Sabine picked up her marker, and turned to the whiteboard, and began class.
The first class began at six in the morning, in the blue hour before the Houston heat remembered itself, and Marcus Webb came through the gym door the way he came through every door, as if the door had been built slightly too small on purpose and he had decided to forgive it. He was six feet four inches of heavyweight, shoulders like the top of a wardrobe, and he carried his gym bag in one hand the way other men carried a lunchbox. Behind him, Tyler Brooks slipped in sideways, quick and lean, already bouncing on the balls of his feet, already warmed up in some way that had nothing to do with temperature. Tyler was never still. Stillness, for Tyler, was a thing that happened to other people.
Sabine Renaud was waiting for them at the center of the mat with two strips of white tape on the floor and a fencing mask tucked under one arm, though there would be no fencing that morning, and no masks, and nothing in either man's hands. She wore plain black training clothes and her hair was braided back flat against her head. She looked, Marcus would say later, like a teacher who had already read the test they were about to fail.
"Good morning," she said. "Shoes off. Socks are fine. We begin on the line."
"We begin on the line," Tyler repeated, grinning, and stripped his shoes off fast, the way he did everything. "This is the part where you teach us to dance, right? Coach at the club said you were going to teach us to dance."
"I am going to teach you to stand," Sabine said. "Dancing is what happens when standing becomes interesting. For you, standing is already a challenge. Line, please."
They stood on the tape line, side by side, a heavyweight and a wrestler, two professional fighters with a combined record that most of the gym envied, and Sabine Renaud walked the length of the line in front of them with her hands behind her back and looked at their feet the way a tailor looks at a hem.
"Marcus," she said. "Your left foot is turned out. You do this because your weight likes to sit in your heel and your heel likes to announce where you will go. Tyler. Your feet are too close together because you are already halfway to running somewhere. You are both telling me your plans. In my sport, telling your plans is the whole of losing. Feet like this." She set her own feet on the line, not wide, not narrow, one very slightly ahead of the other, weight pooled so evenly that she seemed to be resting on the floor rather than standing on it. "Nothing announces. Nothing leans. From here, every direction costs the same. That is the whole secret, and it will take you five weeks, and you will hate it by Thursday."
It took less than that. By seven o'clock Marcus hated it with a purity he usually reserved for referees.
The first drill was called the mirror. Sabine stood facing Marcus across two meters of mat, close enough that he could see the grey coming in at her temples, and she stepped — left, right, forward a half-step, back a quarter — and he was to follow her exactly, keeping the distance constant, neither gaining nor losing a centimeter. It sounded like nothing. It sounded like the warm-up they give children. In fencing, she told him, children did it for a year.
"Do not watch my feet," she said. "Watch my chest. The feet lie politely. The chest tells the truth a half-second earlier."
Marcus watched her chest. She stepped left. He stepped left, a fraction late, and because he was late he stepped too far, and because he stepped too far he had to plant his right foot hard to stop his mass, and the plant was a sound, a real sound, his heel coming down like a stamp on a document. Sabine stopped. The gym was very quiet in the way gyms are at six in the morning, all rubber and breath and the hum of the lights.
"There," she said. "You hear it? That is your power arriving. Everyone in the building hears it arrive. Your power is magnificent, Marcus, nobody disputes your power, but it has a voice, and it speaks before you do. When you plant like that, you have told me: he will strike now, from here, with the right. And I am already gone."
"I wasn't going to strike," Marcus said.