Tomas came in alone, as he had come on the first day, with his bag over his shoulder and his plain clothes already changed out of. He found a space along the wall between a physiotherapist from the Thursday class and a man he recognised from the morning sessions, and he sat down with his back against the padding and his hands loose on his knees, and he watched Duarte warm up the way he watched everything: without hurry, and without looking at the parts of a man that moved the most.
It was Duarte who opened the matter, ten minutes before the round was due to begin. He did it standing, with a towel around his neck, in the voice of a man raising a point of order.
"I want it at real speed," he said.
Antoniou was at the referee's table with the conditions sheet in front of him, weighted down by the stopwatch. He did not look up immediately. "Real speed," he repeated.
"Competition speed. The speed the sport actually happens at." Duarte gestured at the mat, at Tomas, at the whole arrangement, with the towel end. "He beat Kenji in a museum. He beat Colin in a museum. Slow rooms, slow rules, everybody admiring the antiques. Fine. I am not a museum piece. If this round is supposed to mean anything, let him try to do it at the pace of an actual match."
A murmur went along the walls, not disagreement, exactly — interest. Marsh, sitting with his arms folded and his jaw still tender about the second round, said, "He's right. Let him work at pace. It'll be quicker, if nothing else."
Sato said nothing. Sato had said very little since his own round, and what he had said had been precise. He sat two chairs down from Marsh with his hands folded, watching Tomas's face the way a man watches weather he does not yet understand.
"He's asking the wrong question," Sato said at last, so quietly that only Marsh and the woman beside him heard it.
"He's asking to be allowed to fight," Marsh said.
"No," said Sato. "He is asking for the conditions to be blamed afterwards. It is a different request." He did not explain further, and Marsh, who had lost his own round in a way he still turned over at night like a stone in a pocket, found that he had no answer that satisfied him.
Antoniou picked up the conditions sheet. He held it so that the signatures at the bottom were visible to the room, his own first, then the three black belts', then, in smaller and neater handwriting than any of theirs, Tomas's.
"We wrote this down," Antoniou said. "All of us. On the first day, before any round was fought, when nobody in this room knew how any of it would go." He read from it, not performatively, but clearly. "Technical rounds. Control governs. Position and control score. A tap ends everything, instantly, and anything continued past a tap is a disqualification. No contest of strength. My call is final." He put the sheet back under the stopwatch. "It does not say slow, Rafael. It has never said slow. It says controlled. There is a difference, and you know the difference, because you have won competitions inside rules your whole career."
"The control protects him," Duarte said. "That's what it does. It puts a fence around the one thing he can't survive, which is my game at my speed."
"It puts a fence around both of you," Antoniou said. "That is what it was for. It stays."
Duarte looked at Tomas then, across the width of the mat, and the room's attention went with him, the way attention in a theatre follows a light. "And you?" he said. "You're happy to hide behind the paper?"
Tomas considered the question with the same unhurried attention he gave to everything, and shook his head once. "The paper doesn't say anything about speed," he said. "You can move as fast as you like." He paused. "I'll be where I am."
It was not a boast. It was delivered in the tone of a man confirming an address. But it moved through the room differently than a boast would have, because it declined to rise to the bait in a way that suggested the bait had been examined and found uninteresting, and Duarte's smile, when it came, was thinner than the one he had worn through his warm-up.
"Then we understand each other," Duarte said.