Ember

The scouts had a pool going: which game the rookie would choke in.

Eighteen years old, debut night, wrists iced, heart doing something medically inadvisable.

Seventeen thousand people in the building, and the loudest thing in it was the ventilation.

“Game five. Final fight. Baron pit,” the shotcaller said in his ear, flat as a metronome. “Bai. You’re the win condition. Everyone else is bait.”

“Bait. Cool. Love that for us,” Kwan said from the left seat.

“Focus.”

Kwan’s champion drifted wide of the smoke. “Kwan, back,” the shotcaller said. “I’m back. I’m back.” “You’re not back.” “I’m back.”

The smoke cleared. Five red health bars. His own HP: 34 percent.

Here’s what nobody tells you about pro play: you never see the whole game. One frame. Then the next. Then the next.

The enemy jungler blinked first.

Li Bai’s hand moved.

Three spells. One dash. A flash-cancel nobody watching at home would catch at full speed — then KILL bounced off the middle of the screen, then another KILL, then ACE in letters the size of a bus.

The arena went somewhere past loud, into a pressure you felt in the sternum.

“WHAT IS THAT? WHO IS THIS KID?” the caster screamed. “LI BAI! Eighteen years old! A debut match! He just turned a three-versus-five into a clean ace on a third of a health bar!”

“GG,” Kwan said over comms, laughing now. “What was that dash? What was that?”

Li Bai took his hands off the keyboard.

“Didn’t feel like anything,” he said.

A lie. But the handshake line was forming — cameras, confetti cannons, gold paper falling through the stage lights — and there wasn’t time for true things.

* * *

The locker room smelled like muscle spray and somebody’s forgotten lunch.

His left hand wouldn’t close.

He’d noticed it after the last click, when the fight was already won and his body was standing down. A lag. The hand received its final instruction and held it, trembling, one extra beat before executing.

Half a second. Maybe less. Probably less.

He stood at the sinks and made a fist. It happened slowly, the fourth and fifth fingers arriving late to their own instruction.

Open. Closed. Open. By the fourth cycle his mouth had gone dry.

Nobody would’ve seen it. The dash was clean. The post-match screen said his hands ran 0.4 seconds faster than league average, printed in a nice confident font.

He ran the hand under the cold tap until it went numb. Somewhere between biting and nothing was the temperature it liked best, and that fact scared him more than the fist did.

The door banged open. Kwan, jacket half on, phone in his teeth.

“There you are. Media wants the young prodigy.”

“Tell them I died.”

“Tell them yourself, they’re buying dinner.” Kwan squinted at him. “You good? You look like you’re gonna hurl.”

“Tired.”

“Bro, you’re eighteen. You’re not allowed to be tired. That’s a rule.” He fixed his collar in the mirror. “That last fight. I’ve watched you run that combo in scrims two hundred times. It has never come out that fast.”

Li Bai looked at his hand. Wet, red from the cold. Perfectly still now. Behaving.

“Adrenaline,” he said.

“You know what Mukil said about you at tryouts? Said you play like you’ve already watched the replay. Everyone laughed. He wasn’t joking.” Kwan pointed his phone at him. “And the forums are already — wait.” He read off the screen, delighted. “‘Li Bai plays like the game runs slower for him than for everyone else.’ Posted two minutes ago. That’s the most insane compliment I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah,” Li Bai said. “Insane.”

The door swung shut and the room went back to being a room. Gray lockers. Pipes humming. One fluorescent tube near the showers doing its broken little stutter. Dark. Light. Dark. Light.

He made the fist again. It worked fine this time.

He timed it anyway, against the second hand of the wall clock, the way you’d time a limp you hoped nobody clocked. One. Two. Fist.

Half a second of nothing in the middle, felt by exactly one person in the building.

He flexed the hand, shouldered his bag, and went out to be photographed.

* * *

Up in section 314 — nosebleed, corner, behind a concrete pillar — the cheapest seats had emptied before game three, because most of 314 had bet against the home team.

Two people hadn’t moved in three hours.

“Did you see it?” The woman still had her program rolled up, gripping it like a rail. “Did you see what he did?”

“I saw it.”

“You weren’t watching. Your eyes were closed.”

“I watched the last fight.” Which was true. Then he closed his eyes again and pressed the folded rag from his jacket pocket against his mouth and breathed through it, slow, while the building screamed.

The cough sat low in his chest these days. Twenty-two years of foundry dust didn’t leave. It moved in somewhere quiet and wet, and waited.

He was careful with the rag. Wet side folded in. Nobody in 314 was looking anyway.

“He looked thin,” he said. “Do they feed him out here?”

“His manager said there’s a meal plan. Stop.”

“Meal plan,” he repeated, and coughed twice into his fist. “When I started at the plant, the soup had a skin on it by noon and we ate it anyway.”

She opened the canvas coin pouch on her lap and counted, hand doing the work inside, lips moving with the arithmetic. Bus fare home, two. Dumplings at the station if it was still open, three, four.

Everything left goes in the jar.

On the giant screen over the stage, the broadcast replayed her son’s fight on a loop, his face enormous above ten thousand strangers chanting a name they’d learned an hour ago.

“Look how tall he is up there.”

“He gets that from my side.”

“Your side is one point six eight.”

“I’m tall where it counts.”

Above the stairwell door, a fluorescent tube flickered the way every tube in their apartment flickered, and every few seconds the whole cheap section went briefly dark.

“He should eat,” his father said, and folded the rag a little tighter.

They caught the last bus home. In the kitchen, the tube light stuttered over the table while she counted the jar out loud, got the same number twice, and put one coin back, and smiled at it.

On the counter, the small television with the coat-hanger antenna played a muted replay. Golden confetti. An eighteen-year-old lifting a trophy that cost more than the building they lived in.

His father stood in the doorway, breathing carefully around whatever lived in there.

“He won,” he said.

“He won.”

“Good.” He coughed into the rag, so the walls wouldn’t hear it. “Good.”

Across the city, someone he’d never met was already counting his hand.

The number was going up.