Four stalls down, two guys put their heads together and whispered low. Behind me, near the showers, somebody spoke, but I couldn’t make out the specific words. The Friday call-up looked from Dahl to me to Varga and back.
You can’t answer whispers and vague comments. If you push back, you’ve confirmed there’s something to push back about, but when you let it sit, it travels. Dahl had built a door that only opened toward us, no matter which way I leaned on it.
A name flashed in the back of my mind.
Easton.
Varga moved. He got up off the bench and stepped into the middle of it. He was loud and huge.
“Dahl.You’re worried about my marriage? Brother, you’re scratched—go worry about your gap.” The room came halfway back, laughing nervously. “I’ll watch you. How’s that? I’ll put your neutral zone in a film festival. It’s a horror movie. It’s got jump scares—“
The loud guy was stepping in front so nobody looked behind. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever watched him do, but it wouldn’t work.
Dahl’s questions were already spreading beneath the surface. Trier said something else about his cat, and it changed the subject, but underneath the phones were already out. I saw three held low against thighs with the screens tipped away.
A thumb moved. A guy past Dahl read something, glanced up at me, and then read it again.
And I didn’t know the men behind those phones. They weren’t the core. They were the men I’d never engaged with.
Markel’s whistle pulled us onto the ice.
We all had to skate.
It came onto the ice with us. At the first water break, I coasted past the bench, and two guys stopped talking when I got close. They picked it up again when I was gone. At the second break, I caught one word going past a cluster at the far boards. It was my name, “Rook,” and I didn’t hear the rest.
I read flinches for a living. The hum was real. They were talking, but I didn’t get to hear the words. That was worse than knowing what they were.
Markel called a breakout. On the third rotation, I drew the right side, and the puck came around to Varga on the half-wall. He looked for me, and I wasn’t there. I read the pressure a half-beat late, and the lane I was supposed to fill stood empty. His pass died on the far boards.
It was the same miss as the morning after the fight. He looked at the dead puck and then at me.
Markel blew it dead.He stood at the blue line and looked at the empty ice where the pass had died. Then he read the entire length of the bench, end to end. He heard the hum.
“That’s enough for the morning. Off. Treatment if you need it, or eat something. We’ve got a game tonight.”
It was an hour early. Half the room took it as a gift. The other half—the part brandishing phones—filed off not looking at me. I glided to the gate behind men who wouldn’t meet my eye.
Markel had reached for the one dial he could turn. He lowered the volume. He couldn’t touch the content, but he could make it quieter.
Heath caught my eye coming off. He had nothing to say.
Pratt looked up from his stall when I came in. It was the long read, the one he does from the wrong end of the rink. He held it a beat and went back to his tape.
Rafe had one glove off. The kid had spent a season gathering evidence, and the evidence coming in this morning was Dahland the phones. He saw Varga being loud in front of it. He was learning the wrong lesson in real time, but I couldn’t stop it.
I left the locker room as quickly as I could. There’s an equipment room off the tunnel, half-size, with a skate sharpener and a wall of sticks. I went in and put my hands on the bench, taking thirty seconds to breathe.
The door opened behind me. I knew it was Varga before I turned. He shut the door behind him, which we didn’t do because it was what would get noticed. He did it anyway.
“It’s out,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I had it. In the room, I shut it down, and they laughed, but it didn’t hold. Some of them are on their phones now. It’s out.”
“Ahead of us,” I said.
“Who even isDahl—“ He stopped because neither of us knew. We’d staked everything on the core we knew, and it leaked out through the men in the room we didn’t know.
