"You were going to step. It is the same announcement." She reset her feet. "Again. Smaller. You are not moving furniture. You are moving weather."
He tried again. He tried for twenty minutes, and the terrible thing, the thing he would turn over in his head that night in his apartment with an ice pack on a shoulder that did not need it, was that the smaller he tried to step the heavier he felt. His whole career had been built on arriving β arriving at the opponent, arriving with the hip and the shoulder and the full freight of himself β and this small Frenchwoman was asking him to stop arriving, to hover, to be a threat that had not yet decided to exist. His calves burned. His patience, a much smaller muscle, burned worse.
Tyler, meanwhile, was failing at the opposite end of the same drill, failing beautifully, at speed. Where Marcus was late and loud, Tyler was early and eager. Sabine would not have finished shifting her weight and Tyler had already gone, both feet, half a meter, crowding into her space like a dog who has heard a gate open.
"No," Sabine said, not unkindly. "You are answering a question I have not asked."
"I'm reading you," Tyler said. "That's what you're telling Marcus to do. Read earlier. I'm reading earliest."
"You are guessing loudest. There is a difference. A guess that moves your feet is a promise, Tyler. You have promised to be there" β she tapped the spot where his front foot had landed β "and now you must keep the promise, and I know where you sleep tonight." She stepped once, unhurried, a single sliding step to the diagonal, and Tyler, committed, off-line, had to swing his whole body around like a gate to face her again. "You see? Your speed is a straight line. You are the fastest man in this gym from one point to another point. But fighting is not points. Fighting is the space between the points, and in the space you are" β she searched, delicately, for the word β "available."
"Available," Tyler said. "That's a brutal word, coach."
"It is an honest word. I will not give you lies to train on. Lies do not hold weight."
They worked until eight, when the light came hard and white through the high windows and the first of the regular members began to arrive and look, with the special discretion of people pretending not to look, at the heavyweight and the wrestler doing a children's drill under the eye of the footwork coach. Sabine dismissed them with a nod. Tyler bent double, hands on knees, grinning the grin of a man who has been beaten by something he cannot describe. Marcus stood in the center of the mat rolling his great shoulders, frowning at his own feet as if they had been replaced in the night by a cheaper model.
"Same time tomorrow," Sabine said. "We will do the distance game. Bring water. Bring humility. Humility is the heavier one."
In the doorway Tyler paused, one shoe on and one shoe off, balanced without thinking about it, the way the young are balanced in doorways. "Coach," he said. "Honest question. Do you do this with everybody, or are we special?"
"I do this with everyone who asks to learn," Sabine said. "You are the first heavyweights who have asked. Walk carefully on the stairs, Marcus. Your legs will have opinions." They did. He took the stairs down like a man carrying a full aquarium, and Tyler, laughing, took them two at a time and waited at the bottom, patient for once, holding the door.
The distance game arrived on the third morning, and it arrived with a piece of chalk. Sabine drew a wide circle on the mat, perhaps four meters across, and inside it she drew nothing at all, because the nothing was the point. One of them would stand in the circle. The other would stand outside it with a padded target baton β soft, harmless, the kind used for tag drills with teenagers β and the task of the one outside was to step in and touch the one inside, shoulder or hip, with the baton. The task of the one inside was simply to not be touched for thirty seconds. No hands. No blocks. Feet only.
"You may leave the circle," Sabine said. "Leaving is allowed. Being touched is losing. Being chased out three times is also losing, because the world is not infinite, whatever Tyler believes."