Chapter One: The Last Light

“What do you think, Captain?” Xu asked. Qiao Ran stopped the ball. “Can we win?” Jianxia looked at her. For an instant, pale blue threads appeared around Qiao Ran’s feet, like moonlit cracks in water. One ran toward the left post, one curled toward Xiaoman, and another snapped halfway across the court. Jianxia blinked. They vanished. Not again. Ever since that match three years ago, she had seen such lines when exhausted or fiercely concentrated. A neurologist called them visual auras. Her therapist called them a trauma response. Jianxia called them probability lines and did her best to pretend they did not exist. “Yes,” she said. “If, at the moment you most want to chase the ball, you can stop yourselves.”