Osei went ahead, with the conscientious force of a man moving furniture he respects. He took Tomas down and settled onto him with the full, sincere pressure of a hundred kilos, waiting for the customary sequence — the bucking, the shove at the face, the gradual acceptance. What he got instead was a small adjustment somewhere below him that he could not have described afterwards: Tomas's hips turned a few degrees, a forearm appeared in a place that changed the arithmetic of the hold, and the pressure, without ever having been opposed, was suddenly being spent on a structure that had stopped agreeing to hold it up. Osei rolled, mildly bewildered, onto his side, and Tomas was kneeling beside him, offering a hand.
"You've done groundwork," Osei said, half accusation, half gratitude.
"I've practised," Tomas said.
"On who?"
"For a long time, on nobody," Tomas said. "It's slower that way."
Antoniou, circulating, had caught the end of it. He said nothing, but he moved Tomas's name two places up some private ordering in his mind, and moved on.
The next rotation put Tomas with Diana, who announced that her left knee had opinions and that she intended to survive the morning. Tomas adjusted without being asked — he took his throws on her right side, telegraphed every entry at walking pace, and when it was his turn to throw her, he did it the way he had been taught in a place none of them knew existed: completely, and at the same time as if the person in his hands were made of something he was responsible for. She landed laughing, winded, unhurt, and sat up with her hair escaping.
"You throw like you're returning something borrowed," she said.
"That's the idea," Tomas said.
"Where I work, we'd call that technique," she said, "and charge extra for it." Then Antoniou called the rotation again, and the pairs dissolved and re-formed, and the morning wore on toward the moment it had, in retrospect, been approaching since Tomas first climbed the iron stairs.
It was after the second rotation that Duarte came onto the mats. He had been assisting at the far end, correcting grips with fluent impatience, and he worked his way down the line of pairs until he arrived — as weather arrives, without anyone having issued an invitation — in front of Tomas. Osei, reading the sky correctly, stepped back and found a sudden interest in the water bottles.
"Again," Duarte said. It was the correction tone seniors use. "Your partner is being kind to you. They all will be, today, because it's an assessment and everyone wants to look gentle. It gives a false picture." He took his grip — lapel, sleeve, correct as a diagram — and smiled. "I don't do kind. Shall we find out what the picture actually is?"
"At walking pace," Tomas said. "Those were the instructions."
"Of course," Duarte said. "Walking pace."
What followed was walking pace in the way a river walks downhill. Duarte threw him twice, each time with a clean entry and a commitment a fraction above the agreed speed, and each time Tomas fell the way he had fallen all morning — hand first, chin down, out of the breath of it — and rose without haste and re-took his grip. The third time, Duarte changed it: instead of the practised throw, he stepped in deep for the big pick-up, the one that lifts a man entirely off his foundations and shows the room his weight, or his lack of it. Tomas felt the entry arrive — felt it, specifically, in the half-second before it committed, in the shift of pressure through Duarte's hands — and turned his hip a small, decisive angle, so that the lift came up with nothing in its arms but the last inch of Tomas's sleeve, and Duarte completed the shape of a great throw around an absence, and had to take two quick steps to keep his own dignity upright on the mats.
The hall had gone quiet in the way halls do, which is to say one pair at a time.
Duarte released the sleeve. He was smiling, but the smile had work in it now.
"Interesting," he said. "He slips."
"He didn't slip," Sato said from the side, quietly, to no one in particular. "You missed."
"I didn't miss," Duarte said, still smiling at Tomas. "He was simply not there. There's a difference, apparently. In some schools." He turned the word schools into something faintly comic. "Where I come from, my friend, this is the part where we discover whether the trick works against people who know it's coming. This is an assessment for our scholarship. Our mats. Our people have spent ten years learning to do to you the thing you just did to me, and to do it at speed, at weight, on a bad day, with an audience. You cannot come in off the street with your carpet and your tolerant landlord and expect to compete with Stonebridge men. It isn't cruelty to say so. It's information."