It was not agreement. Antoniou, who was learning to listen to the man the way one learns to listen to a quiet instrument, heard the distinction: Tomas was not conceding the round. He was declining, as he had declined everything all day, to argue with the part of the statement that was true. The weight was real. The weight was also, by then, a known quantity with a rhythm in it. Marsh loaded his right side before every drive—the hip wound half a turn, the breath taken and held—and each drive cost him more than the one before, because Tomas had stopped spending anything at all on stopping him, and was spending everything on arriving at the right address at the right second.
The third drive came with a minute left. Marsh gathered himself with a visible effort, the hip wound, the breath held, and he came forward like a man pushing a car, meaning to finish the geography entirely and put Tomas against the edge of the mat and keep him there until the clock made it official. Tomas let the drive arrive. He let it arrive further than anyone along the wall thought survivable. And at the moment when Marsh's weight had committed itself past the point where it kept any other appointment, Tomas's near leg scissored low across his shin, his far foot planted and drove, and his hips came through with the whole borrowed weight of the man on top of him behind the rotation.
The technique was Colin Marsh's. Everyone in the room had seen it twenty minutes before, twice, the second time slowly. It came back to its owner at full size, powered by its owner's own mass, and Marsh went over not so much swept as removed, and landed with a thump that travelled up through the frame of the mat, and Tomas followed the rotation through and settled across him and stayed there, breathing hard, holding the position the way you hold a note, while Antoniou counted over the sudden enormous silence.
"One," Antoniou said. "Two. Three." He looked at the clock. "Time."
The arithmetic, when Hannah read it from the clipboard in a voice that was not quite steady, was as narrow as arithmetic gets: Marsh's two controls against the sweep and the held control and a round's worth of Tomas's smaller credits for position recovered, and the total put Reiner ahead by a single point. Nobody in the room disputed it. Nobody, Antoniou noted, even reached for a dispute. The score had the completeness of a door closing.
Tomas got up and put out his hand, from habit, the way he had been taught somewhere to finish a thing properly. Marsh stayed where he was, seated on the mat with his forearms on his knees, looking at his own hands as if they had been subpoenaed. He did not take the hand. Tomas let it fall, without theatre, and stepped back.
"That sweep," Marsh said at last. His voice had lost its exhibition register entirely. "Where did you learn that sweep?"
"You showed me," Tomas said. "In the warm-up. Twice."
Marsh looked up at him then, and what was in his face was not anger, though anger would arrive later and be dealt with later. It was the expression of a man who has heard his own voice played back to him in a room he does not remember entering. Along the wall, nobody laughed. Duarte, very quietly, uncrossed his arms, and crossed them again the other way, like a man whose whole posture on a subject had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Antoniou announced the interval, and if anyone in the room thought the pause was for the fighters they had not been watching the referee. Tomas went back to his place against the wall. His shirt under the borrowed gi was dark with sweat, and his breathing took a while to come down, and he sat with his forearms on his knees and looked at the middle distance with the air of a man who had done some heavy work in a garden and was deciding what the garden needed next. Marsh remained on the mat longest of anyone. Then he got up, slowly, doing it in stages like a man twice his age, and went to the bench, and did not speak to the people who tried to speak to him, and sat looking at the place where the sweep had happened, as if the mat might still explain it.