On the giant TV, the Iron Dynasty players turned and ran.Five of them, all at once, backing away from the Lockwood Lions as if they were scared; the Lions chased them into the narrow pass by the river, and I knew exactly what was going to happen next, because I was the one who invented it.“No,” I said quietly. “Don’t follow them…”Too late. The Iron Dynasty players spun around in the same second, and two more of their fighters dropped out of the trees behind the Lions. The trap closed like a fist, and the Lions’ whole team was gone in four seconds.GAME OVER flashed across the screen. Iron Dynasty had won 3-0.The room full of Lockwoods groaned, and on the broadcast, the famous caster Dex Carver, white hair, short beard, warm voice, went silent for a long moment.“Folks,” he finally said, “I haven’t seen a move like that in three years.”My hands went cold around the tray of drinks I was holding.That move was called Crown Fall. I’d made it up at twenty-two, on a whiteboard, in a lo

I never found out if Sienna saw the mask. By the time I had pushed it back into the box, her door was shut again, and when she left for the Lions Den at seven the next morning, she only said she’d be late.At eight o’clock on Saturday, I was sitting in a dark room at the Coral Eye Institute with my chin on a cold plastic rest, staring at a tiny white light.“Press the button every time you see a flash,” Dr. Leah Morgan said. “Anywhere, even at the very edge.”“I know how the test works.”“I know you know.” She was tall, with short natural hair and a pen tucked behind her ear, and she had the calmest voice I’d ever heard. “Humor me.”I pressed the button. Then I pressed it again. Then I waited a long time for flashes that I was sure were there, somewhere, in the dark around the edges, but I never saw them.When the lights came on, she was looking at her screen with a face I had learned to read over three years. It was her bad-news face, and she didn’t try to hide it.“Just tell me,” I

The Lions Den was a three-story glass house in Midtown with the team’s gold lion painted on the front door, and every Saturday at noon, I walked through that door with two paper bags of food.Today, I walked in with my eyes still burning from three matches, and nobody noticed.“Look, the house pet brought snacks,” said one of the Lions’ players, a tall kid with dyed red hair, without looking up from his screen.“Does he do tricks?” another one asked.“He fetches,” the first one said, and they both laughed.I set the bags on the long table by the window, the way I always did. Two years of Saturdays, and they still called me that.“Hey. Hey!” A heavy man with a shaved head and a gray goatee came out of the coaches’ office, a whistle bouncing on his coffee-stained polo shirt. Ray Mendez, the assistant coach, never coached anything with that whistle; he just liked the sound of it. “Food goes in the hallway. We’re doing strategy in here, not a picnic.”“Sienna asked me to bring it to the t

On Sunday morning, the sun came up warm over Bayview Hills, and the Lockwoods held brunch on the patio as if nobody’s life was about to be sold for a dollar.I carried out the coffee at ten. My eyes felt like someone had rubbed sand in them, and I’d slept for three hours, but nobody at that table cared how I slept.“There he is,” Brandon called, waving his phone. “The runaway. Where’d you go last night, Cole? Did you finally find a job?”“I was with a friend.”“You don’t have friends,” Vivian said, feeding a piece of bacon to the little white dog in her lap. “You have a phone and a candy game.”Howard sat at the head of the table in a gray suit, even on a Sunday, reading the business pages. Sienna sat beside him with her laptop open, answering emails, her ponytail tight, her face pale. She hadn’t said a word to me since our talk in her office.At ten-thirty, a long silver sports car rolled up the driveway, and Spencer Dalton stepped out in a cream suit and his bright white sneakers, f

At 8:58 p.m. on Sunday, the back room at Respawn was so quiet I could hear Maggie’s heart pounding beside me.Or maybe it was mine.“Two million,” she whispered, staring at the viewer count on her laptop. “Two million people, Cole. That’s more than some Pro League finals.”“Don’t tell me numbers.”“Sorry.”I pulled the black visor over my head and put the headset on over it. The small camera in the corner blinked red. On the stream, my window showed only dark glass, and Reaper_0’s window beside it showed nothing at all, a black square with his name in white letters. No face, no voice, no camera.Somewhere across the city, I knew, the whole Lockwood family was sitting in front of the giant TV in the mansion, because Tyler had made them. He’d texted the family group chat three times since dinner. Final at 9!!! LastLight vs Reaper!!! History!!!Brandon had answered with a picture of his PeakBet ticket. Twenty thousand dollars on Reaper_0.Three minutes earlier, a private message had popp