The second edge came at her with less warning than the first. They had learned her leftward habits from the morning sessions, both of them, and they spent the next forty seconds quietly taxing every slide to her left with a half-step of pre-paid ground, until the circle behind her left shoulder was a rumour and the chalk was under both her heels again and Vic's voice said, "Line, defender, line," not as a warning but as a fact she might find useful.
She found it useful. A line, Etienne used to say, is information that stands still. She put her right heel deliberately onto the chalk itself, feeling it grit through the ball of her foot, legally in, defiantly placed, and stopped moving backwards altogether, and let them discover what several hundred people in the hall discovered in the same instant, which is that a defender who stops retreating changes the mathematics of everyone advancing on her. Marcus's press, calibrated for a moving target, arrived a half-step too long. He checked it, well, skilfully, but the check cost him his angle, and she slid inside his recovering shoulder and was in the open centre with her pulse up for the first time and the whole geometry to spend again.
"Thirty," Vic said. "Thirty seconds."
They spent them like misers and spendthrifts at once, which is to say like men who had finally understood the evening. No rush. No reach. They walked her through two more reductions, each honest, each answered, and when the whistle came she was a metre and a half from the nearest chalk, upright, breathing through her nose, with chalk on both feet and Tyler's fingerprint of dust, two faint lines, drying on the sleeve of her shirt.
"Round one to the defender," Vic said, to the room at large. "No score. Nobody close enough to argue about, whatever your table thinks."
The applause had a surprised quality, as if the crowd had expected the first round to be the story and had just been informed there was a plot. Sabine walked her small circuit of the centre, shaking out her calves, while Carla Nguyen came to the edge of the mat with water and did not offer advice, because Carla, at thirty-four, had been her student for six years and knew the whole of the liturgy.
"They're good," Carla said.
"They are better than good. They are honest. Drink?"
"I'm holding it for decoration," Carla said, and Sabine drank, and handed it back, and looked past her to where the men had their heads together at the far edge, Dana Whitfield hovering at a tactful distance with the expression of a promoter watching her investment behave unexpectedly well. Marcus was doing the talking, with his hands, drawing arcs in the air. Tyler listened with his whole body, nodding, and then laughed once and pointed at his own sleeve, and Sabine knew they were discussing the graze, and that they were discussing it the way craftsmen discuss a joint that almost closed.
"One minute," Vic said. "Corners."
"They will not call as much," Sabine said, half to Carla, half to herself. "The calls were for learning. Now they trust."
"Is that good for us or bad for us?" Carla asked.
"Yes," Sabine said, and went back to the centre, and set her feet on the scuffed ghost of the chalk cross, and waited for the whistle with the particular patience of a woman who had built her entire adult life out of the space between other people's decisions.
"Round two," Vic said, and blew the whistle, and the second round began like a conversation resuming after an interruption, in the middle of a sentence neither side had forgotten.
They came without the call, as she had predicted, and the first thirty seconds were the finest she had ever spent inside the circle, including mornings that belonged to her alone. Marcus and Tyler moved in a loose, breathing coordination that no single word governed, widening and narrowing their spacing by feel, and she understood, with the part of her mind that coaching had made fluent, that what she was watching was the system becoming theirs. It no longer lived in Marcus's voice. It lived in the four hands and the four feet and the agreement underneath them, older now by one round and considerably harder to arrive before.
So she changed the subject.