"We do," said Antoniou, and he stood, and the room quietened around the standing. "So that there is no argument afterwards, I will say it once more, to the room. Speed is permitted. Force through a finished technique is not. If a man taps, it is over before the sound is finished. If I call stop, it is over. If I judge that control has been abandoned — by either man — I will end the round and record it against the man who abandoned it." He looked at Duarte for a moment, and then, with a fairness that cost him something, at Tomas. "That has always been the rule. It is the rule tonight."
He might have left it there, but as Tomas passed the referee's table on his way to the centre of the mat, Antoniou spoke again, lower, for him alone.
"You don't have to prove anything to this room, son. Whatever this is for, it isn't for them."
Tomas nodded, as if the thought had been received and filed in the correct place. "He's shown me most of it already," he said, mildly. "In the warm-up. He warms up honestly. They all do. It's the rest of us who watch dishonestly — we watch the hands."
Antoniou looked at him then with an expression that Tomas did not see, because Tomas had already turned towards the mat: it was the expression of a man who has heard, for the second time, a sentence arranged in an order he has not heard for a very long time, in a voice that did not know it was quoting anyone.
The hall had not been this full since a grading thirty years ago, when Antoniou was a young instructor with his father's hand heavy on the academy's shoulder, and another man — a guest, a friend of the house, a name the building had since been taught to forget — had filled these same mats with students who came from across the county just to be in the room with him. Antoniou had been thinking about that evening more in the last two days than in the previous two decades, and he did not care for it, and he set it aside the way he had been setting it aside all his life: competently, and at a cost he had stopped itemising.
Hannah Weiss closed the door of the hall, though no one had asked her to, and the sound of the latch was the last ordinary sound. Along the walls the students of Stonebridge — teachers, nurses, drivers, clerks, men and women who trained after work and before shifts, all of them adults who had chosen this room out of all the rooms in Fenwick — settled into the particular silence of people who intend to remember what they are about to see.
Antoniou called the two men to the centre. Duarte bounced once on the balls of his feet, loose and bright and entirely certain. Tomas stood still, his weight settled, his breathing so even it seemed to belong to a different occasion altogether.
"Gentlemen," Antoniou said. "When you're ready."
The difference announced itself in the first ten seconds, and it was not a difference of effort.
Duarte came off Antoniou's signal the way he came off every signal, with his hands already where they wanted to be. Tomas reached for a collar and found the collar gone; reached for a sleeve and caught, for a moment, a sleeve that belonged to a man who had already left it. Duarte's right hand settled on Tomas's lapel with a small, definite tug, his left took the cuff, and before Tomas's weight had declared itself in any direction the first sweep arrived — not forced, not muscled, simply placed under a balance that had not yet been built — and Tomas was on his back with Duarte standing over him in the clean geometry of two points.
"Two," Antoniou said from the table, and his pencil moved.
It went on like that. It went on, in fact, like a demonstration of the distance between a very good amateur mystery and a champion in the middle of his career. Duarte passed the guard the second time they engaged, flowing around Tomas's frames as if the frames were furniture in a room he owned, and held side control for the count that made it points, and then, when Tomas rebuilt — patiently, correctly, in the manner of a man laying bricks he expects to stand — Duarte was already leaving, already re-gripping, already beginning the next thing. The mount came midway through the round and lasted long enough for the room to understand that it would last exactly as long as Duarte wanted it to. When Tomas escaped it, he escaped it well, and the escape earned him nothing but the right to be attacked again from a slightly worse position.