Chapter 4 Chapter 4

Wednesday practice did not start well.

This was my fault, which I'm noting upfront so nobody thinks I'm about to blame someone else for something that was objectively my fault. I set two alarms the night before five AM and five-fifteen, the backup system I'd been using since freshman year of high school and somehow, in the specific insanity of Tuesday night, I forgot that I'd silenced my phone during a film review session and never unsilenced it.

I woke up at six oh seven.

Practice started at six.

I'm going to skip over the next eleven minutes because they were not my finest and I'd like to preserve some dignity here. What I will say is that I made it to the rink by six eighteen with my recorder, my notebook, my jacket on correctly, and my hair in a ponytail that was doing its best under the circumstances. I pushed through the rink doors with the energy of someone arriving casually, not someone who had jogged the last four blocks in twenty-two degree weather.

The cold hit me like a wall.

The team was already deep into a drill full speed, end to end, the kind of skating that makes a specific sound against the ice, sharp and rhythmic, like a metronome with urgency. I found a spot at the glass and pulled out my notebook and tried to look like I'd been there for a while.

"You're late."

I turned. Declan was at the boards two feet to my right, water bottle in hand, catching a break between rotations. His hair was damp and his cheeks were flushed from skating and he was looking at me with an expression of pure calm amusement, which told me he'd clocked my arrival approximately four seconds after it happened.

"Observational journalism doesn't have a start time," I said.

"It has your start time," he said. "Which you sent me in an email. Six AM."

"I'm here."

"You're here at six eighteen."

"The journalism started at six," I said. "I was observing the building exterior."

He looked at me.

"Architecturally interesting," I said.

He pressed his lips together and skated back out before the smile could finish forming. I watched him rejoin the drill and did not think about how it was extremely unfair that he could go from standing still to full speed in about two seconds, like a switch getting flipped, like effort and the appearance of effort were completely different things and he'd figured out how to separate them.

I opened my notebook. I wrote: arrived 6:18. Team mid drill. Energy level: high.

Then I watched.

I had been to figure skating practices every day for fourteen years, which meant I understood ice in a way that most people didn't the way a blade reads the surface, the difference between someone skating correctly and someone skating naturally. Most people, watching a hockey practice, just see speed and chaos and a lot of stopping and starting that doesn't seem to have a pattern.

It has a pattern. I could see it.

And Declan Mercer was, I wrote this down because it was observationally accurate and completely relevant to the profile piece always exactly where the puck was going to be before it got there. Not sometimes. Every time. Like he was reading something everyone else was a sentence behind on.

His coach, Briggs a compact man in a Harlow windbreaker who communicated primarily through a whistle and extremely specific hand gestures stopped the drill once to demonstrate something about positioning. He pointed at where two players were standing and then gestured at a spot on the ice three feet over. The players moved. Briggs pointed again. Both players looked uncertain.

Declan skated over and stood in the correct spot without being directed to.

Briggs pointed at him. He skated away.

I wrote: knows where to be before being told. Possibly psychic.

At seven, Briggs blew the final whistle and the team shifted into a cooldown lap around the ice. Some players headed for the boards. A few stayed to shoot. I was writing up my observational notes, which were more detailed than Hendricks probably required and less objective than journalism school technically recommended, when someone materialized beside me.

Not Declan.

His teammate taller, blond, the number seven on his jersey leaned against the boards next to me with the specific confidence of someone who has never been told a bad idea was bad. "You're the journalist," he said.

"That's me," I said.

"Kowalski." He stuck out his hand.

I looked at his hand. Then at him. "The rut," I said.

He looked confused. "What rut?"

"The east wall. Tuesday resurfacing."

"The oh." Recognition landed on his face, followed immediately by the look of someone who has decided the best move is to not fully engage with this line of questioning. "Yeah, that's - that kind of happens."

"It really doesn't, actually," I said.

"Blades catch sometimes"

"Not like that," I said pleasantly. "Not in the same place three weeks running."

Kowalski opened his mouth, then made the wise decision to close it. He had the expression of someone reassessing who, exactly, they had decided to introduce themselves to. "I'm just going to" he gestured vaguely at the ice.

"Good talk," I said.

He left. I turned back to my notebook.

"You just did that on purpose." Declan appeared on my other side, skates off now, sneakers on, jacket zipped. He was looking at me with an expression that was newer than the ones I'd catalogued something closer to impressed than amused

"He introduced himself," I said. "I was cordial."

"You cornered him about a rut in the ice."

"I brought it up conversationally."

"Kowalski looked like he wanted to leave his own body."

"He did leave," I said. "Quickly and without escalating. I'd call that a successful interaction."

Declan stared at me for a second. Then he made a sound short, genuine, the involuntary kind that was either a laugh or something that had been trying to be a laugh and gotten halfway there. He turned it into a cough, but I was standing close enough that the transition was not convincing.

I looked at my notebook with great serenity.

"Do you need anything else for today?" he said. "More architectural observation?"

"I have what I need."

"Good." He shouldered his bag. "I have a forty-five minute skate maintenance window in here before the next team gets the ice. Stick work, edge checks. If you want to stay for that."

I thought about my nine AM lecture. About the ten-minute walk from the rink. About the fact that I had everything I needed and staying was operationally unnecessary.

"I'll stay for twenty minutes," I said.

He nodded like this was the answer he'd expected, which I found mildly annoying, and headed through the gate onto the ice.