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I did not stop skating. I turned my head, casually, as though following the puck, and my eyes went up to the stands.

There, in the third row of the empty upper deck, sat a man in a Northmen jacket with a phone in his hand. He was six foot three, with heavy shoulders and a perpetual scowl.

Derek Mathis, a defenseman from Minnesota, whom I had spoken to exactly once, in the buffet line, when he asked me why I never ate.

The phone was pointed at me. The screen was lit.

I looked at him.

He did not look away. He lowered the phone slowly, and for a moment I saw his face clearly, the flat, pinched, watchful face of a man who has decided something and is waiting to be proved right. It was not envy, and it was not idle curiosity. It was suspicion, cold and specific.

Oh, I thought. There you are.

It was not the birdwatcher. It was smaller than that, and sadder, a boy with a phone and a theory. But I have learned that the sharpest hooks are often the small ones, and that a man with a theory will find a great deal of evidence, if he looks long enough, in what is only a pale face and a private life.

And in the vent on the far wall, in the dark, I heard another sound, higher than the first, a whisper of electricity.

Two, I thought.

The whistle blew. I skated to the bench, sat, took off my helmet, and stared at my hands. Under the noise of the room I could hear my own pulse, which does not exist, and I understood, with cold clarity, that whatever came next, I would be facing it with someone else. That I had a Tamsin. That I had a Sabine.

That I had a boy in a blue jersey who would be, by any reasonable standard, absolutely no use in a crisis.

I found, to my surprise, that the thought made me smile.

At the other end of the ice, Lex Pendleton stood with his stick propped on his shoulder and a water bottle in his hand, laughing at something Jason had said. He looked up. Across a hundred and eighty feet of scarred white ice, his eyes found mine. He raised the bottle and tilted it, once, in a silent toast.

And from the rafters, high in the shadow of the scoreboard, something very small and red blinked once, and went out.

Chapter 14

LEX

Derek

Derek Mathis had a face like a clenched fist.

Six-three, built like a vending machine, defenseman for the Minnesota Northmen, and possessed of a scowl so committed it looked structural. In three years of Frost Cups I’d shared maybe forty words with him, and thirty-five were “move.” He’d never been friendly. But he’d never been weird, either.

Then, over about a week, he got weird.

The first time I noticed was at Monday’s practice. I was running drills with Jason at the far end when I glanced up and saw Derek in the empty stands with his phone raised, aimed dead at the Ravens’ line. I figured he was taping their power play, because guys do that and everybody scouts.

But then I saw what he was filming, and the back of my neck went cold.

But it wasn’t the power play he was filming. It was Maksim, only Maksim, with the lens tracking him up the ice, over the blue line, and into the corner, and every time the phone rose, Derek’s face got tighter.

The second time was in the hallway outside 214, where I’d gone to grab a phone charger I’d left. Derek was standing there with his hands in his pockets, looking at the door. Just looking. When he saw me, he rearranged his face into something meant to be casual and said, “Lost?”

“Nope. You?”

“Waiting for a guy.”

“In front of a door.”

“It’s a free country, Pendleton.”

“Sure is,” I said, and stared at him until he left.