I work through it in the slow methodical way of an Omega who has just remembered, with mild surprise, that food is a thing. The car charges in the small quiet hum of itself. Jude sips a black coffee out of a paper cup and watches the highway in the side mirror. The cab of the Tesla holds the warm savoury of caramelized onion and yeasty bun and the cold-sweet of strawberry, and the amber-bourbon of him, and the small steady pine-trace of the blanket I have wrapped around me, which I confirmed at mile twenty-eight by smell test belongs to Rémi.
“So,” I venture, around a sip of the milkshake, “are you nervous. About Friday’s game.”
Jude does not, immediately, answer.
Which is, by Jude standards, the answer.
“Yes,” he says, level. “We have played that team three times in the past two seasons. We have lost three times. They are not a beatable opponent in the conventional sense. They are a roster with senior-tier playoff experience, last year’s national-tournament finalists, and at least four players who are, on any honest scouting report, going to be in the Stanley Cup pool in the next eighteen months.”
“Okay.” I tip my head against the headrest. “Do you think we have that. As a team. The same potential.”
Long pause.
Long enough that I, for one shameful second, want to retract the question.
“No,” Jude says, finally. “We do not. Not currently.”
Oh.
Honesty. I will, in fact, take it.
“I appreciate the honesty, Captain.”
“To be clear,” he continues, evenly, “it is not that we do not have the talent. We do. The dangerous part is that we do, and I can see it, and Coach Declan can see it, and the Saint Aldwin and conference-final scouting reports both quietly flag us as a roster with deep upside. The problem is that one half of this team is, professionally, committed to the project, and the other half of this team is, professionally, committed to itself. And the two halves are, right now, colliding in real time inside my building.”
“Did you bring it up to Coach.”
“Yes. We are sitting down together after this game and going line by line.”
Quiet.
I sip the milkshake. The strawberry hits the back of my throat in the small cold soothing way a strawberry milkshake is, in this country, professionally engineered to hit the back of an Omega’sthroat, and I take a beat to decide whether I am going to ask the next question.
I ask it.
“It is because of me, isn’t it. The conflict. Why does it not just make sense, Captain, to get rid of the variable.”
Jude turns his head.
Properly. The full captain-look, undiluted, the green-gold of his eyes locked onto mine across the small interior of the parked car, and his voice when it comes is the precise level register he uses when he is about to put a sentence on the record in a way that will not, later, be available for renegotiation.
“O’Shea.”
“Mm.”
“You are not the variable in this equation. If those fuckers cannot adapt to the presence of a competent goaltender because the goaltender has, in their estimation, the wrong designation, then their mentality is what is holding this roster back. You are not the problem. They are.”
Oh.
“Okay,” I whisper.
“For the record,” he continues, “since I do not appear to have communicated this clearly enough at any prior point in the past six weeks, here is the line-by-line. Your reaction time on a high glove-side shot is, by my own private metrics, the fastest in this conference. Your post-integration is the cleanest I have seen at our level since I started watching tape at twelve. Your rebound control is, on average, sixty percent better than the league baseline. Your read on a forward’s shoulder is, frankly, alarming. You have three flaws I will name only because I have promised you the honesty.”
“Go on.” My voice is very small.
“One. You drop the left hip a quarter-beat early on the post-side. Coach D and I are already on this. Two. You over-commiton the first shot of a sequence approximately twelve percent of the time, which is, on the scale we are talking about, a fixable habit. Three.”
He pauses.
