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“It’s—you mean they’re not—”

“It’s been clean since the start of the game. I was held up, we had to—”

“You mean they can—OH MY GOSH” They can actually win, oh, no, oh, my—

“Go, SLUGS!” Catie yelled at the top of her voice, the sheer volume of it nonetheless becoming almost lost in the sea of sound all around her. They have a chance to win. They actually have a chance!

And now it was as if the whole game had been different from the beginning…and now the ending mattered more than ever. The whole arena had become a generator of a single nonstop cheer which was now indistinguishable from white noise, a noise that was “white” the way the sun is white. Catie was as much part of it now as anyone else was. I’ll be hoarse tomorrow, she thought, and didn’t care in the slightest. That long pass that South Florida was setting up came apart as Villeneuve from Xamax snagged it behind a knee, between Daystrom and Marcus, and made off with it. In possession now, Xamax made it plain that they intended to stay that way until time ran out. But the Slugs had other plans. They bounced off the walls and off each other and off the Xamax players in ways that even George and Gracie’s kids had never thought of, and in the middle of them, receiving and passing, and receiving and passing again, there was Brickner, unstoppable, until the Xamax players tried informally to scrum him just to keep him out of the way.

Two minutes. There was no way it could continue at this level, but it continued. Somehow George was no longer at the center of that scrum. He found daylight, emerged into it with the ball in the crook of one elbow, flung the ball to his cocaptain. Mike caught it in a knee-bend, rolled like lightning in yaw axis, flung it away to Daystrom. She caught it elbow-wise, passed it, had it passed back to her. Lined up on the goal—

The goal precessed. The roar, impossibly, got louder. One minute. Daystrom pushed herself off an unfortunate Xamax blocker, spun in pitch axis, fired the ball away again. Someone else from Xamax snagged it, began again the game of keep-away, the only goal to keep South Florida from scoring. Pass, pass, pass, into a self-inflicted scrum and (theoretically) out the other side—except that somehow a South Florida team member, one of the flankers, Monahan, managed to work one arm into that scrum and somehow come out with the ball. The crowd’s noise got impossibly louder. Now the passing game started again, and the Xamax players got busy covering the goals. Thirty seconds. A few of them made attempts to get the ball away from the Slugs again, but their captain shouted them back to the goals again. If they were properly covered there was no danger, nothing to do but wait for time to run out. Twenty seconds.

The goals precessed another hex along. The pass came to Daystrom. She fired it like a bullet at George Brickner. George snagged it, spun, and if it came to him like a bullet, it left him like a laser beam, straight and almost impossible to see, fired right at one of the goals, at a patch of daylight between two of the Xamax guards.

One of them moved just enough to block it. It bounced into the center of the volume again, and George snagged it one more time, pushed off the nearby Daystrom, spun for impetus, and fired it back the way it had come.

The Xamax guard blocked it again. It bounced right back at George. He passed to Daystrom, pushing off her as he did so. She tumbled, came around, fired the ball at him one last time. He caught it, spinning, feinted at the Xamax blocker, threatening a third attempt—spun again, feinted as if to pass, spun—

The ball left him one last time, straight for the goal. The Xamax blocker had drifted just a little to one side….

The horn went.

The spatball impacted squarely in the center of the goal hex.

Amid the impossible roaring, Catie gasped for breath, and wondered when she had last had one.

The occupants of both F&F spaces were emptying into the spat volume now. Hal plunged past her, and Catie, wrung out, astonished,