Chapter 5
Mireya
Two weeks in Florida and my body has almost forgotten what it's like to not be sweating.
But the heat isn't the worst part. The worst part is Hades' double sessions, which feel less like preparation for a soccer season and more like training for a small-scale military invasion.
Two hours every morning straight through: tactics, possession work, transitions. Lunch. A short rest. Then another two hours of conditioning in the afternoon. And at night, for those of us who are new, individual video sessions that drag on into the small hours.
My legs have been complaining for days despite the team physio's best efforts.
The good part is I can feel myself getting better.
I notice it in the drills, in the defensive rotations Hades showed me in that first session on the field; they're coming out much cleaner now, in how I'm clicking with Iris, in how I'm picking up Zoe's passes.
My body is learning a new language. I still stumble over the words, but I understand most of the sentences.
Every team has its alliances and its power structures, and I'm starting to map them out.
Zoe and Iris Vance are the center of gravity.
When either of them speaks, everyone else listens.
Jade Herrera is a quiet satellite who watches everything and keeps her opinions to herself until someone asks, but when she speaks, they all hear it.
Lucía, the Spanish defender, arrives first to every session and always has something encouraging to say to whoever needs it.
She's the one who looks after everyone else.
Tina is pure energy. She's asked me a dozen times to be her gym partner, and I always say yes.
But Nika Wallace stays at the far end, training harder than anyone, watching me with something that's moved past competition into something sharper.
“Guerrero! Put the phone down and come eat,” Tina yells, poking her head around my door. “Iris got us a table in the shade, and if we don't go down now we'll lose the orange juice.”
I wave her off and pocket my phone. My mother sent three messages this morning.
The first, a preseason result from Aura Valley.
A draw, which at this point is a miracle.
The second, a photo of the freshly painted field, courtesy of the transfer money.
The third asks if I'm eating enough. She's never once been able to separate soccer from mothering, and I've known her my entire life.
The shaded table sits beside the hotel pool.
Iris, Zoe, Tessa, and little Wes are already set up.
Wesley has something orange smeared across his face that could be peach juice or sunscreen.
I genuinely cannot tell. He's wearing his Emeralds jersey untucked over his shorts, his light-up sneakers untied, and he's holding a piece of bread in each hand.
“Meya!” he shouts when he sees me, throwing both arms up, bread and all, like he's flagging down a plane.
“You have to smell his hair,” Iris insists. “You smell the Boss's hair and it turns your whole day around. Good luck, every time. It's a scientific fact. Tessa, you're a doctor, back me up.”
Tessa raises her eyebrows and lets out a long breath.
“I'm not confirming that nonsense,” she says.
“Okay, maybe not a scientific fact. But come on, Guerrero, you tell me. Does this kid smell good or not?”
Wesley blinks at me from his high chair, so I lean in toward his head, and honestly? Iris isn't entirely wrong. The kid's hair smells incredible.
“Okay. You're right,” I admit.
“I KNEW IT!” Iris slaps the table hard enough to rattle every glass. “The Boss and I are very pleased you're being reasonable.”
Wesley ignores all of this and leans forward to bury his face in Zoe's jersey. I don't know why, but I think of my father. Of the old photos of me as a little kid, sitting in his lap while he watched soccer on TV.
Iris starts asking Tessa something about whether eating broccoli as a child can cause permanent trauma, but I stop hearing her.
**
The second individual tactical session with Hades is at five in the afternoon, when the sun starts losing its edge, but the Florida air is still thick and hot against my skin.
This time, she wants to work on a breaking run for receiving passes from Zoe and Jade out of midfield. And to teach it to me, she decides to demonstrate it herself.
And damn, she's in seriously good shape.
“The run starts with a fake inside,” she explains. “You sell the center, and the moment the defender buys it, you turn and accelerate on the diagonal. Got it?”
I try it. My fake is decent, but the acceleration is late and Diana stops me.
“You're thinking too much. The turn has to come from your body, not your head. Let's do it together. I'll play the defender. You run against me.”
She sets up directly in front of me, facing me, about a yard and a half away. Her eyes stay fixed on my hips, because that's where the movement starts on a change of direction, and any experienced defender knows it.
“Whenever you're ready,” she says.
I feint. Turn. Accelerate. She reacts late because my fake was sharp, and when she tries to adjust, our bodies collide, and she grabs my shoulder to keep from losing her balance.
We stay like that. Very still and very close.
From the hotel terrace, Tessa calls out for Wes and pulls us both back to earth.
Diana releases my shoulder, though her eyes stay on mine a beat longer.
“That was good,” she tells me. “Do it five more times, and we'll go join the rest of the team.”
I do. This time without contact, which I'm grateful for because the last time rattled me more than I'd like. Diana watches from about ten feet back, arms crossed.
At six we run a scrimmage. I execute the run I just learned, and Jade's pass finds the edge of the box almost like it knew I'd be there. I trap the ball, cut past Lucía with a sharp step-over, and drive it across goal with the inside of my right foot. It slips in at the near post.
Iris launches herself onto my back. Literally climbs on and hangs there. Tina grabs my arm. Lucía pumps her fist from the back line. Jade nods and smiles.
And then, without thinking, still laughing with Iris hanging off me, I turn and hug the first person in front of me.
Hades.
The whole team goes silent, and I stand there looking like an idiot with my arms around my coach.
She goes stiff. Then she steps back fast, like I burned her.
“Good run,” she says, and walks away.
“Oh wow, that's truly the first time I've ever seen anyone hug Hades, I genuinely thought you were going to combust,” Iris says, fanning herself dramatically.
That night, in the individual video session, Diana Creed shows me something I didn't expect.
“That's Suzu Tsukishima. I'm sure you know who she is,” she says, pulling up a clip.
“We signed her four years ago, she was the star of the Japanese league. Attacking midfielder, one of the most creative players of her generation. I put her in the system. I told her to play where I said, when I said, how I said. Within six months, she stopped dribbling. By eight months, she stopped seeing passes she used to find in her sleep. At the end of the season, she requested a transfer back to Japan.”
She pauses and pulls up the next clip.
“Camila Costa. Same thing. Natalie Wells. Same thing. Three players with exceptional talent who wilted inside my system because they couldn't adapt.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.
“Because I don't want you to be next.”
Silence settles between us. On the screen, a frozen frame of Suzu Tsukishima celebrating a goal in her first Emeralds game, before the system took away whatever made her extraordinary.
“So you're admitting your system has a problem?” I ask, raising my eyebrows.
“The system works perfectly for talented players who follow the rules.”
“Iris?”
“Iris Vance follows them halfway, more or less. You're different. You've played your entire career with complete freedom of movement, and this isn't a small club like Aura Valley. For players who can't adapt, the system becomes a cage.”
“Are you telling me I'm going to fail here, or that you will try something different with me?”
Hades leans back in her chair and runs her thumb along her jaw.
“I don't know yet,” she admits. “But I'm working on it. And I think these video sessions are helping me see things I wasn't seeing before.”
I didn't expect that. She just acknowledged a flaw in her system, a weak point, at least. And the world didn't catch fire.
“We're done,” she says, closing the laptop and pulling me out of whatever that was.