Page 80 of Chasing Gold, Catching Her

“We can go with triples too,” Arkadiy continued as they slowly walked toward the Kiss & Cry. “It will just be harder to win the qualifiers for the quota, and after that harder to get to the Olympics… but we’ll talk about all that later. Now let’s go see the scores.”

“I can’t…” she mumbled in a trembling voice, barely moving her lips because even speaking somehow made the pain sharper. “I need to go to the infirmary, my knee hurts so bad.”

Arkadiy’s face changed immediately, all the joy and tension from the scores vanishing somewhere at once, replaced by that cold, strict seriousness that always appeared when one of his skaters was hurt.

“Take her to the infirmary, okay?” he said sharply, turning toward his assistants. “Tell me everything right after the examination, I’ll wait in the area for the points, understood?”

Two young guys immediately came up to her, and Alisa recognized Sasha and Artyom — the boys she trained with almost every day, who had apparently come today either to watch the competition or to help as volunteers, although right now it did not matter at all, because the second they saw her face both of them instantly became pale and serious.

“Easy, easy…” Sasha muttered quietly.

They crouched down beside her, carefully putting the guards on her blades, and Alisa nodded weakly.

“Thank you, guys…”

Then they took her by the shoulders and almost carried her down the corridor toward the medical examination room, trying with all their strength to make sure she would not have to bend her left knee even once, and Alisa gritted her teeth with every step, because the pain was spreading higher and higher, crawling under her skin, and inside her head, much worse than the pain, there were thoughts.

Terrible thoughts.

What if?..

What if it was like Lev’s?

What if that sharp, wrong feeling in the knee was not just pain, but the beginning of the end?

Alisa jerked her head from side to side as if she could physically throw those thoughts away.

“No, no, hush, baby, it’s okay, it’s okay… maybe you just overworked yourself, maybe you just need to rest, you need to sleep, that’s all, it’s okay, it’s okay…” she whispered under her breath over and over and over again, clutching at those words as if they were the only thing keeping her from falling apart completely.

By the time they reached the infirmary, her heart was beating so hard that she could hear it in her ears. The boys sat her down carefully on the couch and left the room, and then there was only the nurse, the smell of antiseptic and alcohol, the cold light under the ceiling and endless questions.

“Does it hurt here?”

“And here?”

“And if I press like this?”

Alisa answered automatically, barely hearing herself, because her own voice sounded strange and distant, as if it were echoing somewhere very far away.

“Here… yes… stronger here… no, not there…”

Time dragged on endlessly.

Then at some point the nurse left too, and Alisa remained alone in the examination room, lying on the narrow couch with her knee wrapped tightly in elastic bandages, while both skates lay abandoned on the floor in the corner, the laces untied hastily, as if she had simply torn them off.

The room smelled of pain ointment now too.

Then there was a knock.

The door opened, and Arkadiy came in. He was holding a tube of anti-inflammatory cream in one hand, and his face was so serious that Alisa’s stomach dropped somewhere down into her skates. For a second she thought, that’s it, that’s it, it’s fucking over.

But then suddenly he smiled.

“You’re going to Beijing,” he said.

Alisa stared at him. She couldn’t believe her ears!

To Beijing?