NULL AND RISING

  Book One: Sovereign Embryo

  Chapter 7: Luka

  The story Luka told in interviews, when journalists asked about his beginnings, was accurate in its facts and incomplete in its texture.

  He had grown up in a small village. He had trained hard. He had been fortunate to have a coach who believed in him. He had worked for everything he had. The journalists wrote this down and it became the approved narrative — the boy from nowhere who made it, the work ethic, the hunger, the village that no one had heard of producing someone the whole country now knew. It was a good story. It was also the story that omitted the bus, and Horvat calling the academy before Luka had been there a week, and the scouts who came and sat in the stands and looked at two boys and chose one.

  Igor did not resent the story. Luka had not invented it — journalists invented it from the facts available and Luka, who was not a complicated person in the way that some talented people were complicated, had accepted it because it was essentially true and easier than the version that included the other boy who had also been there and had also worked and had also wanted it and had not been chosen. That version required a different kind of honesty that nobody was asking for.

  He thought about this on Sunday morning, reading the latest profile piece that had appeared in a German sports magazine — one of the ones with long features and good photography — prompted by the Bayern München interest. There was a photograph of Luka at seventeen, in the Rijeka academy kit, the specific leanness of a teenager who has grown into his height but not yet his full weight. He was looking at something off-camera with the expression that Igor recognised from a thousand sessions on the bus and the pitch and the field in Baranja — the slightly abstracted focus of someone who was thinking about the next thing rather than the current thing, who was always, in some sense, already ahead.

  The article was four pages. Igor read all of it.

  He did this when Luka profiles appeared — read them completely, with the systematic attention he gave to things he needed to understand properly. He had tried, at various points over the years, to analyse what this reading was in service of. Was it masochism? He did not think so. Masochism implied a pleasure in the pain and he took no pleasure in it. Was it some residual competitive instinct, a need to keep track of the benchmark? Possibly. More likely, he thought, it was simply what he did with things that mattered — he studied them. Luka mattered, in the register of a thing that had shaped the course of his life, and so he studied him.

  The article mentioned PSG twice and Bayern München three times. A source close to Luka's camp — the article used this phrase with the practiced casualness of sports journalism that had decided anonymous sourcing was a genre convention — said that a decision would be made before the end of the January window. A move to Germany was described as likely. Leipzig was not mentioned specifically. Igor noted this.

  He put the magazine down. Teddy, who had been sitting on the adjacent seat on the couch, relocated to Igor's lap in the specific way he had of occupying space that had just been vacated — as though warmth was a resource to be managed and he was the manager.

  "He might come to Leipzig," Igor said.

  Teddy looked up.

  "Bayern were interested in a winger last January. Didn't sign anyone. Leipzig have been linked with Rijeka players before." He paused. "Statistically it's unlikely. But not impossible."

  Teddy held eye contact for a moment, then looked away. This was, Igor had decided, Teddy's way of indicating that the conversation was proceeding at an acceptable level and he was prepared to continue listening without intervention.

  "I don't know what I would do if he came to Leipzig," Igor said. This was the honest version of the thought, stripped of the usual processing. He generally didn't let himself get this far. "I don't know if I'd go to the match. I think I would. I think I'd buy a ticket and sit in the stand and watch." He paused. "I don't know if that's healthy or not. I've stopped trying to evaluate it."

  Teddy slow-blinked.

  "That's what I thought."

  He had seen Luka once since leaving Croatia.

  This was not something he had told anyone. It was not a secret — secrets implied a reason to conceal, and he had no reason, he simply had no one it was relevant to tell. It had happened three years ago, in Leipzig, improbably: Rijeka had played in a Europa League qualifying match against a German team, a fixture that had taken the Croatian club to a city in the German Bundesliga's geography, and Luka had been in the squad. Igor had read about this on a Tuesday evening, gone very still for approximately thirty seconds, and then, with the deliberate calm of a man making a decision he had already made without realizing, gone to the match.

  He had bought the cheapest ticket available. He sat in the away section, which was a choice he had made for reasons he had not examined carefully, and watched Rijeka play in a stadium that held forty thousand people and was two-thirds full on a Thursday evening. Luka came on in the sixty-second minute as a substitute.

  He played for twenty-eight minutes and in those twenty-eight minutes he did what he always did — the movement before the play, the acceleration of decision, the quality that had no clean name. He did not score. He had one chance, a shot that the goalkeeper saved well, and he stood over the save for a moment with his hands on his knees and the expression of a man who had filed the moment and moved on before the crowd had finished reacting.

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  Igor watched him the whole time. Not the match. Luka specifically — the runs he made when the ball was elsewhere, the positioning, the communication with teammates, the way he processed the game. The same things he had watched on the field in Baranja with traffic cone corner flags, twenty years ago, on a different scale with better lighting and forty thousand people who had no idea they were watching the same thing he had watched since they were eleven.

  Rijeka lost 2-1. Luka came off at the final whistle and shook hands with the opposition players and walked to the tunnel and disappeared.

  Igor sat in the stand until it was half empty. Then he got up and went home.

  He had thought about what it would mean if Luka had seen him there. Luka wouldn't have recognized him at that distance, in that crowd, in a stand that was not where you looked when you were a professional footballer exiting a losing match. But in the hypothetical — if their eyes had met, if some accident of geometry had put them both at the same point of attention — Igor had thought about that.

  He had not resolved it. He put it in the same file as the unfinished sentences.

  The magazine profile had a section at the end — a short, standardized format, the same ten questions they asked everyone — where Luka was asked about people who had influenced him. He mentioned Horvat. He mentioned his father. He mentioned a teammate at the Rijeka academy who had helped him adjust to the professional environment. He did not mention the boy from the village who had ridden the bus with him every Saturday morning for three years, who had arrived first and left last, who had been there for every session and every drill and every small increment of improvement.

  Igor did not expect to be mentioned. He was not hurt by not being mentioned. He was not in Luka's story — not because Luka had excised him but because Igor had never been the protagonist of Luka's story, only a presence in the background of it, a part of the context rather than the content.

  He was fine with this.

  He was mostly fine with this.

  He folded the magazine and put it in the recycling.

  Sunday afternoon. He ran.

  This was his second form of physical maintenance, separate from football — he ran four times a week, thirty to forty minutes, no particular route, the city as the landscape. He ran at a pace that was sustainable for the full duration, not fast, not social, the kind of running that cleared the head by occupying the body just enough to release the mind from having to do something and not enough to require the mind's active involvement.

  He ran through Connewitz, where he had stayed his first week in Leipzig in the eighteen-euro hostel that smelled of other people's decisions. He ran along the canal. He ran back through the residential streets he knew by shape and gradient — the slight rise on K?nneritzstra?e, the flat stretch near the park, the cobblestones on the older section that required a slight adjustment of gait.

  He thought about Luka for the first fifteen minutes, which was standard, and then stopped, which was also standard. The run had a way of wearing through the top layer of preoccupation and arriving at something quieter underneath. By the time he was on the return leg he was not thinking about anything specific — he was running, which was enough.

  He was on the canal path, heading back, when he noticed the birds.

  A large group of them — starlings, he thought, though he was not expert enough to be certain — had gathered on the canal bank in a configuration that was wrong in a way he could not immediately name. Not wrong in terms of bird behavior specifically, which he did not know well enough to evaluate, but wrong in the way the pigeons on the pavement had been wrong and Teddy at the window had been wrong: the quality of stillness, the orientation, all of them facing the same direction, that direction being nowhere in particular — not a food source, not a threat, just a point in the middle distance above the canal that contained nothing visible.

  He slowed. Stopped.

  The starlings did not move.

  He stood there for perhaps thirty seconds, watching them. Then he began running again, at the same pace, and did not look back. He filed it in the same part of his mind where he had filed the pigeon and Teddy's stillness and the pressure in his ears and the sixty-one cities that had become seventy-one.

  He arrived home breathing steadily, unlocked the door, found Teddy in the hallway. Normal position, normal expression.

  "Starlings," Igor said.

  Teddy looked at him.

  "On the canal. All facing the same direction."

  Teddy turned and walked to the kitchen. Igor followed, drank water, stood at the window. The courtyard: empty. The sky: grey. The city: quiet in the Sunday afternoon way, the particular peaceful vacancy of a city that had sent its people on small errands and private lives and would have them back by evening.

  He showered. He made coffee. He sat at the table with his notebook and wrote:

  The birds on the canal. Same as the pigeon. Same as Teddy at the window.

  Something is at the edge of perception. Not mine — I can't see or hear it. Theirs. They have the equipment for it and I don't.

  Wednesday is three days away.

  He stopped. Read what he'd written. Added:

  I keep counting down to Wednesday and I don't know why.

  He closed the notebook and sat with his coffee and thought about this — the counting down, the specific way Wednesday had settled in his mind as a threshold. He had not decided to do this. It had happened, the way the emergency cat food had happened, the way waking before the alarm had happened. Some part of him was preparing that the rest of him had not been informed about.

  He thought about the LitRPG novel he had nearly finished. About the protagonist who had felt hope when told his class was undefined.

  He thought about what he had written on Tuesday night: Whatever is coming — I want a fair start.

  He looked at Teddy, who was on the windowsill again, facing the direction he had been facing for days now.

  "What is it?" Igor said. Not a real question. Or not a question he expected an answer to.

  Teddy's ear twitched.

  Outside: grey sky, quiet city, three days.

  The hum in seventy-one cities.

  And somewhere above the clouds — above Leipzig, above Baranja, above Kuala Lumpur where Ana was, above the Rijeka training ground where Luka was probably already thinking about the next thing rather than the current one — something that had been preparing for longer than any of them had been alive was nearly ready.

  — ? —