Tomas cycled home through the wet streets with his buckled wheel ticking its small complaint at every revolution, and found that his body had taken the evening's lesson into custody without consulting him. Twice, cornering, he felt the new thing happen again — the little turning give at the hip, answering a shift of balance before his mind had registered there was one. In the bakery's doorway he stopped, out of nothing but curiosity, and stood the way he had been taught to stand, and pushed his own shoulder gently against the door frame, and listened to what the pressure said. It said very little. But it said it clearly, in a language he apparently already owned and had merely never been addressed in.
At the top of the stairs he put the kettle on, and then — because his hands needed an occupation and the evening had rearranged something in him that had been unmoved for four years — he took out his tuning forks, laid them in their roll in order, and sounded the A against the table's edge and listened to it die, all the way down, to the very end of its being audible, the way he had just been taught to listen to everything else.
The challenge, once Antoniou had written its conditions on the whiteboard in his square, deliberate hand, stopped being an argument and became an appointment. The evaluation candidates were given water and ten minutes. Mats were checked. Somebody's phone was asked, politely and then less politely, to leave the room. Through all of it Tomas sat against the wall with his borrowed gi folded over his knees, watching nothing in particular, the way he might wait in a client's hallway while a piano was moved.
Expectation had arranged itself comfortably in the room by then. Sato would be first, because Sato was the technician, and the technician would make the demonstration cleanest: the quiet man would be taken apart politely, joint by joint, and everyone could go home with the world in its proper order. Duarte watched from the doorway with the patience of a man waiting for a later train. Marsh, who was to be second, had already decided what he was looking at and was only waiting for it to begin.
Antoniou cleared the centre of the mat with two short gestures, the way a man clears a table he intends to work at. The other candidates moved back to the edge without being told. Hannah Weiss stood by the door with her clipboard held against her chest, and the room made the particular silence of people who have agreed, without discussing it, to pay attention.
"Round one," Antoniou said. "Three minutes. Points for clean entries, for takedowns, and for control held to my count of three. No striking. Strength is not scored in this room today." He looked at both men in turn. "If something is finished, say so, or tap. There is no shame entered in the record either way."
Kenji Sato bowed from the waist, exact and unhurried. He was not a large man, but he had the stillness of an instrument that has been tuned and left alone, and everything about his gi was arranged as if arrangement were part of the technique. Tomas bowed back, a fraction deeper than necessary, and took his place on the line with his hands open at his sides.
Sato did not rush. For the first half minute he did almost nothing that a stranger would have called fighting. He took a grip on Tomas's collar, gave a small pull, released it. He took the sleeve, stepped half a step, released that too. Each contact was a question, and he watched how Tomas answered: where the weight went, which foot moved first, how quickly the hips came back under the shoulders. Tomas gave ground each time, patiently, resetting himself to the same plain stance, and if he had a plan he kept it so far inside himself that his face gave away nothing at all.
"He is reading him the way you read a label," one of the candidates murmured.
Sato heard it, perhaps. His expression did not change. He set his grips again, and this time the questions stopped and the statement began.