What Blake did not know, and what Yusuf knew, and what Dee herself would not have been able to put into a sentence, was that she was collecting him. Every entry he made gave her something. The dip of the shoulder before the fast one. The way his weight went to his front foot when he was pleased with himself. The little extra flourish, a quarter second of theatre, that he put on the end of the entries that worked, as if some part of him were already watching the replay. She had cleaned this building for years in the dark hours when nobody performed for anybody, and she understood rooms by walking them slowly, and she understood this young man the same way, by letting him cross her space again and again while she kept her breathing low and her right shoulder safe and her patience intact. Patience was not a mood with Dee Marenco. It was a technique, and it had a longer reach than his arms did.
He tried to finish her in the third minute, sensing, as champions sense, that the room had turned and the moment was his to close. He came in behind a flurry of grips, hand fighting, sleeve, collar, off-balancing her twice in quick succession, and the second off-balance nearly worked; she stumbled, genuinely stumbled, and a gasp went around the hall and Carla's hands came up to her mouth. But Dee had been falling profitably since she was fifteen years old. She let the stumble take her down on her own terms, rolled through her good side, kept her elbows home and her shoulder out of the wreckage, and came up underneath the worst of it with her guard around his waist and her heels set, breathing hard but even, while Blake, who had expected to be standing over a finished thing, found himself standing over nothing at all and had to spend the next twenty seconds working honestly to free his leg from a woman who held on like a tide. He freed it. Sam called them back to the centre. The score still said Blake, by plenty. But the hall had gone a degree quieter, the way a room does when it starts, belatedly, to pay attention.
The middle of the bout belonged, on paper, to Blake Rennert, and everyone keeping paper knew it. He worked at his range and rationed his risks and scored the way a man scores when he has decided to be professional about his revenge: nothing wild, nothing offered, quick hands, quicker feet, points gathered one and two at a time like a man picking up coins he had dropped. He put Dee down once more with a foot sweep so clean and light that the hall applauded before it remembered whose side it was on, and he held her in side control for a long, grinding passage, his weight high and careful, while the clock ran and the sweat came through her jacket and Sam circled them, close and watchful. She did not thrash. She did not spend herself in the big, hopeful bridges and bucking escapes that tired people try. She made small frames. She breathed. She kept her right shoulder pinned safely under her own architecture and she waited with her eyes open, taking the pressure the way she took everything, until his weight shifted a fraction too far toward her head in his eagerness to advance, and then she was out, not dramatically, just out, the way water is out of a cup tipped at exactly the right angle, and she came to her knees and then her feet while the crowd made a noise it had not planned to make.
"You're still here," Blake said to her, quietly, as they reset, and there was surprise in it, and something else.
"I'm always still here," Dee said. "It's the job."
He laughed before he could stop himself, one short breath of it, and she saw that too and filed it with the rest: he was beginning to fight a person now instead of a video, and people are harder to beat than videos because they answer back. He came in again and this time she met him closer to his own ground, tying up his sleeve hand early so the fast entry had to start from a worse neighbourhood, and for a sequence of perhaps forty seconds the bout changed its texture entirely. It became grips and half steps, her forehead against his collarbone, his long arms working to strip her hands away, the two of them turning in a slow, ugly, intimate circle while the hall leaned in and Sam's shoes whispered on the mat. Twice she felt his timing set itself for the big entry and twice she spoiled it early, stepping her hip an inch out of the road and letting his speed carry him past the place he had meant to arrive. He scored no points in that passage. Neither did she. But when Sam separated them she was breathing through her nose, steady as a woman mopping a floor, and Blake Rennert was breathing through his mouth.