My suppressants are calibrated for Knottingley.
For a town where the Alpha population could fit in a single pub and frequently did. The dose in my bag was prescribed by a small-town doctor for a small-town saturation, and I am now standing in a kingdombuiltof Alphas—every breath I take is layered with them, cedar and smoke and bourbon and bonfire, a dozen rut-edged signatures braided through the cold.
Will my dose hold here?
That's a tomorrow problem…
I decide, folding the pamphlet into my back pocket alongside the first one. Today's problem is finding the hockey administration office before I lose my nerve, my fingers, or both.
The main building's lobby is a cathedral of glass and echo. My boots squeak. Somewhere a whistle shrills through a far doorway. The air in here is warmer, thicker—floor wax, fresh coffee, the rubber-and-tape perfume of a place where equipment lives, and underneath it all that ambient, unkillable note ofAlpha,turned up to a volume my hometown never reached.
I find the corridor marked ADMINISTRATION.
I do not find an unobstructed door.
Two men stand square in the mouth of it. Coaching staff, by the look of them—North Star polos stretched over the kind of shoulders that used to play and now mostly intimidate. One's holding a clipboard. The other's holding a coffee. Both are holding a conversation that does not include the possibility of my existence.
I stop, wait, and briefly, I attempt to be a model of patience.
Attempt…until I’m just wasting time.
"Excuse me." I shift the duffel. "Could I get through?"
Nothing.
Not a glance or a grunt. The clipboard one keeps talking about a defenseman's hip flexor like I'm a draft from a window.
I feel my eyebrow climb.
All right.
I plant my boots, square my own shoulders,built, thank you, from years of conditioning that would make their defenseman weep, and try again, pitching my voice with the carrying snap I usually reserve for waving off my own defense.
"Gentlemen. I need to get past. As administrative staff, is standing in the middle of a doorway, the look you're going for, or is that a happy accident?"
That lands.
Both heads turn.
The coffee one looks me over—duffel, stick, pink hair escaping its braid, the whole unlikely package—with the slow, cataloguing once-over of a man pricing a horse.
"You need something from hockey admin?" he says, like the words don't fit together.
"Figure skating's the other building," the clipboard one supplies, already turning back to his hip flexor.
"I'm aware of where figure skating is." I keep my tone pleasant.Pleasant is a weapon if you sharpen it right."Three people have told me. I'm not here for figure skating. I'm here for the hockey department."
A pause.
And then they laugh.
Not a chuckle. Not a politeah, the new girl's funny.
They lose it—genuine, doubled-over, wheezing hilarity, the clipboard man actually wiping the corner of his eye, as though I have delivered the finest joke this corridor has heard all winter.
I stand in it and let them have it. I've found that if you don't flinch while a man laughs at you, he runs out of laughs faster.
"Oh—oh, that's good." Coffee straightens, still grinning. "Sweetheart. There are no women on the hockey roster. Not in this department. Female participation at this college runs about one percent, and that one percent is not playingnet." He leans in, and—God, here it comes—hesniffs.A slow, theatrical pull ofair, right off the line of my throat. "And you, sweetheart, are very obviously an Omega. So you're standing in the wrong building, in the wrong department, in the wrong story."
