My Team Cut Me on Stage for a Younger Star, So I Took Last Place to the Final novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Hospice

The Owls' sniper refuses a coach from Crown until Joel calls her game by ear from the kitchen, and the league's caster calls the team a hospice on air.

On Monday morning I woke up on a beanbag in the Owls' living room with a fork pointed at my face.

"Pancakes," said the man holding it. "From the Denny's on Sepulveda. I run the overnight."

He was thirty-six, in a Denny's polo with a name tag turned around backward.

He was the team's support player, the one who kept everybody alive with a healing drone.

He set a foil pan on my chest, sat down at his desk, and fell asleep sitting straight up.

A big man in a Texas Tech T-shirt was eating cereal out of a mixing bowl in the kitchen.

"Morning, sir," he said to me.

"Morning, sir," he said to Bodie, who was eighteen.

He played anchor, the shield.

The fifth player came down the hall in socks and stepped on my hand.

"Sorry! Oh, sorry. I'm so sorry."

He was from Winnipeg, twenty-one, and he played flex.

Bodie said he apologized after every kill in a match too, even on the team voice channel.

The woman with the braid was already at her desk with a cup of sunflower seeds.

Her name was Mac Petrie, and she was the sniper.

She had called the team's plays all season, and she didn't turn around when I said good morning.

"So that's everybody," Bodie said. "Mac's the best one. Don't tell her."

"I can hear you," Mac said.

I stood up and put the pancakes on the counter.

"I'd like to watch you all play this morning," I said.

Mac spat a shell into the cup.

"Can I ask you something first, Crown?"

"Joel."

"Who's buying our slot?"

The living room went quiet except for the ceiling fan.

"Glenn Moberly," I said.

"Right. Your owner wants this team for his academy kids. The cheaper we finish, the cheaper we are."

She swung around in her chair.

"Then Saturday he cuts you on a stage, and four hours later you're in our kitchen."

"He cut me for real," I said. "You can watch it. Nine thousand people did."

"I've been inside a Crown building," Mac said. "I know what they send."

The Texan had stopped chewing.

Bodie looked at me, then at Mac.

"Fine," I said. "Put your game on speakers and play a ranked match. I'll call it from the kitchen."

"Call what?"

"Where they are, before you see them."

Mac laughed for the first time.

"In a real match you can't talk while the round's running," she said. "You get thirty seconds between rounds."

"And two timeouts a map. And my headset only gives me one of you at a time."

"So this is a party trick."

"Then it costs you nothing to watch it."

She narrowed her eyes at me.

"Three rounds," she said. "Miss one, and you drive back to El Segundo tonight."

"Deal."

She pulled the plug on her headset, and the game came out of her speakers loud enough to wake the night manager.

I sat on the kitchen stool with my back to her screen and closed my eyes.

Holdline is five against five.

The attackers carry a breach charge to one of two vaults, A or B, and the defenders try to stop them.

Mac's team was defending.

The first round, I heard four sets of boots go left and one go right.

"A," I said. "Four of them. One faking B."

They came through A with four.

Mac killed two, and her team held.

In the second round, a sniper's scope chirped on the far balcony.

A scope chirps when it zooms in.

It chirped again, a second later, the sound of zooming out and back in.

Then there was nothing for three seconds, and a shot.

Mac went down.

"Their sniper zooms twice before he peeks," I said. "Every time. He's nervous."

"That's not a call," Mac said. "You didn't say where."

"I did now. Shoot the second chirp."

The third round, the scope chirped twice on the far balcony.

Mac didn't wait to see him.

She fired at the empty doorframe on the second chirp, and the other sniper stepped into her bullet.

The Texan put his mixing bowl down on the counter.

"Yes sir," he said quietly.

Mac didn't say anything.

She played the rest of the game without looking back, and she won it.

When it ended, she put her headset back in.

"One match," she said. "That's what you get."

The TV over the desks had the league's studio show on with the sound low.

The Canadian turned it up.

Toni Kasten was on the desk.

She was the Circuit's weekday caster, in a blazer over a band T-shirt, with short dark-blond hair and gray eyes.

Every player in the league watched her, and every player in the league was a little afraid of her.

"The Valley Owls have hired Joel Strickler as their coach," she said.

Her partner laughed before she even got there.

"Three matches left, oh and eight, and they've hired a wrist with a headset," Toni said. "Welcome to the Reseda hospice."

The night manager woke up.

"What's a hospice?" he asked.

"Where you go to die comfortable," the Texan said.

Bodie was looking at his shoes.

Mac reached over and turned the TV off.

"Saturday's Phoenix," she said to me. "If we lose, you're gone, and I call the plays."

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