The humidity hit Alejandro the second he stepped off the narrow stairs onto the tarmac at Humberto Delgado Airport.
It smelled of sulfur, warm sea salt, and diesel fumes—nothing like the damp, bleach-scented air of Annex B.
In the arrival hall, a local driver holding a laminated placard that read A.
VILLA U21 didn’t wave or make eye contact.
He simply turned on his heel the moment Davies nodded at him, expecting the five-man delegation to follow.
Harrison bumped his elbow against Alejandro’s shoulder as they walked through the automatic glass doors.
“Check the parking lot,” Harrison muttered, pointing with his chin toward a silver hatchback with a missing left wing mirror.
“Thought Corrigan’s agency ran luxury cars.”
The driver shoved their bags into the hatch, slamming the door twice because the latch wouldn’t catch on the first try.
Alejandro sat in the middle seat of the rear bench, his knees jammed against the plastic backing of the driver’s headrest.
His phone rested in his pocket—showing a steady 68% battery—showing no new messages since his father’s brief text about the tea.
Outside the window, Lisbon blurred past in streaks of pastel pink plaster and yellow streetlamps.
The traffic moved fast, horns chirping at every roundabout, drivers leaning out of open windows to shout in sharp, rhythmic Portuguese.
Twenty minutes later, the silver hatchback pulled into the rear entrance of Residencial Alvalade, a three-story stucco building four blocks from Sporting Lisbon’s Academy grounds.
The neon sign above the entrance flickered, three letters completely dead.
James Corrigan was not waiting in a private lounge or a glass boardroom.
He was sitting at a Formica table in the building’s basement breakfast room, wearing a faded gray cotton tracksuit with a grease smudge on the collar.
A greaseproof paper wrapper containing half a cold pastel de nata sat on top of an iPad mini with a shattered glass screen.
Alejandro stopped three feet from the table.
For three days, the name Corrigan had meant power.
It was the authority behind the mysterious scouting reports, the man whose schedule dictated whether Alejandro stayed in Birmingham or got thrown onto a flight to Europe.
Corrigan didn’t stand up.
He didn’t offer a handshake.
He was aggressively, almost obsessively focused on scraping a tiny piece of burnt crust off his thumb with a metal coffee spoon.
“Davies,” Corrigan said, his voice loud, gravelly, and entirely lacking in professional polish.
He had a thick Essex accent that buzzed through his nose.
“Why’s the luggage trailer late?
The driver at the terminal said you lot took forty minutes to clear customs.”
“The U18 defender lost his landing card,” Davies replied, setting his leather briefcase on a plastic chair.
“We had to wait for the desk to print a duplicate.”
Corrigan finally looked up.
His eyes were small, watery, and surrounded by deep, yellowish bags that made him look like he hadn’t slept since Monday.
He squinted at Alejandro, his gaze sweeping down to the black electrical tape wrapped around Alejandro’s right shoe.
“You’re the Jesse boy,” Corrigan said, tossing the spoon onto the paper wrapper.
It made a loud clack.
“Yes,” Alejandro said.
“Davies tells me your father gave him a hard time on the phone yesterday,” Corrigan said instantly, with zero hesitation or subtlety.
He pulled a cheap plastic lighter out of his pocket and began clicking the spark wheel repeatedly without lighting the flame.
Snap.
Snap.
Snap.
“Told him I was stripping your rights under Article 12.”
Alejandro kept his shoulders level.
“My dad was worried about the hospital deposit.”
Corrigan scoffed, a quick, rattling sound in his throat.
“Your dad’s an amateur.
I’ve got forty-two boys registered across three European leagues.
If I paid five grand to every Sunday league side in South London before a trial was even confirmed, I’d be selling fish on the pier in Southend.”
He reached out and tapped the shattered screen of the iPad twice.
“I don’t care about your dad’s hospital bills, Jesse.
And I don’t care about Solihull,” Corrigan added, his tone entirely dry, devoid of anger or warmth.
“I care that Sporting’s U19 director gave me a twenty-minute window tomorrow morning at eight-thirty.
You’re playing forty-five minutes against their reserve fullbacks on Pitch 4.”
He pointed a thick, square-nailed finger at Alejandro’s taped shoe.
“Get proper boots from the kit bag tonight.
You look like a rag-and-bone man standing there in that tape.”
The dorm room on the second floor had two narrow iron cots and a single window overlooking a narrow alleyway lined with plastic rubbish bins.
Alejandro threw his travel bag onto the cot near the radiator.
The radiator was cold to the touch, its metal pipe emitting a faint, rhythmic whistling sound every few seconds.
Harrison opened his own suitcase on the opposite cot, tossing a pair of spare leather studs across the gap between the beds.
They landed with a heavy thud on the thin cotton duvet.
“Size ten,” Harrison said, pulling off his hoodie.
“Might be a half-size big, but the leather’s soft.
Better than wearing black tape in front of Sporting’s director.”
Alejandro picked up the left boot.
The leather was supple, pre-conditioned with dubbin wax, the aluminum studs clean and unpitted.
“He didn’t even ask to see my highlight clips,” Alejandro said, his voice quiet against the whistling radiator pipe.
“Corrigan doesn’t watch clips,” Harrison said, dragging a blanket over his shoulders as he lay down on his cot.
“He sells body count to academies.
He gets five lads onto a pitch, hopes one of them doesn’t freeze when the ball comes over the top, and takes twenty percent of the signing fee if the club bites.”
Alejandro sat on the edge of the iron frame, holding Harrison’s spare boot in his lap.
He pulled his phone out of his pocket.
The screen lit up instantly, showing the time: 9:44 PM local time.
He opened his messages.
He thumbed past the last text from his father.
He started typing a reply to his Aunt Elena, asking if his mother was still on the gurney near the ambulance bay or if a standard bed had cleared in the main ward.
His thumb hovered over the send button.
If he sent it, he would spend the next eight hours staring at the dark screen, waiting for a signal bar to flicker in a basement dorm in Lisbon.
He deleted the text line by line.
He set the phone face down on the small wooden laminate table beside his bed.
He unlaced his own split shoe, pulled off the black tape, and dropped the sticky, crumpled ball into the plastic bin by the door.
He tried on Harrison’s left boot.
His toes had a quarter-inch of extra space near the front cap, but when he pulled the laces tight, the heel locked flush against the cup.
From the street below the window, a mopeds revved high, its engine echoing off the narrow alley walls before fading into the Lisbon night.
Alejandro lay back on the stiff mattress, staring up at the bare lightbulb hanging from the plaster ceiling, and laced his fingers over his stomach.