The heat has risen past Kit’s ears. She thinks of an interview she saw with Tina Franklin when Franklin was a rookie in the WNBA. Franklin said the game moved at a faster speed at this level. She kept saying at this level. Then she joked and said it felt like her entire life was now moving at this level.

Kit understands. What’s anxiety when there’s no calm to offset it?

She cracks the pill in half, makes to break it into quarters, hears Mom in the hall again, downs one half without water.

It’s okay. She’s got ice water in her veins.

Doesn’t she?

“Coming,” she says.

She puts the bottle back into the drawer and closes it just as Dad appears in the doorjamb and says, “Sleep with us tonight. I don’t trust a goddamn person in this city right now.”

Sitting on a cold green chair in the Samhattan High School gym, lined up with the entire (remaining) team, some parents, and Coach Wanda, too, with an actual detective standing before her, it strikes Kit how right she was to be up last night, up all night, in Mom and Dad’s bedroom, listening for sounds in the hall.

This isn’t a game. In fact, she’s seen more than one WNBA star comment on how what they do, what they play, is, in fact, only a game. And meaningless, at that, in the face of what troubles society, what troubles the world.

Here, something troubles Samhattan.

Kit hasn’t slept. But she’s not exhausted. She’s piqued in a way she hasn’t been before. Ghosts or no ghosts, legend or reality, Tammy Jones was killed, a team picture was taken, and the gym she finds herself in is no longer a place of cheer, triumph, joy.

This is the same floor on which she just hit the shot of her life. And now?

Now it’s an interrogation room. The bright lights in the rafters might as well be a single bulb in a stone room deep in the belly of the Samhattan Police Department.

There isn’t a shred of humor on the face of the detective, Carla McGowan, who gives off the energy of a tire too full of air, the pump still motoring beside it.

Kit senses a similar acceptance, a gravity, from the others. Most of them are dressed in sneakers and shorts, tank tops and braids, as if they’re unable to divorce the outfit from the gym, the place they were summoned, a place Detective Carla McGowan no doubt believed they’d be more comfortable. But of course they’re not. Nobody speaks unless spoken to. Nobody offers up information. Because nobody has any. All the ballers sit quiet and listen to the serious woman as she explains how important it is that any information, any at all, could be the very bit she needs to solve what’s happened here.

It’s clear she has no leads.

“The metrics,” McGowan says, “are the usual. Though this man seems bigger than most.” She clears her throat. “He’s probably between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Single, most likely. A loner, probably. But big. The marks on your friend indicate a very strong man, indeed.” Then: “Have any of you girls seen a man like this around the city? Around the gym? Maybe he was talking to Tammy after games? Outside the locker room? Maybe you saw him after school last year? Saw her interacting with a man taller than I am?”