He’s one of the brightest hockey talents this town has ever seen, but no one realized it until this spring. He lives with his mom in one of the cheapest apartment blocks at the far end of the Hollow in the north of Beartown; he’s always played with secondhand equipment, and he’s been told he’s too small, but no one is faster on skates than he is. “Kill them!” his best friends usually say instead of “Good luck!” His speed is his weapon.

Hockey is the sport of bears around here, but Amat taught himself to play it like a lion. The sport became his way into the community, and he thought it could be his ticket out as well. His mother works as a cleaner in the ice rink in the winter and in the hospital during the summer, but one day Amat hopes to turn professional and take her away from here. Back in the spring he got his chance, with the junior team. He grabbed it. He showed everyone in town that he was a winner, and the path to his dreams lay open. It was the best day and the worst night of his life. After the game he was invited to a party that Maya Andersson was also going to, and the only thing Amat had ever dreamed of more than playing was being allowed to kiss her.

He was drunk, but even so he will never forget every detail of how he stumbled through room after room of drunk and high teenagers singing and laughing, went upstairs, and heard Maya calling for help. Amat opened a door and saw the rape.

When Kevin realized what Amat had seen, he and William Lyt and some of the other boys in the junior team offered Amat everything the boy had dreamed of—a place on the junior team, star status, a career—in exchange for keeping his mouth shut. Kevin’s father gave him money and promised to get his mother a better job. If anyone condemns Amat for giving the offer serious consideration, that person has lived a life where morality is easy. It never is. Morality is a luxury.

Kevin’s parents and the club’s sponsors called a meeting and tried to force Maya’s father out of the club. In the end Amat went to the meeting, stood up at the front, and told everyone what he had seen Kevin do. Peter Andersson won the vote of confidence and kept his job.

And then what? Amat is running faster now, his feet hurt more, because what the hell happened next? Kevin was never punished. Maya never got justice, and Amat left that meeting with hundreds of enemies. Lyt and his friends found him and beat him up, and if Bobo hadn’t changed sides at the last minute and defended Amat, they would have killed him.

Neither Amat nor Bobo is welcome at Hed Hockey Club now. Amat is a snitch and Bobo a traitor. And Beartown Ice Hockey? Soon it won’t exist anymore. Amat is on his way to becoming one of those people who sits at a bar counter in thirty years’ time with a story full of “ifs” and “if only that hadn’ts.” He’s seen them in the rink, shabby men with three days’ worth of stubble and four days’ worth of hangover, whose lives peaked while they were still teenagers.

* * *

Amat could have turned professional, his life could have changed, but instead he’s on his way to becoming a has-been at the age of sixteen.

* * *

His gaze is focused inward. He doesn’t even notice the Jeep behind him. When it passes him, he doesn’t know it was fifty yards behind him for several minutes, so that the stranger could make a note of how far he is from Beartown and how fast he’s running. The stranger writes, “Amat. If his heart is as big as his lungs.”

* * *

Benji is sitting with his back against his father’s headstone. His body is full of moonshine and grass, and the combination acts as a circuit breaker. He’s closing down. Can’t bear it otherwise.

He has three older sisters, and you can tell the difference between them if you mention his name. Gaby has young children; she reads them bedtime stories, goes to bed early on Friday nights and still watches TV programs on TV instead of a computer. Katia is a bartender at the Barn in Hed; she spends her Friday nights pouring beer and shepherding three-hundred-pound drunks through the door when they decide to try to relieve other three-hundred-pound drunks of their front teeth. Adri is the eldest; she lives alone at her boarding kennels outside Beartown, she hunts and fishes and likes people who keep their mouths shut. So if you say “Benji,” Gaby will exclaim anxiously, “Has something happened to him?” Katia will sigh and wonder, “What’s he done now?” But Adri will force you up against a wall and demand, “What the hell do you want with my brother?” Gaby worries, Katia solves problems, Adri protects: that’s been the division of responsibilities since their father took his rifle and went out into the forest. They know they can’t teach a heart like Benji’s, but they might be able to tame it. So when he lives like a nomad, staying sometimes at his mother’s, sometimes out in the forest, sometimes with one of his sisters, they fall into their old roles. If he’s at Gaby’s, she still gets up at night to check that he’s breathing, even though he’s eighteen years old. When he sees Katia, she still spoils him, lets him get away with way too much shit, because she doesn’t want him to stop coming to her with his problems. And when he’s staying out at the kennels with Adri, she sleeps with the key to the gun cabinet under her pillow. To make sure her little brother doesn’t do the same thing as their father.

There have always been adults in this town who have thought that Benji is a rebel. His sisters know that the exact opposite is true. He became precisely the person everyone wanted him to be, because a young boy carrying a huge secret soon learns that sometimes the best place to hide it is where everyone can see you.

As a child Benji was the first person to recognize that Kevin could be a star. In Beartown players like that are called “cherry trees.” So Benji saw to it that Kevin got enough space on the ice to blossom. Benji could give and take so much rough treatment that men in the stands used to say, “Now, there’s a real hockey player. This isn’t a sport for fags and weaklings, it’s for guys like Benji!” The more he fought, the better they thought they knew him. Until he became the person they wanted him to be.

He’s eighteen now. He gets up and leans on the headstone, kisses his father’s name. Then he takes a step back, clenches his fist as tightly as he can, and punches the same place with full force. Blood drips from his knuckles as he makes his way through the forest toward Hed. Tomorrow would have been Alain Ovich’s birthday, and this is the first time that Benji is celebrating it without Kevin. He’s going to need someone to fight tonight.

He never sees the Jeep. It’s standing parked beneath a tree. The stranger walks through the rain to the grave, looks at the name engraved in the stone. Back in the Jeep a pen scratches on a sheet of paper, “Ovich. If he still wants to play.”

* * *

Benji. Amat. Bobo. Inside every large story there are always plenty of small ones. While three young men in Beartown thought they were in the process of losing their club, a stranger was already constructing a team with them.

* * *

Richard Theo, the politician, is alone in the council building when evening falls. He looks younger than his forty years, a genetic quirk he used to hate when he inspected his impassively hairless testicles as he waited for the onset of puberty but from which he is now reaping the rewards as his contemporaries pluck gray hairs from their beards and curse the law of gravity every time they pee. Theo is wearing a suit. At best his colleagues wear jeans and a jacket, so he’s used to being mocked for “looking like a government minister even though he’s just a nobody from the provinces.” It doesn’t bother him. He doesn’t dress for the job he’s got but for the one he wants.

He grew up in Beartown but was never one of the popular kids, never played hockey. He went abroad to study, and no one noticed he was gone. He worked in a bank in London and was gone for years before he suddenly came home with expensive suits and political ambitions. He joined the smallest political party in the area. It isn’t the smallest anymore.