Prologue: One Lucky Shot
~SAGE~
The puck leaves my stick with a crack that echoes through the arena like a gunshot, and for three glorious seconds, I watch it sail toward the top corner of the net with everything I have behind it.
Speed. Precision. Fury.
Every muscle in my body is screaming from two hours of drills, my lungs burning with that familiar fire that only comes from pushing past the point where your body politely suggests you stop and your brain responds with a very aggressivego fuck yourself.
My jersey is plastered to my spine with sweat, my legs are trembling under the weight of fatigue, and I can feel the blisters forming on my right hand where the tape has worn thin against the shaft of my stick.
But the shot is perfect.
I know it before it lands. Know it in my bones, in the muscle memory that has been carved into my body through fifteen years of early mornings and bruised shins and coaches who screamed until their voices cracked. The angle is textbook. The velocity iselite. The placement targets the exact gap between the goalie's blocker and the crossbar that only opens for a fraction of a heartbeat during a glove save.
The puck rips through that gap like it was designed for the space.
Top shelf. Clean. Untouchable.
The net bulges.
And the arena stays silent.
No horn. No cheers. No thunderous roar of fans on their feet and teammates crashing into my body with celebration. Just the hollow echo of rubber hitting mesh, followed by the soft scrape of my blades as I slow to a stop at center ice.
Because this is not a game.
This is a tryout.
And I already know how it ends.
The scouts are clustered behind the plexiglass at the far end, their clipboards angled away from me like shields. Three men in identical navy parkas with NHL logos stitched onto the breast pockets. They have been watching for the full two hours, and in that time, I have caught exactly zero of them writing anything down while I was on the ice.
Not during the skating drills, where I outpaced every single Alpha on the roster in the lateral agility test.
Nor during the puck-handling circuit, where I threaded the obstacle course two full seconds faster than the next closest time.
And certainly not during the scrimmage, where I stripped the puck from their best forward three times in four minutes and set up a breakaway goal that made Coach Briggs whistle through his teeth.
Nothing.
They wrote plenty when Michael Ross deked through the neutral zone with a move I taught him last week. Scribbledfuriously when Dillon Park completed a stretch pass that I set up by drawing two defenders toward my position. Nodded and circled and underlined when Tyler Webb scored off a rebound that only existed because my initial shot forced the goalie to over-commit.
But Sage Holloway?
The Omega girl with the navy-and-emerald hair and the scarred knuckles and the defensive instincts that can read a play three passes before it develops?
Invisible.
I lean on my stick at center ice, chest heaving, watching my breath crystallize in the cold arena air. The other players are drifting toward the bench in small groups, helmets tucked under arms, laughing about dinner plans and weekend parties and the casual bullshit that fills the space between meaningful moments.
None of them look at me.
That used to hurt. Back when I was fourteen and trying out for my first competitive team, the silence felt like suffocation. Like the air had been sucked out of the rink and replaced with something thick and hostile that clung to my skin and whisperedyou do not belong herein a voice that sounded a lot like my mother's.
Now it just feels familiar.
The comfortable weight of being underestimated by everyone in the room.
