The Defenseman's Sin

Twenty-three. He asked for any other number when they handed him the locker room assignment, and the equipment man shrugged and said the roster was already printed. So he wears his brother's birthday across his shoulders every night, and the weight of it is not a metaphor. The tape job is wrong. Third time he has ripped it off, and the adhesive has left a gummy residue on the carbon fibre that catches a thumbprint like a fossil. Hayden pulls another strip from the roll and smooths it along the blade, heel to toe, heel to toe, the way Levi showed him when he was twelve and still using a wooden stick found at a garage sale. *Leave it, Shaw. You're gonna sand through the goddamn thing.* Jules skates past with a water bottle already in hand. He has had one in his grip since the first preseason game, like a toddler with a sippy cup, and he is the only man in the league who hydrates between shifts and still arrives at the bench smelling of last night's burrito. Hayden does not answer. The tape is not right. He has worn that number for two seasons and answered exactly one question about it, badly, in a scrum after a loss, and the clip is still circulating. Sloane's job is to look at a season's worth of numbers and tell the organisation what they mean, and the numbers have started saying something about him that nobody in the building wants written down. What follows: the facewash he deserved, numbers that do not lie, a lesson taught to a rookie at somebody else's expense, a hard drive, a ghost living in the data, a trance somebody mistakes for focus, a viper in the locker room, and an algorithm that turns out to have an opinion. *For not letting me do this alone.* *Never again.* What Sloane finds in that data may permanently rewrite everything she believed about the season, the organisation that hired her, and the reason a man refuses to change a number he never wanted.