Priya considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "My self-defence ladies are going to love you even more than they already do," she said. "Half the waiting list is women who saw you refuse to be chased."
"Tell them to come at seven," Sabine said. "Six is spoken for."
Word moved through the club the way word always moved through it, faster than any official channel: the fencing coach had set her terms, the two prospects had signed, there would be a gala, there would be five weeks of something the front desk staff had already begun calling the early shift. Posters went up, honest ones, three names and a circle and no pink anywhere, and Carla caught herself checking them twice because she had written the instructions herself and still did not entirely believe a promoter had followed them. Tickets moved. The self-defence programme's waiting list doubled, and Priya Nair, who would coordinate the gala's volunteers and half of the programme's new intake, found herself giving the same answer all week: yes, it's her, yes, it's real, yes, footwork class is exactly as hard as it sounds, no, there are no spectators at six in the morning, it is a class, not a zoo.
Sabine changed nothing. That was what the regulars reported afterward, and it was nearly true. She arrived at the club as she always arrived, in the blue hour before the day shift, with her bag and her thermos and her braided hair, and she set out the cones and the ladders and the tape lines on the floor as she had set them out every Tuesday and Thursday for years, for the retirees learning balance, for the teenagers from the outreach programme who were all, by any reasonable reckoning, still asleep in their beds at that hour and not her concern until seven. She wrote the morning's session on the whiteboard in her small, exact hand. She did not write their names on it. She had told Dana the condition was not negotiable at six in the morning, and she had meant something plainer than it sounded: at six in the morning, there was no headline, no gala, no contract slot, no clip with comments underneath it. There was only the class, and whoever stood in it, stood in it as a student.
The first Tuesday came up cold for Houston, a thin grey light at the windows, the club smelling of mat cleaner and coffee from the office where Vic was doing the crossword in pen. The regulars arrived in twos and threes, yawning, loyal, and took their places along the tape line. Six o'clock approached. The clock over the cage read five fifty-eight, and then five fifty-nine, and there was a moment, brief and human, in which Sabine allowed herself to wonder whether she had misread them after all, whether the signature had been the performance and the class would be the excuse, and whether she would have to telephone Dana Whitfield and tell her that her gala had a hole in it shaped like two men sleeping.
At five fifty-nine and some thirty seconds, the door at the far end of the hall opened on the dark outside, and Marcus Webb and Tyler Brooks came in together, on time, bags over their shoulders, shoes in their hands. Neither of them was smiling. Tyler's hair was still wet from a shower taken in a hurry and Marcus had the drained, serious face of a man who had met his alarm clock as an opponent and won on points, and they crossed the floor without a word to anyone, set their bags down along the wall where the students set their bags, hung their jackets on the students' hooks, and took the two open places at the end of the tape line, behind a retired schoolteacher and beside a man who came to the class for his knees. Marcus looked down the line at Sabine, once, and did not make it a joke, and Tyler was already watching her feet.