“Okay, let’s get ready, skate to the rink, and play the best match of our lives,” she said. The cheers from her teammates temporarily settled her nerves. When she reached over to puther phone in her locker, it flashed with a message from a familiar name:
Gracie:Good luck today!!! Cheering you on from my couch!!
The message came with a photo of Gracie sitting in front of her TV in full Team GB regalia. Patriotic to the point where the plaster cast around her broken leg was decorated with Union Jacks. Ari smiled, sent her a team photo from the locker room, and then joined the girls as they got ready.
Izzy, who was in charge of the playlist that day, pressedPLAYas they separated from their groups and put aside their distractions. It was time to get into match mode. Ari watched her teammates pick up their helmets, lace up their skates, and do their final individual prematch rituals. Izzy danced around the room, hyping herself up as she got ready to leave. Yasmeen sprayed her favorite perfume on the sleeves of her jersey, saying it smelled like good luck. And Sienna closed her eyes, trying to center herself amid the chaos. As the players made the final adjustments to their uniforms, Ari sent out a silent prayer to a God she only believed in on the rink, and then she and the other girls did one final team huddle before they made their way out into the hockey stadium.
The match they played felt straight out of a dream.
From the minute the first puck landed in the center of the rink, Ari realized they had the advantage of beingunderestimated. The Czech team had beaten Team GB last time, so Ari could tell that they’d come into the match certain they would win again. However, that assumption had made them less alert when it came to preventing the British from scoring. Plus, they’d made the mistake of underestimating just how determined Ari and her teammates were. The girls had something to prove. Going home early wasn’t an option.
Izzy had never looked more alert in her life. Ari watched in awe as her friend prevented their opponents from scoring goals, as if she already knew where the puck would land. But the puck rarely reached her because Yasmeen and the other girls on defense took Ari’s January training session advice and built a rock-solid wall between the center and the goal. Sienna, who had spent all six weeks of boot camp worrying, skated around the ice with laser focus, and Ari smiled beneath her helmet as she watched her shoot goal after goal with an uncharacteristic level of confidence. The combination of it all inspired Ari to play in what felt like the best form of her life. She scored goals and batted pucks away from the opposition with fierce determination. That morning, the girls commanded the ice rink as if it were their own, and, for the first time that year, their team played in complete harmony.
By the time the final buzzer rang, the score was 6–2. Ari couldn’t believe it, they’d won their first preliminary match and had gotten further than the pundits and cynics back home had predicted. And despite all Ari’s worries, her first match as captain hadn’t been a total mess. She was overwhelmed with relief as her teammates skated to their side of the rink, pulled themselves into a group hug, and cheered in delight.
“I know it’s the first game, and we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves, but…” began Ari, excited to celebrate but afraid of jinxing it.
“We killed it,” said Sienna as she squeezed her tight.
It was definitely too early to celebrate; this was just the first of the four group-stage matches they were playing. But Ari couldn’t help but feel a small, tentative wave of hope.
She looked out into the crowd, trying to see if any of her other athlete friends were there to watch the game. She waved when she saw a Polish speed skater and a Chilean skier she knew cheering in the crowd. But her eyes stopped when they reached the middle of the stands. Because there, amid her friends, was one unwelcome guest.
Harrison.
She hadn’t invited him, of course, but he’d still shown up. She hadn’t messaged him, but he was only ever a matter of minutes away. The men’s snowboarding team was staying just one floor below her in GB House, and the Village was too small to avoid him. So she needed to devise a Harrison-proof plan to stop him from trying to claw his way back into her life.
Harrison didn’t really do boundaries, but there was one she knew he wouldn’t cross. By the time she and the girls skated out of the rink and headed over to the locker room to debrief, she was already hatching a plan. It was a long shot, and there were a hundred ways it could go wrong, but as she started to map it all out in her head, she realized it might be ridiculous enough to work.
She just needed to figure out where the press office was and find out if Drew was willing to playone more game.
16Drew
DAY ONE OF THE 2026 OLYMPICS
MESSAGE FROM:Zeus BTS team
Key people:Lukas Horvath
Key sports:Freestyle skiing and ski jump
Assignment:Photograph the highs and lows of today’s competition. Try to capture the behind-the-scenes moments our followers won’t see on the screen.
Drew was pretty sure he was going to throw up. He could feel the cereal he’d eaten for breakfast churning in his stomach and the coffee he’d washed it down with threatening to come back up. It was fourteen degrees Fahrenheit outside, but small, stressed-out droplets of sweat were crawling down his face as he stood in the snow. Drew had woken up early that morning to take a shuttle to the top of the mountain and watch people fly over eight hundred feet through the air in the name of sport.
The ski jump was one of the most dangerous winter sports, but it was also one of the most compelling. The jumpers put their lives at risk each time they left the slope. Drew and the other photographers in the press pit couldn’t look away. It felt like watching someone else’s life flashing before his eyes, but he had an assignment to complete, so he positioned his camera to get the perfect midair shot. That morning’s sunshine made the white snow on the mountains look too bright, so he switched to shooting in manual, lowered the ISO, and walked around to find a spot that didn’t have him positioned in front of the sun. As he walked back and forth across the snow taking photos of the skiers, he wondered what it would be like to fly without knowing where he’d land.
When the final jump was over, he rushed over to the athletes standing in the press circle. Zeus Athletics had assigned him to take photos of Lukas Horvath, one of the Slovakian ski jumpers they were sponsoring that year. But when Drew reached him, he realized just how deflated the skier looked. The strangest thing about professional sports was how quickly athletes were expected to go from a devastating loss straight into an interview. Lukas had come last in the ski jump due to a mixture of nerves and a sprain he hadn’t quite recovered from. It felt weird to be standing there and documenting him at his lowest point, but Drew was on assignment. So, he got his camera out and took a photo of Lukas’s downcast expression, his gloved hands carrying his skis, and the team of coaches surrounding him with reassurance.
At first, Drew felt guilty. As if he was imposing on a private moment. But then he remembered how a person’s low points often made for the most memorable and meaningful photos. His sister’s devastating ice hockey injury had landed just a few days before her eighteenth birthday. But their grandparents insisted on celebrating anyway. Drew could still remember the photo he’dtaken of Thandie holding a slice of birthday cake with a pained expression. Four years later, she’d used it on the invite for the party she’d thrown to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. One that almost perfectly coincided with her getting an invite to join the Olympic team. He hoped that one day Lukas would find the photo he’d taken and reframe it in his mind.
His official assignment at the Games was to get photos of the Zeus-sponsored athletes in action. But he wanted to impress them, so he’d pitched them a photo diary of candid behind-the-scenes moments. Primarily photos of athletes but also ordinary people, too. Spectators, volunteers, family members, and other people experiencing the Games in their unique ways. So, as he headed over to the line for the chairlift, he tried to come up with a list of people he’d met who might be willing to let him take a portrait of them.
When he got to the front of the line and saw the downhill chairlift, he was overcome by a sinking feeling. Drew wasn’t scared of heights, but riding a Ferris wheel or sitting on a residential rooftop was a lot different than sitting in an open-air chairlift a few dozen feet above the ground. However, he needed to get to the bottom of the mountain, so he took a seat and winced as the operator locked him in. At the last second, another passenger came running over. They had their hood up and a woolly scarf obscuring most of their face. Drew watched as they took their place on the other side of the chairlift and checked that the safety bar was secure. The lift began moving, and before Drew could truly understand what he was getting himself into, they were on their way.
The chairlift was over a hundred feet above the ground. Drew’s feet were dangling over the mountains with only a flimsy-looking metal bar between him and a deadly drop. The sense of vertigo was becoming overwhelming, Drew didn’t realize hewas whisperingno no nountil the guy on the other end of the chairlift started laughing.
The man pulled down his hood, unwrapped his scarf, and got comfortable. Drew immediately recognized him. It was Hans Leitner. Drew had spotted him and his film crew gathering footage at the top of the mountain and figured they would wait for the shuttle like the rest of the media crews. But he and Hans were casual travel companions on what felt like the least stable mode of transport in the Village.
