They had their cameras on the ice before anyone had even started drills, which meant everyone was performing slightly more than usual, which meantIwas performing more than usual, which should have been impossible given my baseline.
Something was still wrong.
Not dramatically wrong, nothing that would read on camera, nothing that would make the reporters scribble something alarming, but wrong in the way a car sounds wrong before it stops, this small persistent wrongness underneath the normal noise.
My timing was off. Not by much, half a second maybe, but in hockey half a second was the difference between a good play and an embarrassing one, and I knew my own body well enough to know when it was lying to me and still couldn't quite catch the lie.
I pushed harder, the way I always pushed harder when something felt wrong, because the answer tonot workingwas alwaysmore.
Then Jenkins went down.
It was nothing, the rookie just caught an edge wrong in a drill, went down sideways, came up wincing with his hand on his knee. Wasn't even a hit.
He hobbled to the boards and Cross was already there when he got there, already crouching. I watched from across the ice while he checked Jenkins over with his hands, asking questions I couldn't hear. Jenkins nodded, and Cross said something, and Jenkins laughed.
Laughed?
Cross said something that made Jenkinslaugh,his hand still on the kid's knee, and the expression on his face was. . . It wasdifferent, it was a different face than the one I got.
I had been close to Cross more times than I could count. Training rooms, benches, corridors, alleys, his bedroom in the dark. I thought I had catalogued every version of his face.
I had not seen that one.
He helped Jenkins up. Said something else. Jenkins nodded again and Cross patted his shoulder, once, and sent him back to the bench.
I watched the whole thing.
Cross never uses that tone with me.
I didn't know why that was the thought I landed on, or what I was supposed to do with it. I didn't want his tone. I didn't need him to be gentle with me. I needed him to stay out of my way andlet me do my job. The fact that he'd apparently reserved some separate, functional, human version of himself for everyone else on the roster was just information. Noted. Filed. Moving on.
I tried something stupid.
I knew it was stupid when I set it up, which was my particular brand: full awareness of the mistake while making it, narrating your own car crash in real time.
The reporters were there, and my timing was off. Cross was over at the boards being warm at Jenkins. I went for a move I'd landed maybe sixty percent of the time in practice even when I was feeling perfect. A sharp cut into a spin shot from a terrible angle, the kind of thing that worked when your body was cooperating and very much didn't when it wasn't.
It didn't.
My edge caught wrong, the spin turned into something uncontrolled, and I went down sideways on the ice, not like Jenkins, not a gentle wobble, but hard, my shoulder hitting first and my helmet after, and the world did a slow, horrible tilt that had nothing to do with the fall.
I stayed down.
Not by choice, not this time. Just stayed there, because the ice was cold and level and the ceiling of the rink wasn't tilting like my vision was. I needed exactly four seconds of not moving while everything recalibrated.
The rink went quiet.
Four seconds.
Then skates on ice, fast and deliberate, and Cross was kneeling next to me with one knee on the ice, touching the back of my helmet with two fingers, not pulling, just contact, justhere, and his voice was low and completely even.
"Stay down."
Not loud. Didn't need to be. The command had this quality to it, his voice, like it came from somewhere solid, and my bodydid the thing it always did with Cross which was obey before my brain weighed in.
"I'm—"
"Stay down, Wesley."
