She gave them their reset. It cost her nothing and it bought her the only currency she traded in, which was their best work, because anything less than their best work would have made the whole evening into theatre, and she had not spent five weeks of dawns building a piece of theatre.
The last minute of the round was theirs, mostly, and she let the record show it. They worked her in a tightening spiral that owed nothing to calls now, a shepherd's pattern, patient and legal and very nearly sufficient, and twice her heels kissed the chalk and twice she bought her way back inside at the price of ground she would have preferred to keep. Her breathing had deepened. There was a stitch of honest fatigue under her left ribs, thirty-eight years old and unimpressed by narrative. The circle had shrunk to the size it truly was. When it happened, it happened at the junction of all of it, the spiral, the fatigue, a call Marcus should not have made and made anyway out of the old hunger to finish a thing in words.
"Now," Marcus said, on Tyler's picture, not his own. "Now — take her now."
Tyler was already set against the word; his picture showed a Sabine half a step further committed than the Sabine who existed, and Marcus, hearing his own call, believing his own call, chasing the agreement the way he had been trained for five weeks to chase it, planted his left foot to drive across her front and cut the last lane, and the plant, made on a call instead of a fact, landed long. His weight arrived before his balance did. The canvas, chalked and re-chalked and polished by an evening of feet, took his shoe and gave it nothing, and Marcus Webb slid, one full, helpless, unmistakable step, planted foot travelling like a man stepping onto ice he had been warned about, out through the chalk line and onto the bare mat beyond it before he could gather himself, upright still, unhurt, arms windmilling once with a grace that only made it funnier and worse, entirely and legally outside the circle of his own attack.
The roar came up off the tables like weather. Vic's whistle shrilled, not to punish — an attacker out was no score against anyone, only a reset, his own feet his own problem — but to give the moment its punctuation, and Marcus, standing outside the chalk with his hands spread in eloquent disbelief at his own shoe, looked at Sabine, looked at Tyler, and laughed so hard that his reset was delayed a full five seconds while he stood there shaking.
"I called that," he said, to the hall, to Vic, to anyone. "Nobody touch that. That one's mine, I called my own man out of the circle. She didn't even—" He pointed at her, delighted and appalled. "She didn't touch me. She has never touched me. I have been beaten this round by a rumour I started."
"You chased the first picture," Tyler said, merciless, delighted.
"I chased the only picture. It was a self-portrait." Marcus stepped back inside the chalk, set his feet with exaggerated, ceremonious care, and bowed to her, not deeply, not for show, a working bow between professionals. "Coach. Your round is a school and I would like it noted that I am paying attention."
"It is noted," Sabine said, and her own smile got away from her then, briefly, in front of everyone, and she let it. "Reset, gentlemen. There is still a round to survive and I intend to be tiresome in it."
"She intends," Tyler said to the ceiling, "to be tiresome. Wonderful. My favourite kind of evening."
Vic gave them the last twenty seconds of the round as a formality and they spent it honestly, one more reduction, one more answer, her heels nowhere near the chalk when the whistle came, and Sabine walked to her corner with the crowd standing in patches now, applauding in the rolling, uncertain way of people who suspect the evening has not yet shown them its best thing.
"Two rounds to the defender," Vic said. "No score. One own exit, attackers, which I mention only because the room would riot if I didn't."
Priya Nair was waiting at the edge with the towel Sabine never used and the water she always did. Priya, thirty-one, who ran the club's books and half its conscience, looked at the chalk, looked at Marcus still grinning at his own shoe, and said, "You broke their language."