Turn 2 of 7

Give ground as always — let her set the pattern, then decide

You step back. The motion is so practised it lives in your calves, in the set of your hips, in the way your weight rolls from ball to heel without consulting your brain. Sarkady's blade catches the light as it extends, and you watch it come the way you have watched forty-one blades come before — with attention, with respect, with the absolute certainty that it will not touch you unless you let it. You let it pass close enough to feel the displaced air against your jacket. The gallery murmurs its small approval. A beat. You give another half-step, and the chalk line beneath your boots is the line you have always crossed, the one that means the bout is tilting the way everyone expects.

Sarkady reads the retreat and presses forward. Her footwork is economical, each advance covering ground without overcommitting, and you catalogue it the way you catalogue every opponent — the slight hesitation in her left shoulder before a change of line, the way her wrist cocks a quarter-second before a disengage. She is very good. She is not Oradem-good, not the kind of fencer who makes the air leave your lungs, but she is disciplined and she has prepared. Her second thrust targets your left shoulder, a test, and you give ground again with a parry that is deliberately late enough to look desperate. Tomas makes a sound behind you. A small, pained inhalation.

The pattern establishes itself. She advances, you retreat. She commits, you evade by margins that look like luck. Three exchanges in, and the gallery has already settled into the bored attention of people watching a known outcome unfold. They have seen you lose before. They know the rhythm. What they do not see is what you see — that Sarkady is not trying to end this quickly. She is mapping you. Every retreat you give her is a data point, and she is reading them with the focus of someone who has bet rather a lot on the opposite result.

Because that is the thing. She has bet on you to win. Which means she is not trying to understand how you lose — she is trying to understand how much of the losing is real. She feints high and you step back again, and you catch the flicker in her expression when your retreat is half an inch too clean, too controlled, the footwork of someone who knows exactly where the blade is going. She saw that. You let her see it. The question is whether she understands what she is looking at, or whether she thinks it was an accident of adrenaline, a body remembering competence it has forgotten how to use.

Your right heel finds the rear third of the strip. The chalk mark here is scuffed and old, the line where forty-one bouts have ended the same way — with you backing past it, conceding ground until the referee calls the touch. Sarkady pauses. She is breathing harder than you are, which is wrong, which is the tell that the gallery will never notice but that Tomas might, if he were watching closely enough. She has been pressing the attack while you have been gliding backward, and she is the one spending the energy. Her blade is still pointed at your chest. Her eyes are on yours. She is waiting to see which version of you crosses that line.