The Ice Remembers

CHAPTER FOUR PRESS DAY, GATE B

"Professionalism is the armor you wear when the person standing across from you once knew exactly where it didn't fit"

She arrived at the Stormfront facility at eight-forty on Thursday morning, twenty minutes before the media briefing was scheduled to begin, which was exactly the right amount of early - professional, unhurried, present without being eager. She selected her outfit the night before with the same editorial precision she applied to a long form feature: black trousers, a structured cream blouse that photographed well and communicated absolutely nothing about her personal life, her better coat. Low heels. She had considered flats, and then rejected them, not because of any particular logic, but because she had spent five years becoming a person who wore her better coat to important assignments and she wasn't going to make an exception today.

The Stormfront facility occupied an entire city block in the northern sports district - a modern complex of glass and reinforced steel, it's architecture deliberately aggressive, the kind of building designed to make you feel the weight of what happened inside it before you even reached the entrance. She had been here once before, three years ago, for a league-wide facility tour that she had covered as a brief sidebar in a larger infrastructure piece. she had written two paragraphs about the building's ice maintenance system and not once let her eyes travel to the Captain's name above the championship banners in the main corridor.

She remembered that very precisely. The not-looking. How much effort it had required and how she had told herself it required none at all.

Gate B was the designated press entrance -a side access point staffed by a young woman in a Stormfront branded fleece who checked credentials with the speed of someone who had been doing it since six AM and was already tired of it. Lin Xia handed over her press ID. The woman scanned it, consulted a tablet, scanned it again.

"Ice and Blood Weekly" the woman said. Not a question. She was already typing something.

"That's right"

"Embedded beat journalist, championship season" Another keystroke. A small frown of concentration. "There's a note on your credential"

Lin Xia kept her expression neutral with the ease of long practice.

"What kind of note?"

"Restricted zones for solo access".

The woman looked up, apologetic in the professional way of someone delivering a policy rather than a personal position.

"You'll have full access to the press box, post game corridors and all scheduled media sessions. Solo access to training areas and the team corridor requires an escort from the communications office". A pause. "all journalists on the embedded list have the same restrictions" she added, which was almost certainly untrue but kindly meant.

"Of course", Lin Xia said. She smiled and took her credential badge from her- the standard laminated rectangle with her name, publication, and photograph- and clipped it to her lapel.

She looked down at it once.

Her name was misspelled, The last character of her given name was wrong. It was a small error, the kind that happens in a data entry when a similar looking character is substituted for the correct one by someone working too quickly. In any other context, it would have been a minor inconvenience, easily corrected.

The misspelled name was - letter for letter, stroke for stroke - the nickname he had used for her. The private one, used only between them, the one that had started as a joke about a character in a drama they'd watched three episodes of before abandoning it, had become, over two years, the name that meant 'you specifically, in my specific life'.

She stood at Gate B in the November morning, looked at the badge and kept trying to convince herself that it was just a data entry error, it had to be, for her sake.

She walked inside.