It didn't feel like triumph. It felt like a held breath. In the tunnel, Maya stared at the floor. "If I'd been sharper on that toss—"
"Stop," Amaya said. "I mean it. We go home, we drill transitions until they bore us, and we walk into the championship like we've already done it. Because we have."
Elijah was waiting by the exit, and he didn't say a word — just put his hand on her shoulder, and that was enough. In the car, he said, "You held that stunt like it was nothing."
"It wasn't nothing."
"No," he said. "It wasn't." He was quiet a moment. "You know what a SEAL team does after a mission that goes sideways? Debrief. Honest, no blame. Then they go again."
"We debriefed," Amaya said, and he smiled, and that was the whole conversation. She leaned her head against the window and watched the streetlights blur, and felt the shake in her hands start to settle.
They'd qualified. Not triumphant. Shaken, but standing. And sometimes standing was the whole thing.
The next week of practice was brutal and quiet. Coach stripped the pyramid back to basics and rebuilt the transition one count at a time. They drilled it until Maya complained her arms had filed for divorce, until Jordan stopped flinching at the timing, until the flyers trusted the bases like gravity. Amaya came home with bruises on her shoulders and ice on her knees and a notebook full of counts.
On Friday night, Tariq showed up at practice with his laptop and a tripod. "For film," he said. "So you can see what you're doing."
He filmed the rebuilt transition from three angles. On the playback, it was almost beautiful — the flyer rising, the catch, the hold. Almost. "One more adjustment," Coach said. "Amaya, you're anticipating. Trust the catch."
"Trust the catch," Amaya repeated, and on the next rep she did, and the stunt locked in like a key turning. The team exhaled together, and Maya whooped, and for the first time since regionals, Amaya felt the knot in her chest loosen.
Walking out, Jordan fell into step beside her. "Hey. Regionals. Thank you."
"For what?"
"For not letting me drown on that mat." Jordan bumped her shoulder. "You could've thrown me under the bus. Most people would've."
"I'm not most people," Amaya said, and they both laughed, because it was the most Maya-adjacent thing she'd ever said and Maya, overhearing, shouted, "She's learning!"
Amaya's hair was growing back, brushing her jaw now, and she wore it loose that night, the arena lights long gone but something in her still humming. They were going to the championship. Shaken. Standing. Ready to be excellent.
In the car, her phone buzzed — a text from an unknown number. She almost ignored it. Then she opened it, and the humming stopped cold.
Chapter 17
The Leak
The text was from a number she didn't recognize: a link, no message. Amaya almost deleted it. Then instinct — her father's training, always verify — made her open it in the parking lot, with the arena lights still burning behind her.
It was a video. Thirty seconds. Her, in the locker room, laughing — the audio dubbed over with a voice that sounded like hers, saying things she had never said. Cruel things. About Coach Rivera. About the team. About the girls who'd hurt her last fall getting exactly what they deserved. It cut to a clip of her at regionals, stone-faced after the wobble, with a caption: *Two-faced. Still faking it.*
Her stomach dropped through the floor of the car. It was doctored — clumsily, if you looked — but it would travel faster than the truth. It already had: the little view counter under the post said 2,000. Then, as she watched, 2,300.
"Amaya?" Elijah's voice. "What is it?"
She handed him the phone. He watched it twice, his face doing nothing, which meant he was furious. "Don't respond," he said. "Don't post. Screenshot everything. Send it to me. And then we call Principal Harrison."
"Dad, it's forty-eight hours before—" She stopped. The championship was two weeks out, but the team had a showcase this weekend. "It's supposed to rattle me before the showcase."
"I know what it's supposed to do." He started the car. "That's why we don't let it."
At home, she screenshotted the post, the account, the comments — already filling with strangers' opinions about a girl they'd never met. Tariq was on the phone before she'd finished. She'd texted the group chat: *need you guys. my house. now.*
"He used a voice clone," Tariq said the moment he walked in, laptop already open, not even taking off his shoes. He'd been sent the link by Maya. "It's garbage, honestly. The lip sync drifts by like six frames and the room tone doesn't match. Watch." He played it frame by frame, pointing out the seams the way other people pointed out constellations. "I can prove it's fake. I just need an hour."
Maya arrived with ice cream and fury. "Someone from Brett's orbit did this. You know they did. He got suspended, lost his captaincy, and now—"
"Don't," Amaya said quietly. "We don't know."
Jordan showed up last, pale. "I know who posted it," she said, and the room went still. "It wasn't Brett. It was Sam." A beat. "He sent it to me first. He said — he said if I forwarded it to the squad group chat, he'd make sure the thing about me and the grades—" She stopped, swallowing. "He had screenshots of my transcript. He said he'd leak those too. I didn't forward it, I swear, but I didn't tell anyone either, and then it went public anyway and I—"
"Hey." Amaya crossed the room and took Jordan's shaking hands. "You didn't send it. That's the part that matters."
"But I almost—"
"You didn't." Maya sat down hard on the other side of her. "And he tried to blackmail you, Jordan. That's not on you. That's on him."
Elijah, leaning in the doorway, said, "Jordan, does your family know about the transcript?"
She shook her head.
"Then you tell them tonight," he said, not unkindly. "Take his leverage away. Secrets are only weapons if you keep them for the other guy."
The plan came together the way plans did when Tariq was involved: fast and thorough. He built a side-by-side breakdown — the original locker-room footage (someone's practice video, posted months ago, public) against the doctored clip, the audio waveform mismatched, the lip sync drifting. He traced the posting account to a burner, and the burner to a phone number Sam had used on a team fundraiser spreadsheet. Receipts, stacked neatly.
"Send it to Harrison," Elijah said. "Not to the internet. The truth, through the right channel, beats a rumor every time. That's the creed."
Amaya looked at him. "We don't get even. We get excellent — and we make the truth impossible to ignore."