Get up, I urged silently. Come on, whatever your name is. Get up.
She didn’t get up.
§
After twenty minutes they called the bout in favor of the Rose Petals and removed the fallen Bad Idea Bear — whose derby name was “Bear–ly Legal”; I didn’t catch her real name, largely because no one was throwing it out there — from the track. Most of her team went with her.
Carlotta skated across the empty track to the Slasher Chicks side. The halftime music had started, but no one seemed to be in a partying mood. “What the fuck just happened?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are they taking her to the hospital?”
Carlotta nodded, expression grim. “They’re talking about whether they’re going to let us skate tonight.”
I paused before I said anything, choosing my words very carefully. “If they’ve taken her to the hospital, is that really something that we should be worrying about right now?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Carlotta shook her head, shoulders slumping. “I don’t understand what happened. I saw her stop, but I thought she was trying to give the other team a fair chance or something stupid like that. I didn’t realize there was anything wrong with her.”
“I don’t think it would have made a difference if you had,” I said. “You couldn’t go onto the track during active play, and her teammates didn’t catch it either. As soon as she went down, the medics moved.”
“What if she had a stroke or something?”
“God, Carlotta, I don’t know.” I grimaced. “I really don’t. I wish I did. But hey, we have like ten minutes before halftime is supposed to end, and they can extend it as long as they want to while they figure out whether or not we’re going to skate. Why don’t you go make out with Elsie behind the bleachers? You’ll both feel better, and I promise to send Fern to fetch you if they say we’re going to skate.”
Carlotta blinked before smiling gratefully at me. “You know, I wonder every time we talk why I didn’t recruit you to the Concussion Stand when I had the chance.”
“Because I look better in bloodstains than I do in bruises, and because if you were my team captain, it would be inappropriate for you to put your hand down my cousin’s pants,” I said promptly.
Carlotta laughed, flipped me off, and skated away.
I turned to Fern. “I don’t think it was a stroke.”
“Me, neither,” she said.
“So what was it?”
Fern frowned. “I don’t know, but something about it wasn’t right. She stopped too slow.”
“What do you mean?”
“Physics says that momentum and inertia are real things that really do stuff, okay?”
I was pretty sure the actual physical laws of reality were more complicated than “real things that really do stuff,” but I was willing to go along with it for the moment. “Okay,” I agreed.
“If she’d been having a stroke, either she should have fallen over immediately because she lost the ability to keep her balance, or she should have tried to stop herself while she figured out what was going on. She didn’t do either one. She drifted until she ran out of momentum.” Fern shook her head. “That’s not a stroke. That’s something else.”
I blinked. Sylphs have a reputation amongst the cryptid community for being a little, well, empty–headed. Given how much time they spend insubstantial, I can’t say the reputation isn’t at least somewhat justified. But I’d never considered that Fern might need a sophisticated understanding of physical forces if she was going to keep moving while changing her personal density.
“So… what do you think it is?” I asked.
Fern frowned. “I think —” she began.
Elmira Street’s arrival cut her off. Elmira was wearing a red and green striped tank top instead of the standard team white. It went with her theme, so we never objected. “The referees have decided to continue play,” she said, without preamble. “They’re giving halftime another ten minutes, since some girls still need to finish suiting up, and then we’re on. Meggie, Final, you’re on the starting line.”
“Okay, Captain,” said Fern.
I just nodded.
Elmira turned and skated away, presumably to rustle up the rest of her wayward lambs. I checked the straps on my kneepads before straightening up and looking to Fern. “Can you go get Carlotta?” I asked. “I want to do a few laps and warm up before I’m expected to jam.”
Fern smiled beatifically. “I’ll see you in a minute,” she said, and started skating off toward the bleachers. I smiled after her retreating back and joined the throng of roller girls from all four of the day’s skating teams as they circled the track.
During actual gameplay, there’s no such thing as “the fast lane” or “the slow lane.” There’s the “moving at the speed of play” lane, and then there’s the “getting knocked on your ass and praying no one skates over you” lane. During warm ups, people tend to be a little more charitable, if only because it’s no fun to bruise the opposing players before the game begins. I started on the outside, where the traffic was at its slowest, and began working my way into a groove.
Skating works different muscles than any of the other things I do; that’s part of why I like it so much. Verity is faster and Alex is stronger, but I’m the only one in my family who can smash a watermelon between my thighs. (Not a skill that makes me popular at parties, but it has its uses, and it’s definitely helped with my trapeze classes.) I skated slowly, listening to the cues I was receiving from my body, until I was sure everything was in proper working order. Then I merged into the main group of girls, sliding smoothly in between a Rose Petal and one of the Concussion Stand blockers — Shomi d’Money, who had the remarkable ability to stop dead while moving at top speed, and who had knocked me out of the track with that little trick more than once. Shomi smiled when she saw me. I smiled back. Until the whistle blows, we’re all friends here.
Fern blew past me on the inside lane, already moving at a speed that had half the girls shifting over to get out of her way. Some of them looked after her with envy, others with disbelief. Fern just giggled, still accelerating.
If Fern was here, that meant Carlotta had been roused from behind the bleachers. I glanced to the stands and saw Elsie reclaiming her spot, surreptitiously smoothing her pink–tipped hair. I smiled — and then I blinked, smile fading into confusion.
One of the Rose Petals was sitting behind Elsie, a sated expression on her face. She was still wearing her pink and green uniform, although she’d added a zipped–up hoodie over the top of it. Without her helmet, her hair was frost–white, cupping her cheeks in a perfect bob. She looked like a cinema idea of a roller girl, too perfect and unbruised to be real.
She caught my eye and smiled lazily. I wrenched my gaze back to the track. There was another Rose Petal skating three girls ahead of me. I sped up, pushing my way through the pack until we were skating side–by–side.
“Hey,” I said, a little overly–loud to be heard above the clatter of skates against the track. “I’m Final Girl.”
She frowned a little, giving me a sidelong look, before asking, “From the Slasher Chicks?”
I nodded.
“Cool. I’m Triskaidekaphilia — you can call me Trisk.”
That made her the team captain, if the roster I’d seen earlier was correct. “Nice to meet you. We have a match next month, right?”
“Only if you beat the Concussion Stand,” she said, laughing.
I laughed back. It didn’t even sound fake. “Right. Oh, hey — one of your players is in the bleachers behind my cousin, and she looks super familiar. Do you know her?”
Trisk glanced to the bleachers. “White hair?”
“That’s the one.”
“That’s Adrienne. She’s one of our jammers. She’s the one who got that last power jam in and won us the game.” Trisk grimaced. “That sounded really heartless, didn’t it? She was our jammer during the last skate.”
/>
“It’s cool, I understand.” I kept my pace matched to Trisk’s. “Has she been skating with you long?”
“She just transferred from a team in Colorado.” Trisk’s smile shifted as she apparently reached some conclusion about my reasons for asking. “Look, you’re super–hot and all, and you’ve got a great rack, but she doesn’t swing that way.”
“What? Oh! No, not why I was asking.” My cheeks burned red. “I don’t swing that way either. My cousin does, and she wanted me to ask.” Elsie wouldn’t get too angry at me for using her as a cover. I hoped.
“Ah. Well, tell your ‘cousin’ that she’s not going to have any luck there. Now, if she wanted to pick a different kind of rose, she might find what she’s looking for.” Trisk blew me a kiss and sped up, easily vanishing into the pack.
Cheeks still burning, I bent forward and focused on getting ready for the match. When I looked at the bleachers again, Adrienne was gone.
§
The Slasher Chicks defeated the Concussion Stand by a twenty–four point margin, skating to victory thanks to some impressive blocking (aided by Fern’s ability to slide in front of the opposing jammers and suddenly become practically immovable), one too many technical fouls by Carlotta, whose seat in the penalty box might as well have been permanently reserved, and one hell of a power jam by yours truly. (Power jam: when the lead jammer is in the penalty box and the remaining jammer can go and go and go with no one to call off the round.) We were going on to the next match, where we would be skating against the Rose Petals.
“What kind of name is ‘Rose Petals’ for a derby team, anyway?” asked Elsie after the match, as we were en route to the diner where we were having the first stage of the after party. Fern was in the backseat, trying to get the last of the fake blood out from under her fingernails. Carlotta had her own car, thankfully. The conversation I wanted to be having wasn’t exactly human–friendly.
“A lousy one,” I said, propping my open laptop against my knees. “Did you see the jammer with the white hair?”
“Uh — which ones are the jammers again?”
“The ones with the stars on their helmets. Me.”
Elsie nodded. “Right. Um, no, I didn’t notice any jammers with white hair. Is she on your team?”
“She’s on the Rose Petals. She’s new, and she was the jammer in the round where the jammer for the Bad News Bears collapsed.” I pulled up a browser window, typing in a search for “roller derby” and “Colorado.” “She was sitting behind you in the bleachers for a little while during halftime.”
“Oh. No, I can’t say I noticed her.”
“Me neither,” said Fern, from the back.
“Something’s off about her.” I switched my search to images, scrolling through page after page of Colorado derby girls until I spotted a familiar white–haired figure photographed mid–jam. The caption said that the picture was taken during a bout between the Rocky Mountain Rocketeers and the NCOs. A little more digging produced her bio. “ ‘Ivana Cutya is a recent transfer to the Rocky Mountain Rocketeers. She hails from chilly Wisconsin, where she skated with Cheesetopia for the past year. Her interests include roller derby, roller derby, roller derby, and none of your goddamn business.’ ”
“Friendly,” said Elsie. “Why are you so interested in this chick? I thought you didn’t like girls.”
“You’re the second person today to assume that I can’t be curious unless I’m also horny, you realize.” I returned to the search engine, typing in “roller derby injuries Colorado.” The results were extensive, and unnerving. “Okay, this isn’t good.”
“What?” asked Fern.
“There were fifty–seven on–track accidents last year in Colorado. Thirty–five of them involved the Rocky Mountain Rocketeers, and twenty involved girls stopping or collapsing on the track for no apparent reason. I don’t have all the game rosters yet, but the ones I do have all show that Ivana was jamming.”
“So you think she was cheating somehow to help her team win? Uncool,” said Elsie.
“More than half the injuries were to her team,” I said. “Fern, can we drop you off? I think I need to go home and study.”
“Sure,” said Fern. “No party?”
“Yeah, Annie, no party?” said Elsie, turning big sad eyes on me.
“You’re semi–dating a derby girl,” I pointed out. “You don’t need me to get into the party. You’ll have more fun if I’m not there, since you won’t have me bitching every time you and Carlotta decide to start making out.”
“Homophobe,” said Elsie without heat.
“I don’t like PDAs, no matter who’s doing them,” I countered. “You can drop me off at home, turn around, and come straight back to join the drunken debauchery already in progress.”
“I’ll text you if we move to Marnie’s house,” added Fern, almost shyly. “She has a pool.”
“A pool, Elsie,” I said. “Imagine how much more fun you can have at a party with a pool if you take me home first so that I can do my research and you can stay as late as you want.”
“I hate you.”
“That means you’ll take me home, right?”
“I do, I really hate you. Are we sure that we’re related? Because I think you’re actually my punishment from God.”
“That’s how you know we’re related,” I said, and kept typing.
§
An hour later, I was back in my room, sitting at my desk, and staring at way too much data for one person to handle. Ivana had only skated with the Rocky Mountain Rocketeers for a year before she transferred to the Rose Petals, half–recruited by the team captain, Cylia “Triskaidekaphilia” Mackie. Before that, Ivana had been with Cheesetopia, and before that, she’d been with the Toronto Maple Griefs. And the trail kept going. It’s surprisingly difficult to follow a derby girl from team to team, especially if she doesn’t want to be followed. There were gaps in Adrienne–slash–Ivana’s timeline that could most easily be explained by the assumption that I was missing some of her team postings.
I needed help. I needed someone who had even less of a life than I did, because he had spent all his time hiding from the prospect of social interaction. I booted up Skype on my laptop, and sure enough, he was online. I sent a chat request. When that was ignored, I sent another one. And another.
After five minutes of a chat request every thirty seconds, my headset beeped, and Artie’s voice demanded, “What did I ever do to you?”
“Oh, the usual, but that was when we were much younger, and I’ve virtually forgiven you by now,” I said, copying all the links I’d been able to find thus far into an email and hitting “send.” “Check your inbox. I just sent you some links.”
“Uh–huh, and…?”
“And I need your help.” I quickly outlined the situation with Adrienne.
When I was done, Artie asked, slowly, “So is there anything to actually indicate that she’s doing this?”
“Not as such.”
“She just creeps you out, and that is somehow enough to launch a full scale investigation.”
“No, she creeped me out, and that was somehow enough to trigger a simple web search. The results of said simple web search have motivated me to launch a full scale investigation. But Artie, I think I’m missing some of the teams she’s skated with, and it’s possible that this is all a really shitty coincidence.”
To my surprise, Artie laughed. “I should mark today on my calendar. ‘The day Antimony admitted coincidences happen.’ ”
“Look, will you help me or not?”
“I’m already helping. The witty repartee has been covering the sound of my frantic typing. You missed five teams — no, whoops, six. That’s minimum, not absolute, but it fills the holes. Anything else came simultaneous with something on the list, or before the list begins.”
That was an unnerving thought, since the list we had already went back five years. “And? Does the pattern hold?”
“Hang on.” This time, he stoppe
d talking, and I could hear him typing. After what felt like fifteen minutes but was probably more like ninety seconds, he said, “Yes, it does. I’m sending you the links. From what I can find, the weird injuries and fugue states seem to accompany her from team to team.”
“So it’s not a coincidence.”
“Not unless she has an invisible friend who really likes making derby girls pass out.”
“Unlikely but not impossible.” My computer beeped as Artie’s email arrived. I opened it, beginning to click the links. “What confuses me is that she goes for her own team, too. It’s not just something that helps whoever she’s skating for win.”
“That’s assuming she has any control over what she’s doing.” A note of barely–concealed disgust crept into Artie’s voice. “She could be like me, you know. Maybe she doesn’t even know what makes the people around her keel over.”
I thought about the way she’d been watching the girls circle the rink. She’d looked assessing, even predatory. “I don’t think that’s it,” I said. “Whoever and whatever this girl is, I’m pretty sure she knows exactly what she’s doing.”
“Well, I’m happy to help with research. Just don’t ask me to come to a bout.”
I wrinkled my nose, even though he couldn’t see me. “How did you know I was going to invite you to come and see her for yourself?”
“One, I’ve met you. Two, you’ve been trying to get me out of the basement all summer. It didn’t work when Warren Ellis came to town for a signing, and it’s sure as hell not going to work for roller derby.”
“You’re no fun, Arthur Harrington.”
“So I’ve been told.” The sound of typing came through my headset again. “I’ll keep digging around to see if there’s any other trace of her, but there’s not too much for me to go on. I can’t even tell you for sure if Adrienne is her real name.”
“It’s real enough for me. Look — thanks for your help on this. My team’s skating against hers next month, and I’d really rather not get whammied by something I can’t identify.”
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