"Thirty seconds," she said to Tyler, pleasantly. "One minute," she said to Marcus. "I have excellent hearing and a long memory, and on the night I will bring both. Gentlemen. You have three weeks to become one person with four hands. I suggest you practise being kind to each other. It is the part you will find most difficult."
"Thursday," Vic said quickly, into the beautiful, ringing silence, with the air of a referee stepping between two fighters he is delighted with. "Confirmation Thursday, pending Coach Renaud's final word, the club's word is given: Circle Night, headline demonstration, survival circle, three minutes, rules as stated, referee me, whistle and stop word, controlled contact only, and proceeds to the Sunday programme whatever happens. Shake." And because the room was watching and the salute had been performed, Marcus Webb and Tyler Brooks reached out, one after the other, and shook the fencing coach's hand, and each of them โ she noted it, and filed it, and said nothing โ squeezed with the exact, calibrated pressure of a man signing a contract he intends to win.
The story was out of the building before the mats were stacked. It was, in the way of gym stories, improved in transit: by the car park it was a grudge match, by group chat it was a bet, by the following morning's class it had acquired a poster in somebody's imagination and a nickname in three. Sabine heard none of it, or behaved as if she heard none of it. She taught her Thursday class. She taught the Sunday movement module to forty-one women, three of whom, at coffee afterwards, asked her straight out whether she was going to do the circle, and whether she was scared, and she had answered with complete honesty: yes, and yes, a little, at two in the morning, and that both answers could be true at once was rather the point of the module.
On Thursday she went to the office before the morning class and said the word.
She said it without ceremony, standing, because Carla was mid email and Vic was mid-sentence about the ice machine, and there is a kind of decision that does not want a chair.
"Yes," Sabine said. "For the programme. On the rules as stated, and one condition of my own, which is not negotiable and not dramatic. I train for it my way, in my hours, and nobody makes a poster of my face with a sword on it. Dana may have a thesis, but she may not have clip art."
"She'll grieve for a day," Carla said, typing. "It's confirmed. It's in the calendar. In ink."
"Then it is real," Sabine said, "and we had all better begin being serious."
She began, that evening, after the last class had gone and the hall had emptied into the Houston night, with the doors locked from inside and the fans turning their slow, warm circles overhead. She took the thick white chalk from the equipment cupboard โ the real chalk, the old kind, kept for the circle since before the tape era, dusty and honest in the hand โ and she drew the circle herself, on her knees, in the middle of the main mat: three metres across, her old lunge measured and doubled, a fencer's unit, though she did not tell the chalk that. She stood up and brushed her hands on her leggings and looked at what she had made. A white ring on a grey mat, in an empty hall, in a country not her own.
Then she took off her shoes, because you do not enter a piste in street shoes, not even an imaginary one, and she stepped over the chalk line, carefully, the way one steps into cold water, and she walked to the centre of the circle and stopped.
She stood there a while. She felt the mat give and settle under her bare feet. She looked at the chalk at its nearest and its farthest, and ran the arithmetic that every defender in every century has run before the doors open: how many steps to the edge, how many to safety, how much room a life has when it is measured honestly. Three metres. Two men. Four hands. One hundred and eighty seconds.
Never be where the blow was aimed, said the old man in Lyon, across six years and an ocean, from a cold salle with a leaking corner.