by Leslie North
“Take Monday off, and you can count on a day off Sunday, too.”
Five steps. Six. Seven. Damn, she didn’t remember the hallway being this long.
“Nice to meet you, ClaireBear.”
Without breaking stride, Claire fired back, “Call me that again and all the other insignificant data I lifted from the sensors in your pants become common knowledge.”
Claire rounded the corner to the elevators, broke into a smile, and hi-fived the troll-like Rogue mascot painted on the wall.
2
“Seriously?” Marcus raised his hands in surrender and backed away. “I can’t. Not with this level of betrayal.”
Every other light in the rafters beneath the practice dome was lit, casting a sleepy glow on an already-dark Monday morning. Rain hammered the synthetic fiberglass roof and sounded like distant cheers of the masses, a sensory tool Marcus had used from time to time to psych himself up during grueling practices. There was more than enough light, however, to make out the word Seahawks under the NFL logo at the V-neck of the jersey Claire wore.
“What?” she asked, her eyes wide and playfully defensive, as if she were completely ignorant of her crime.
“What?” He mimicked her protest to near-perfect pitch. “Your wires would know what. I have a biochemical, physiological, whole-body response to that jersey.”
“There is nothing wrong with this jersey.”
“That jersey, here, is a sacrilege.”
“It’s NFL.”
“No. No-no-no-no. I’m gonna get you something far more appropriate.”
At this obscene hour, the equipment trailer would be locked. He snagged his practice duffel and pulled out one of his clean Rogue T-shirts he stashed for media interviews then returned to her multi-computer set up that looked more like the NASA command center. He wondered how early she had to get here to set up all the equipment.
“I like my jersey.” Her protest had all the bite of soggy breakfast cereal.
Gone were the dark smudges around her eyes. Her face was scrubbed nearly nude but for the napalm of some dark color at her lips, but her hair more than brought game. Parted into impressive gridlines, each shiny, dark section twisted onto itself and pinned close to her scalp but for a tiny tuft of hair at each center—mesmerizing and distracting all at once.
“You think Seahawks are the better team?”
“No.”
“Then why wear it? The color? Something?”
“It belonged to my brother.” She busied herself pulling sticky backs off tiny, wireless electrodes and affixing them to the spread fingers of her left hand. When she ran out of real estate on her fingers, she clustered them on the inside of her wrist.
“He a Seahawks fan?”
“Was.”
“‘Was,’ meaning not anymore? He upset they lost the Super Bowl last year?”
Claire’s precision focus stalled then continued at a faster clip.
“Clay was killed in Afghanistan. His third and last deployment.”
Her words anchored Marcus like cast-iron shoulder pads. Rain swelled above them, around them, between them, a graying of what had started off more promising than the animosity of the previous day. He balled the cotton T-shirt with his fist, wishing he could repurpose it into a gag that might work in reverse, taking back the words he’d already spoken.
“I’m sorry. Sometimes my mouth runs away from me.”
His apology thawed the air more than his teasing. Her lips tugged into a reluctant smile, stripped of joy but dense with effort. He had come today intending to make her life difficult, but life, it seemed, had already handed her its fair share of difficult.
“It’s the only thing football I own. My attempt to show you I’m a team player.”
“Wrong team, but aight…” He shrugged. “Keep it on. Looks good.”
Truthfully, it did. Despite being three sizes too large, there was something infinitely sexy about a woman who wore a football jersey like a dress. With her form-fitting half-leggings and her shoestring Jesus sandals hugging the slender curves of her legs, she might be some Bohemian dude’s perfect cup of ganja-infused tea. She was a walking curiosity shop. Every time Marcus glanced at her, a new detail somewhere on Claire Wynifred snagged his attention.
“We’re foregoing the helmet today. Feedback there seemed to cause you the most trouble, so the plan is to get you used to the sensors from the neck down first. Take off your shirt.”
He wanted to say you first, but thought better of it. Turns out, he did have command over his mouth. Sometimes. Marcus shrugged out of his shirt, wishing it was as easy to shrug out of the self-consciousness settling around his bones at her close scrutiny of his torso. He assumed a rigid posture that flexed his upper body into the best possible form and counted the number of times Claire hesitated before pressing her first sensor against the warm skin of his left pectoral muscle, directly above his heart.
No fewer than three hesitations.
Marcus suppressed a grin.
She moved around his torso and right shoulder, gently placing gummy, pea-sized disks against his skin. As she transitioned into a lengthy explanation of biofeedback theories and processors and modules of little interest to him—no doubt a self-soothing method to counteract her uneven exhales buffeting his skin—he focused on the tiny, silver, long-stemmed fruit dangling from her earlobes. One cherry, one pear. When she inched down his bicep, he stopped her.
“Nothing on my throwing arm or hand.”
“Data from those areas are critical to your passing performance.”
“Such as?”
“Perspiration levels impacting grip and friction on the ball at release.”
“I lick my fingertips for that.”
He expected a scientific diatribe about parts-per-million germs on a game ball. She simply leveled a stare his direction and said, “Gross.”
“But effective.”
“Our first goal is to optimize the range of motion in your injured shoulder. Without a baseline—that is, before your injury last season—it’s difficult but not impossible. I’ve entered the data from Colin’s session last week for lack of a better starting point. As someone who plays the same position, his conditioning should give us a comparable range.”
On her screen, she pulled up a heavily-pixilated but remarkable computer model—presumably Eggert by the mane of dreadlocks that were his crowning glory. Marcus drew closer to the image as he watched the digital human take snaps and work through lateral and forward passes in four zones at increasing five-yard intervals downfield. His fascination with sensors translating into real-time animation on the screen warred with the idea that any information related to him would originate as Eggert’s data.
Veins in Marcus’s neck pulsed.
“We’re totally different players. He scrambles, rushes to decisions. Rarely sinks back into the pocket to let his offensive line do its job.”
“Does he throw the football?”
“Yes.”
“Then for our purposes, it works.”
Marcus scowled. “Why start with the snap?”
“It gives us the truest origination of the shoulder’s angle before throwing.”
“Who’s going to snap me the ball? You?”
“As tempting as it is to squat and pass pigskin between my thighs, I brought reinforcements.” Claire pressed her first two fingers to her lips and fired off an air raid–caliber whistle.
Immediately, Marcus sensed movement in his peripheral vision. He turned to see his money wide-receiver, Keane, and his never-fail center, Basterra, jogging toward them from the closest end zone. Claire could not have picked two more ideal guys to make him look his best, but clearly the favor extended all the way back to the weeks when his injury kept him in rehab. Basterra greeted Claire with a hug, and Keane’s endearment of baby doll had Marcus wondering if he was the only teammate who had yet to board the Claire fan bus.
She put them through a series of orderly paces, simple snap-th
row combinations to designated zones within each of the five yard markers. By the time Marcus had warmed up to repetitive twenty-plus–yard passes, his shoulder protested. At the forty-yard bombs, his accuracy tanked and his joint berated him like a scorned lover. When they had completed Claire’s tasks, he jogged over to her electronic fortress while Keane took a call and Basterra disappeared to chase down something he left at the last practice.
Marcus sidled up beside her at her makeshift desk. She wanted him; she was going to get all of him. That included the sweat and foul breath that accompanied physical exertion. With any luck, she’d call it a day based on the saturation of his shirt alone.
A trio of monitors, set in close proximity, riveted her attention. The first displayed a legless image of him cycling through each throw. The middle screen reduced his movements to real-time lines on a bar graph, continuously drawing and reshaping based upon the throw. The third screen flashed a conglomerate of bio stats at one-second intervals that culminated in a final snapshot of average vitals for each throw.
None of the screens coughed up the truth: his shoulder hurt like a motherfucker.
No way was he revealing that. No way. He would be out on that field Sunday if he had to sink razor blades into the pads of his feet to offset the pain.
“So if you look at the corresponding red line for each throw, you’ll see that the repetitions that hit closest to your maximum range of movement achieve the most inconsistent results. Understandable, given your injury. But take a look at the green spikes. These indicate the maximum velocity during the course of each rotation. Cross reference the red and green against the completion graph, and we can deduce that the faster you achieve your maximum rotation, the more effective the throw—at less of a range.”
He didn’t understand a word she said past red and green—which he vaguely knew in isolation but turned into a mess in proximity to other colors in the spectrum—but goddamned if her features didn’t light up with all this data and spark something deep inside him where his passion for the game resided.
“Translation?”
“Faster, not harder.”
The spark ignited and sent a current straight to his groin. Damned if he didn’t feel motion. He dismissed it as the endorphin cocktail of a spent body. He probably would have mugged Edna, head groundskeeper of the stadium with an unfortunate can-opener front tooth, had she paraded in front of him right now with those words.
His skin crawled at the thought. Maybe not. But there was no way he was sexing up the enemy. He’d do well to remember that. Even her name—Claire Wynifred—could make a guy sterile.
Marcus scooped up his shirt, his mind already ten minutes past this absurd drama. He tried to pick off the first of probably thirty electrodes, but some brainiac had engineered the glue to withstand a waterfall of sweat. He’d get them later. He strode toward the locker room.
“Faster, not harder. I’ll keep that in mind on Sunday,” he called over his shoulder.
She stood. “Where are you going?”
Her voice held all the surprise it shouldn’t have. Clearly, ClaireBear wasn’t as good at reading people as she claimed. Every second he was out here, he felt like a puppet of her tech. He stopped and turned.
“To shower. Then a soft bed with a soft woman of my choice.”
“We’re not finished.”
“Clearly you know nothing about my injury if you think I’m going to use my arm today for anything more than holding up a cold beer. You’ve pushed it through enough passes for three games.”
“We still need waist-down data. Your game stats yesterday indicated unnecessary steps. Raising your awareness about wider strides will conserve your energy and shave crucial seconds off the running game.”
“Conserve your energy.” Jesus, he’d had enough. He made a ten-yard play to leave. “I’m outta here.”
“We could try your helmet. The azimuth of your eye scan down field is anomalous—”
“You don’t get it, do you? There is no we. I won’t be thinking about wider strides or faster and harder throws on the line of scrimmage. Football is a game of instincts. Plays unfold in milliseconds, and I react. There isn’t a computer in the world that can quantify human decision in that moment. The only thing your numbers do is get in the way of instincts that took me a decade to develop. So you can take your red and green lines and azimuths,”—whatever the fuck those were—“to Sterling and tell him I showed and did my part.”
Damned if her eyes didn’t widen to the most vulnerable orbs. Even at this distance—twenty yards—he knew their color, whatever color, would be spectacular. Not the grayscale of the field but not far off. Not for the first time in his life, he believed his colorblindness made him miss something worthwhile. This time, however, the fleeting stab of loss in his gut lasted longer, carved deeper.
“I can help you, Marcus. I can make sure you’re on that field Sunday.”
“Tripping on the power? You say the word, and I’m in?”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then you tell me what it’s like. Because from where I stand, you’re the problem.”
“I can help you because I have years and sweat and neglected relationships and everything I have ever wanted—really wanted—contingent on your success on that field Sunday. You win, I win.”
Marcus shook his head. He didn’t want to know her, to know anything about her years and neglected relationships. He wanted her to fail so she would no longer impose her number-crunching, scientific theories on his performance. A performance that caused him sleepless nights.
“I know you’re scared your career is over.” She made a play, closer, closer. Her voice softened. “I can help you.”
His throat squeezed tight; his heart pumped as if he’d sprinted downfield and forgotten his numb, unfeeling, unmoving legs in the process. She knew zip. Less than zip.
“You’ll never be part of my win, Claire.” Marcus reached for the first sensor she had placed on him—the one above his heart. He ripped it from his skin and made a show of dropping it on the field, the final punctuation to his firmest belief. His declaration should have nestled beneath his flesh, warm and righteous and satisfying.
It didn’t.
He jogged off the field, feeling like a first-rate asshole.
3
Claire bribed Keane to find Marcus. She promised Keane she wouldn’t head down to the Hazelwood district, Portland’s highest crime neighborhood, but an hour later she handed the cab driver an extra wad of cash to wait for her. She just needed a minute.
She hadn’t exactly formulated a plan to get Marcus to return for another session tomorrow. Applying her research to high-functioning players like Keane and Basterra wasn’t going to get her the data she needed to secure her biggest goal—the United States military. She needed an impressive before and after, someone with high-profile results, someone with enough of an impact on the game to affect a team’s outcome. If she delivered, Sterling guaranteed he would use his money and connections to help her secure an audience at the Pentagon.
That was where her tech could make a real difference. Her tech on every uniform that deployed. Lives saved. Not some stupid ballgame.
The building that matched the address Keane had given her was an old two-story firehouse. The first floor windows had been bricked in, but the top floor was dotted every ten feet with large circular windows and capstones that looked like eyelashes, winking against the waning day. The craftsmanship was extraordinary for its era—no doubt pre-WWII. The bright pink graffiti that ran the length of the saltbox structure—words too stylized to even read—made her a little nauseous. Clay died so that inner city punks could deface beauty.
What was Marcus doing here?
All day, the sky had sputtered a combination of wind and droplets that threatened to drive her back inside. Gray days were a novelty that hadn’t yet worn out their welcome on her sunny California mentality. Given time, an entire season? She might be tempted to spray paint her d
istress, too. Claire glanced back to make sure the cab still clung to the curb. Satisfied the driver had kept his word to wait, she tried the double metal doors facing the street.
Locked.
Indistinct sounds seeped through the door cracks—music, maybe. Every now and then, a male voice rose above the din. She knocked, twice. No one came.
On the building’s east side, she spotted a metal staircase to a second floor door. She scaled the damp steps and found the door unlocked. Inside, a potent combination of musty sweat and hard-core rap ambushed her senses. She welcomed the onslaught—in from the chill and a covert, bird’s-nest view of a gym, complete with an expensive-looking fight cage in the center. Surrounding the octagon, pockets of equipment crowded the space: color-coordinated weight machines and free weights, punching bags, fitness machines. Nailed to the far wall—the one defaced by graffiti outside—was the most intricate climbing wall Claire had ever seen, complete with ropes and harnesses and a skywalk of pathways that crisscrossed below her. Everywhere, teenaged boys in matching yellow logo shirts trained. For what, she couldn’t say. Life beyond this little oasis, for starters.
Claire should have descended the stairs, announced her presence. Instead, she lowered herself to the steps and watched a shirtless Marcus work with a young man in the center cage. She couldn’t make out their words, but Marcus broke down moves into slow-motion and contoured the boy’s stance and position to ensure optimum contact. Every few minutes, the boy’s expression would morph from concentration to a mega-watt smile that dissolved into laughter.
And Claire’s smile would stretch a little more.
Marcus had ignored her calls all day, and she still hadn’t decided if she should tell him the real reason Sterling hired her. For some, the truth would be motivating. For others, crippling. She didn’t know Marcus well enough to know on which side of the truth divide he fell. Sterling already had his eye on Eggert. Believing Marcus’s best days were behind him, Sterling wanted to download the genius that Marcus came by naturally into the team’s new protégé. Claire didn’t really care who led the Rogues to victory so long as her tech proved sound.