Serendipitous, you say,

That, falling, you caught something

Before the black water

And its anvil surface

...

I, who have been scratched and dislocated

By many hands,

Know better.

Presented with the choice of waiting for one of the three Dominions to emerge from the locker room-one of the three who had tightened around her like a net in the dark-and gambling on unknown doors and unknown men, Kalypso chose the latter.

The first door wasn't one, really-it was instead a set of swinging saloon doors that led to a kitchen. A kitchen, huh? So were they making their own food instead of getting a sealed cafeteria-style meal slid to them through some silent dispenser?

There was no one in the kitchen, so she didn't linger. The next door hissed open before her, presenting a long, dim corridor lined with more doors. The same black block text from the lockers leered along the hallway: S01, S02, S03, S04…

Kalypso recoiled from that open doorway as if it had shocked her. Sensing her departure, the door leading to their rooms slid closed again.

For a moment, she stood still, battling with herself. Someone might be in their room. She could go knock on doors, and maybe someone would answer, and maybe they'd help her with the blood test lock, and then she'd finally be able to get some peace. She could do that, and maybe, just maybe-

But maybe someone would answer, and not help. And where would that leave her? Where would it leave him?

With a lost, pleading Lamb begging at his doorstep, a Lamb who'd entered his personal domain, who'd come looking for him, who couldn't really say no to anything, not when he was her only option, her only choice-that's where it would leave him.

Kalypso did not, not for a second, trust a Dominion left in such a circumstance. She knew better. She'd learned better.

Call it wisdom, or cowardice, or maybe even pride. Kalypso did not try any of those doors.

She went to the third door. None of them were locked, she'd noticed bitterly-just the one to her room, her locker itself, and that other, mystery door at the back of her room.

This next door opened into a room that was mostly darkness, except for the blue and yellow glow of the holograms projected upward from the wide center table.

Kalypso stared. It was a projection of a volleyball court, with four figures gliding across it in slow motion. She recognized them, and the drill they were engaged in, instantly.

There was Cu Chulainn's high hut set, and Jaegerjaquez's approach. There was Duibhne's smooth jump, and the ball rocketing just outside of the line-and herself, stepping off court to greet it with the flat plane of a forearm pass.

It was a three-dimensional recording of their drill. Not an approximation-an exact recording. There were no details to their faces, but all the rest was captured perfectly. Kalypso remembered that hit and the extra step back she'd taken when she saw Jaegerjaquez rush his approach a bit under the set. Look, there was even that libero's hand moving to his hip, and Duibhne turning around to lecture her. It was all there.

All thought of getting back to her room vanished from her mind. This was brilliant. This was the perfect way to figure out if Jaegerjaquez had tells she missed, which of her guesses she could crystalize into certainty next time, how she could capitalize, improve, evolve. Kalypso bolted for the table, circling around it to get a better look at the angles-

"Hey there, Ixora."

She froze.

How the hell had she not noticed him?

Gilbert Redford leaned forward to put an elbow on the table. That lean brought him within range of the soft glow emanating from the holograms; it drew the intensity out from the corners of his eyes, drew him out from behind that facade of cheerful, generous good-nature. The smothering amberglow trap of him was bared, here. That he hadn't planned this ambush didn't make it less suffocating.

From where she'd entered the door-with the hologram court as reference, the attacker's side-he was sitting to the left, where he could watch the set meet the ghost of Jaegerjaquez's swing. Kalypso had gone charging around the right side. If she'd gone left, she would have bowled straight into him.

Her chemistry should have warned her of his presence instantly, but the shock of this hologram recording and the sheer excitement it sparked in her had happened simultaneously to its reaction to him. Her heart rate had spiked, her blood had started to sing, and she'd mistaken affliction for joy. That had never happened before.

"Redford," she said, trying her best to strip her voice of everything-startlement, fright, bitterness, thrill.

"Here for cooldown studies?"

No, she was here to get his help. But she didn't have a hologram table in her room. Jaegerjaquez's hologram was airborne again-her own had loitered at the attack line, and now sprinted left. Rendered slow, it was easy to see now that she'd only been able to make that read because there hadn't been a middle blocker. His cut was wickedly sharp; he'd have likely gotten around the middle with it too, and Kalypso wouldn't have had the early warning flash of his arm to clue her in. If a middle blocker had been there, that middle would have blocked her line of sight.

Kalypso swallowed, squeezed her fists, and finished her route to the far side of the table. "Does everything in there get recorded?"

"Yeah." Redford reached a hand through the hologram, made a small, backwards-shoving motion. Everything paused, then reversed-Duibhne's shape pulling his fingers out from their run through his hair, herself peeling up out of her roll and tipping back onto her feet, that pass lifting itself out of the cart, the cut flying back to Jaegerjaquez's palm, then floating back in a high arc into Cu Chulainn's hands-until Redford touched two fingers back to the surface of the table, and it all stopped again. "I like slowing it down. Your drill, though, your taste-tap to play. Four fingers, one-fourth speed, three for one-third, you get it."

Kalypso tapped the table with four fingers. Sure enough, the hologram resumed its motion, at the same quarter-speed it had been set to previously.

"They cut us off in there at weird times," Redford said.

It was a strange sensation, listening to him while watching this fascinating play of lights recreate every angle of a drill. Her chemistry would not let her ignore him-it latched her brain tight to his voice without her consent, but if she didn't fight that fixation on the sound of him, she could look at the ball, the moment of contact, the turn of Jaegerjaquez's shoulders, the spread of her own feet, and ugh, those tiny, surgically precise movements in Duibhne to get him in exactly the same spot of that asinine block every single time. She listened, intently and grudgingly, so that she could look where she wanted without having to fight a war with her own biology, which would otherwise be trying to force her into looking at him instead.

"If it's all of us in there doing some kinda full-court drill, we don't get as long before they kill the power on us. Smaller groups, like you four, they give you more time. I think it's got to do with this thing."

Interesting. Not as interesting as the volleyball in front of her, but nonetheless. "What, limited storage?"

"That, or processing power, or something like that, yeah. That's what I figure. Abarai thinks it's just to keep us from over-training, but I don't buy it."

"Does it save these?"

"Not for long. This one will be gone before tomorrow's team training."

She heard the implied question there, but was not going to give him anything she didn't have to. Yes, she would be showing up for that, certain as sunrise. It meant more playing. And no, she was not obligated to file her intentions with him in advance.

She, on the other hand, had another suspicion about this table-and about the setter who'd been sitting in here in the dark, watching his tilted outside hitter fail line shots on repeat. "You were watching us live, here."

He didn't deny it. "Why's that sound like an accusation, Ixora?"

A bit of it was she didn't like the thought of any of these Dominions watching her like she was a rare captive animal, but that wasn't quite rational. She hadn't been able to resist the allure of this table herself-look at her now. No, it was mostly something else.

How could he stand watching when he could just go play?

"You could've come set him yourself."

"Hah." That soft little exhale of laughter made her bristle, even though it had the same sort of distance from her that she'd noticed again and again with these men. It wasn't her, not her as a concept and not her words, that had drawn out that laugh. "That wouldn't have lasted five minutes."

"So instead you sat in here watching him blow single-blocked huts." What good would that do? None-but ah, yes, for a rebuffed Dominion, it probably felt great. Watching your rival prove, once and for all, that you weren't the problem, that he was the fuck-up? Not much would get a Dominion harder.

Scorn rippled out of Kalypso's gut. She tried to keep it off her face, because she'd endured more than enough Flares already, but for god's sake. Great show they were putting on today. Tilting, setting two hundred huts, blocking like a robot, sitting in here getting fellated by footage of someone else playing badly-this was not what she'd been told would be happening here. Where was the fearless trajectory toward evolution Xigbar had promised her? Where was the capacity, the hunger, in any of them?

"That was what I started out watching," Redford acknowledged. "Then somebody showed up and put his head on straight." He reached out into the hologram again, made a sort of widening motion that cut the court in half just as Jaegerjaquez swung line and Kalypso's hologram guessed wrong. Kalypso watched the ball hammer down the line, deep in the corner, while her recorded self darted left like an imbecile. "You're a menace back there. Did Cu Chulainn say anything?"

Mostly he had thrown 'hooos' and 'ayyys' around when something went terrifically well, or crooked-grin jabs when something went awfully wrong. "He wanted to switch with me."

"Ah. I imagine Jaegerjaquez wasn't keen on letting that happen."

He hadn't been.

"Jaegerjaquez made you his crutch, Ixora. If you'd switched to setting him, he'd have gone skidding off the rails again and been right back to missing the line every hit." Redford made a pinching gesture, and the still-in-motion court went back to its previous size, to include the setter again. "Ain't the worst possible role to be in, but…is that what you want to settle for here?"

That was such an unexpected interpretation that Kalypso actually looked up from the hologram to stare at him.

Did he think she'd be upset that playing the game changed the game? Yes, she had joined the drill, and as a result, there had been a passing defense, and as a result of that in turn, Jaegerjaquez's hits had changed. Where there had been void, now there was her. If it untilted the hitter, which, yes, it had a bit, so much the better. A crutch? She was a player.

He thought that was her settling?

"Sure," she said, because it didn't matter, agreeing with that. The question was nonsense, and she had no regrets about joining that drill at all. Some of her footwork was garbage and some of her misreads were flagrant, as this hologram was hammering home, but all the better to do it, see it, learn from it. Not even the terror of hands in the darkness could make her regret playing.

The sticky amber prison of him should have stopped her from pushing the point. It didn't, because she just couldn't believe a serious player could take such a bizarre stance on this.

"You," she said, and knew the words were a mistake before they even left her mouth, because his attention tightened, that 'you' catching and sizzling in his eyes, "settled for coming in here and watching home movies instead."

The sparks of his impending Flare fluttered out of him, golden motes across her vision. First the light, and the burn-that's what would come next, once he got over his surprise.

He was surprised. It was there in the widening of his unpatched eye, in the way he rose out of his lean on the table, just a little. "We all have our pride, Ixora."

"I don't," she said. "Not there." The table read her gesture as a command, and the ball that had just taken a bad bounce from her ghost self's arms to pelt away like a misfired cannonball came back, slowly, to pound itself back off again toward its origin point. "Pride dies there. If we're smart, we bury it there, so we don't trip."

Two fingers on the table restarted the play. Kalypso watched herself fumble that pass again-she'd still been moving perpendicular to the ball's trajectory, her arms moving too, which was the bad bit. It made a difficult pass fiendishly so, as the slightest, smallest overextension spoiled the necessary plane of reception entirely. There. Yep. She'd gone too far right. A particularly nimble, lucky teammate might be able to get something on it, send it skyward for a weak recovered return. More likely, the rally would die with her failure.

Alright. Noted. Good hit outta Jaegerjaquez. Next.

She waited for Redford's Flare to build itself toward a roar and a consequence.

Instead, it smoldered there, low and golden, like a candle in a lantern of amber, and the next ball left her hologram's forearms with quiet, gentle backspin, soft and fleeting as a dream.