Page 282 of Slashed Bonds

Maddie giggles.

And I understand something, watching her face change under the lifted cage. I understand why she fits with the other two. Why a pink woman who skips across parking lots belongs in a trinity with a green one who carries a recorder and a black one who said we play to ruin to a man’s face. Because the grin that comes onto Maddie’s mouth is sinister. There’s no softer word. Her eyes go dark under the black liner and the sweetness drains out of the rest of her face like water out of a basin, and what’s left is a thing that’s been waiting a long time to be let out on a sheet of ice.

“Cold feet would be all well and dandy,” she says, sweetly, bending over the dot. “But our bestie’s pregnant and thriving. And becoming a mom’s a touch more important than putting on a show for you.” A tilt of the pink helmet. “Don’t you think?”

Naomi’s eyes go wide.

Pregnant. The word lands on her the way it landed on me in a locker room, except she’s standing across a dot from it with twelve thousand people watching her face, and the woman who put a drug in a neck to make sure that word never got said is hearing it in a giggle.

The whistle goes.

The ref’s hand drops. The puck hits the ice between two Omegas⁠—

And the building goes black.

All of it. Every light, every bank, at once, the way they’d gone down for our intro at Ashford except nobody’s cued this and there’s no spot waiting to find anyone. Twelve thousand people in the dark, and the sound they make is a single intake, a whole arena breathing in.

“What the fuck?”

The twins. From the bench. In unison, in the dark.

And before anyone can panic, before the first scream that a blackout in a full building earns, the screens come on.

The big ones. Four of them, hung over center ice, lighting the sheet from above in a wash of blue-white, and the audio comes with them. Through every speaker in the Civic at once, at a volume that gets into the teeth.

A woman’s voice. Bright. Bored. Pitched for an audience.

“We pushed that bitch off the balcony into the pit of snakes she belongs in.”

A laugh.

“Hah. And imagine. I found a pregnancy test in the drawer. She was pregnant with Theo’s baby! What a foolish cunt!”

Her voice. The one from Meg’s. The one from a changing room into a phone. Recorded somewhere, some night, to someone she trusted, and the someone kept it.

Everyone on the ice is looking at the culprit.

Naomi’s eyes are wide. Wider than they went for pregnant. She’s pulled her helmet off, the pink-painted thing in one hand, and her mouth’s open and she’s turning in a circle at the dot looking for where the voice is coming from, and it’s coming from everywhere.

The lights come up.

And the screens change.

Footage. Security footage, the kind with a timestamp in the corner and a fisheye curve to the edges, and I know the building before I know the room, because I signed an offer on it Thursday with a law firm’s name on the folder. A corner office. Glass and pale stone. Gray carpet with a pattern like water.

A long balcony beyond a glass door.

Naomi, five years younger, in a white blazer, saying something to two men in dark suits with earpieces, and the audio’s clear, cleaner than any security system I’ve ever seen produce, because somebody with a laptop and three days has cleaned it.

“Take out the trash.”

The guards move.

And twelve thousand people gasp, a single sound, hands going to mouths all over the lower bowl, because the trash is a girl.

Eighteen. I know she’s eighteen because I’ve seen the photograph from the tournament, but the photograph didn’t move. This moves. A girl with bright eyes and hair to her shoulders, black, no red in it yet, in a sweater with the sleeves pushed up over arms that are bandaged from wrist to elbow and bleeding through the bandages, fresh, red going brown at the edges.

Four years ago I’d have said I couldn’t be surprised by what people do. I’ve stood at a grave. I’ve watched my father do arithmetic with a list. I was wrong. I’m being surprised. I’m standing on a sheet of ice in a semifinal being surprised in front of twelve thousand people.