He scored once, in the middle minutes: a small, tidy reversal off a failed pass, the kind of point that is given for being right at the right moment, and Antoniou's voice said "One," and the score stood at seven to one, and then nine to two, and the numbers had the flat sound of a report being read about weather in another county.
The worst of it — the worst of it by the scoring, which was not the same as the worst of it — came when Duarte ran the whole of his famous chain for the first time and ran it clean. The feint drew Tomas's hands up a fraction; the level drop took the leg before the fraction had settled; and then the spin arrived, the great rolling turn underneath, and Tomas did everything the modern answer prescribes and every bit of it was half a breath late, because the man performing the technique was the man who had built it. Duarte came out behind him the way water comes out behind a stone. The hooks went in. The chest settled against the back. Four points, Antoniou said, and then, in the long seconds that followed, the room got to watch Tomas do the one thing he had done better than anyone all week: refuse, quietly and completely, to be finished. He kept his chin down and his near wrist guarded and his hips walking, walking, an inch at a time, away from the angle of the choke, until Duarte — who could have held the position until the clock died and taken the points and the evening — chose instead to improve it, reached for more, and in reaching gave back the inch in the other direction. Tomas came out of the back the wrong way, the survivor's way, on his knees with Duarte's grip still on his collar and the score wider than before and his face, when he turned, entirely calm.
"Still with me?" Duarte said, pleasantly, resetting his grips. He was not even breathing hard. "This is the speed, my friend. This is what it costs."
"I can see that," Tomas said, and meant it as plainly as anything he had ever said, and Duarte laughed, because he heard admiration in it, and admiration was the only currency he had brought a wallet for.
"Now," Marsh said, to no one, with the satisfaction of a man watching his own argument win a debate in public. "Now we see it."
Sato leaned forward in his chair. He had been leaning forward by degrees for some minutes, and his folded hands had come unfolded, and he was watching Tomas's face — not Duarte's technique, which he could have watched any weekend of the year, but Tomas's face, which was doing something Sato had not seen a losing face do before. It was not strained. It was not hunting for a plan. It was attending, with a quality of attention so complete that it looked, from the chairs, almost like rest.
Because Tomas was losing the round in the only currency the round kept, and winning something the round did not keep, and the second of those was the one he had come for.
Duarte's chain was the crown of his game, and he ran it the way champions run the thing that made them: without decision, the way a signature is written. It began with the collar grip and the feint — a half-step offered and withdrawn, an invitation to defend the wrong doorway. It continued with the level drop, the sudden committed arrival into the legs, the single grip gathered like a handle. And it flowered in the spin: the deep roll underneath, shoulder to the mat, the whole of Duarte's long body rotating through the space beneath Tomas's hips to arrive behind him, hooks seeking, chest seeking the back, the position from which Duarte had finished half the men in the region. Each element was superb. Each element was also, Tomas understood now, load-bearing. The chain was not five techniques. It was one technique wearing five coats, and it stood or fell on a single hinge: the instant before the spin, when Duarte's weight committed forward and down onto his right shoulder, and his left knee turned inward, and everything he was going to be for the next two seconds was decided and could not be undecided.