"We could go tell her," Tyler said, when the laughing stopped. "Or we could just β not be that."
"Be what?"
"The two idiots in her story. You know what she wants. She wants us to spend the whole week trying to out-star each other so that by Saturday we walk in as rivals, and then the circle looks like a feud. And I get it. I do get it. It probably would look great."
"It would look great," Marcus said. "That's the rotten part."
"But it's her story. Not the circle's." Tyler held up his taped wrists and flexed them, examining his own work. "The circle has rules, Marcus. Vic's rules. The first rule is the two hunters hunt together or they don't hunt at all. That's not decoration. That's the format. If we walk in there running two private auditions, we don't just look bad. We lose. She will dismantle us separately and it won't even be close, and Dana will get her theatre anyway, except the theatre will be two men being taught a lesson in front of four hundred people, and she'll sell next year's tickets off it too."
Marcus was quiet for a moment. He took the drawing out of his bag and looked at the leaning letters. "She told me it was leaning my way," he said, "and I believed her because I wanted an edge on you. That's the part I don't like."
"I believed her because I wanted to be underestimated at a profit," Tyler said. "We're a pair of geniuses. A matched set." He stood up and held out a taped hand. "So. Team first. Rivals after. When there's an after that matters β a ranking bout, a real contract, something with Carla's paperwork on it β we'll be rivals properly and I'll try to take your head off inside the rules and you'll try to take off mine. Saturday is not that. Saturday we hunt together, or the lady from France teaches Houston what she thinks of us."
"Team first," Marcus said, and shook. "Rivals after."
"And we don't tell Dana."
"We don't tell Dana," Marcus agreed, and grinned for the first time in a week like a man whose bag had got lighter. "She can find out the same way everybody else does. By watching."
They did their real work that week in the morning sessions, which the club ran at seven before the heat got into the building, and it was in those sessions that Sabine β who arrived at six-thirty each day to open the footwork room and take her tea on the fire escape β began to understand that the gala had changed shape under her. For two years she had trained against Marcus and Tyler as a pair the way a lighthouse trains against weather: they came at her in their habits, Marcus direct as a thrown rope, Tyler patient as tide, and their habits never quite met in the middle, because each man, arriving at the moment of agreement, would glance β not hesitate, glance β at the other's intention, and in that glance lived the half-second Sabine had built her whole defence upon. It was her address. She lived in the distance between two men's decisions.
By Wednesday, the glance was gone.
She watched from the fire-escape door with her tea going cold. They were running the long drill, the one with the full training circle and the thirty-second rotations, against one of Vic's heavyweights, a good-natured man named Osei who played the quarry with theatrical despair. Marcus cut the circle at the third line β not the second, the third β and Tyler, without looking, was already arriving at the far gate like a door closing. Osei turned, found Marcus, turned again, found the line gone. Tag. Clean as a signature. They reset, laughing, and did it again, and did it better, and Sabine stood in the doorway and felt the particular professional pleasure of watching a problem become excellent, which was followed, at the correct interval, by the particular professional alarm.
"They have stopped negotiating," she said to Priya Nair that evening, in the footwork room, after the last class had gone. "In February, they hunted like two men sharing a coat. Now they hunt like one man with four feet."