Tyler went first inside, because Tyler always went first, and Marcus circled him with the baton loose in his hand, relaxed, amused, a big man playing a child's game. Then Marcus stepped in with all of himself at once, huge and sudden, and Tyler was gone โ but he was gone in the only direction he ever went, straight back, fast, and two more steps put the chalk at his heels and a third put him out of the circle entirely. He had not been touched. He had also not, by any definition Sabine would accept, survived.
"You ran away very quickly," she said. "It is a skill. Soldiers pay for it."
Then Marcus went inside, and Tyler came at him the way weather comes at a house, from everywhere, in gusts, feinting, doubling back, darting at the hip, at the shoulder, laughing, tireless โ and Marcus, who could not move the way Tyler moved, did something neither of them expected. He stopped trying to move at all. He stood in the center like a lighthouse and turned, only turned, small pivots, keeping his chest to the threat, and Tyler's baton tapped air, air, air, and once, gloriously, Marcus's raised forearm, which was against the rules for him but forgiven, because everyone was laughing, including Sabine, a real laugh that startled the pigeons in the rafters.
"Yes," she said, when the thirty seconds died. "You see, Marcus? When you cannot plant, your power must learn manners. It must wait to be invited. And you, Tyler โ when he waits, your speed has nowhere to spend itself. You both have a fortune. You are both spending it on the wrong thing."
On the fifth morning, Priya Nair came to watch, because Priya had begun to suspect that something unusual was happening in the six o'clock dark and she intended to see it with her own eyes. Priya was thirty-one, a physiotherapist who worked with half the fighters in the building, with ink-black hair she wore in a knot and a professional habit of looking at people's knees before their faces. She and Sabine had been friends for four years, since the winter Sabine arrived in Houston with two suitcases and a Frenchman's grief and Priya had been the one to tell her, bluntly, that the ache in her front leg was not damage but disuse โ that the leg was not broken, only unemployed. They had been close ever since, in the way of women who have seen each other at unglamorous hours.
Priya watched the mirror drill. She watched Marcus, the heavyweight, the club's great hammer, moving in half-steps with the concentration of a man defusing something. She watched Tyler unlearn his own reflexes one honest correction at a time. She watched Sabine correct them without a flicker of triumph, without the smallest savoring of the power she currently held over the two men she would, in five weeks, face alone in the survival circle at the Whitfield gala โ two against one, controlled, no strikes, a format built entirely on the thing she was now, morning by morning, teaching them.
Afterwards, in the small office Sabine used for lesson plans and spare tape, Priya closed the door and said what she had come to say.
"You're sharpening them."
"I am teaching them," Sabine said.
"It's the same thing and you know it is. Sabine. In five weeks those two men are going to stand in a circle with you, together, with a plan, and everything you fix in them between now and then is a thing you will have to beat later. Marcus can't move โ you're teaching him to move. Tyler telegraphs everything โ you're teaching him to be quiet. Why? And do not tell me it's the contract, I know about the contract, Carla told me Dana made the classes a condition. Conditions explain why you let them in the door. They don't explain why you're teaching them properly. You could teach them badly. You could teach them just badly enough. Nobody would know. I would know, but nobody who matters to the result would know."
Sabine was quiet for a moment. She was coiling a roll of tape, slowly, with great evenness, the way she did everything, and Priya, who loved her, recognized the coiling for what it was: a woman arranging her thoughts into distances.
"When I was twenty-six," Sabine said, "I trained for one winter with a woman named Odile Marchand, the best defensive fencer in France, perhaps in Europe. She was retiring. Everyone said she would teach the young ones nothing real, that champions keep the last ten percent in a locked drawer. Instead she taught us everything. The parry she had invented. The retreat she was famous for. All of it, to girls who would use it against the girls she coached. I asked her the same question you ask me. Do you know what she said?" She set the tape down. "She said: if it only works when nobody knows it, it is not a technique. It is a superstition. I have thought about that sentence for twelve years."