They fell without falling.
One second they stood in the stadium. The next, they were inside a reconstructed version of it built from luminous cubes, as if a child’s construction game had swallowed a national arena and taught it to dream in corporate colors. Every wall shifted. Every doorway rearranged. Crowd noise rolled over them though the seats were empty.
Nia landed hard on her shoulder. Milo helped her up, but she pulled away too quickly.
“I’m fine.”
“You always are,” he snapped. “That’s the problem.”
A whistle blew.
Across the digital field, a younger version of Nia appeared: coach’s braid tight, jaw set, clipboard under one arm. Beside her stood twelve-year-old Lark, knees shaking before a difficult stunt.
Memory-Nia said, “Again.”
Memory-Lark whispered, “My ankle hurts.”
“Again,” the memory repeated.
Milo stared at his mother.
Nia’s face collapsed. “That isn’t all of it.”
But the grid was already moving. The field became a locker room, then a hospital corridor, then their old apartment where Nia argued with sponsors on speakerphone while Lark iced her bruises and smiled for livestream followers.
Milo had worshiped Lark’s courage. He had never noticed how much of it had been survival.
“CheerGrid fed on archived footage,” Nia said. “Practice videos. Interviews. Medical reports. Private coaching files. Celeste bought everything after I was dismissed.”
“Dismissed for what?” Milo asked.
Nia closed her eyes.
“For reporting them too late.”
The grid froze.
A new memory unfolded: Nia in Celeste’s office three years earlier, holding a file of injury data and psychological assessments. Celeste, calm and bright, offering Nia a promotion if she buried the evidence. Nia refusing—but only after signing Lark into the elite program because she believed it was Lark’s only path out of their crumbling neighborhood.
Milo’s anger had nowhere clean to land.
“You knew this place was dangerous.”
“I thought I could control the danger.”
“That’s what every parent says right before they call control love.”
Nia recoiled as if struck.
Before she could answer, the holographic crowd began chanting.
COM-ETS, COM-ETS, COM-ETS.
Milo remembered Lark’s clue: Count the wrong cheer.
He listened.
Most chants had two beats. COM-ETS. COM-ETS. But every ninth repetition had three.
COM-ET-LARK.
“There,” he said. “She hid herself in the error.”
He tapped the cube in rhythm with the wrong cheer. The stadium blocks reconfigured, opening a narrow stairwell descending into black.
From below came a real human cough.
Nia and Milo ran.
At the bottom they found a maintenance chamber lined with servers, cooling pipes, and emergency batteries. In the corner, behind a mesh partition, lay Lark Vale—alive, thinner, with electrodes taped behind her ears and one wrist cuffed to a medical chair.
Milo reached the partition first.
“Lark!”
Her eyes opened. For a moment she looked at him as if he were another hallucination. Then she smiled, crooked and real.
“Little brother,” she rasped. “You got taller.”
Nia sobbed once, a sound torn from somewhere too deep for pride.
Lark saw her mother and stiffened.
“No time,” she said.
Milo smashed the lock with a metal pipe while Nia tore away the electrodes. The instant the last wire came loose, every screen in the chamber lit up with Celeste’s face.
“Touching,” Celeste said. “But incomplete.”
Lark tried to stand and nearly collapsed. Milo caught her.
Celeste continued, “The stadium is full now. Fifty thousand fans upstairs. Millions watching the memorial performance online. In seven minutes, Lark’s digital resurrection goes live. If the original appears, the miracle becomes a scandal.”
Nia glared at the screen. “Then we go public.”
Celeste smiled.
“With what proof? A traumatized girl? A disgraced coach? A boy known for conspiracy posts? The world believes what is polished, Nia. Not what is true.”
Lark looked at Milo’s cube.
“She’s wrong,” Lark whispered. “The proof is in the routine.”
