You carry them and they slow your feet. The champions I feared were the ones whose whole game was written in letters ten feet tall, because they had done it so many times it could not be surprised out of them." She nodded toward the mats, the office, the building, the two men somewhere inside it signing their names. "If they come in five weeks and they are good enough to touch me, then they have done the work, and losing to the work is not a disgrace. It is the only respectable way to lose. And if they are not good enough—" She shrugged. "Then the work is still the work, and the circle is still honest, and my students will see that nobody in this building is protected from it. Not even me. Especially not me."