# Chapter 58 — Last Train
The bus had been rolling ten minutes when Valt came down the aisle with the trophy under one arm and stopped at the empty seat.
"Where's Ryo?"
"Back row." Rantaro had his shoes up on the seat opposite. "He does that. He sits at the back, he lets us be loud, and then at the end he says one thing that makes you feel stupid."
"There's a coat on the back row and a paper cup lying on its side."
Rantaro's feet came down.
Valt called him. The recorded voice picked up, and he ended it and called again and got the same woman saying the same sentence, and he was already thumbing it a third time when Shu spoke from the window seat.
"He went out the front doors. Twenty minutes ago, bag on his shoulder."
Nothing moved on that bus.
Valt turned around with the phone still lit in his hand. "You saw him."
"I did."
"You watched him walk out of the building on his own, and then you picked my bag up off the floor and carried it onto this bus and sat down by the window."
"Yes."
"He put his fist through a locker two hours ago!"
It came out of Valt loud enough that the driver's eyes came up into the mirror, and Rantaro froze with the wrapper half off a lollipop.
"He what," Rantaro said.
"After battle two. I went to find him and the door was open and he was hitting it, and he kept hitting it until there was a dent in it in the shape of his own hand. I stood in the doorway and I didn't go in." Valt was still looking at Shu. "And then he came out and sat down on our bench and asked you who was taking battle three, and you gave your battle away, and none of you said one word about it, and now he's gone."
"I know what he did to that locker," Shu said. "I could hear it in the corridor."
Rantaro pushed the lollipop back into its wrapper.
"So you knew." Valt came a step closer, and his voice dropped, and that was worse than the shouting. "You knew and you let him go anyway."
"I let him go because of it." Shu turned in the seat at last, and his eyes were level and did not move off Valt's. "If I'd put a hand on that door he would have stayed. He'd have come to the party, he'd have got in every photo, and he'd have sat at the back of this bus tonight being fine at us. And then in five weeks he'd stand across from Lui and be one second short again."
"That's not your decision."
"It was his decision. I was just the one standing there when he made it."
Valt's jaw worked. Nobody on that bus had ever seen him look at Shu like that.
"He's our teammate."
"He's mine too." Shu let that sit. "So I gave him the only thing he'd have taken from any of us tonight, which was nothing at all."
Wakiya had turned around over the seat back, and for once he didn't sound like he was scoring a point. "He didn't leave the team, Valt. He left the party. There's a difference and you know exactly which one this is."
"Then he can leave the party after the cake," Rantaro said. "That's how parties work. You eat the cake, you get the photo, THEN you go and be dramatic on a train." He looked at the wrapper in his fist. "His name's on the poster at the club. I drew the dragon on it. I did the wings twice."
The bus came up the ramp onto the ring road and the arena lights went out of the back window.
Valt sat down hard and put the trophy on the seat beside him and turned it until the plate faced the window.
"Valt." Shu didn't raise his voice. "At the doors. He looked back down the whole corridor first."
"At who?"
"Take a guess."
Valt started typing. He got most of the way to the bridge with it, deleted all of it, wrote it again shorter, and held his thumb over the screen for a while before it came down.
Then he put his jacket back over the cup and didn't say anything else the rest of the way.
---
I made the last connection by four minutes, and I made it running, with the guard already leaning out of the door to check the platform.
The carriage was almost empty. A woman asleep across two seats with her shopping under her feet, four boys in school jackets down at the far end, and the city going past the window in lights that got further apart until there was nothing out there but my own face.
My knuckles had gone stiff on the way over. I opened and closed the hand and watched the skin pull white over the middle two.
The phone had been going in my pocket since the arena. I finally took it out.
Forty one messages in the club group. A photo of five sets of hands on the cup, taken from high up in the stands, too far away to tell whose hands are whose. Rantaro in capital letters. Wakiya correcting his spelling. Somebody's mother asking if we had eaten anything.
And under all of it, three minutes old.
**Valt:** *You forgot to say goodbye. So I'm not saying it either. See you in the bracket.*
I read it three times. Then I turned the phone face down on my leg and sat with my jaw shut until my throat let go of me.
'He didn't ask me where I was going.'
*He put himself on the other side of a bracket instead,* Drago said.
Down at the end of the carriage a phone speaker started playing the crack.
"...there, look, LOOK, that's the floor going, that's not even him, my brother says they use cheap boards at the nationals..."
"Your brother is stupid and doesn't think straight. Why would they use cheap floors at the biggest tournament in the country, the moves just had a lot of power in them."
"Hey. Watch what you say about my brother. He was at the shop when it happened and everyone there said the same thing."
"Then everyone there is stupid too."
I turned around in my seat and looked at them with a bit of a smile. It was strange. The battle was three hours old, my hand still hurt from a locker door, and four boys on a night train were already picking sides over it. Tomorrow the news would have their turn.
"The floor wasn't cheap," I said. "I think it was the best one they had. They're going to need better than that for the next Nationals."
Four faces came up at once. One of them opened his mouth, looked at the phone in his hand, looked back at me, and went the colour of the seat covers.
"You're... you're Ryo. What are you doing here?"
"Going home."
"Why aren't you with your team? You won."
"They did win, and I should be there." I put my arm over the back of the seat. "But you tell me. You lose it like that, in front of everyone, with the man asking you for another one straight after. What do you do the same night?"
They went quiet on that. I watched them work through it, and every one of them came out in the same place.
"Get away from everybody," the one with the phone said. "And train until you can beat him."
"Then you already know why I'm on this train."
They got off two stops later and stood arguing on the platform with their bags half open, and the one who had defended his brother was still going when the train pulled us out of there.
Then it was fields, and my own face in the glass again.
I got Drago out and put him on the fold down table, took the tool out of the side pocket of my bag, and stripped him down. Layer, frame, disc, tip, laid out on the plastic in the order they come apart.
Solar Eclipse had a bright scrape across one face. Spike Edge was clean. And the point of Nova Rush had a flat worn onto one side of it, small, smooth, exactly where a tip meets a crack in a floor at full speed.
I sat and looked at that flat for a long time.
'Ren can turn a new tip in a day. He's got the blanks in the drawer under the lathe.'
*No.*
'It's a worn point. It stuttered on the crack, and if it had been fresh...'
*If it had been fresh it would have stuttered on the crack.* The layer went hot enough on the table that the woman two rows up shifted in her sleep. *Say the true one, Ryo. You did not lose that battle by a millimetre of plastic. You lost it because you turned for the finish with everything you had left already spent, and if that floor had held you would have won by a hair and called it a plan.*
'We were faster than him. You said it yourself, on the floor, with the pieces in my hand.'
*We were faster. We were not deeper.* A pause, and the heat came down out of the layer, slower. *He is the only blader alive who can lose his whole position and still have one perfect strike sitting in his pocket. You had nothing in yours. That is what five weeks is for. Not a new tip.*
The carriage rocked over a junction. I put my hand flat on the table so the parts would not travel.
'So I'm carrying that all the way to the house and telling my father the Bey is fine.'
*Tell him the Bey is fine.* Something in the voice moved, close to amusement, closer to teeth. *Then let him look at it anyway. He will find something we did not. He always does.*
I put Drago back together, disc, frame, layer, and seated the tip with my thumb until it clicked home. Then I sat with him in my fist and ran the last exchange back from the launch. The line jumping out from under the contact point. The stutter. Longinus coming off the rim into that quarter second. I let the whole thing play and I did not stop it anywhere, and my hand stayed steady the entire way through, which it had not done once since the referee's arm went up.
My stop is one light on a platform and a timetable in a cracked plastic frame.
Nobody else got off. The train took its noise away down the line and left me with gravel under my shoes and cut grass in the air and the road bending up between the hedges. Fifteen minutes' walk, past midnight, with the strap cutting into my shoulder, and I did not slow down for any of it.
The house came up on the left with the porch light burning and the curtains shut.
The workshop window at the side was lit too.