Page 54 of Blade

But all eyes would be on Indy tomorrow during the senior ladies’ free skate. She still hadn’t landed the triple Axel clean. Sometimes she stayed on her feet with a quarter-turn cheat. Other times, she fell—just like she had at the show, landing on that same hip so hard you could feel her bone crack the ice.

Then came the knock on the door. Ana got up, thinking it was room service. But Jolene held her arm.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

“What’s going on?” Ana asked Indy. But she didn’t answer.

Jolene looked through the peephole, then opened the door.

It was Hugo—Hugo, who skated for Spain and should have been back in Echo.

And yet Indy wasn’t surprised to see him. “Do you have it?” she asked.

Hugo glanced around the room to make sure they were alone.

“It’s fine,” Jolene told him, planting a kiss on his cheek.

“I’ve got it.” He had a backpack that he set on the ground. He unzipped it and pulled out the contents.

“What’s happening?” Ana asked again.

“It’s for the bruise,” Jolene said.

Ana felt a quick breath fill her lungs. A little gasp of surprise she tried to swallow because Indy and Jolene had made these arrangements behind her back. At least, that was how it felt. The sunshine beginning to fade.

Hugo pulled out a plastic container with a screw top. It was clear with no label, like a giant water bottle.

“What is that?” Ana asked.

“It’s DMSO,” he said. “A chemical compound that speeds up healing.”

Indy asked to see it. But Hugo told her, “There’s nothing to see—it’s not labeled or anything.”

“Is it safe?” Indy was worried.

Ana froze, just like she’d done that night in the field, and back at Emile’s house when Kayla lay in his bed with her busted lip and bruised eye. It was still in her—this instinct. In spite of her sessions with the doctor.

“Yes,” Hugo insisted. “We use it all the time back home.”

“What do I do with it?” Indy asked.

Ana listened to the conversation about how the liquid chemical worked. How it passed easily through membranes in the skin and reduced inflammation. Jolene read things from her laptop—dimethyl sulfoxide, a colorless liquid, a by-product of papermaking, a solvent but also now used for wound care.

Ana’s head was spinning with each new piece of data. Hugo was so brazen, so certain. Jolene so trusting of everything he said, blinded by love.

“There’s a vet who mixes it with something that numbs the pain while it’s healing,” Hugo said. “It’s totally safe if you just put it on your skin.”

Hugo went on about how it was used to treat animals here but hadn’t been approved by the “backward government” and “political bullshit,” even though everyone knew it was safe, but they were all so paranoid about painkillers.

“Indy ... I don’t know about this,” Ana said, tugging at her arm.

“What else am I supposed to do?” Indy’s eyes welled with tears, which she quickly brushed away. “I need that stupid jump.”

Dawn was never going to send her home, and her mother was never going to let her, not until she had the triple Axel.

Ana saw a flash of Patrice when she’d been here for the show. The way she’d been practically skating Indy’s program herself from the boards, her face like that of a young girl, on the ice, jumping and spinning.

She searched her brain, but nothing came forward to answer the question. What else could Indy do?