Tyler Brooks did not laugh. Tyler rarely spent energy on anything that was not the problem directly in front of him, and at twenty-seven he had the wrestler's build and the wrestler's temperament: compact, fast, single-minded, with a cauliflower ear he wore the way other men wore wedding rings, as evidence of a commitment. He had come up through college wrestling and into MMA with a double-leg takedown that his coaches described as inevitable and his opponents described in less printable terms. His feet were quick. His feet were also, in Sabine's professional judgement, honest to a fault โ they announced everything he intended a half-second before he intended it, in writing, with the date on it.
"Pairs," she said. "Mirror drill. You know it. Lead foot only, no hands, stay in your lanes. If your partner can read your step before you take it, your step is a letter you have posted to the wrong address. Marcus. Tyler. Together. It will be good for both of your souls."
"It'll be good for one of our souls," Marcus said, cheerfully, and took his place across from Tyler, and the class began.
The mirror drill was simple to describe and miserable to do well. Two partners faced each other in stance. One moved โ advances, retreats, lateral slides, feints with the feet alone โ and the other shadowed, keeping distance constant, keeping stance honest, never crossing the feet, never letting the heels kiss the mat and fall asleep there. Sabine walked the lanes between the pairs with her hands clasped behind her back, a coach's posture she had stolen whole from Etienne, who had walked the piste the same way, and who had maintained that a coach's hands should be behind his back because if they are in front of him he will start doing the fencing himself, and the student will learn to watch instead of to move.
"Marcus," she said, stopping beside the big man's lane. "Your retreat. Show me."
Marcus retreated, or rather Marcus performed the idea of retreat: his front foot stepped back generously and his back foot, after a considering pause, wandered after it like a guest leaving a party he had not enjoyed.
"You see," Sabine said to the class at large, but gently, in the tone of a woman pointing out weather. "He steps, and then he gathers. Between the step and the gather, there is a small country where he cannot punch, cannot check, cannot change direction. It is a nice country. People will visit him there. They will bring gifts."
A few of the fighters laughed. Marcus, to his credit, laughed too, and shook his head, and did it again with his attention actually switched on, and it was better, and she nodded once and moved on before the improvement could curdle into a performance. That was the rule she had made for herself in this room, and it had taken her a full year to learn it: she corrected their feet and left their pride exactly where she found it. A fighter's pride was load-bearing. In Lyon she had taught fencers, and fencers arrived pre-equipped with a philosophy of honour six centuries old; here she taught people who got punched for money and for love, and she had learned that you could tell a man his stance was a crime scene if you told him privately, or lightly, or once โ but if you made a room laugh at his feet, his feet would never listen to you again.
"Tyler," she said. "Advance. Stop. Again. Stop." She held up one finger. "Before you move, your front heel rises. Every time. It is a doorbell. You ring, and then you arrive. A patient man will be waiting in the hall with a chair."
"Everybody says my shot's too fast to read," Tyler said, not offended, exactly โ consulting her, the way he consulted the whiteboard for the workout, as a source of data.
"Your shot is fast," she agreed. "So we will make the doorbell quiet, and then it will be faster. Heel down until the step is already happening. The foot should be a rumour, not an announcement. Again."
He did it again. The heel stayed down perhaps half the time, which for Tyler Brooks counted as a conversion experience, and she let the smallest approval into her face and moved on down the lanes.