Emory pulled on the practice jersey too big, smelling like old sweat and the chemical ghost of a hundred washes and watched forty guys stretch and tape ankles and talk about nothing in the easy loud way of people who’d known each other since elementary school.
The field at three-thirty on a Tuesday looked like somewhere people got hurt on purpose.
It was.
He was new.
He was quiet.
He was standing at the edge of something he’d chosen, and he still wasn’t sure if that made him smart or suicidal.
The Hum stayed flat.
Baseline.
Nobody here was dying.
Nobody off-world cared about a high school lacrosse tryout in a nothing town, and the relief of that was almost restful.
Coach Finstock blew the whistle like a man declaring war on silence itself.
“All right!
Listen up!
I don’t care who your daddy is, I don’t care what you lettered in last year, and I especially don’t care about your feelings!
You want first line, you earn first line!
Everyone else can sit on the bench and contemplate their life choices!
GREENBERG!
Why are you here?
Rhetorical question, don’t answer, just run a lap for existing!”
A kid in the back presumably Greenberg looked confused and miserable and jogged off toward the far goal.
Emory bit down on a grin.
Caught it just in time.
An adult brain in a teenager’s body had exactly one move at a tryout, and it was keep your head down and look average, which was harder than it sounded when you could hear Coach’s heartbeat from thirty feet out and smell who’d skipped breakfast.
Scott was three rows ahead, bent over his stick, breathing too fast.
His hands were shaking.
Not a lot.
Enough.
Emory counted it: two exits if this went bad, the equipment shed and the gap in the bleachers.
Closest adult who might believe a gas leak story, the assistant coach by the bench.
Closest weapon if it came to that, a discarded stick near the water cooler.
He hated that his brain did this now.
He hated that it was useful.
“Line drills!” Finstock yelled.
“Fast feet, soft hands, and if I see anyone jogging I’m gonna assume you don’t want to be here and help you leave!
Move!”
The whistle shrieked.
Forty people moved.
Emory ran the drill.
Caught the pass.
Cradled it wrong on purpose a tell he’d practiced in the driveway last night, a little too much wrist, the ball sitting high in the pocket the way it did when you were good but not great.
Passed it clean to the next guy.
Jogged back.
It felt like holding his breath.
Throttling down.
Playing a wolf’s reflexes at half-speed was harder than going all-out, because all-out had an easy script and this was a negotiation with a body that wanted to win.
Scott caught a pass, pivoted, and the ball went wide by three feet.
His eyes flashed gold for half a second.
Nobody saw it but Emory.
The kid who’d thrown the pass swore and jogged after the rolling ball, and Scott stood there frozen, hands clenched white on the stick.
Emory moved.
Stepped into his line of sight.
Grinned like an idiot.
“Hey, man.
New guy.
You drop stuff when you’re nervous too, or is that just me?”
Scott blinked.
The gold died.
His face did something complicated that wanted to be gratitude and came out as confusion and exhausted relief all at once.
“Yeah,” Scott said.
“Yeah, I it’s the first day back, you know?”
“Totally.” Emory clapped him on the shoulder, human-normal, and jogged back to his line before the touch could linger and feel like what it was triage disguised as being friendly.
The Hum didn’t move.
Cold.
Flat.
Safe.
“Voss!” Finstock bellowed.
“Good hands!
Terrible footwork!
Work on that or I’ll make you run suicides until you remember how knees work!”
Emory gave a thumbs-up he didn’t feel and ran the next drill.
Jackson Whittemore was watching him now.
Emory felt the weight of it the way you felt a scope on your back a specific quality of attention that had teeth in it.
Jackson was tall, built, moved like someone who’d been good at this since he could walk, and his whole face was doing math Emory didn’t like.
The next drill was one-on-ones.
Offense trying to get past defense to the goal.
Jackson stepped into Emory’s lane.
“Transfer, right?” Jackson said it light, easy, the kind of friendly that wasn’t.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s see what you’ve got.”
The whistle blew.
Jackson came in fast and hit him high and late, a stick-check that landed on ribs instead of the ball, and Emory’s whole body lit up with the clean, simple, vertebrate want to hit back harder.
He didn’t.
He took the hit.
Stumbled.
Held onto the ball by accident-on-purpose and went down in the grass, and the whistle blew again.
“Clean it up, Whittemore!” Coach yelled.
“This isn’t hockey!”
Jackson smiled.
Offered a hand.
Pulled Emory up with just a little too much grip, a little too much eye contact, the universal sign for I see you and you’re a problem and we’re gonna fix that.
Emory let him.
Took the hand.
Said nothing.
Jogged back to the line with a bruise blooming under his ribs that would be gone by morning and a small cold satisfaction that he’d chosen this the hurt, the human tell, the thing that kept his eyes brown.
It wasn’t Bite-Discipline.
He didn’t have that yet.
Didn’t have the Ember for it, didn’t have anything but a wolf he was holding by the throat with his own two hands and a dim understanding that this was the rehearsal.
The drills ran on.
Emory stayed average.
Scott stayed barely-together.
Jackson stayed a problem for later.
By the time Coach blew the final whistle and told them second line would be posted by Friday, Emory’s shirt was soaked and his legs were tired in the good human way, and the Hum hadn’t spiked once.
Nobody off-world had paid a single coin to watch him play decent lacrosse and go home with a bruise.
He caught himself grinning at that.
Tucked it away.
A small joy: being ordinary.
Being a kid at a tryout.
Worth protecting, maybe, if he could figure out how to protect anything in a town that kept trying to bleed him for an audience he’d never met.
The locker room was loud and warm and smelled like adolescence and cheap body spray.
Emory peeled off the wet jersey, found his jacket, his backpack, and was halfway to the door when Scott came in, bent over, hands on his knees, still breathing too hard.
Stiles was right behind him, a hand on Scott’s shoulder, saying something low.
Emory gave them space.
Walked past.
Let Scott fall apart in private with the one person who’d believe him, because that was the decent thing and because Emory had no idea what he’d say if Scott asked him why his eyes had done that, and lying to the earnest ones always cost more.
Outside, the sky was going purple at the edges.
The field was empty.
Emory got in the truck, drove home, and the Hum stayed quiet the whole way.
He parked in the driveway.
Sat there a minute.
Two fingers pressed flat to the dashboard, the headcount habit, and he didn’t know who he was counting anymore the people he wanted to keep breathing, or the days until the off-world crowd got bored and stopped paying unless he bled louder.
He’d made himself a promise once.
Now he just had to figure out how to keep it on a budget of zero Ember and a tree that only paid after he’d already survived the thing that should’ve killed him.
Emory got out.
Locked the truck.
Went inside.
The house was empty.
His mother was working.
He made a sandwich, ate it standing at the counter, and went to bed still grinning at the memory of being unremarkable for a whole hour.
Borrowed time.
He knew that.
He’d take it anyway.