Page 262 of Slashed Bonds

Five days. The shadow lost four-one. The real one won’t be the shadow. But the shadow’s where you find out the plan’s a plan.

Nikolai had faced forty-one shots from a shadow and stopped thirty-nine, and the two that went in were both on the power play, both from the slot, both off a screen the twin-Dorian set with his back to the net. He came off and sat on the bench with his eyes shut for ten seconds and then opened them and said to nobody, “He’ll screen with the stick down. Silas’s teams always screen with the stick down. I need the glove higher through the bodies.” And then he went back out and we ran the kill twelve more times, and the puck didn’t go in again.

He found the still. Then he found the hole in it and closed it. That’s the whole man, in one shift.

Killian’s shift came after that. The one after a lost draw, when Theo chases. Okonkwo chased, because he’d been told to, head down up the wall, and Killian met him at the far blue line with his shoulder square and his feet on the ice and nothing in it the liaison could write a page about, and Okonkwo sat down on the ice with his back against the glass and said a word I won’t repeat and Killian skated away.

Halloran didn’t blow the whistle. Halloran looked at the liaison, who was in the stands with her notebook, and the liaison looked at her notebook, and wrote nothing.

Then Roz had skated out to center with a clipboard under her arm, which she never does, and said one thing to the whole group with her reading glasses on her head.

“They’ll have watched the same tape. Assume they know you know. Assume Ross has been told about his mouth and his hand and he’s spent a week trying to unlearn both.” She’d looked at me. “Nobody unlearns a tell in a week. They get worse at hiding it. He’ll breathe through his nose on the first draw and through his mouth on the second, and you’ll see him deciding.”

She’s right. Theo’s never been able to hold a decision past the first time it costs him something.

“So.” Valerie pulls a stool up and swings the lamp. “What’s the vision?”

I show her.

The ink that’s already on my wrist got there four years ago in a strip mall between a nail salon and a place that sold vape juice, from a man with a shaking hand who looked at the slashes and said I can cover those in the tone of someone offering to bury a body. I paid him in twenties from a money game. He went heavy. He went black over every line until my wrist was a bracelet of nothing, and I walked out into the parking lot and looked at it and felt, for the first time in a year, like a person who’d done something to her own body on purpose.

He was scared of me. Val said that in a lounge with a pie story still in the air. He hid the scar instead of using it. Today somebody’s going to use it.

On my phone, the images I’ve been collecting since a beanbag and a stuffed snake. A monarch. Wings open, the orange gone to a deep umber in the versions I like best, and around the whole of it a dark aura, a bleed, like the butterfly’s giving off smoke or shadow or something that isn’t light. A crescent moon behind it in some. A crown in one, drawn badly by Viper with her thumb.

“Monarch,” I say. “With a black aura around it. Like it’s radiating.”

She looks for four seconds. Then she’s already drawing.

Not on paper. On the tablet by the printer, with a stylus, fast, the way Cassian draws a play when he’s seen it in his head and his hand’s catching up. The wings come first, veined, the umber shading in. Then the aura, which she does with the side of the stylus in a smoky stroke that goes out past the wings and fades, and it’s better than any of my photos, it looks like heat coming off a road.

“Crown?” she says.

“Viper’s idea.”

“Viper’s ideas are usually good.” A small crown, low, between the antennae, barely there. “Sized for the back of a hand, this’ll sit from here”—a finger at the base of my index knuckle—“to here”—the wrist bone—“and the aura can run down between the tendons. It’ll move when you make a fist. Can you live with it moving?”

“I’d like it to move.”

She hits print.

The stencil comes out purple and damp, and she holds it up against my hand, over the ink that’s already there on the inside of the wrist where a strip-mall artist hid a scar four years ago, and I look at it and I see my hand with a thing on it that I chose.

“Can we add two tiny butterflies?”

It comes out before I’ve decided to say it.

“Sure?” She tilts her head. “Any reasoning?”

I think about it.

Long. Hard. With the lamp warm on my knuckles and three men pretending not to listen from across a basement and a pink friend who’s stopped filming because she’s heard something in my voice. And then I giggle, which is the sound I make when the alternative is the other sound, and I whisper it.

“I always thought I’d have two kids.”

Nobody moves.

“So. Maybe they’ll represent the one I lost.” A breath. “And the one I’ll always yearn for. Until my next life.”