Hog bursts out laughing. They drink a toast. They sit next to each other and actually talk about hockey for ten minutes without falling out. One day they will both be grandfathers to the same kids. Good luck to those grandchildren if they dare to pick a favorite team.

  * * *

  Down in the corridor outside the locker room Amat is walking along with his bag over his shoulder. He stops when he reaches Bobo and they give each other a long hug.

  “This is our last season together, then you’re going to be a pro,” Bobo says, his voice thick.

  “You’re going to be saying that every season,” Amat smiles.

  But Bobo is actually right. The rest of the team is already in the locker room, Amat sits down between Big City and Mumble, and as they get changed Amat asks them:

  “Do you want to do some extra training tomorrow?”

  They nod. Then Big City asks:

  “How about tonight? Are you busy after the game?”

  They aren’t. Out in the stands a thousand voices are roaring as one: “DO YOU WANT US? COME AND GET US!” Both standing areas are chanting the same thing, the whole forest is in uproar. Mumble’s face is impassive but his knees are bouncing nonstop.

  “Nervous?” Big City asks.

  Mumble nods, embarrassed.

  “Don’t be. We aren’t even going to let Hed borrow the puck,” Big City grins, as if the hubris of the forest folk has already started to rub off on him.

  “FIGHT US! FIGHT US! NONE OF YOU DARE FIGHT US!” the standing areas are chanting outside, to politicians and those in positions of power, and to the whole world, all at once.

  “I’d forgotten how much they yell,” Amat says.

  “I’ve never heard anything like this,” Big City admits.

  “Wait till we go out. It’s like a hurricane,” Amat declares.

  “Any tips on how to handle it?” Big City asks.

  And Mumble surprises everyone, not least himself, by suddenly grinning and replying:

  “By winning.”

  They roar with laughter. And just then Benji comes into the locker room holding Alicia by the hand. She has questions.

  * * *

  Many, many questions.

  * * *

  Zackell comes down from the office and walks back and forth outside the locker room. She’s nervous, which doesn’t often happen. So she smokes more cigars than normal. The caretaker swears and goes and opens the emergency exit so that the fire alarm doesn’t go off. He forgets to shut it.

  * * *

  Ana’s dad is sitting in the row below his daughter. He’s sober. She called the guys on his hunting team and they told her he didn’t drink anything yesterday because he knew he was going to the game with his daughter today. “Let’s hope he has a drink before the next hunt, anyway, because he’s the best hunter in Beartown when he’s sober, and that’s unfair to the rest of us,” the old men grumbled. Ana leans forward and asks:

  “Dad, did you bring the pickup?”

  He nods quickly but assures her eagerly:

  “Yes, yes, but I haven’t been drinking! I swear!”

  He’s so afraid of embarrassing her, so horrified that she’ll be ashamed of him. But she smiles, and then he smiles too, the smile he keeps just for her. Then she asks thoughtfully:

  “Dad. Did you remember not to leave the rifle in the truck?”

  His eyes open wide.

  “It wasn’t… I wasn’t drunk… I was just stressed!”

  She shakes her head wearily.

  “Did you at least lock the truck?”

  He gets up at once and pushes his way along the row to rush out into the parking lot and check. She calls after him. When he turns around, ready for her to start shouting at him about something else as well, she yells so that the whole stand can hear:

  “I love you, Dad!”

  He isn’t perfect, her old man. But he’s hers. And she’s never ashamed of that.

  103 Questions

  The game is about to start, but it will never be played. Instead, now everything that we will never stop regretting starts. Every single person in the ice rink will go over and over these minutes for the rest of their lives, asking silently: “Could I have done anything different? Something small, something microscopic, anything at all? Could I have stopped him?”

  We’re on our way into a night when we question everything we have ever done, all that we are, and the entire society that we’ve built. Because what is it? The whole lot of it? Only the sum of all our choices. Only the result of us. Can we cope with the way it turned out?

  This hockey game will never be played, and for many of us it will feel as if we never really emerge from the ice rink. We will be stuck in the nightmare forever. We are a people who tell stories, who try to use stories to put what we have experienced into some sort of context, to explain what we have been fighting about in the hope that it will excuse what we have done. But stories reveal both the very best of us and the very worst, and can one ever outweigh the other? Are our triumphs greater than our mistakes? What are we responsible for? What are we guilty of? Can we look ourselves in the mirror tomorrow? Can we look each other in the eye?

  * * *

  No.

  * * *

  Not after this.

  104 Regrets

  Lev is sitting on the terrace outside his little house next to the scrapyard in Hed. The black-and-white dog is resting by his feet. The evening is cold, the air fresh, his chest aches with loneliness. He’s so good at never revealing this to the guys he employs, because otherwise they would be uncontrollable. He has always been amazed by grown men who show that they are scared, that’s such a luxury, like a rabbit that knows nothing about predators because it’s never seen one. Where Lev grew up, a man didn’t show his fear even if his heart broke. That was why he picked Hed. He’s lived in many places but he chose to settle down in this forest because the people here are also survivors, and not that much less dangerous than he is. He thought that perhaps here he isn’t quite as different as he was in the places he has been chased away from, perhaps here they would let him live a peaceful life among them. Perhaps here he would have time to build up something.

  He is a violent man, but if you ask him why he will reply that it’s because he hates violence. He has a pistol so he doesn’t have to kill anyone. He frightens people away rather than take the risk of letting anyone get too close. That is how he has survived, but it has also left him lonely. He doesn’t often let himself feel that, but that woman, Adri, who was here and bought the Bearskin from him, she set off something inside him, kicked a door in somewhere inside his rib cage. She made him remember his nieces. It’s for their sakes that he wants to build something. For their children’s sakes. Lev never had children of his own, almost his entire family died in a war the rest of the world didn’t even call a war. He has seen good people capable of great evil, but also terrible people capable of great goodness. It’s the same everywhere: almost everyone loves too much, hates too easily, forgives too little. But most people want the same as him: to live in peace, to let your heart beat a little more slowly when night comes, to earn a bit of money to support the ones you love.

  He built up the business at the scrapyard so he could send money to his nieces and their children. One day perhaps he will build a big house here that they can all come and live in. Is he a good man? No. He knows that. He has done many things he ought to regret, but he regrets hardly any of them, and isn’t that the definition of evil? A man can do a lot of bad things to protect his family, might be prepared to defend all he has built up with violence if he built it for their sakes. One day perhaps Lev’s nieces’ own daughters and sons can become lawyers and bosses, he hopes so. One day perhaps they can belong to a place as obviously as Peter Andersson does, without having to apologize or say thank you the whole time, without either stealing or begging for charity. But until then? Until then Lev will do what he has to.

  Regret? Yes, there’s one thing he regrets. The boy. Amat. Everything that happened with the NHL draft. Amat reminded Lev of his younger brother as a small child, in another forest in another time, they played hockey the same way. So no matter what Peter Andersson and other men might say, it wasn’t greed that drove Lev to help Amat. At least, no more greed than was driving Peter Andersson himself. Lev helped him because he saw someone he loved in that boy, and now he regrets not seeing him as just that: a boy. Where Lev grew up, there were no boys of Amat’s age, they were already regarded as men, because in a violent place childhood is over in the blink of an eye. If that. Lev isn’t a man who finds it easy to admit his mistakes, but he knows now that he should have asked Amat which he wanted more: acclaim or money. It was so obvious to Lev that only people who are already rich care about acclaim, but it might have been different for the boy. Perhaps he wanted something that Lev can’t even understand.

  Regrets? Yes, Lev probably does have a few, in spite of everything. He regrets not listening. He regrets not being at the game now. He would have liked to see Amat one more time. Flying forward, just like Lev’s brother once did. It’s a miraculous game. A wonderful game.

  * * *

  He closes his eyes. Hears footsteps on the gravel outside. Heavy breathing.

  * * *

  One of the men who works at the scrapyard comes out of one of the trailers, wild-eyed. He runs as fast as he can out through the gate and along the road to Lev’s house. He bangs madly on the door until Lev opens it angrily with a small glass of strong liquor in his hand.

  That’s how he finds out what another of his employees has done. What he sold to that fourteen-year-old who was here wanting to get a pistol. One of the other men at the scrapyard saw Matteo in Beartown earlier today, they were on their way to sell hot dogs outside the rink and saw the boy walking to the game. “He looked like darkness,” the man says. There probably isn’t anyone who has driven his car through the forest as fast as Lev does, either before or since.

  * * *

  The parking lot is empty when Ana’s dad gets out to his pickup. The game is about to start inside, somewhere up by the road an old American car is driving far too fast, presumably in a hurry to make it to the start of the game. Ana’s dad tries the door of his own truck and crumples with shame when he discovers that it’s unlocked. The rifle is there, of course, he had forgotten it just as Ana predicted, not because of drink but because of age. That’s worse.

  Just as he’s about to hide it under the seat and lock the truck before going back into the ice rink, he sees a lone figure pad along the side of the building. At first it’s just a movement in the corner of his eye, like when he sees something in the forest and doesn’t immediately know if it’s an animal or a person, but he can always rely on his instincts. He knows when something is wrong, when something is moving in an unnatural way. A whole life in the forest has taught him what fear looks like, what flight looks like, and what hunting looks like.

  He takes a few steps between the cars and sees the figure, a young boy, peer in through all the windows and try all the doors. Then he sees one that’s open, an emergency exit at the end of the corridor by the locker rooms, it ought to be closed, it can only be opened from the inside, but the caretaker left it open to air out the cigar smoke.

  The boy suddenly runs toward the door and that’s when Ana’s dad sees the pistol in his hand. He doesn’t have time to shout and warn anyone before the boy has slipped inside. It happens so fast, so incredibly remorselessly horribly fast.

  The American car swerves into the parking lot. Ana’s dad grabs his rifle and runs toward the ice rink.

  * * *

  Mumble is sitting on the bench in the locker room. Matteo walks in. To begin with no one sees the pistol, but then it’s as if everyone sees it at the same time. At first someone thinks it’s a joke, it looks so unnatural at the end of a fourteen-year-old’s arm, but then they see his eyes. There’s nothing there. If there was ever a human being in there, he’s gone now. Then comes the first shot.

  * * *

  BANG

  * * *

  The second and third.

  * * *

  BANG BANG

  * * *

  And everyone screams. Runs. Flees toward the shower room and bathrooms. Anywhere. They crouch down beneath basins and behind doors. No one who is there will forget how it feels when you stop believing that you’re going to die and start knowing that it’s happening right now. Now it’s over. So many people say that your life passes before your eyes, but for most of us we only have time to think about such small things: a single person. A small hand in ours. A giggle. Breath against the palm of our hand.

  * * *

  BANG

  * * *

  Mumble knows he’s going to die. He’s the one Matteo is aiming at. Mumble realizes that it’s all over the moment the boy walks in so he just sits still and screws his eyes shut and hopes it will be quick. That it won’t hurt too much. It doesn’t hurt at all. He waits for his chest to explode and for his body to slump to the ground, but nothing happens. When he opens his eyes there’s blood everywhere and there are two bodies lying on the floor.

  * * *

  Alicia is moving around the locker room like a small but persistent fart. Questions, questions, questions. A top she wants signed, a sort of skate she wants to know more about, a way of binding a hockey stick that she wants to know the secret behind. She gets a hug from Amat and looks like she might faint. Benji is sitting on a bench on the other side of the locker room, He’s relaxed, leaning back, almost on the point of dozing off. He doesn’t notice Matteo walk in. He doesn’t see Alicia standing in the middle of the floor. Right in front of Mumble.

  * * *

  BANG

  * * *

  Hannah is at the hospital. She doesn’t hear the cries in the corridor, doesn’t know that the alarm has come from the ice rink, where her family is, doesn’t hear something breaking in her colleagues’ voices. A splinter of glass in the soul of every nurse and doctor who passes the information on. Hannah doesn’t even know it’s happening, because she’s in here doing her job. Twice, in fact.

  It’s like a cruel joke, as if God wants to point out that He can do what He likes with us. Unless this is the opposite: His penance.

  As two cherished lives end over in the ice rink, the twins’ hearts start to beat in Hannah’s arms. Two childhoods begin. Beep-bo. Tickles and helpless giggling. Climbing trees. Puddles and boots that are too big. Ice on the lake. A million ice creams. Whisper-shouts from parents on the phone when you’re playing with a ball indoors. Swings. Best friends. First love.

  * * *

  This day brings incomprehensible violence and incredible mercy. The greatest fear, the smallest people. Everything belongs to us.

  * * *

  How are we to talk about Alicia?

  * * *

  All our stories are about her, of course. All the ones that end here, all the ones that begin here, she has been the reason for all of them.

  * * *

  BANG

  * * *

  Matteo stands in the doorway and she doesn’t understand what he’s holding in his hand. She just sees the darkness, it comes like smoke and envelops her, she just hears the sound of screaming and noise of things crashing over. All the men around her run.

  * * *

  BANG BANG

  * * *

  The first shot goes too high. The recoil is too sharp and Matteo’s hands are shaking too much, so he lowers the weapon and squeezes the trigger again. The second and third shots hit home. Right in the chest. The body is dead before it hits the ground.

  * * *

  BANG

  * * *

  All the men in the locker room run. Some toward the bathrooms, some toward the shower room, some try to crawl out through the window. All except Benji. Because he’s the sort of person who runs toward fire.

  * * *

  He always has been.

  * * *

  Ana’s dad rushes across the parking lot toward the emergency exit and peers breathlessly into the gloom. He sees Matteo fire his first shot into the locker room, sees him walk into the room to fire again, but then someone flies into him from inside the room with all his strength. Matteo tumbles back out into the corridor again with a much larger body on top of him.

  * * *

  BANG BANG

  * * *

  Those are the two shots that take Benji’s life. Both to the heart. What else could they have hit in there? He was all heart. Matteo heaves his body aside and jumps up to his feet again, aiming wildly around him to carry on killing.

  * * *

  We will say it couldn’t possibly have happened the way the police and the media describe. We will say that no one could possibly have hit at that distance, under those circumstances, not even the most exceptional marksman could have done that. Not even the very best hunter in the whole of Beartown, we will swear. That isn’t true.