"It may be information," Tomas said. "It isn't an assessment."
Something in the levelness of it — the complete absence of heat, of the flinch Duarte's provocations were built to manufacture — seemed to irritate him more than defiance would have. Men like Duarte are connoisseurs of reaction; a room that won't react is a room misbehaving.
"Then assess yourself," Duarte said. "Out loud. Tell us what you are."
Antoniou had stopped circulating. He stood at the edge of the nearest mat with his arms folded, watching, and he did not intervene, and several of the applicants would remember later that this was the moment they understood the assessment had changed into something else — that the old man was letting it happen, the way you let a string be plucked to hear whether it is true.
"I came here to be assessed," Tomas said. "Not to fight anyone." He said it without apology and without emphasis, as a man states the time from a clock both parties can see. "I haven't come to take anything off anybody, and I haven't come to be made an example of, either. But an assessment is supposed to measure something real." He looked at Duarte, and then, briefly, at Marsh and at Sato, including them the way a man includes the whole weather and not just the nearest cloud. "If what you need, to measure it, is a real partner — somebody who will actually try to throw me, and actually try not to be thrown — then I am willing. I'll be that. For any of you."
The quiet deepened. Osei, by the water bottles, had forgotten to drink.
Duarte laughed — a single note, surprised out of him. "Any of us," he repeated. "He says any of us." He looked at Antoniou, appealing to the referee of this irregularity, expecting — reasonably, on the evidence of the morning — a rebuke, a restoration of the programme, tea. "Sensei. The applicant is offering to fight the senior students. In the middle of your assessment."
Antoniou unfolded his arms. He looked at Tomas for a long moment, and what he was looking for, Tomas could not tell; the examination was thorough and entirely without hostility, like a tuner sounding a string he has some private reason to suspect.
"Mr. Reiner," Antoniou said at last, "do you understand what you have just offered?"
"Yes," Tomas said.
"And you understand that I might accept it?"
Tomas nodded. "That's why I said it in front of you," he said, "and not to him."
At the side of the mat, Sato uncrossed his arms — a small movement, and, from him, an event.
"Tea," Antoniou said, into the silence, as if nothing in the morning had departed from his programme in the slightest. "Fifteen minutes. Then we will discuss" — he chose the word with visible care — "format."
Duarte picked up his water bottle. "I look forward to the discussion, sensei," he said. He said it to Antoniou, but he was looking at Tomas, and the look had changed: there was appetite in it now, and under the appetite, something he would not have named, which was the wish to be contradicted by evidence rather than merely annoyed by a stranger's composure.
Tomas folded Diana's towel where she had dropped it, set it on her bag, and went to make tea for the room.
They took their tea standing, the way people do in rooms where something has been decided not to be discussed, and Antoniou withdrew to his office with the folder and did not reappear for the full fifteen minutes. Hannah, who had worked at Stonebridge for nine years, refilled the urn and said to no one in particular that in her experience the length of the old man's thinking was in direct proportion to the seriousness of the matter, and that on the day of the roof leak he had thought for four minutes. The applicants, doing their own arithmetic, looked at the office door and then at Tomas, who was washing the mugs.
When Antoniou returned, he brought with him a single sheet of paper and a pen, and the room understood before he spoke that the thinking had produced a document.
"We will do this properly or not at all," he said. "Mr. Reiner has offered himself as a working partner at full technical honesty. Mr. Duarte has questioned whether the offer means anything. Both positions are now on my floor, and I dislike untidiness." He held up the sheet. "So. There will be three rounds. One against each of my senior students. They will be conducted under conditions, which I am now going to dictate, and which Hannah will write on the whiteboard, and which will not be negotiated afterward by anybody, including me."