He charges down the corridor, rounds a corner, and almost smashes into Harv Matision.

Matision reacts quickly, kicking out with his foot, catching T.K. in the ribs. T.K. stumbles backwards, swiftly regains his balance and pulls out his long knife. Matision sets off up a nearby flight of stairs in search of a better defensive position.

T.K. follows hot on Matision’s heels.

Halfway up the stairs, Matision rips a painting from the wall and scales it down at T.K. In a brilliant swirl of blue, gray and green, the painting zips by T.K.’s head.

T.K.’s referee throws down a yellow and black checkered flag. Penalty. Offensive use of a weapon. The stunt will cost the Minutemen fifteen yards at the play’s conclusion.

T.K. dodges the painting, barely slowing in his dash up the stairs. He reaches the top, spots Matision, and chases after him.

Matision turns a corner. T.K. hears a door slam, rounds the same corner, and comes to the end of the corridor. There’s a single, thick, windowless door in front of him. He tries it. It won’t open. Matision’s either locked or barricaded it from the inside.

But why? A quick scan tells T.K. there’s no other door leading out of that room. Matision has to move the ball. If he spends more than ten minutes in there, the play will be called dead. Ahead by only fourteen points, it’s hardly likely he’d go for a ten minute stall. That means, appearances to the contrary, he has a way out. T.K. visualizes the building’s outside. A standard chromagian affair. No outside fire escapes. No covered porticoes. Just granite slabs heaped atop one another separated only by blank rows of windows. Of course! Windows. And underneath each window, a narrow granite ledge.

T.K. enters the first open door he comes to, runs to the window, smashes it open, and sticks his head outside. Sure enough, there, not twelve feet away from him, is Harv Matision, carefully inching his way along the granite ledge, making for the corner of the building, where a series of granite indentations ladder their way straight from the ledge to the ground.

Realizing he can never catch Matision by going down the stairs and out the door, T.K. slips through the window and hops onto the ledge himself.

Matision’s back is pressed to the wall. The football, stuffed into his gut pocket, sticks straight out ahead of him, giving him a pregnant appearance. Seeing T.K. coming after him, he tries to move faster. The ledge is coated with ice. Even with the suction cups on his shoes, he can’t increase his speed much above a slow sideways shuffle.