Priya was thirty-one and had been Sabine's student, then her colleague, then β this was the rarest promotion and the one the club did not print anywhere β her second pair of eyes. Priya taught the Saturday self-defence classes the gala was funding, and she had the teacher's disease in its most useful form: she could not watch a drill without wanting to make it harder. She set down the two foam training blades they used for the evasion work and considered.
"Good," Priya said. "You were bored in February. I watched you be bored. You did the whole demonstration at eighty per cent and spent the tag breaks planning your grocery list. I could see the list. It had leeks."
"It did not have leeks."
"It had leeks, Sabine. This week it has leeks nowhere." Priya picked up the blades again and spun one, once, the way a drummer spins a stick. "So we prepare for the hardest version. Not the version where they make mistakes. The version where they don't. Tomorrow and Friday, my class gives you its two best movers β Anita and Rob β and you rehearse against the pair that shares a brain. Full circle. Full speed of feet, no contact above the tag. And I stand where Vic will stand, and I am not kind about the line."
"Anita is fifty-two," Sabine said.
"Anita," Priya said, "has been leaving rooms safely for thirty years and she has the best retreat step in this building after yours. Rob is a dance teacher. He counts in his head and so do you. It will be horrible. You'll love it."
It was horrible, and she loved it, and it was necessary. Anita and Rob were not Marcus and Tyler β nobody was Marcus and Tyler, that was rather the point of the week β but they were two adults who had agreed with each other completely, and rehearsing against agreement was the work. Thursday's session taught her the shape of her danger: when the pair truly shared a plan, the false distances vanished. A single hunter she could read like print. A pair in agreement had to be read like weather, earlier and all at once, and her feet β thirty-eight years old, twenty of them spent on pistes and in circles, with a left ankle that kept its own counsel in damp weather β her feet had to be somewhere before the weather arrived, not after.
The message from Etienne came on Friday morning, while she was taping the training-room floor for the final rehearsal. Etienne Roche had taught her sabre in Paris when she was a girl with more reach than sense, and he had followed her second career in Houston with the fierce, unsentimental attention of a man reading his own handwriting in someone else's book. He was seventy-nine now and wrote text messages the way he had once written on her report cards, in sentences that assumed she was intelligent and in a hurry. She had sent him, the night before, a photograph of the new poster and one line of her own: They have learned to agree. It changes the geometry.
His reply was waiting when she picked up the phone.
β You do not have to be faster than two men. You have to be EARLIER than their agreement. An agreement is a bridge, Sabine. It is built, it is crossed, it is built again. Be standing where the bridge is not. Arrive at the far bank before they have finished deciding there is a river. β E.
She read it standing in the empty training room with the tape roll in her hand, and then she read it again and laughed, alone, out loud, because it was the whole of fencing and the whole of the survival circle in four sentences, and because he had known it when she was fifteen and had waited, with a master's patience, for her to need it at thirty-eight. She took down the tape lines she had laid and laid them again, differently: not the rehearsal floor of a woman preparing to be chased, but of a woman preparing to be early β gates placed where agreement would be weakest, at the seams between one shared decision and the next.
Friday's rehearsal was the best work she had done all year, and Priya, standing in Vic's place with her arms folded and her kindness withheld exactly as promised, called the line like a hanging judge and afterwards said only: "Again tomorrow, you won't need to. That was the one."
Friday evening, Sabine telephoned Etienne, which she did on the first Friday of every month by a treaty older than the club, and she told him about the poster, and the sales, and the programme, and he listened the way he listened to bouts, in silence, storing everything.