The kid’s name was Geoffrey. With a G. Because of course it was.
He was a second-year from one of the old families, the kind that had been practitioners since before the school existed, the kind with private portals in the family estate and a trust fund built on generations of accumulated access.
He had the look they all had, that particular confidence that comes from growing up knowing the world was designed for you. Nice clothes. Perfect teeth. The kind of haircut that cost more than Dao’s mom spent on groceries in a week.
Geoffrey said the thing during lunch. Wednesday. Meatloaf day, which was already a bad sign because Mudwick’s meatloaf tasted like someone had ground up a shoe and covered it in ketchup out of pity.
Dao was sitting with his usual crew.
Eli was there, doing that thing where he stared into the middle distance and Dao couldn’t tell if he was reading someone or just zoning out.
Sasha had a textbook open next to her plate because Sasha always had a textbook open.
Thaddeus was eating like he’d been raised by wolves, which was funny because Thaddeus had been raised with silverware that probably had its own silverware.
It was a normal Wednesday. Right up until it wasn’t.
Geoffrey was at the next table, talking to his friends in that performative whisper people use when they want to be overheard. The kind where the volume is low but the projection is Broadway.
“My dad said the last Reyes who had any real talent drained three sacred sites before anyone caught him. Just sucked them dry for personal gain. No wonder they got blacklisted.”
The table went quiet. Not just Dao’s table. The surrounding tables too, because at Mudwick, everyone could feel the shift in emotional saturation when someone said something that landed like a fist.
Dao put down his fork.
“Don’t,” Eli said quietly.
“I’m not going to do anything.”
“Your jaw is doing the thing.”
Dao unclenched his jaw. He picked his fork back up. He took a bite of the terrible meatloaf and chewed slowly and deliberately while Geoffrey’s table went back to their conversation and the moment passed.
But it didn’t pass. That was the thing about moments like this. They didn’t pass. They accumulated.
—-
The Reyes name at Mudwick was like a stain on a white shirt. You could wash it. You could bleach it. You could wear it anyway and pretend it wasn’t there. But people always looked at that spot first, and their eyes always lingered, and no amount of being excellent at everything you did could make them look at something else.
Dao’s grandfather had been accused of hollowing three sites in the Southwest in the 1970s.
The accusation was never proven because there was never a formal investigation, which somehow made it worse. An actual trial would have produced evidence or the lack of it. Instead, the old families just let the rumor sit there and marinate for fifty years until it became indistinguishable from fact.
The sites were hollowed. That much was real. Someone had drained them to husks, left them dead and wrong in a way that local practitioners could still feel decades later. But saying the sites were hollowed and saying Dao’s grandfather did it were two very different claims, and nobody seemed interested in that distinction.
His grandfather had died before Dao was born. His grandmother talked about him sometimes, in the careful way people talk about the dead they loved.
She showed Dao photos of a man with serious eyes and big hands who’d been a respected practitioner before the accusations. A man who’d worked with the Southwest communities, who’d contributed as much as he drew, who’d taught her everything she knew about the balance between taking and giving back.
The old families didn’t care about any of that. The Reyes name was useful to them. It was a cautionary tale they could tell at dinner parties. “You see what happens when people without proper heritage get access to sacred sites? Remember the Reyes situation.”
A convenient bogeyman for a system that needed someone to blame for the damage it was doing itself.
Dao had figured this out by the time he was twelve. Understanding it didn’t make it hurt less.
—-
Three days after the meatloaf incident, Dao’s team had a Drift match against Geoffrey’s team.
This was not a coincidence. The practice schedule had been posted for weeks, and Dao had been looking forward to it in the way you look forward to something that might destroy you. A toxic anticipation. The kind where you know the smart move is to play it cool and the burning in your chest says no.
The field shimmered with energy pools, shifting and reforming across the terrain. Dao could see them clearly. His affinity was conflict, and Drift was basically organized conflict with a flag, so the saturation lit up for him like a neon sign in a dark room.
His team was solid. Eli as their reader, doing his weird thing where he tracked the other caller instead of the field. Sasha on tactics, calling adjustments in that calm analytical voice that somehow cut through chaos. Thaddeus holding the rear, steady as always.
Geoffrey’s team was also solid, because old family kids had been training since they could walk and they played Drift the way rich kids played lacrosse, with expensive equipment and private coaches and a generational sense of entitlement to the field.
The whistle blew.
Dao ran.
Not toward the flag. That wasn’t his job. His job was interception, meeting the other team’s runners before they could charge up and blow past their defenses. He was good at it because he was fast and because conflict saturation flowed into him like water downhill, natural and easy, the one part of this whole practitioner thing that felt like it belonged to him.
He met their first runner at midfield. She was quick, already glowing with power from a pool she’d hit on the sprint, but Dao had drawn too. The collision was clean and sharp, their competing pushes cancelling each other out in a burst of visible energy that made the air taste like copper.
The runner stumbled. Dao didn’t. He pushed again, harder, drawing from a pool that bloomed right at his feet like the field itself was choosing sides. The push hit her square and she froze, locked in place for a solid three seconds while Dao sprinted past.
He was heading for their flag. The path was clear.
Then Geoffrey stepped into it.
Not physically. Energetically. Geoffrey had been hovering near his own flag, drawing steadily from a massive pool the field had placed right at the base of his post. He was so charged up he glowed like a lamp, and when he released the push, it came at Dao like a wall.
Dao felt it hit. Felt his own energy drain as the force crashed through him. He dropped to one knee, the freeze locking his muscles, his vision going gray at the edges.
And while he knelt there, unable to move, Geoffrey walked over and stood above him.
“Nice try, Reyes.”
Just those three words. Nice try, Reyes. Said with that smile. The one that looked friendly to anyone watching from the sideline but felt, to Dao, like being patted on the head by someone who considered you a pet.
The freeze released. Dao stood up.
The smart move was to walk away. Reset. Get back in position and let the game play out. Sasha was already calling adjustments, her voice steady and focused. Eli was tracking Geoffrey’s caller. Thaddeus had rotated to cover Dao’s gap.
The smart move was to trust his team and play the game.
Dao ran straight at Geoffrey instead.
Not to the flag. At Geoffrey. Drawing from every pool in reach, pulling conflict energy like he was ripping it out of the ground, feeling the fury and the history and the fifty years of whispered accusations and sidelong glances and “remember the Reyes situation” building in his chest until it physically hurt.
He pushed. Everything he had. Not a tactical push. Not the controlled release they’d been taught in class. A raw blast driven by every Wednesday meatloaf comment, every raised eyebrow in the hallway, every time a professor said his name and he felt the little stutter of recognition that meant they’d heard the story too.
Geoffrey’s shield cracked. Not fully, but enough. He stumbled backward, surprise breaking through his composure for half a second before he recovered and pushed back.
They traded pushes in the middle of the field while the game devolved around them, both of their teams adjusting to the fact that their players had abandoned strategy for a grudge match.
Dao didn’t care. He was so deep in the draw that everything tasted like old battlefields, like cannon smoke and bayonet steel and the particular desperation of people who fight because they have no other option left. The bleed-through was real and he didn’t care about that either. Let it bleed. Let it burn.
Geoffrey was strong. Old family strong, trained since childhood, with access to saturated sites Dao would never see. But Dao was fighting for something Geoffrey couldn’t understand, and that made the draw deeper, the push harder, the willingness to spend himself more complete.
The whistle blew.
Not the game whistle. Coach Vasquez, stepping onto the field with the kind of calm authority that meant someone was about to get their ass handed to them verbally.
“Reyes. Off the field. Now.”
—-
The talk happened in Vasquez’s office, which was a small room off the training hall that smelled like liniment and old leather and the specific frustration of a man who’d been coaching teenagers with magical abilities for too long.
“You want to tell me what that was?”
“He was in my way.”
“He was guarding his flag. That’s the game.” Vasquez sat behind his desk and looked at Dao with an expression that wasn’t angry exactly. More tired. “You’re better than that. You know that. Your field sense is excellent, your draw efficiency is top of the first-year class, and your tactical instincts when you’re not being an idiot are genuinely impressive.”
“But.”
“But you abandoned your team to pick a personal fight in the middle of a match, and if this had been a sanctioned tournament instead of practice, you’d be suspended. Maybe expelled.”
Dao said nothing. The anger was still there, banked but not extinguished. His fingers were cold from the draw, the way they always got when he pulled too much too fast. Bleed-through from conflict sites always left him cold. Like the warmth had been burned out by all that old violence.
“Let me tell you something you don’t want to hear,” Vasquez said. “I knew your grandfather.”
Dao’s head came up.
“Arturo Reyes. Good man. Better practitioner. One of the best field readers I ever saw, and I’ve seen a lot of them.” Vasquez paused. “He didn’t drain those sites.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because from where I was standing, it looked like you were fighting a kid named Geoffrey when you were really fighting everyone who ever believed the accusation. And that’s a fight you can’t win by pushing harder.”
Dao’s jaw clenched. He could feel the truth of it sitting in his chest, heavy and unwelcome. He hated it.
“Your grandfather was set up,” Vasquez said. “I don’t know by whom and I can’t prove it. But I was a young practitioner in the Southwest chapter when it happened, and I saw how fast the story spread and how conveniently it landed on a Filipino family that had been gaining influence the old guard didn’t appreciate. The whole thing smelled wrong then and it smells wrong now.”
“Then why didn’t anyone do anything?”
“Because the people who could have done something were the people who benefited from not doing it.” Vasquez’s voice was matter-of-fact. No drama. No performance. Just the flat tone of someone stating something they’d come to terms with a long time ago. “That’s how it works. The people with the power to investigate are the people who’d look bad if the truth came out.”
“So what am I supposed to do? Just take it? Smile when kids like Geoffrey talk about my family like we’re criminals and say ‘thank you sir, may I have another’?”
“No. You’re supposed to be so good they can’t ignore you. You’re supposed to play the long game. Build something they can’t tear down with a rumor.” Vasquez leaned forward. “And you’re supposed to stop giving them ammunition by blowing up on the Drift field where everyone can see you, because right now the story about you is ‘Reyes kid, anger problems, just like his grandfather, can’t control himself, see what happens when you give those families access.’ Is that the story you want them telling?”
It wasn’t. Dao knew it wasn’t. He’d known it before he charged at Geoffrey and he’d done it anyway because knowing the smart play and making the smart play are two completely different things when your blood is hot and someone’s standing over you with that smile.
“One game suspension,” Vasquez said. “Sit in the stands. Watch. Think about whether you want to be the player everyone’s afraid of or the player everyone wants on their side. Those are different things, Reyes. Figure out which one you are.”
—-
Dao sat in the stands for the next practice match and watched his team play without him.
They lost. Not badly, and not because Dao was the difference between winning and losing, but they lost. Eli tried his people-reading trick without Dao’s physical presence to anchor the front line and it worked less well when the runners had nobody to intercept. Sasha had to play double duty on strategy and coverage and it stretched her too thin. Thaddeus held steady but steady wasn’t enough.
Geoffrey’s team won. Geoffrey looked at the stands and found Dao and gave him that smile. That friendly, performative, I-know-exactly-what-I’m-doing smile.
Dao looked back. Didn’t smile. Didn’t flinch. Just looked at him the way his grandmother looked at people who weren’t worth her anger, which was the coldest and most controlled expression he’d ever seen a human being make.
Geoffrey’s smile flickered.
Good.
After the match, Eli found him.
“How you doing?”
“Peachy.”
“Liar.”
“Obviously.” Dao stretched his legs out on the bleacher in front of him. His hands were warm again. The bleed-through had faded. He felt like himself, which was both a relief and a problem because himself was still the kid with the name everyone whispered about.
“Vasquez told me something about my grandfather,” Dao said. “That he was set up.”
Eli nodded. He had that look he got when he was reading someone and trying not to show it, the careful blankness that had gotten better over the semester but still wasn’t fooling anyone who knew him.
“I already knew that,” Dao continued. “Or felt it, or whatever. But hearing someone else say it matters. You know?”
“Yeah. I know.”
They sat there in the bleachers while the field’s saturation faded and the autumn shadows grew long across the grass. Somewhere in the main building, someone was playing music. Something low and steady that carried across the grounds.
“I’m still going to beat him,” Dao said. “Geoffrey. Next match. I’m going to beat him so bad his ancestors feel it.”
“Sure.”
“But I’m going to do it the right way. Sasha’s way. Play smart. Win clean. Make it so obvious that anyone who talks about the Reyes name has to reckon with the fact that a Reyes just destroyed their kid on the field.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“It’s a garbage plan. It requires patience and I have the patience of a lit fuse.”
Eli almost smiled. “Dao.”
“What.”
“Your emotional baggage isn’t exactly hidden.”
Dao looked at him. Then he laughed, the real one, the one that came out before he could stop it.
“Read away, man. Read away.”