Chapter Text
By the time Shane Hollander landed in Calgary, he had already read the packet three times.
The cover page of the packet said:
U18 International Elite Hockey Development Camp
Calgary, Alberta, Canada: August 10–31, 2008
Airport Transportation Instructions Enclosed
Camp Schedule Enclosed
Player Roster Enclosed
Once on the plane. Once while they waited at baggage claim. Once more while Yuna Hollander steadied her son’s suitcase beside the carousel and made sure he had not somehow managed to lose anything important between Ottawa and Alberta. Though, that would be very unlikely for someone like Shane.
He looked at the packet again anyway.
The paper was already soft at the corners. His dorm assignment had been circled. The roster was folded back inside, but he knew exactly where to find the line he wanted.
Shane Hollander, Ottawa, Canada.
His eyes moved quickly after that.
Montreal. Minneapolis. Geneva. Tampere. Boston.
Ilya G. Rozanov, Moscow, Russia.
Ilya Rozanov.
Shane had watched video of him so many times he had stopped counting.
At full speed. In slow motion. One shift at a time. He had watched zone entries, board battles, cutbacks off the rush, the ridiculous patience Rozanov had with the puck when anyone else would have forced a bad shot or gotten pinned to the wall. Shane had tried, more than once, to reduce the whole thing into mechanics. Weight transfer. Edge work. Timing. Habits. A tell. Something.
It had not worked as well as he wanted.
Rozanov was strong in ways video made obvious and still failed to explain. Strong on his skates. Strong through contact. Strong with the puck when he had a defender leaning the wrong way by half an inch and knew it.
Shane was faster. Cleaner. More exact. He knew that. He trusted his own game.
Still, coaches and scouts kept saying Rozanov’s name in that tone that made it sound as if he already belonged to the future.
Curious was the word Shane preferred for it.
Curious was safe. Curious meant study, comparison, preparation. Curious meant there was another player his age who was as good as he was, maybe better in some ways, and Shane wanted to know exactly how.
Curious did not mean that he could still picture the cut of Rozanov’s shoulder through a defender, or the way he stayed on his feet through contact that should have dropped him.
Calgary International was like any other airport, just louder. People walking and suitcase wheels hissed over tile and smoothed themselves into the carpeted floor. The air smelled like burnt coffee, fryer oil, and the cold metallic breath of airport ventilation.
Shane and Yuna soon spotted the U18 hockey camp’s designated waiting area. It sat past baggage claim under two taped signs and had already spread beyond them. Gear bags were stacked against the wall in black heaps, hockey sticks jutting up at bad angles. Parents stood nearby pretending not to hover. Boys in travel clothes and team jackets leaned against pillars, checked phones, shifted duffels with their shoes.
Shane knew some of them immediately. A nod from a defenseman out of Edmonton. A quick chin-lift from an Ontario forward he had seen at U16 camp the year before. One brief, automatic hello to an American winger he recognized from tournament weekends. No one stopped to talk long. At this level, most of them already knew who everyone else was. That was part of what made the room feel so strange. Too many boys pretending they were not checking the same names against the same bodies.
“Shane,” Yuna said. “You have everything, right?”
“Yes.”
She gave him one quick look, saw whatever she needed to see, and nodded.
He looked around the area.
Not yet.
He looked back at the packet, refolded it, then looked toward the arrival doors.
A voice approached him and said, “Hey, Hollander.”
Shane turned.
That voice came from Ethan. Ethan Wu, from Seattle, stood there with a duffel over one shoulder. Shane knew him on sight. There were not many Asian boys at this level. Not enough that you forgot one. They had crossed paths often enough in camps and tournament weekends and the narrow lanes of elite youth hockey where certain names kept returning.
“Wu,” Shane said.
Ethan hitched his duffel higher. “Funny, isn’t it? I flew just over an hour to another country, and you had to cross half the continent to just stay in Canada.”
Shane considered that. “I guess.”
Ethan grinned first. “No shit.”
The corner of Shane’s mouth moved before he could stop it.
Yuna looked past Shane automatically. “Ethan, did your parents come with you?”
“Hi, Mrs. Hollander,” Ethan said, straightening slightly. “My dad’s teaching today, so my mom flew with me. She had to head back to Seattle right after we landed, though. Urgent client meeting. She checked with airport security, made sure I knew where to go, and left.”
“Already?” Yuna said.
He shrugged once. “Yeah.”
“That sounds like Elaine,” Yuna said, but warmly.
“She made sure I found the luggage carousel first,” Ethan said.
“Well,” Yuna said, “that is still good mothering.”
He laughed softly. “I’ll tell her you said so.”
Yuna glanced toward the camp signs. “Do they let you boys keep your phones?”
Ethan made a face. “Probably not during meetings and practices. Probably not after lights-out either. Oh, right! I gotta call my girlfriend before they start acting like communication is a privilege.” Then he stepped a little away, already pulling his phone from his pocket.
Shane’s attention went back to the sliding doors almost immediately.
That annoyed him enough that he unfolded the roster again.
Ethan was the kind of boy who already knew, without anyone ever saying it directly, that as an Asian hockey player in North America he would have to be a little cleaner, a little sharper, a little more prepared than the boys around him if he wanted nobody questioning whether he belonged. Shane had known that too for years. “Hollander” bought him a second sometimes. Not more than that.
Some of the boys already here mattered.
Vincent Lemaire stood near the windows with another forward beside a stack of sticks, looking like this sort of room already belonged to him. When Ethan glanced that way on his way back, Vincent caught his eye and gave him a brief nod.
Team USA. Of course.
Ethan drifted over there for a minute anyway. Shane watched him exchange a few words with Vincent and the other forward. Cliff Marlow, American, easy shoulders, the kind of face that always looked halfway to a grin. Ethan said something. Vincent answered with a short laugh. Cliff tipped his head back toward the doors, then toward the signs, as if already keeping track of who had and had not shown up.
When Ethan came back, he hooked one thumb through the strap of his duffel and said, “They got here right before me. Ryan’s still not here, though.”
Right. Ryan Sullivan.
Shane had played against him a couple of times. Defenseman. Strong through the body. Good reach. Harder to get around cleanly than he looked at first.
Shane folded the roster again.
“The Russians aren’t here yet,” Ethan said.
“No,” Shane said shortly.
“The Russian 3i’s,” Ethan said, and the way he said it made the nickname sound less stupid than it was. Like everybody in the room already knew what it meant, even if no one wanted to say so first. “Ilya, Ivan, Igor. You’d think they’d want to arrive together just on principle.”
Shane was looking for a response to that when a booming voice cut across the room before the body attached to it fully appeared.
“Mon Dieu, this place is depressing.”
J.J. Dagenais came through the airport doors in one loud, easy motion, talking over his shoulder to his parents in French and carrying his own bag like it weighed nothing. He was enormous already, all height and shoulders and social certainty, and he made the waiting area feel smaller the second he entered it. He seemed as completely at ease as he had at the U16 camps, as if every room belonged to him until proven otherwise.
He spotted Shane first.
“Hollander,” J.J. announced. “You look like you got here three hours early.”
“Twenty minutes,” Shane said.
“That is basically three hours in airport time.”
J.J. glanced once at Shane’s packet, once at the doors, and then saw Ethan. He lifted his chin. “Hey you, Seattle.”
Ethan answered, just as dry, “Bonjour to you too, idiot.”
For a second, both of them looked amused before J.J. dropped his bag and looked around the waiting area. “So where are the famous Russians?”
“Not here yet,” Ethan said.
“The 3i’s,” J.J. said with relish.
Shane did not answer. He was looking at the doors again.
The waiting area kept filling. Another stack of bags got added to the growing wall of black nylon and taped sticks. Late-summer light slanted through the airport windows and made everything look sharper than it had any right to.
Then the sliding doors opened.
Three boys in dark travel jackets came through together. Equipment bags trailing behind them. Russian, obviously, even before Shane heard the language.
His pulse kicked once, hard.
Not dramatically. No one stopped talking. No one announced them. But attention shifted all at once in that small, embarrassing way it did around people everyone had already been expecting.
Shane knew immediately which one was Rozanov.
The first thing he noticed was the sheer presence of him.
Rozanov was built more heavily than most boys their age, not bulky, not slow-looking, but dense through the shoulders and back and legs in a way that made Shane think automatically of routines. Lifts. Recovery. Food. Off-ice work. Whatever kind of training built that kind of mass and force by 17. Shane wondered, instantly and against his own will, what Rozanov did every morning. What his week looked like. How much of it was natural and how much had been made.
Then the hair.
It was fuller and less controlled than Shane had expected, brown with loose curls at the edges. The sun caught in it when he turned his head, pulling lighter warmth out of it without making it soft.
Then the eyes.
They were lighter than Shane expected. Blue-grey maybe, except the light made them look more blue.
The blond one beside him had to be Ivan, the defenseman. Igor, the goalie, already seemed slightly apart even while walking with them, carrying himself with that private goalie distance that made them look like a different species.
But Shane barely processed either of them after that first second.
Rozanov stopped just inside the waiting area, duffel on one shoulder, his bag trailing behind him. Ivan said something to him in quick, clipped Russian. Rozanov answered without looking at him, his attention moving over the room in short, efficient sweeps. Staff. Players. Parents. Signs.
Then his eyes found Shane.
Not by chance.
Recognition crossed his face too fast to mistake for politeness. Not quite a smile, but close enough for Shane to notice how his face changed when it almost happened.
Shane held his gaze.
For one second Rozanov’s eyes moved over him in a measuring pass that should not have meant anything and did. Then he looked away.
Not far. Just enough.
Shane became aware of the packet still in his hand.
Across the waiting area, Ivan said something to him in Russian, low and quick. Rozanov answered without taking long over it.
Then, as if something had tugged him back, he looked at Shane a second time.
That second glance was worse.
The first could still have been recognition. The second was choice.
It lasted only a moment. Because it lasted only a moment, it already felt gone while it was still happening, which made it land harder, not softer. Airport noise moved around them unchanged, rolling bags, a baby crying somewhere nearby, parents talking, the volunteer calling for camp players to stay close to the signs because the shuttle would be there soon, but Shane had the sudden unreasonable sense that something had just happened to him yet too quickly for him to name.
Beside him, Ethan had gone still in the quiet way he had. J.J. said, under his breath and sounding delighted, “Hah!”
The airport kept moving in its ordinary, messy, meticulous way. Nevertheless, none of that seemed to register properly.
He took a deep breath, folded the packet and slid it into his duffel and did not look at the camp schedule again.
If the camp schedule had looked manageable, Rozanov walking into it had made something different.
Whatever this was, “curious” was no longer the right word.
------------------------
For Ilya Rozanov, Calgary was supposed to be useful.
Scouts. Coaches. Better competition. Three weeks away from Moscow and from rooms that remembered too much.
Not freedom. Nothing soft like that. Just distance. A different country, a different bed, a different routine. Sometimes that was enough to make a person feel lighter, or at least less trapped inside the same old thoughts.
Their coach had already gone over the camp logistics so many times Ilya could still hear his voice in his head. Airport pickup. Dorm check-in. Curfew. Practice schedule. Scout presence. Represent your country well. Do not act like idiots in public. As if any of that had ever stopped boys their age from acting like idiots in public.
The packet was folded into the outer pocket of his bag. He had read it on the flight from Moscow to Heathrow, then again somewhere over the Atlantic, then once more only because there had been nothing else to do and sleep had refused to come in the small seat of the regional jet from Toronto to Calgary.
Most of it had not mattered. The roster had.
A few Americans. A few Canadians. A few Europeans. And,
Shane Hollander.
Ilya knew what Hollander looked like on video.
Not perfectly. Video flattened people. It lied about size sometimes, and speed, and the way a body occupied space. But it gave enough. Canadian center. Fast. Clean. Too exact. The kind of player coaches liked because he made difficult things look controlled instead of dramatic. Ilya had watched enough clips by now to know the cut of Hollander’s edges and the way he reset his hands before a pass.
Enough to know he was very good.
That part did not bother Ilya. Or not in any way he respected. What bothered him was that Hollander had started to feel a little too real before they had even met. A name on a roster. A face on video. And still, by the time the plane touched down in Calgary, Ilya already had the uneasy sense that camp had been leaning toward this before he ever got on it.
By the time they landed in Calgary, Ivan had already asked two airport employees where to go, even though the answer was in the packet. Ivan did things like that on purpose. Not because he was confused. Because he liked movement, liked hearing himself talk, liked seeing whether people would answer him in English and then in slower English when they heard his accent. It worked more often than it should have.
Igor stayed with them, quiet as ever, his goalie gear packed into one battered luggage case and the same private indifference he wore everywhere. Goalies were strange on principle. Ilya had accepted that years ago.
The camp had sent someone to meet the international arrivals, a local liaison in a camp polo with a clipboard and Russian good enough to be useful. Their actual coach was an ocean and half a continent away. Better that way.
They followed the signs toward the camp waiting area, the three of them moving together mostly because people expected them to. Russian boys at international camps were apparently supposed to arrive in little packs. It made other people comfortable. Or uncomfortable. Both are useful.
The arrivals hall was already crowded with boys their age, camp staff, parents, hockey bags, sticks, noise. Hockey people had a way of making any space feel narrower. Too much height. Too much energy. Too many shoulders turned automatically toward one another as if everything was already a locker room.
A volunteer stood near two taped signs, trying to gather players into something resembling order. Parents made the usual soft pre-camp conversation nearby, flights, hotels, schedules, weather, while keeping one eye on their sons and the other on the growing pile of gear. Boys leaned on luggage, checked for messages, and pretended not to look around while obviously looking around.
Ilya saw Hollander before anyone said his name.
He was standing beside a woman who had to be his mother, packet in hand, posture too straight to be accidental. A boy stood near him too. Ilya recognized him after a second. The Team USA Asian boy. And not far from them, the huge Canadian defenseman from the roster, talking in French like he had never once doubted his own right to take up space.
But Hollander was the one who held Ilya’s attention.
On video, Hollander’s hair had looked almost black. In person, the August light pulled a hint of brown out of it.
Ilya had not expected to notice that first.
The hair was the first thing. Not because it mattered. Because it should not have.
He had expected the player from the video clips; the Canadian center, the careful one, the one scouts liked to talk about like he had already learned how to become somebody important. He had not expected the sunlight to get involved.
Ivan slowed beside him and followed his line of sight.
“There,” he said in Russian. “Obvious, no?”
“I see him.” Ilya replied briefly.
“Hard not to.”
That was the kind of comment Ilya could tolerate. Not too clever. Not too interested.
The boys near Hollander were saying something to him. Hollander answered. Easy enough. Nothing strange in that. Still, Ilya noticed the exchange more than he wanted to.
He looked away first, toward the rest of the room.
There were other players already there, some he recognized from video, some from federation gossip, some only from the kind of reputation that followed boys around before they had done anything worth the noise. An American forward was talking to another boy near the windows. Parents. Volunteers. Too much brightness from the airport windows.
Then Hollander looked up.
Straight at him.
That hit faster than it should have.
Recognition crossed Hollander’s face in one brief, sharp movement. Not surprised. Not a smile. Just the visible fact that he knew exactly who he was looking at.
Ilya felt his own answer to it before he had decided what expression to wear. He let his gaze move once over Hollander in a short, measuring pass.
The packet was still in Hollander’s hand. That detail almost made him smile.
He looked like he had read the whole thing twice and memorized it once more just in case.
Then, Ilya looked away. Not because he wanted to. Because wanting to look longer was already too much.
Ivan adjusted his grip on his stick bag. “We should go closer.”
“We are going closer.”
“I mean to people!”
Ilya said nothing to that.
They moved farther into the waiting area with the slow inevitability of players being absorbed into the same temporary room. Someone said something in English about the Russians. Ilya caught 3i’s and chose not to reward it. Igor was already drifting subtly outward from the group in the way goalies did, detached without actually leaving.
Near the signs, one of the mothers touched her son’s arm and said something low before stepping back.
Something in Ilya went still.
Not softened. Just still.
His hand came up once, briefly, to the center of his chest, where the crucifix sat under his shirt.
Ivan said something to him in Russian, quick and practical, about the volunteers near the signs. Ilya answered automatically.
When he looked up again, Hollander was still there. Still watching, or looking again. Hard to tell which.
The second glance lasted barely a second. That was what made it stay.
The first could have been recognition. Everybody at this level recognized everybody. The second felt more deliberate than that. More like Hollander had looked once, looked away, and then found he had not finished.
That landed lower than Ilya liked.
He felt, suddenly and inconveniently, the urge to smoke.
Around them, the airport kept operating without caring. People moving. Parents talking. One volunteer calling for camp players to stay close because the shuttle would be there soon. Somebody laughing near the windows. The big Canadian saying something that made the Asian American boy beside Hollander go still.
Ivan nudged Ilya’s arm lightly with the back of his wrist, not teasing now, just impatient to get on with it.
“Come on,” he said in Russian. “We should check in.”
“Yes. Probably.” Ilya replied.
He shifted his bag higher on his shoulder and followed Ivan and Igor toward the volunteers.
Outside, the Calgary air hit hot and dry, full of pavement heat and fuel and late-summer brightness. Buses waited by the curb. Staff called instructions. Boys gathered into the first loose shapes of camp, some loud already, some silent, all of them trying not to look as young as they were.
Ilya carried one stupid thought with him, bright and quick as a match struck in the dark: camp had just become a lot less boring.