Chapter Seventeen
Minerva
“Are you sure it’s okay for me to be back here?” I ask.
Violet bobs her head. “You’re a Venom employee. Of course it is.”
“Oh, but I mean… Tristan’s out on the ice right now. Shouldn’t I be out there keeping an eye on him?”
God, listen to me. Acting like my presence has any effect on him. Except… he did say he plays better when he knows I’m nearby. I pretend that thought doesn’t warm my chest.
Violet nudges me with her shoulder before pulling herself up onto the counter so that her short legs dangle inches above the floor.
“It’s not like you can protect him from injury with the power of your mind.
” She does jazz hands to make it clear how silly that idea is.
I laugh along, even though it does feel that way sometimes.
She’s right, I suppose, but I’ve got a routine now, and routine can blur with superstition all too easily.
“What your brain can do,” she adds, “is help diagnose injuries that I can’t see. Don’t get me wrong, I’m good at diagnosing concussions, but—”
“Can you tell what part of the brain is injured?” I interrupt. Shit. People don’t like it when you talk over them, but I genuinely want to know.
Violet falls silent for a moment. “Hm.” She rubs her hand over her mouth in thought.
At least she doesn’t appear to be mad at me.
“Well, kind of? Most of what I do here is basically triage, and then rehab, of course. If I checked one of the players over and they had a serious head injury, they’d need to go to a hospital anyway.
I’ve worked on that end, but it’s a matter of equipment.
Brain injuries are really complex, and the type of specialized machinery I’d need to do the more serious scans is really expensive, and we wouldn’t get much use out of it. ”
I nod. “That’s what I’ve seen in the medical journals, too. And the technology advances so quickly that buying something like an MRI scanner wouldn’t be a worthwhile investment. You need something portable, light, affordable, and effective.”
“Ooh!” Violet claps her hands in front of her. “Is this where you ask me to join your MLM?”
“Um, no.” I reach for my case. “But I do want to get your opinion.”
I feel a little self-conscious as I unveil my design. It’s not the prettiest—it’s still a prototype and looks very homebrew —but I can’t afford to have a better version made. Not yet. Plus, I have no idea what kind of data I’ve overlooked that someone in Violet’s field might find useful.
Violet cranes her neck to peer into the case. “What does it do?”
“I can show you.”
“Yes, let’s do it!” She hops off the counter. “Bring it with you.”
“I thought I would show you in here?”
“I thought so, too, but now that I’m thinking about it, we need a guinea pig.”
“You have a guinea pig?” The words fall out of me before I realize what she means. “Ugh, sorry, you mean a test subject. I know that, I’m just nervous, so I’m all…” It’s my turn to do jazz hands.
Frankie would laugh in my face for the slip-up. It’s not uncommon for my mouth to get ahead of my brain. Violet seems relatively unbothered by this.
“If you demonstrate on yourself, you won’t be able to see what you’re doing. If you demonstrate on me, I won’t be able to see. Therefore, we need to test your prototype on a willing victim. Come on!”
I bring the case and follow her out to the ice. She’s got her own sneaky entrance to the rink, probably to make it easier to remove injured players.
The Venom guys are practicing, running the same drills that I’ve now seen them do dozens of times. I’m gratified to see that Tristan no longer seems to be favoring either side. His movements are controlled and precise, and the puck goes in with every shot.
“Hey, Coach!” Violet calls. “We need a volunteer!”
Coach Metcalfe blows his whistle, and the guys scatter out of formation. Tristan spots me and waves. I give him a shy wave back.
“What’s this, now?” Coach asks.
Violet gestures toward me. “We want to try out Minerva’s device. If it works, it’ll be a game-changer.”
No pressure, then. I’m going to make a fool of myself if this dry run turns out to be a dud.
“Oh, hey, is this the thing for the concussion test?” Coach grins at me. How does he know about that? I’ve barely talked to him, so it’s not like I told him.
“Yeah, the one I was telling you about. Pretty cool, right?” Violet says, grinning.
I open the case again, and Coach comes over to inspect my work. I know that he isn’t going to grade me, but I still find myself wanting to earn a gold star for my homework.
“I’m looking forward to seeing it in action.” Coach lifts his head, and suddenly he’s talking to me, not to Violet. “You want to try it out on one of the guys?”
I nod a little too enthusiastically. “That would be great.”
“Cool. Hey, Knight, get over here.”
Viktor barks out a laugh. “Ha! Can’t wait to see if Hale has brain damage!”
“At least I’ve got a brain,” Knight retorts. “No wonder Coach didn’t pick you.”
“Hey, rude!”
“He’s right,” Camden deadpans. “There’s a reason we voted you ‘Most Likely to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.’”
“I thought that was because of my parkour skills.”
“Nah,” Bowen says. “It’s because you’re the zombie equivalent of celery.”
“Negative calories,” Lenyx clarifies.
Tristan catches my eye and winks. Heat skitters across my cheeks before I can stop it. I don’t look away this time. Knight, meanwhile, has come over to the bench and is fumbling his helmet off. “What else do you need? Should I take anything else off?”
“Striptease!” Adler calls. Bowen wolf-whistles.
“No,” I tell Knight, “this is good. Is it okay if I touch your face?”
“Go to town.” He closes his eyes, utterly trusting.
I remove my prototype from the case. There are three pieces: the pads, the visor, and the control screen.
Right now, I’m just using a tablet that can connect to the other two pieces via Bluetooth.
In the future, I’d like to come up with a version that can work offline, but for now, I’m working with what I’ve got.
The team gathers around as I wipe Knight’s face with a clean towel. Then I clean the test areas with an alcohol pad. I stick the three nodes to Knight’s face, taking care to align them properly. Two go to the temples, one goes on the forehead.
“It kinds of looks like the pads for my TENS unit,” Violet says.
“Or an EKG,” Viktor ads.
“Ooh, are you gonna shock him?” one of the guys asks. “I’ll give you a Benjamin if you crank it up to high.”
I don’t look up from my work. “They’re similar, but instead of emitting a current, they take readings.
I initially wanted a third pad, but it’s hard to attach without shaving the subject’s head.
Three is good enough, especially with these.
” I slide the visor onto Knight’s face. “Open your eyes, please. In addition to monitoring your brain activity, I want to be able to track your eye movements, response to light, and monitor pupil size.”
I pull up the software on the tablet and step back. My screen is divided up so that I can see brain response on the top portion of the screen, Knight’s eyes and the metrics on the lower half, and a box off to the right that will automatically populate with results once there’s any data to analyze.
“Do I look tech-sexy?” Knight asks. He strikes a pose for the team.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Viktor grumbles. “But you’re not sexy in any capacity.”
It takes me about twenty minutes to run the full routine. It will be faster when I’ve had a chance to sort out the bugs. I babble too much, info-dumping about my process in a way that most people would find annoying. Violet stays riveted to the screen the whole time.
“Minerva, this is fucking incredible,” she says when I’m done. “Do you know what it would mean to have access to all this real-time data? Heart rate. Head impact sensors. Neurological response times… all in one place. This is brilliant.”
“You think?”
“I know.” Violet points to the readouts. “I know you think this is too slow, but that’s because Knight’s brain is, eh, relatively normal.”
“Hey!” Knight crosses his arms.
“Only kidding. You’ve got a great brain, little buddy.
” She gives his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
“But if you had a concussion, it would have shown up right away, and we’d get a sense of how serious your injuries were in minutes.
We’d probably be able to catch a brain-bleed, or ocular damage, too.
And in rehab cases?” She lifts both hands and shakes her head.
“I can think of so many uses for this thing, I’m not even going to list them. ”
“Do you have any suggestions?” I ask. “Is there any other information that you might want to collect?”
“Sure. I can make a list.” Violet bobs her head.
I catch Tristan’s eye, and he gives me a thumbs-up.
Coach Metcalfe doesn’t appear to have followed my technobabble as closely, but he grunts his approval. “Can we get a pilot version? Next month, maybe?”
“Next month?” I squeak. “I don’t know…”
“I’ll bankroll the next prototype,” Dante says.
I clasp the tablet to my chest. “When did you get here?”
My godfather chuckles at my obvious alarm. “Coach texted me that you were showing off your brain machine. I wanted to see for myself, and the potential is there, cupcake. You’re a goddamn Marino, all right. But the good kind.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. Praise from my family has always felt like a trap, a setup. But Dante’s voice doesn’t have claws in it.
It lands… warm. Steady.
Safe enough that my throat goes tight. “That’s an oxymoron.”
“Agree to disagree.” Dante nods to Tristan, keeping his voice low for my benefit. “And I’m not the only one who feels that way. Maybe you can get me one, and I’ll use it on Sergio.” He raises his voice and points at Knight. “And you’re right, kid. You look tech-sexy as hell.”
“Damn skippy.” Knight stretches out on the bench. “I’ve never looked better.”
I collect the parts of my prototype from Knight’s head, and the guys get back to practicing.
Tristan blows me a kiss before he leaves.
I take my time packing everything safely back into the foam-lined case, then return to the stands for the rest of practice.
Marley isn’t here today, so it’s just me.
I settle in and pull out my phone to see what Kepler’s up to, using the live-feed baby cam I set up in front of the play space.
He’s sacked out in his bed at the bottom of the play space Tristan built for him, with a contented smile on his face.
His lips and nose twitch from time to time in his dreams.
I whisper to him, even if there’s no way he can hear me. “We’re gonna change the world, little man. One impact sensor at a time.”