"No," said Sano Hikaru.
He said it politely, with a small bow, as if declining a second helping of rice. Then he took off his glasses, polished them on his shirt, and put them back on.
"No," he said again. "Thank you. But no."
Ren sat across from him on the roof of the school building, with a flask of tea between them and a stack of diagrams spread out on the concrete. It was Sunday, early, and the city below was quiet. The air tasted of wet stone and frying onions.
"You haven't heard the plan," Ren said.
"I've seen the diagrams." Hikaru gestured at the pages, which fluttered in the wind. "I understand them. They're very good. It's a clever idea, and I would like to make it clear that I think you're a genius."
"But?"
"But I'm not a passer. I'm a watcher. I'm the one who sits on the roof and draws." Hikaru's voice dropped. "I'm not the one on the pitch."
"You are now."
"I've played eleven minutes in an official match. Eleven. Against Tōhoku. I touched the ball four times, and I passed it backwards twice."
"Backwards is fine."
"Backwards is *terrible*." Hikaru hugged his knees. "Do you know what I am, Kageyama? I'm the boy that nobody sees. I've always been that boy. I sit in the back of every classroom. I walk through every corridor. People look at me and then they forget they've looked. Teachers mark me absent when I'm in my seat." His smile was small and crooked. "I got used to it. I thought it was what I was for."
Ren was quiet for a moment. The wind turned a page of the diagram. A pigeon landed on the railing and regarded them with one orange eye.
"Do you know what Kaito does?" he said.
"He reads the passes."
"He reads *me*. He watches my eyes, my shoulders, my breath. He's learned me so well that I can't hide a thing." Ren picked up the diagram. "But he's never learned you."
"Because I haven't played."
"Because he doesn't look at you. Nobody does. Not Kaito, not the Kuroshio defenders, not the Committee, not anyone." He smiled. "Hikaru, that isn't a weakness. It's the best thing about you."
Hikaru stared at him.
"If I'm the passer," Ren said, "Kaito sees me. He knows what I'll do before I do. But if you are the passer, and I'm only the decoy, the one he's watching, the one whose eyes and shoulders he follows." He tapped the page. "Then I'm looking at one place, and the ball is going somewhere else, and the person who sends it is the one he never thought to watch."
"The one who makes the pass," Hikaru said slowly, "isn't the one who reads it."
"My father wrote it in the margin. I didn't understand it until the night after the hospital."
A long silence followed. Down on the street, a bicycle bell rang twice.
"It could work," Hikaru whispered.
"It could."
"It would work if I were good enough."
"You don't have to be good enough. You have to be good at one thing."
"Which is?"
"Seeing." Ren leaned forward. "You see the pitch better than any of us. You drew every Shirogane match for two years. You know where everyone should be. All I'm asking you to do is the same thing with a ball at your feet."
Hikaru looked down at his hands. They were thin and pale, ink-stained at the fingertips.
"I might be terrible."
"You might."
"I might embarrass the whole team."
"We'll be embarrassed together."
A tiny, startled laugh escaped him. He wiped his glasses again, though they were perfectly clean.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'll try."
The training began that afternoon.
Ren kept it secret. No one outside the squad knew, and even within it, only the six who trained after dark on the street pitch behind the laundromat: Ren, Hikaru, Gōki, Haruto, Daichi and Shin. The others were told it was fitness work. Takeru complained loudly about being left out. Yūto said he didn't mind, he needed the sleep.
The street pitch was lit by a single flickering lamp. Old Man Tetsu sat on his beer crate with his radio muttering, and every so often he glanced up and said things like, "Too slow," or "Better," or "Again, boy, again," in a tone that suggested he had said the same words to someone else a long time ago.
The first week was a catastrophe.
Hikaru could see everything. That was the problem. He saw too much. He would stand with the ball at his feet, eyes flicking from runner to runner, calculating angles, weighing options, and by the time he had decided, the runners had stopped and the defenders had arrived.
"Too slow!" Tetsu shouted. "He's thinking!"
"I'm *supposed* to think!" Hikaru said desperately.
"Not with the ball! With the ball you *feel*!"
On the fourth night Hikaru passed the ball into the wall of the laundromat and put his head in his hands.
"I can't do it," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I can see the pass. I can see it perfectly. But my foot won't do what my head says."
"That's because you're afraid," Gōki said bluntly.
"Of what?"
"Of being seen."
Hikaru looked up. Gōki stood over him with his arms crossed, sweat dripping from his chin, the scar on his eyebrow shining in the lamplight.
"I'm the same," Gōki said. "Nobody wanted to see me either. Two schools told me I didn't belong. I got so used to people looking away that when somebody finally looked at me, I wanted to smash their face in." He shrugged. "It's the same thing. You and me. We just do it in different directions."
Haruto, leaning on the wall with a bottle of water, raised an eyebrow. "That's the most introspective thing you've ever said."
"Shut up."
"I was complimenting you."
"Shut up!"
Hikaru laughed. It was a small, unsteady laugh, but it was real.
"Do it again," Ren said gently. "Don't think. Just play it to the place where you feel someone will be."
He set the ball at Hikaru's feet and walked away to the far end of the pitch, forty metres off, until he was a dark shape beneath the lamp.
Hikaru looked at the ball. He looked at the pitch. He looked at Gōki, who had begun to run, and Haruto, who had begun to run the other way, and Shin, who was standing perfectly still and watching, and Daichi, shouting something nobody could hear.
And then he stopped looking.
His foot came forward. It was not elegant. It was not graceful. The ball rolled off his instep with an odd, soft spin, a low, slow, curling pass that seemed to wander off in the wrong direction.
Gōki, running full tilt, changed course. He did not know why. He ran after the ball as if somebody had called his name.
It arrived at his feet exactly as he did.
Nobody said anything. Tetsu's radio crackled quietly. A moth circled the lamp.
"Was that," Hikaru said, very small, "okay?"
"That," said Old Man Tetsu from his crate, in a voice nobody had heard him use before, "was a Third Pass."
They all turned to look at him.
He sat very still, one hand on the head of his cane. The radio had gone quiet. His old eyes, bright and wet in the lamplight, were fixed on Hikaru.
"I haven't seen one of those in twenty years," he said. "Not from a boy like you."
He did not say anything else.
It was while they were packing up that the figure appeared at the end of the street.
He walked slowly down the middle of the road, hands in the pockets of a red jacket, a gold earring glinting under the lamp. Wild red hair stuck out in every direction. His eyes were bright and hungry and very, very awake.
"So this is where the Kageyama boy practises," he said.
Gōki stopped with a ball under his arm. "Who are you?"
"Akabane Ryūga." The boy grinned, a quick, white, dangerous grin. "Akatsuki FC. Left wing. I heard you lost to Kuroshio."
"So?"
"So I thought I'd come and see whether you were worth beating." He rolled his shoulders. "Prefecture final. Eleven weeks. I'm going to be waiting. I wanted you to know."
He looked at Ren for a long moment.
"Don't lose before then," he said. "I'd hate to win by walkover."
Then he turned and walked back down the street, whistling, and vanished into the dark.