"Time," Antoniou said.
Tomas released the control at the word itself, not after it, and sat back on his heels. He was breathing a little harder than before. That was all.
The score was not close in structure, only in arithmetic: two holds to one, the restless arithmetic of a man who had spent the last round answering. Antoniou announced the result in the flat tone of a results clerk, points to Reiner, and several people in the room exhaled at the same moment, as if a held note in a piece of music had finally been allowed to resolve.
Sato stood for a moment in the centre of the mat. Then he bowed to Tomas, and it was not the bow he had given at the start of the round. It was slower.
"That was my entry," he said quietly.
"It still is," Tomas said.
Sato considered him for a moment longer, and then he stepped back to the edge of the mat and sat down among the candidates, with his hands resting on his knees and his eyes on the empty space where the round had been, taking it apart piece by piece in the privacy of his own mind.
Hannah had written the result on her clipboard in her neat hand, and then, after a moment, she had underlined it, which was unlike her. At the back of the room a candidate who had been ready to laugh at noon was saying nothing at all now, and looking at his own hands. Tomas walked to the wall, sat down where he had sat before, and folded the borrowed gi over his knees again, as if the last three minutes had been an errand he had run between other errands. His hands were steady. They were the steadiest thing in the room.
Antoniou said nothing about what he had seen. He looked at the whiteboard, where the conditions of the challenge stood in his own square writing, and then he looked at Tomas for a moment longer than the result required, and then he called for the mats to be reset for the second round.
The interval Antoniou allowed between rounds was ten minutes, and the room spent the first two of them not knowing what a result like that was supposed to sound like.
It was Marsh who found the sound first.
"A trick," he said, to the room generally, in the tone of a man returning an item to a shop. "Come on. It's a trick. He set it up." He was already half out of his gi top, a towel around his neck, and he spoke with the energy of someone clearing a table of plates he did not intend to wash. "Sato runs his entry, the bloke falls over, then all of a sudden he knows the counter? Nobody knows the counter. Sato's been polishing that entry for six years and a piano man walks in and knows the counter?"
"I did not go easy," Sato said, from where he sat at the edge of the mat. He said it mildly, without looking up, still taking the round apart in his mind. "And I have never met him before today. And it was not the counter to the entry, Colin. It was the counter to me. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of it."
"Well, it's something," Marsh said. "Video, then. He's seen you on video. There's hours of you on video, Kenji, the regionals put everything up. He's a ringer. Somebody's planted a ringer in the scholarship line for a laugh, and we're all standing here—"
"Nobody planted me," Tomas said.
He said it from the wall, where he sat with the borrowed gi folded over his knees, and he said it the way he had said everything that day: without heat, as a piece of information he happened to be carrying. Marsh turned to look at him properly for the first time since the round had ended, and seemed annoyed to find nothing in the man's face to push against—no triumph, no smirk, nothing arranged for an audience.
"Then what are you?" Marsh said.
"A piano tuner," Tomas said. "I'm sorry. I know it isn't the answer you want."