Page 267 of Slashed Bonds

Nikolai’s been doing a thing between points that I don’t think he knows I’ve seen. Racket down, eyes shut, three seconds, then open. The still. He’s practicing it in a parking lot with a shuttlecock the way he practices it in a crease with a puck, building the door so it opens on command, and when he opens his eyes his serve is the hardest thing in the lot.

Four men coming down the ice at him on Thursday. Silas’s old teams screen with the stick down. He’s going to stand in that crease with the glove high through the bodies and his eyes shut for three seconds before every drop and be the lake. And I’m going to be on the far dot watching him do it and not be able to say a word about it until after.

Monday’s the Civic. Roz said it like a promise. Nobody’s skated it, which is the point of a neutral sheet, but Roz called in a favor and we get two hours on it before Hellsing Ross does, and I know what Cassian’s going to do with those two hours because I’ve watched him do it at Ashford, at Westmere, at Carrow. Three laps along the boards with his blade dragging. Reading the ice the way you’d read a face. Finding the soft corner, the Zamboni seam, the place where the boards give too much and the place where they don’t, and by the end of two hours there’ll be a page in the book that’s nothing but the building.

And then Thursday. Twelve thousand seats. Every camera in the conference on a dot where a man’s going to breathe through his nose on the first draw and his mouth on the second.

Killian hasn’t said a word about Thursday all day. That’s how I know it’s the only thing in his head. He’s playing badminton like a man playing badminton, loose, laughing, insulting Nikolai in two languages, and under it there’s a thing he’s been drawing for two weeks that has Theo Ross’s name on it and a blue line, and he’s keeping it the way he keeps everything, by not looking at it in daylight.

I watched him in the chair yesterday. When Val put the crown on his finger, last, after the monarch. He’d looked at it for a long time with his face doing nothing, and then he’d looked at me across the basement, and I’d understood that for a man who reads walls, a ring finger is a load-bearing one.

Nikolai hits the birdie.

Too hard. Over the net, over Killian’s racket, over the carts, climbing, and it’s still climbing when a seagull comes across the parking lot at about the height of a stop sign on its way to the dumpsters behind the store.

The birdie hits the seagull.

Square. In the body. And the seagull drops.

Like it’s dead. Wings folding, straight down onto the asphalt between the net and the cart corral, and it lies there in a heap of gray and white, and doesn’t move.

“OH, SHIT.”

All of us. At once. Twenty-two people and one pink Omega in a shopping cart, frozen, rackets up, staring at a bird on the ground.

Nobody moves.

And then the other seagulls come.

Three of them. Four. Coming down out of nowhere, landing in a ring around the fallen one with their heads cocked, hopping closer, looking at it and then at us and then at it, like they’ve come to check on a fallen comrade and are forming opinions about who’s responsible.

“Well.” Viper, from the hood of the car, more to herself than anyone. “Shit. I caught every frame of that.”

“Damn.” Greenie, with both hands on the handle of Maddie’s cart, staring. “The seagulls are having a moment of silence for their pal.”

“Moment of silence my ASS!” Maddie, from inside the cart, with a Sour Patch Kid halfway to her mouth. “Uh. Do we call 911?”

“For an ANIMAL?”

The twins. Together. Identical outrage.

“You lot,” says a voice from behind us, “are being troublesome outside of campus.”

We turn.

All of us. The whole team, in a wave, rackets, carts, pickle jars, and standing at the edge of the lot by the cart return with her arms crossed and her reading glasses up in her hair is Roz Ibarra. In a tracksuit. Black, zipped to the throat. And beside her Halloran, with his hands in his jacket. And beside him, Valerie, in a coat with her arms crossed exactly the way Roz has hers crossed, because that’s what best friends do without noticing. And beside her, in a black coat that costs what a car costs, with his inked hands in his pockets and his face unimpressed⁠—

Dox.

They came for groceries. The four of them. Together. On a Saturday. I’m filing that beside the pie.

Dox is looking at the net. Not at the bird. The net, strung between two carts with what I now notice is a length of athletic tape and a dog leash, and the look on his face is the look of a man who runs a basement and a floor and an operation nobody says the name of, being confronted with the fact that the Vipers who are going to carry his documents into a ballroom on Wednesday have tied a badminton net to a shopping cart with a leash.

Welcome to the team, Dominic. We’re extremely serious people.

“Oh, no.”

Greenie. Quiet, horrified, in a voice I’ve never heard from him.