Chapter Text
Shane knew things like this did happen, they happened all the time. There was a guy who played for—Minnesota, Shane thought—who swore up and down that he had lived the same 2-0 loss to New Jersey a hundred times. Shane had always treated his story with scepticism—if he had played the same game over and over, he felt sure he would have found a way to win—but Ilya had embraced it with wholehearted and unsympathetic glee, sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear and rattling off the details from an article on his phone while Shane brushed his teeth in the en suite.
“What do you think, Hollander?” he had asked when Shane returned, tossing his phone aside in favour of reaching already for Shane’s hipbones. “Stuck in time loop. What would you do?”
“I don’t know,” Shane said, sliding his hands over Ilya’s shoulders. When they were younger, Ilya was always coming up with questions like this, impossible scenarios and bizarre hypotheticals, batting them at Shane like he was tossing a baseball. It had made Shane uncertain, uncomfortable—he had felt obscurely that Ilya was mocking him, and not in the playful way that Ilya was always mocking him in those days. He had not trusted his own responses, which felt at once too nondescript and too revealing, and he had not understood, then, that Ilya’s motivations were rarely that complex—that almost everything he did, he did only to provoke an honest reaction. He was cataloguing Shane, hoarding him up—it had taken Shane years to learn that there were genuinely no wrong answers. Ilya would be content with anything, as long as he felt it was true. “Try to break it, I guess. That’s what you’re supposed to do, right?”
Ilya had smiled and said, “Boring answer, Hollander,” but he’d looked satisfied, anyway. Then, they had had only a few more hours together, and there had been better things to do than talk. Montreal, 2018—another lifetime.
None of this was on Shane’s mind at all when pulled his hoodie over his head and looked up to see the colour run out of J.J.’s face like paint from a punctured tin. He was still thinking about the game, and how fucking annoying it was to lose when the team had done everything right. He tried not to be superstitious, but sometimes when your luck was against you, it was really fucking against you.
“What’s wrong, J.J.?” Hayden asked, noticing it at the same moment as Shane. J.J. gaped, fish-mouthed and floundering, eyes wide and staring around the locker room as if any of them could explain the story that he still hadn’t shared. He had his phone in his hand, and Shane’s first thought was that maybe something had happened to his parents, or the younger sister he was always so proud of.
“The Centaurs’ plane,” J.J. said, hoarse. He was answering Hayden’s question, but his eyes found Shane’s. He swallowed hard. “It’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Shane asked, frowning. There was a faint ringing in his ears but it wasn’t yet a siren; he couldn’t understand what J.J. meant, and his ignorance protected him, just for a moment. “Like, somebody stole it?”
Hayden found his phone, scrambling it off of the shelf above his stall. His face went ashen when he unlocked it. “Oh, holy shit…”
“Not stolen,” J.J. said, shaking his head. “It’s gone, Cap. Vanished.”
Before Shane could turn that into something that made sense, Hayden’s hand closed around his elbow, grip urgent. “Shane.”
He turned Shane bodily towards him. A crowd was forming around J.J., Drapeau and some of the others craning over his shoulders to see whatever he had found, but Hayden was tugging Shane over to the far corner of the room, fingers wrapped too tightly around his arm.
“Hayden—” Shane started, trying to pull free, but Hayden shook his head, jaw tight.
“Trust me, you don’t want to hear this in front of the whole team,” he said. He looked shaken, skin pale and nostrils flaring, blue eyes wide and watery. He held his phone out so that the screen was facing Shane.
The headline ran HOCKEY TEAM’S JET DISAPPEARS IN SKY ABOVE FLORIDA. There was a photo beneath of the Centaurs boarding a plane—Shane recognised Ilya’s broad shoulders on the rolling staircase, the cut of his profile as he turned towards Zane Boodram on the step below him—and a subheading in smaller, bolded font: Ottawa Centaurs declared missing after their chartered flight vanished from the sky just a few hours after departing Charleston International Airport.
There was more after that, but that word—missing—hanging over a photo of Ilya kicked the ringing in Shane’s ears into a new register; suddenly, it was all he could hear. The room blurred, and he staggered as if the floor was moving under him. Hayden lurched to steady him.
“Easy, Shane, easy,” he was saying. Shane clutched at him, holding himself upright while his heart took up a frenzied pounding in his chest.
“What—Hayden, what happened, what are they saying—” Behind him, the other Metros were also reacting to the news, but they may as well have been on another planet for all that it mattered to Shane. Hayden tried to guide him down onto the bench of an unoccupied stall, but he shook him off. “My phone, I need my phone.”
“Shane—”
He stumbled back to his stall and fumbled his phone out of the cubby above it, swiping impatiently through his notifications for Ilya’s name. There was nothing—breaking news bulletins and missed calls from his parents and Svetlana, a string of texts from Rose, a few private messages on Instagram and a dozen unread bullshit emails, but nothing, nothing from Lily.
Bile rose in his throat. He turned back to Hayden. “Tell me what they’re saying.”
Hayden shrugged, looking helpless. “Just what you read, man. The plane was coming in to land; it flew into a cloud somewhere over Tampa Bay and never flew out the other side. No debris, no sign that anything was wrong, just there one minute and gone the next. They’ve sent up choppers to sweep the area, but, Shane, buddy—”
“I have to get to Florida,” Shane cut him off, running a hand through his hair. His heart felt like a grenade in his throat. “I have to—I can book a flight, I could be there before tomorrow morning—”
“Shane, listen,” Hayden grabbed him again, towing him away from the centre of the room. He spoke in a low voice, glancing over Shane’s shoulder to make sure the rest of the team weren’t paying them any attention. “You can’t just fly to Florida in the middle of the season, alright?”
“Hayden, it’s Ilya—”
“Believe me, I know, but what are you going to tell Coach? What are you going to tell the team?” Shane didn’t know, but how could it matter? Ilya was missing; his plane had disappeared into thin air like some kind of fucking magic trick, and here Shane was, in fucking Washington, the most useless man alive. Hayden shook his head, face creased in lines of sympathy. “It fucking sucks, but there’s nothing you can do, Shane. The government has people for shit like this, alright, the APD or whatever the fuck they’re called. Remember that hiker up in Alberta? Said she got stuck walking the trail over and over until they sent someone out to grab her? She was fine after that, and Rozanov will be, too. You have to believe that.”
Shane shook his head, not a denial of what Hayden was saying—he did remember that story; it had spent about half a week at the top of every news broadcast before people had lost interest—but a vehement rejection of the idea that all he could do was sit and wait for somebody else to find Ilya and bring him back. It was antithetical.
Before he could say anything to that effect, though, Comeau called for him across the room.
“Just when you thought the Centaurs’ season couldn’t get any worse, eh, Hollander? Can’t wait to see the clowns they call up to play out the rest of the year. How d’you think this affects our chance at playoffs?”
In front of Shane, Hayden’s face twisted into a hot, furious scowl. He glared over Shane’s shoulder. “Hey, shut the fuck up, man. Would it kill you to have some fucking respect?”
“What? It’s not like they’re dead,” Comeau said. He paused as if waiting to deliver a punchline, then corrected himself. “Well, not yet, anyway.”
“That’s fucked up, bro—”
“You can’t say that, man—”
“You’re sick, dude—”
The general cry of objection from the rest of the team—some of it spoken through smiles—obscured the way Shane spun on his heel and had to be held back by Hayden’s fist in the back of his shirt, his chest heaving with fury. It was lucky Comeau wasn’t looking at him; there would have been no mistaking the look of snarling rage on his face.
Hayden’s fingers tightened nervously over the middle of his back.
“Shane,” he murmured, cautioning. “Not worth it.”
Shane dragged in a deep breath, biting back his anger, uncurling his fingers, with effort, from the fists they’d formed.
“Don’t fucking joke about this,” he said, words clipped, loud enough for the whole room to hear. It was an act of genuine endeavour to keep the tremor out of his voice. His gaze swept the room. “Don’t talk to the media, don’t post on Twitter, just get on the bus and keep your mouths shut. Everybody on that plane has somebody who’s worried about them.”
Once again, he shook off Hayden’s hold, heading over to his stall to pick up his bag without meeting anybody’s eyes. He left the locker room with his head down and his heart still racing like a horse out of the starting gate, phone in his hand and Ilya’s contact under his thumb. He dialled and held the phone to his ear, but it was still ringing when he cleared the doorway—he still heard, perfectly plain, somebody’s muttered retort come from behind him: “What, even Rozanov?”
The layout of Washington’s home stadium was only vaguely familiar, but Shane had been there often enough to know that the first room he passed on the left was where the physios set up. It was empty when he looked in through the cross-hatched glass window in the door, and he wasted no time in shouldering inside and turning the lock behind him. There was a padded examination table in the middle of the room and a few chairs lined up against the walls, but Shane retreated to the corner, where he would be invisible from the corridor. His phone was still ringing; he sank down against the wall with his knees pulled in to his chest, trying to breathe evenly as he waited for Ilya to pick up.
“Hi, this is Ilya, I will never listen to your voicemail.”
Shane’s breath hitched, tearing like fabric caught on a nail. He dialled again, hands shaking, and squeezed his eyes shut, praying.
"Hi, this is Ilya, I will never listen to your voicemail.”
He hung up without saying anything, fingers numb, the tremor travelling up through his wrists and elbows until he had to wrap his arms around his chest to hold himself still. He buried his face in his folded arms and tried to reel in his spiralling panic, his chest tightening like a vice around his heart, eyes damp. He tried to remember the last thing he had said to Ilya and couldn’t; had he told him that he was sorry? Had he told him that he loved him?
His phone rang, and he scrambled to answer it without checking the screen, hope searing a fiery line through his fear.
“Ilya?”
“Shane? Oh, Shane, sweetie.” Yuna Hollander was not a woman who cried often, but there was no denying the awful break in her voice, like it had been stitched together around her tears.
“Mom,” Shane said, his own voice cracking. He scrubbed a hand, hard, over his face, looking up at the white tiles of the ceiling. His ribs felt like broken matchsticks, running the soft meat of his lungs through with splinters. “Mom, what have you heard? What’s happening? Is Ilya okay?”
“I don’t know, baby, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get through to somebody who knows what’s going on, but no one’s telling me anything—they’re saying it’s an active situation, they’re saying they can’t share details with the public. You haven’t heard from him?”
“No,” Shane said. He dug his fingernails hard into the meat of his thigh, swallowing the urge to vomit. To his own ears, he sounded hoarse and wrecked. The public, his mom had said, as if Ilya were a stranger to them. “I can’t get hold of him, I don’t know anything, I—Mom, I have to be on a bus back to the hotel in, like, ten minutes, what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
He couldn’t think past the echo of Ilya’s voice in his ears, Hi, this is Ilya, I will never listen to your voicemail. What if it was true? What if Ilya was—what if Ilya had gone somewhere where Shane could never reach him again? The last time Shane had seen him he had been pixelated on the tiny rectangle of Shane’s phone screen; what if that, forever, was the last image Shane had of him? He could feel his ribs contract, his lungs crushed, his throat closed to the width of a pin head.
“Shane, you have to breathe, baby,” his mom was saying. Her voice sounded like it was coming from the wrong end of a long tunnel, but he tried his best to obey. Every mouthful of air scoured his throat like steel wool. “I’m going to get through to somebody on the ground in Florida, and I promise you I will find out what’s happening, but you have to breathe.”
Shane was trying. He pulled his knees closer to his chest and bowed over them, shoving his forehead against his kneecaps. He closed his eyes again.
“Is Dad with you?” he forced out.
“I’m here, son.” His dad’s voice, steady as a rock. “What do you need?”
“Hayden said—there’s an agency, right? The government has people, for things like this.”
“That’s right. Name’s a bit of a mouthful—we call ‘em the D.A.P., Department for Anomalous Phenomena. That’s who your mom’s been trying to get in touch with.”
“Do you know anyone who works there?” He wasn’t above leveraging his dad’s position at the Treasury if it would get him some answers.
“No, I’m sorry. I’ve sent out some messages to colleagues to see if we can get a more direct contact, but I’ve never had much to do with them. Never thought I’d have to.”
Because they were the people who dealt in the impossible, the absurd—the kind of things that everybody assumed would never happen to them. You filed your taxes and your vehicle registration and all the other boring, pedestrian shit because that was the dust and the lint of daily life, but who ever assumed that they’d need to be rescued from a time loop, or a disappearing aeroplane? Ilya had vanished like salt into water, probably without ever having heard of the D.A.P..
“We’re going to figure this out, honey,” his mom soothed. “We’ll get him back, okay? Some cases like this I’ve heard get wrapped up in a matter of hours. You don’t need to worry. It’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that,” Shane said. His head was starting to pound. He could hear movement in the hallway, heading for the locker room; Hayden would come up with some excuse for him, but it probably meant that the clock was running down on his panic attack. Far sooner than was reasonable, he would have to leave this room and pretend that the world had not been broken past the mending—that anything could possibly matter to him until Ilya was home and safe in his arms.
“I do.” Her voice was firm, everything but the faintest tremor forced smooth. “I do, baby. You know why?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Because the man on that plane won’t let anything come between the two of you and the life you deserve.”
Shane swallowed, her words settling behind his sternum like a feather on the surface of a storm-tossed sea. It was so tempting to believe; even with things strained and strange as they were between them, Shane couldn’t imagine a universe where Ilya wouldn’t be fighting as hard as he could to get back to him. He swallowed, rubbing his chest with the knuckles of his free hand like that would make the air come easier. After a few beats, it did; he dragged in one lungful and then another.
“You think so?” he asked raggedly, feeling like he was nine years old and his mother’s words still dictated which tracks the world rode on.
“I know so,” she said. “Now, get on that bus and come home. I’ll keep making calls, and I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything, okay? Stay off the internet, let Hayden take care of you. We love you, sweetie.”
“Love you, son,” his dad echoed.
“Yeah, I love you, too.” He blew out a heavy breath. “Text me the second you know anything, okay?”
“We will. Try not to worry. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Okay. Okay.” There was more movement in the corridor, footsteps, the locker room door swinging briefly open to let out his teammates’ voices—hockey players only had one volume setting. “I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later. I love you.”
He hung up. For a minute, he sat with his phone in his hands, thinking over what his mom had said and trying to keep breathing steadily. The urge to vomit hadn’t yet receded, and he still felt shaky and unmoored; it was unfathomable that he could rise from this floor and rejoin the world as if nothing was wrong. His mind spiralled back to Ilya—where he could be, and if he was scared, or alone, or hurt. Overhead, the fluorescents glared bright and awful, buzzing in his back teeth. He thunked his head hard into the wall and pressed the corner of his phone to his mouth. He wondered if the bus would leave without him if he stayed there for long enough; maybe for a little while, someone else could be Shane Hollander, Captain of the Montreal Metros, and he could just be Shane, Ilya Rozanov’s boyfriend, worried out of his mind and close to losing it.
His phone buzzed, a text from Hayden.
(From: Hayden Pike – 22:06:) You okay? Don’t worry about press, I covered for you—Coach is pissed, but he’ll get over it.
(From: Hayden Pike – 22:07:) Team’s heading for the bus soon. You gonna meet us there?
He curled his fingers around his phone so tightly that the case creaked. For a moment, he wanted to fling it as far away from himself as he could; he wanted to throw the examination table onto its side, flip the chairs, smash the little window in the door with a heavy fist, scream until his throat bled. Ilya was missing, maybe worse, and there was nothing Shane could do about it, and nobody he could tell who would understand what it meant. He sunk his teeth into the heel of his palm and bit down until the pain had crowded out every other impulse, and when he withdrew, there were deep purple indentations in the skin, throbbing angrily.
Slowly, he stood. His body ached, and he couldn’t tell how much of the pain belonged just to the hockey he had played; it made sense to him that his worry for Ilya would manifest in the same way.
The corridor was empty when he stepped out of the room, and the noise from the locker room was weirdly subdued, which would have concerned Shane if he had had any concern to spare. He pulled his hood up over his head and fixed his eyes on his Reeboks so that nobody would speak to him on his way out of the building.
The bus driver raised his eyebrows when Shane boarded alone, but thankfully didn’t ask. Shane scrounged up a nod for him then beelined for the back of the bus, slumping into the window seat and pulling out his phone again. His mom had said not to check the internet, but Shane couldn’t stand not knowing. It took him a frustrating moment to remember his Twitter log-in; unlike Ilya, he preferred not to manage his own social media. His feed was flooded with chatter about the Centaurs’ plane—most of the teams in the League had already put out an official statement, although the Metros hadn’t yet, and he skimmed past half a dozen carbon-copied tweets about thoughts and prayers before he found an article from a source he trusted enough to click through.
Sunday, 3rd January, 2021 – Tampa Bay, Florida
The MLH has been rocked this evening by the news that a chartered flight carrying Canadian men’s hockey team the Ottawa Centaurs has disappeared mid-way through its journey from South Carolina to Florida.
Sources on the ground at Tampa International Airport confirm that the Centaurs’ plane was expected to land at around 9PM EST after departing Charleston International Airport earlier this evening. However, shortly before its scheduled arrival, air traffic control lost contact with the flight. At the time of writing, the current whereabouts of the plane and its passengers remain unknown, although no foul play is suspected.
Before contact was lost, there were no reports of distress or malfunction from crew aboard the plane, and no crash has yet been reported. The prevailing explanation for the plane’s sudden disappearance is that the flight has fallen victim to a serious preternatural anomaly which has left it out of alignment with reality as experienced by most other people. Canada’s Department for Anomalous Phenomena is reportedly liaising with American authorities to investigate this claim and establish a timeline of events. They are yet to release any official statement, although D.A.P. helicopters and drones have been identified at work in the area.
Approached for comment this evening, Major League Hockey Commissioner Roger Crowell said, “Obviously, everybody at the MLH is deeply concerned about the events in Florida, and we are all very keen to see the Centaurs safely reunited with their friends and families as soon as possible. Our thoughts and prayers are with the loved ones of all those missing at this difficult time, including the players, the team staff, and the pilot and crew manning the flight.
In terms of hockey, I will personally be overseeing conversations with the remaining staff in Ottawa, as we hope to navigate the Centaurs’ participation in the rest of the season. It is our hope that the remaining fixtures will go ahead more or less as planned, but there are of course discussions to be had, which fans will be updated on as and when information is available.”
Tomorrow’s scheduled game between the Centaurs and the Tampa Bay Tornadoes has been postponed until further notice. The airspace corridor from South Carolina to Florida has also been temporarily closed, causing delays, diversions, and cancellations to departures from all commercial airports in the area. As authorities are currently treating the anomaly as a purely localised phenomenon, air travel across the rest of the country remains unaffected.
Shane bounced his knee as he read, chewing a hole in his bottom lip. His stomach was writhing like a pit of snakes; he closed out of the article and tried Ilya’s number one more time, desperation overriding the rational part of him that knew he would have heard already if anything had changed.
“Hi, this is Ilya, I will never listen to your voicemail.”
“Fuck,” he swore.
The bus rocked as the rest of the team started climbing on board, and he slumped down further in his seat. If anybody tried to speak to him, he was certain that the scream he’d been strangling in the back of his throat would break loose. He kept his eyes turned deliberately out of the window and shoved his headphones in, folding his arms over his chest to signal as clearly as he could that he wanted to be left alone. In his periphery, he caught a few of the weird looks his teammates sent his way, but for once, he couldn’t have cared less about whatever they were thinking about him.
Hayden slung his body into the seat beside him. Shane could feel the weight of his attention, but he didn’t look at him. He was clinging to composure with the barest edges of his fingernails, and if Hayden asked him how he was, he would go to pieces.
Hayden didn’t ask, though. Instead, in a voice low enough for only Shane to hear, he said, “J.J. reamed the guys out after you left. I guess nobody realised what good buddies he is with Wyatt Hayes. He was pretty pissed that they were all so cool making jokes about it.”
Shane’s eyes found the back of J.J.’s head, a few rows in front of them and sitting alone, head down. Shane hadn’t even considered that he might not be the only Metro with a vested interest in the missing players; he was so worried about Ilya that he hadn’t really thought about them at all. He gave Hayden a clench-jawed nod of acknowledgement.
“The press had a couple of questions about it, but Theriault had me stick to the party line. We hope they come back safely soon, the League won’t be the same without them—stuff like that. I told him Yuna was calling when he asked where you are—you can pretend you’ve got a sick uncle, or something.” He shifted in his seat, enough to make Shane look at him. His expression was uncomfortable. “You haven’t heard anything from him yet, have you?”
Shane shook his head. “No.”
“Fuck. I was hoping…” He trailed off, but Shane knew what he’d meant. Shane, too, had been hoping it was a hoax, or a prank, or anything but what it seemed to be. He would forgive Ilya for making him worry if Ilya called him now and told him it had all been a joke—some kind of a bizarre, elaborate publicity stunt. He would even laugh.
His phone stayed silent. He closed his eyes and leant back against the headrest. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry, man,” in a lead-lined voice, heavy with feeling.
Shane didn’t say anything. There wasn’t anything to be said. He felt Hayden’s eyes on him, but he was done with talking, and eventually, Hayden’s attention fell away.
Shane heard the doors closing and peeled his eyes open. Theriault boarded with the last of the staff, and cast his eyes over the seats. It seemed to Shane that they snagged deliberately on him when they found him, lingering for a loaded beat.
“You’ve all heard by now about the Centaurs,” Theriault said, casting his voice loud enough to reach them at the back. “It’s a tough break, and no denying, but we don’t let it affect our game. That’s our line, and we stick to it. There’s a lot of hockey left to play, and we don’t need anybody getting distracted.”
Shane’s hands curled into fists, sitting like stones on his thighs. Luckily, that was all it seemed Theriault had wanted to say; he swung into his seat at the front of the coach, dropping out of Shane’s eyeline. The engine rumbled to life, and the coach pulled slowly out of the parking garage. Mid-January in D.C.—the night outside was tarry black and cloudless, stars flickering with a thin and watery light, like smothered matches. Shane pressed his forehead against the cold cold glass of the window and thought about Ilya, missing, Ilya, lost, Ilya, alone. His mom had said that these things were ironed out, sometimes, in a matter of hours, but it had been hours already, and there was no news. He thought about what he would do if he never got to see Ilya agin, and the idea was so stunningly and acutely painful that it struck the breath from his lungs. After that, he tried to think about nothing at all. The sodium glow of the streetlights flared bright, even through his closed eyelids. He tried to sleep, and couldn’t.
They made it to the hotel. The bus emptied; Shane was the last one off it. He was tired and sore and it didn’t even register—for once, he wasn’t thinking about stretching before bed or making sure he got a full eight hours or whether the hotel breakfast would include anything he was allowed to eat. Those concerns belonged to a version of himself he no longer recognised. He received his room key with a silent nod and was about to follow Hayden up to the fourth floor when Theriault called him back, standing in the lobby with his arms folded and his expression stern.
Shane gritted his teeth and dragged himself over to him, hitching his bag higher on his shoulder. “Yes, Coach?”
“Look, I know you and Rozanov have been working together lately. I don’t understand it, but I accept that you consider him a friend.”
He’s the love of my life, Shane wanted to say. If anything bad ever happened to him, I think it would kill me, too.
Instead, he said, “Yes, Coach.”
Theriault nodded. “I know you must be… concerned, given everything that’s going on, but I can’t have you losing your head over this, understand?” His pale blue eyes scrutinised Shane’s face from beneath bent and grey-flecked eyebrows. “You’re the captain, alright? We need you sharp.”
Shane bit down hard on his tongue, swallowing back the hot coal of anger he wanted to spit into Theriault’s expectant face. “Yes, Coach. Sorry, Coach.”
Theriault narrowed his eyes, surveying Shane for another long moment, and then he nodded again. “Okay, as long as that’s understood. Get some rest, Hollander. Early flight tomorrow.”
Shane was dismissed. He returned Theriault’s nod curtly, then turned on his heel and made for the elevators, concealing his shaking hands in the pocket of his hoodie. When the elevator arrived, he stepped in and punched the button for the fourth floor with unnecessary force. As the doors slid closed, he closed his eyes and slumped against the railing on the back wall, exhaling hard. He pulled one hand out of his pocket and raised it to eye level to watch it tremble; there were crescent-shaped indentations in his palm from his fingernails.
The elevator dinged politely as it arrived at its destination. Shane stepped out onto a carpet in dark burgundy, patterned with geometric shapes that messed with his eyes. He couldn’t focus on anything properly; he walked down the corridor to the room he was sharing with Hayden hardly feeling real.
“Yeah, okay, honey.” Hayden was on the phone when Shane entered the room, and he had that soft tone in his voice that meant it was Jackie. He glanced up at the sound of the door, and his expression flinched guiltily when he saw Shane. Sorry, he mouthed.
Shane didn’t understand, and then he did. He turned his face sharply away so that Hayden wouldn’t see his expression. How many of his teammates were, right now, on the phone to their partners, sharing the relief of the big terrible thing having happened to that other team, and not to them? How many of them were awash with gratitude, just hearing the voice of somebody they loved and knowing that they would see them tomorrow?
“Yeah, that was Shane. He just got back,” Hayden was saying. He kept his voice low like he wished Shane didn’t have to hear it. “Theriault grabbed him on the way up. No, he hasn’t heard anything yet.”
Shane swallowed hard. He dumped his bag on his bed—the one on the right side of the room, like it was every time he shared with Hayden—and said, without making eye contact, “I’m heading out. Tell Jackie I’m okay.”
“Hold on a minute—wait, Shane—”
He didn’t wait to hear what Hayden wanted to say to him. He left the room and let the door swing shut behind him, then found the stairwell at the end of the corridor and started downstairs at a jog. He couldn’t blame Hayden for anything—he called Jackie after every away game—but he couldn’t stand being in the room with him while they spoke. He missed Ilya with a desperation that made him feel like he had a taloned hand wrapped around his heart, claws biting into the meat; he could not, on top of that, stomach anybody’s pity.
Past the lobby, he found the gym. It was deserted; the motion-sensor lights blinked on as he stepped through the glass doors, bright and stark enough to make his eyes sting. Of course he couldn’t help remembering the night of the draft—Ilya’s golden, sweat-soaked skin, his heaving chest, the splay of his long legs, the meat of his thighs; the way he smiled like he knew how badly Shane wanted to climb into his lap, even though Shane hardly knew himself. Shane’s breathlessness had only been partly due to how hard he’d pushed himself on the exercise bike.
He gritted his teeth against the sting of the memory, walking past all the equipment to sink down onto a weight-lifting bench at the back of the room where he wouldn’t be easily disturbed. He took out his phone.
“Hi, this is Ilya, I will never listen to your voicemail.”
He closed his eyes and redialled, just to hear Ilya’s voice again. At the beep of the tone after the message, he said, “Ilya.” He had to pause, drawing a ragged breath. His voice was frayed and uneven when he spoke again. “You have to come back, okay? Just. Come back to me. Please.”
He hung up quickly after that, breathing harshly and burying his face in his hands. Alone again, there was nothing to distract him from the fear, and he was dumbfounded by how badly it hurt; it was a barbed-wire scourge, shredding tissue and nerve. He wanted Ilya. He wanted Ilya with a childish simplicity, like a crying infant or a dog who wanted to come in out of the rain.
The walls of the gym were panelled with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, so when he looked up, he could see his own face reflected back at him, wan and strained as if he were sick. What distressed him the most was that it wouldn’t even be obvious to somebody who didn’t know him well; he was still recognisably the face of the Metros, the face of Rolex, the face of Reebok. He wanted the fact of Ilya’s disappearance stamped on him like a brand, so that everyone who saw him could know what he had lost.
His phone buzzed with an incoming call, and again the hope surged through him like a solar flare before he could snuff it. But it was Svetlana’s name flashing on the screen, and not Lily’s. He answered.
“Svetlana. Hi.”
“Jane.” Svetlana sighed, connection crackling so that it was hard to tell if the note in her voice was relief or something else. She always called him Jane as if it were a term of endearment. “You didn’t call me back.”
“I’m sorry, I just—” He realised he had no idea what time it was. “Uh, I hope you weren’t waiting up for me, or anything.”
She laughed, utterly without humour. “You think I could sleep, зая?”
The first time Svetlana had called him that, Ilya had pouted and glared and warned her not to flirt with his boyfriend. At the time, he had been lying across both of their laps, his head resting on Shane’s thighs and his legs draped over Svetlana’s. It was deep summer, the two of them swaddled in the warm cotton peace of the cottage, and Svetlana, visiting for the first time. All evening, Ilya had been glowing with happiness, casting soft-eyed glances between her and Shane as if he couldn’t believe they were there, together. The firelight on his face was the colour of honey, and the depth of the love Shane had for him was infinite.
“No.” Shane swallowed. In the mirror, he caught sight of the dark circles under his eyes. He glanced quickly away. “No, I guess not.”
“What have you heard?”
“Probably the same as you,” he said. “I keep trying his phone, but—”
“Yes. I only get his Тупой чёртов voicemail.” Her voice went jagged and bitter over the curse words. “I swear I will kill him, when I see him again.”
It was comforting that she said when, not if. “What do you think happened to them?”
She sighed again. “I don’t know. I knew a girl in Russia who said her mother was lost for six weeks in a banya that turned to a maze.”
“Six weeks,” Shane repeated. Six weeks was a lifetime.
“Yes,” she said, as if she agreed. “But also, I knew a boy who walked through a door in the forest and never came back at all, so I will take six weeks and thank God for it.”
Shane shook his head, a flat denial. “That won’t happen to Ilya. He’s coming back.”
“I hope you are right, Jane.” Her voice was soft. “I hope he is home with you before you have time to miss him.”
It was already too late for that, but Shane didn’t say so. Svetlana surely knew, anyway.
“What are you going to do,” Shane asked, “until he’s back?”
He asked because he wanted a blueprint to follow; he had no idea what he was going to do.
Svetlana hummed.
“Pray,” she said, tone twisting with irony. “Watch the news and hope your government knows what they are doing.” There was a pause, the sound of her shifting slightly on the other end of the line. “And you? The Admirals come to Montreal in two days. Will you play?”
Shane hadn’t thought about hockey for hours.
“I don’t know. I guess so,” he said, although the thought filled him with dread.
“The team will struggle without you,” Svetlana noted. “Every time you miss a game, it takes them the whole first period to remember how to play when you are not carrying them. Boston were the same with him, for years.”
“Yeah, well,” Shane said. Talking about hockey with Svetlana wasn’t awkward the way it could be with other people, which had been a profound relief the first time Ilya had introduced them. Svetlana was easily the most beautiful woman he had ever met, and it was impossible not to be daunted by the depth and breadth of her history with Ilya; she was the only person alive, maybe, who had as much of a claim to him as Shane did. Finding out that Ilya’s declaration that she knew everything about hockey wasn’t at all exaggerated gave them common ground that Shane wasn’t afraid to meet her on. Still, he didn’t want to think about it, now. “I’m sure they’d figure it out.”
Svetlana made a noise like she wasn’t convinced. “Still. If you are planning to play, you should rest.”
She was right, but Shane was reluctant to hang up. Outside of his parents, there was nobody else he could speak to who loved Ilya as much as he did.
“Will you sleep?” he asked.
“Maybe I will try,” she said. “And maybe when I wake up, this will all be a dream.”
Shane’s fingers, fidgeting in his lap, found a loose thread dangling from the seam of his pocket. He tugged it free, winding it around the tip of his finger until the skin was white and tingling. He said, quietly, “That would be nice.”
“Yes,” Svetlana agreed. There was a beat of silence, neither of them willing to hang up yet. Shane wondered if Svetlana felt as lonely as he did, as if Ilya’s absence had purged the world of some vital warmth. She sighed for a third time, and said, gentling her tone, “Go to sleep, Jane. I will call you if I hear anything, and you do the same.”
“Okay,” he said. He plucked at his left eyelid, flicking away an eyelash that came out on his thumb. He cleared his throat. “Goodnight, Svetlana. I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Please, do. Goodnight, Jane.”
The call ended, and Shane blew out a long breath, leaning back on his hands. It had gone midnight; he should take Svetlana’s advice and sleep, but he wasn’t sure he could. Instead, he took out his phone again and navigated to his notifications tab, still full. Rose was a serial texter by habit, and there was a chain of unopened messages from her sandwiched between eleven unread emails and four direct messages on Instagram. He checked Rose’s first.
(From: Rose Landry – 21:40:) Oh my god Shane don’t check the news
(From: Rose Landry – 21:41:) Everything’s going to be fine don’t worry
(From: Rose Landry– 21:43:) Are you okay? Have you heard anything?
(From: Rose Landry – 21:45:) Do you need me to come to Montreal? I can be there in four hours.
Her last text was just a string of red heart emojis and an invitation to call him if he needed. Maybe she’d realised that he wasn’t going to see her texts until after the game, or maybe she’d thought twice about what kind of reaction he would have to half a dozen panicked text messages he might see before he’d heard the news for himself. He tapped out a response, letting her know he was fine and hadn’t heard anything. He was glad that she had texted and not called; it was much easier to lie when she couldn’t hear his voice. She replied immediately, another long block of emojis that he didn’t have the energy to do more than drop a heart reaction on.
A quick glance showed that most of his emails had gone to his mom, too; he decided to leave them to her and swept them from the screen. That just left Instagram.
It wasn’t a site he used often—his social media team managed pretty much everything for him—but occasionally sponsors used his private messages to get in touch, and his mom had drilled into him how important it was that he kept an eye on it.
The messages waiting for him weren’t from any sponsor. When he saw Ilya’s username, his heart leapt from his chest and beat about the chamber of his throat like a trapped bird. He had forgotten, in the panic of learning that Ilya was missing, that sometimes he used Instagram when he was travelling. The messages he had left were short, but they went through Shane like a rain of knives.
Shane
You are rhe best thing in my life.
I love yiu. Always. Maybe from rhe fiest time I saw you.
I am thinkfing only about you rihht now. A million memories. Thank uou for those.
Whayever happens, I am with you. Safe in your heart. I believe it.
He read them once, then once more. Ilya was usually scrupulous about his texts; he was careful about his English, even now; he didn’t want to be misunderstood. If he was drunk enough—or horny enough—his standards slipped, but Shane knew that that wasn’t what this was. His ears were ringing again, and the outer edge of his vision was blurry; he could hear a strange wheezing sound, and it took him a long minute to realise that it was coming from him. His breathing had collapsed again, chest tightening like he had been crushed against the boards and pinned there with the weight of a truck. He could see his hands trembling where they were still clutching his phone, but he couldn’t feel them; it was like they had been replaced with gloves made of stiff rubber. Missing, everybody had said—Ilya’s plane was missing—but his messages read like a last words missive or—fucking Christ—a suicide note.
For the first time all evening, the thought he had been trying hard to drown at the back of his skull broke the surface.
Ilya could be dead.
It broke over him like a sixty-foot wave, implacable force, strong enough to bowl him over. He folded, bent double over the bench and gasping, every breath wracking his body like the wind tearing a seam in the ocean. Ilya could be dead, and Shane, somehow, would have to live in the world without him, as if that were even possible. As if they hadn’t grown around each other like two vines around the same branch. He gasped out a chain of short, ugly breaths, and hot tears came flooding forth like water from a dam burst. For once, he didn’t try to stop them. Even if he’d wanted to, he wasn’t sure he could.