Chapter 2 Eleven Minutes

Mars

The locker room smelled like sweat, sparkling cider, and victory.

Someone had turned the music up so loud the lockers rattled. Sophomores were dancing on benches. A reporter I'd never met shoved a microphone in my face and asked how it felt to be a legend, and I heard myself say, "Ask me tomorrow, I'm still breathing."

"She's still breathing!" Bea Tanaka yelled from across the room. She was our trainer, five feet tall, and somehow always the loudest person in any room. "Log it, somebody! Marin Kessler survived!"

"Barely," I said.

"Ice your knee."

"It's fine."

"It's not fine, it's swollen. Ice it or I'll tell Voss you're hiding it."

"You wouldn't."

"Try me."

I dropped onto a bench and let her press a bag of ice against my knee. My hands were still shaking. My whole body felt like a struck bell. Around me my teammates screamed and hugged and cried, and somebody had started a chant that was mostly my name and partly a swear word.

"Kessler! Kessler! KESSLER!"

"Oh my God, stop," I said. But I was grinning so hard my face hurt.

Sloane Whitaker dropped onto the bench beside me. She still had her jersey on, her hair a wild tangle. She looked at me for a long moment, and for once she didn't sneer.

"That was a good goal," she said.

"Thank you."

"I hate that it was a good goal."

"I know."

"Don't get used to me being nice."

"I wouldn't dare."

She almost smiled. Then she stood and walked away, and I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.

I glanced at the clock over the door. Eleven minutes had passed since the buzzer. I looked around the room, searching for the one face I wanted to see more than any other.

"Where's Tess?" I asked.

Bea looked up. "Isn't she with you?"

"She was on the ice. Then she wasn't."

"She's probably hiding in the bathroom. You know how she gets with crowds."

"Yeah." But my stomach had started to twist. "She wasn't smiling, Bea. When we won. She looked at somebody in the stands and she just stopped."

"Who?"

"A guy in a gray coat."

Bea frowned. "Which guy?"

"I don't know. She did the signal."

"What signal?"

"The crossbar thing. Two taps."

The ice pack in Bea's hand slowly stopped moving. "The thing you two made up in September? The joke?"

"It wasn't a joke," I said. "We never used it. She said it was for emergencies."

"Mars."

"I'm going to find her."

"Mars, the trophy ceremony is in five minutes."

"Then tell them I'm in the bathroom!"

I was already on my feet, ignoring the knee, ignoring Bea calling my name behind me. I pushed through the crowd and out the door, and the noise dropped away like somebody had shut a lid.

The hallway beyond the locker room was cold and empty. Concrete walls, flickering fluorescent lights, a rubber floor that squeaked under my skates. I pulled off my helmet and let it hang from my hand.

"Tess?" I called.

Nothing. Just the distant thump of music.

I tried the bathrooms first. Empty. The equipment room. Empty. The medical room, where a single sports drink sat sweating on a counter. I checked the players' lounge, the video room, even the supply closet, feeling stupider by the second.

"Come on," I muttered. "Don't do this. Where are you?"

At the end of the hall, a heavy steel door stood cracked open. A faded sign above it read ICE MAINTENANCE. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

The Zamboni bay.

Tess used to hide in there before big games. She said it was the only quiet place in the entire building, that the smell of wet ice and machine oil helped her think. I'd teased her about it for two years.

"Tess?" I pushed the door open. "If you're in here scaring me on purpose, I'm going to kill you."

Cold air hit my face. The bay was long and dim, with a low ceiling and puddled concrete. The big resurfacing machine sat parked against the far wall like a sleeping animal. A single work light buzzed over the drain.

And there, beside the machine, in the light, someone was lying on the floor.

"Tess?"

She was on her side. Her pads were still on. Her arm was flung out over the wet concrete like she'd been reaching for something.

"Tess!"

I dropped to my knees so hard I felt it through my kneecaps. I grabbed her shoulder and rolled her onto her back, and her head lolled sideways, and her face was the color of old paper.

"No. No, no, no. Tess. Hey. Hey!" I slapped her cheek, gently, then not gently. "Wake up. Wake up right now, this isn't funny."

Nothing. Her lips were a faint, terrible blue.

I put two fingers against her throat. I felt for a pulse the way we'd been taught in team first aid, and I couldn't find one, and I tried again, and again, pressing so hard my own hand shook.

"Somebody!" I screamed. "SOMEBODY HELP!"

My voice echoed off the concrete. Nobody came.

"Okay," I said, hearing my own voice go high and thin. "Okay. Okay. I know this. I know how to do this."

I tore off my gloves. I tilted her chin back. I pinched her nose and breathed into her mouth, two breaths, and then I laced my hands together on her chest and pushed.

One. Two. Three.

"Come on, Tess."

Four. Five. Six.

"You don't get to do this. You don't get to do this to me. Not tonight. Not tonight."

I lost count somewhere past thirty. I gave two more breaths, and her chest rose and fell only because I was making it. I pushed again. Her ribs cracked under my hands, and I cried out and didn't stop.

"HELP! Somebody help us!"

Footsteps pounded down the corridor. The door banged against the wall.

"Oh my God." Bea. She was barefoot, still holding a medical bag, her face gone white. "Oh my God, Mars, what happened?"

"I don't know. I found her like this."

"How long?"

"I don't know! I don't know, five minutes, ten, I don't know!" I kept pushing. "There's no pulse. She's not breathing."

"Move." Bea dropped beside me and tore open the bag. She pulled out a defibrillator and ripped the pads open with shaking fingers. "Cut her jersey. Get it off her chest, now."

"With what?"

"There's scissors in the front pocket!"

I fumbled them out and sliced through Tess's jersey and pads as fast as I could. Bea slapped the sticky pads against her skin. The machine spoke in a flat, calm voice.

Analyzing heart rhythm. Do not touch the patient.

"Hands off," Bea said. "Mars. Hands off!"

I pulled back and knelt there, my palms hovering over my best friend's chest, sobbing.

Shock not advised. Continue CPR.

"No," I whispered. "No, that's wrong. Shock her. Shock her again."

"It won't fire if there's no rhythm to shock," Bea said, her voice cracking. "Keep pushing. Keep pushing, Mars, I'll call it in."

"Just call it!"

"I'm calling!" She grabbed her phone with one hand and pressed it to her ear. "This is Bea Tanaka at Lakefront Arena, I need paramedics in the ice maintenance bay right now. A nineteen year old female, unresponsive, no pulse. Yes, we're doing CPR. Please hurry."

I kept pushing. My arms burned. Tears ran into my mouth. Beside me, Tess's mask lay on its side against the concrete where it must have fallen, and somewhere in the blur of grief and adrenaline my eyes drifted to it.

A strip of white tape had been wrapped across the cage. It wasn't the tape she used for her stick. It was thinner, cleaner, and it was covered in tiny handwriting. Numbers, dozens of them, in black marker. Rows and rows of them, cramped and neat, like somebody had needed to write everything down in a hurry.

"Bea," I said. "Bea, look at her mask."

"Not now!"

"There's writing on it."

"Mars, I can't, keep pushing!"

I pushed. I stared at those numbers, and a strange, cold pressure started to build behind my ribs. Tess didn't tape her mask. She never taped her mask. She said it was bad luck to change anything the night of a game.

My eyes dropped to her hands. Her right hand still wore its blocker. Her left, her catching glove, was gone.

"Her glove," I said. "Where's her other glove?"

"What?"

"She never takes it off. Never. It's not here."

"Mars, please!"

The door banged open again. Paramedics rushed in with a stretcher and a bag and a wave of noise. Someone pulled me backward by the shoulders. I fought them, then stopped, and let them go.

"What's her name?" one of them asked, dropping beside Tess.

"Tess," I said. "Tess Wynn. She's the goalie."

"How long has she been down?"

"I don't know. Eleven minutes. Maybe more."

"Any medical history? Allergies, heart conditions?"

"No. Nothing. She's healthy. She's the healthiest person I know."

They cut, and pressed, and shocked, and shouted numbers at each other. I stood pressed against the cold wall while Bea held my hand so hard it hurt. I watched them work, and I watched the clock on the paramedic's monitor, and I watched a flat green line refuse to move.

It was hard to say exactly when I knew. Maybe it was the way the paramedic stopped shouting. Maybe it was the way he looked at his partner and shook his head.

"Time of death," he said quietly, "twenty two nineteen."

"No," I said.

"I'm so sorry."

"No. She just won. We just won. She was fine."

"Miss."

"She was fine!"

The door slammed open again. This time it was security, two big men in dark jackets, and between them, striding through like he owned the building, was a tall young man in a navy warmup jacket with a HALLORAN crest on the chest.

I recognized him instantly. Everybody at Northmere did. Rhett Halloran, captain of the men's team, the dark and cold and untouchable defenseman they called The Professor. He'd never said a word to me in his life.

He didn't look at me now. He didn't look at anyone. He looked at the stretcher, and at the pale face on it, and all the color drained out of him at once.

"Tess," he said.

It was barely a sound.

"Sir, you can't be in here," one of the paramedics said.

"That's my sister."

I stared at him. The words didn't make sense. Tess didn't have a brother. Tess Wynn was an only child from a small town, and she'd told me that herself, on her bed, in the dark, more than once.

Rhett crossed the room in four long steps and dropped to his knees beside the stretcher. He touched her cheek with two fingers, very gently, the way you'd touch something that might break.

Then he looked up, and found me standing against the wall in my bloodied jersey with my best friend's mask in my shaking hands, and his gray eyes turned to ice.

"What did you do?" he said.