The Ice Remembers

CHAPTER SIX

She found the press workroom. She set up her laptop and her recorder and the small notebook she kept for first-pass observations, the one she would later transcribe into proper notes. She asked the communications assistant assigned to the press pool — a young man named Wei who seemed genuinely enthusiastic about hockey in a way that made her feel briefly warm toward him — whether the media schedule had been updated to include the individual access request process.

It had. The form was three pages. The review process was ten business days.

Ten days. For a championship season that would conclude in under twelve weeks.

She looked at the form. She looked at Wei. Wei looked back with the expression of someone delivering a policy he personally found unreasonable but had been told not to editorialize about.

"Thank you," Lin Xia said. She took the form. She was going to fill it out today, every field, with the thoroughness of someone who knew that paper trails were their own kind of interview.

She was halfway back to her workstation when she heard footsteps behind her, and then a voice she recognized without needing to turn around — had always recognized, would recognize at any volume, in any room, apparently across any number of years — low and quiet and stripped of anything decorative:

"You should have stayed with the assignment you had."

She turned around slowly. The way you turned around when you had decided what expression you were going to be wearing before you got there.

He was standing six feet away. Alone. No teammates, no trainer, no tablet. In the training facility corridor with the fluorescent lights above him and the championship banners visible at the far end of the hall, and he was looking at her with an expression she could not immediately read — which had never happened before, which was its own piece of data, because she had always been able to read him — and his jaw was set and his hands were still at his sides and he looked, in some essential way she could not precisely articulate, like a person who had been holding something for a very long time and was extremely unwilling to put it down.

"I go where the assignment takes me," she said. Her voice was even. She was proud of that.

"This assignment is going to be difficult," he said. Also even. Also, she suspected, an act of will.

"I'm aware." She held his gaze. "I do difficult assignments. It's my job."

Something moved in his expression — there and gone, too fast to categorize. "Xia—"

"Lin Xia," she said. Quietly. Not unkindly. Just: the correction, clear and necessary. We are not those people anymore. This is who we are now.

He stopped. He looked at her for a moment that lasted slightly longer than it should have. Then he nodded — a single, precise motion, the acceptance of a rule — and turned and walked away down the corridor without another word.

She watched him go. She counted his footsteps without meaning to.

She looked down at the press credential still clipped to her lapel. Her misspelled name. His private name for her, printed in standard league font on a laminated rectangle, clipped to the chest of her better coat.

She should correct the badge. She would correct it tomorrow — email the credentials office, submit a name correction form, receive a new badge within twenty-four hours. It was a simple administrative task. Five minutes, at most.

She did not correct it that afternoon. She told herself it was because she was too busy, because the day was full and the access request form was three pages and she had a feature due Thursday and a new filing schedule to integrate and seventeen other things that were easier to think about than the fact that she had spent the last six hours in the same building as Gu Yan for the first time in five years and had survived it with all of her professional composure intact and only three moments — the corridor, the transcript, the badge — that she would not be including in any record she kept of this day.

She was in the elevator, press materials in her bag, heading back to the gate, when her phone vibrated. A message from an unknown number — different from the one that had texted her on Tuesday, different area code, no name. Short.

Room 4B. Training corridor. Six AM tomorrow. Come alone. Don't file this. — Z

She stared at it. Z. She didn't know anyone on the Stormfront roster whose name began with Z. She pulled up the team roster on her phone — twelve forwards, seven defensemen, two goalkeepers — and went through the names twice.

No Z. Not among the players. Not among the staff listed on the public-facing team page.

The elevator doors opened. She stepped out into the lobby. At the far end of the atrium, near the main entrance, she could see two of the other embedded journalists from today's briefing — they had made arrangements for post-day drinks, had tried to include her, she had declined politely — deep in conversation, already relaxed, already wrapping the day into something manageable.

She looked back at the message. 'Don't file this'.

Every professional instinct she possessed said to forward it to her editor, note the source as unknown, flag it as a potential credibility risk, and not act on it until she understood who sent it and why.

She was going to do that. She was absolutely going to do that.

She went home. She ate dinner. She set her alarm for five-fifteen.

At five forty-seven the next morning, she was standing in front of the Stormfront facility at Gate B.

The gate was already open.

The credentials officer was not at his station.

And from somewhere deep inside the building — from the direction of the training corridor, from the direction of the ice — she could hear something she had not expected to hear at this hour, in this place, with this particular quality of silence surrounding it:

Her name. Her real name. Being said aloud, by a voice she would have known anywhere, in the tone people only ever use when they are completely alone and completely unguarded and have no idea anyone can hear them.

She stood at Gate B in the early morning cold and did not move for a very long time.