There was a small, interested silence, of the kind that develops in a room when a door has been opened onto weather.
"Marcus," Vic said, mildly. "You were saying. About the attack."
"I was saying either one of us finishes that game solo in a minute." The big man said it to the room, pleasantly, a statement about the world. "Circle's three metres, coach. Three. I take two steps I'm at the far chalk. Somebody's got to stand in there and be caught, that's the job, it's a demo — I'm not saying it isn't skilled, I'm saying it's skilled the way—" he searched, genial as a steamroller, for the mot juste, and found the one he had clearly been saving "—the way fencing is skilled. Dancing with cutlery. All that sliding around is beautiful until somebody just walks in and picks you up, and then it's a cooking show." The room laughed — he had timing, Marcus, he had always had timing, it was half his market value — and Tyler, not to be left holding the smaller half of the laugh, leaned on the cage post and topped it the way he topped everything, by going shorter.
"Solo's a minute," Tyler said. "Both of us together? Thirty seconds. And that's with Vic reading the rules first."
The room laughed again, louder, the good laugh, the one with appreciation in it for a line properly landed. And into the middle of it, not loudly, in the tone of a woman remarking that a window has been left open, Sabine spoke from where she stood at the back with her arms folded, where she had been standing, unnoticed in the way of coaches and furniture, since the parliament began.
"Then it is settled," she said, "and I thank you both."
The laugh changed shape. Heads turned. Marcus looked around, grinning, sensing a joke in which he had somehow become a participant rather than an author, and not yet sure whether to mind.
"Coach?" he said.
"You have volunteered," Sabine said. "Both of you. Publicly. In front of your promoter." She nodded at Dana, who had gone very still in the particular way of promoters who can hear money being printed in the next room. "A demonstration requires, I am told, a defender the room can root for and attackers the room has heard of. Vic requires agreement from his two idiots — his word travels, Vic, you must forgive it — and I require, for my answer on Thursday, to know exactly what I am answering. So. Let us be exact." She came forward through the group, unhurried, and stopped at the edge of the mat, and the room, without being asked, gave her the floor, because six years of Tuesdays had taught it the value of letting her finish a sentence.
"The survival circle. The club's rules, the laminated card, no inventions. I defend, alone. Marcus and Tyler attack, together, at the same time, with full hearts. Three minutes. No strikes — there are never strikes. No locks, no chokes, no throws, nothing that arrives by surprise. A touch is two hands, clean, on the torso. To put me out, you must move both of my feet across the chalk, or take me down the slow way, a hand on the shoulder, like gentlemen helping a lady to a chair." Her eyes went from one to the other. "Vic referees. Vic's whistle, Vic's word, and any word from me stops it in the same breath. If it becomes a wrestling match, it is over and everyone is embarrassed, mostly me for agreeing. Those are the rules you already play by every year at this party. The only new thing is the casting."
"Coach," Marcus said, and the grin had changed — it had not vanished, it had acquired interest, like a dog hearing its name in a sentence about food. "We were talking. That was talk. That was me running my mouth because there's a microphone-shaped object in any room I'm in."
"Yes," Sabine said. "I know. In fencing we also had talk. We called it the salute. You raise your weapon, you announce yourself, and then the bout is not talk any more." She looked at Vic. "You may tell them what I tell you Thursday, Vic. But they have performed the salute. It would be rude of me not to answer it." She turned back to the two of them, and for a moment the dry humour went out of her face and left the thing underneath it, which her fighters saw rarely and remembered: the stillness of a woman who had once been the eleventh-best in the world at a sport measured in milliseconds, looking at a problem the size of a three-metre circle.