Blue Ticks

Thirteen: The Rival

Delivering the Ghost91 file took me three days.

Not because it was complicated. Because every time I opened the anonymous email draft and hovered over the send button, I thought about Kai's voice saying Nate's name and closed the tab.

I sent it on Thursday morning before first period, standing in the girls' bathroom with my phone, so I couldn't talk myself out of it again.

No blue stationery nor handwriting. Just a clean forwarded file from an account that didn't exist attached to an email address that would stop existing the moment I hit send. Ghost91 got their confirmation. I got my $120. The whole thing was invisible and untraceable and exactly the way Blue Ticks was supposed to work.

I felt terrible for the rest of the day.

By lunch the rumor was already moving.

I heard it first from two juniors behind me in the lunch line, something about Nate Calloway and the Riverside game and a freshman who got hurt. By the time I got to our table, Maya was already on her phone, eyebrows raised.

"Did you see the hockey group chat?" she asked, not looking up.

"I'm not in the hockey group chat."

"Tyler showed me." She turned her phone around. It was a screenshot of a screenshot, already three people removed from the source. Someone sent Coach Ramirez proof that Nate lied about the Riverside night. Drew Halston. Remember that freshman who got jumped? Nate was supposed to be there.

I looked at it long enough to seem normal. "That's bad."

"It's really bad. Tyler said practice got cancelled this morning. Coach pulled Nate into his office." Maya set her phone down. "Kai's going to lose it. Those two are like brothers."

I took a bite of my sandwich and said nothing.

Maya was still watching me. "You okay? You look kind of pale."

"Didn't sleep great."

She accepted that, because she usually did, and moved on to telling me about her and Tyler's plans for the weekend. I nodded at the right moments and kept my eyes on my tray and thought about a freshman named Drew Halston with a broken wrist and a concussion, alone in a parking lot.

The thing I kept coming back to was this: Ghost91 wasn't wrong. Whatever Nate had done, or hadn't done, someone had paid for it. That was real. The information was real.

It didn't make my stomach hurt any less.

I was at my locker after sixth period when I felt it.

The specific weight of being watched.

I turned slowly. Nate Calloway was leaning against the locker bank across the hall, arms crossed, looking directly at me. He was big, almost as tall as Kai but broader, with a jaw that was clenched so tight I could see the muscle jumping from ten feet away.

I'd never spoken to Nate Calloway in my life.

I turned back to my locker.

"Hey." His voice was low. "Voss, right?"

I looked over. "Yeah."

He pushed off the lockers and walked over, stopping close enough that I had to look up at him. His eyes were dark and flat in a way that made the back of my neck prickle.

"You're always around," he said. Not a question.

"I do yearbook photography," I said carefully. "I'm always around everywhere."

"Uh huh." He studied me for a moment. "You and Kai have been hanging out."

"A little."

"Right." He glanced down the hallway, then back at me. Something shifted in his expression, not threatening exactly, but close enough to it. "Just be careful with the company you keep. People talk."

I kept my face completely blank. "Thanks for the advice."

He held my gaze for another beat, then walked away.

I turned back to my locker and realized my hands were shaking slightly. I pressed them flat against the cool metal until they stopped.

People talk.

Was that a warning? A deflection? Was he fishing for something or just rattled and looking for somewhere to aim it?

I didn't know. But Nate Calloway now knew my name and my face and that I was connected to Kai, and that felt like a door I hadn't meant to open.

Kai found me in the darkroom at the end of the day.

He looked tired in a specific way I hadn't seen before, not post-practice tired or late-night tired, but the kind that came from something happening inside your chest all day that you couldn't put down.

"Hey," he said, closing the door behind him.

"Hey." I moved over on the bench to make room. He sat, elbows on knees, staring at the drying prints without really seeing them.

I waited.

"Nate got pulled from practice," he said finally. "Indefinitely, maybe. Coach got some kind of anonymous tip about the Riverside game. About Drew Halston."

"I heard something about it."

"Yeah, everyone did." He exhaled through his nose. "I've known Nate since we were eight. He's not " He stopped. Started again. "He made a bad call. He knows that. But someone decided to go around him and go straight to the coach, and now it's out of everyone's hands."

I looked at a print on the line. Kai from last week, mid-stride on the ice. I'd been photographing him for months and I still hadn't figured out how to make the camera capture the thing that made him impossible to look away from.

"Do you think what Nate did was wrong?" I asked.

Kai was quiet for a moment. "Yeah. I do." He said it like it cost him something. "Drew was a fourteen year old kid. Nate was supposed to be there. He wasn't." A pause. "But I also think whoever sent that tip wasn't doing it for Drew."

My throat tightened. "What do you mean?"

"I mean people don't go anonymous when they're doing something purely righteous." He glanced at me sideways. "They go anonymous when they want the outcome without the accountability."

I held very still.

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe they just knew no one would listen if it had a name attached."

Kai looked at me for a long moment. Those gray-blue eyes that always seemed to be doing two things at once, seeing what was in front of them and looking for what was underneath.

"Maybe," he said finally.

He didn't say anything else for a while. Neither did I. We sat in the red light while the prints swayed gently overhead and the guilt settled into my bones like the cold outside, the kind that didn't go away just because you came indoors.

Eventually he reached over and took my hand, the same way he had before, slow and certain.

"I'm glad you're here," he said quietly.

It was the worst possible thing he could have said.

"Me too," I told him.

And I meant it.

And I hated that I meant it.

That night, back home, I sat on my bedroom floor with my back against the bed and the Blue Tick app open in my lap.

Ghost91 had left a follow up message.

Good work. Clean delivery. I may have another request soon.

I stared at it for a long time.

Then I typed back: Understood.

Closed the app.

Pulled my knees to my chest.

Outside the window, the first real snow of November was starting to fall, soft and quiet and covering everything.

I watched it for a while.

Then I got up, went to the kitchen, and started dinner, because Leo needed to eat and Mom needed to rest and the world kept requiring things from me regardless of how I felt about any of it.

Some nights that was enough to keep moving.

Tonight it was going to have to be.