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Think, think,
he told himself as he washed his hands and wiped his face. He looked pale in the mirror, and inside he felt haunted.
There must be an explanation.

He walked outside and nearly crashed into a pedestrian. Everything looked normal, but not normal at the same time. Something was off. That light shouldn’t have happened. That light only existed in Kaah Mukul. Reality was not Kaah Mukul. Life couldn’t imitate
that
art.
And he knew from experience that the light had a terrible meaning.

In the concourse, amidst the crowds, he looked around for some anchor on which to secure his sanity, some pure product of reality. He saw the concession stand. Food! Food could only be real. Hot dogs and pretzels and fats and oils; there was nothing so tangible. He got in the long line
and searched for his wallet with shaking hands.

It w
ill
all be OK,
h
e repeated in his mind, looking around
.

There were carts with people selling t-shirts and merchandise. There was music and balloons and little kids holding plastic basketballs with Final Four logos on them. A small commotion started when a group with suits came up the elevator guarding someone in sunglasses. A few people began snapping
pictures with their phones. Some
celebrity. There was a non-descript door embedded in the concourse entryway that opened out onto the escalators. The door was opened as the celebrity approached. From between the bodies in the crowd, he made out a face, and a mane of spiked hair.

It was Myung-Ki Noh.

Perry
jumped out of the line and ran towards the man
. “Noh! Noh!” he called. The man he thought was Noh disappeared and the door shut behind him. Perry ran up but was stopped cold by a security guard. They wouldn’t let him pass. Perry resisted, yelling Noh’s name while the guards tried to calm him down. He tripped and fell on his back. When he looked up, he saw a large man with red hair stand
ing
over him.

“What’s going on?” the man asked
authoritatively
.

Perry said nothing,
just
put up his hands, rolled onto his stomach
,
and stood up, slapping away any helping hands. He walked off mumbling apologies and returned to the bathroom. He entered the same stall that he’d used before and closed the door. The reflection in the stainless steel door showed no ominous lights, merely his own pale, damp reflection.

His mind gyrated in seemingly endless loop.
Arena. Bracket. Noh.
Ahtzon
. Life. Art. Fate…Arena…Bracket…
He laid his head against the door, closed his eyes, and rested.

In what seemed a moment to him, he came to. He looked around to
reorient himself. What time was it?
He checked his watch. When he saw the time,
gasped,
then
raced out of the bathroom and straight through the short tunnel into the arena. The clock on the Jumbotron confirmed that he had somehow missed most of the second half. Scrambling, he spun around until he remembered where his seats were. He scrambled over the knees of the irritated CEO and
the flop
py-haired guy
and sat
down
, ignoring the questions about where he had been.
There were five minutes left to play. The score was now Nebraska
7
2, Georgia
6
3.

He couldn’t understand what was happening. The players were the same ones that had started the game. They weren’t injured. They looked like they were doing the same things. But something unseen had changed, there was this imbalance now. As he watched, he became more and more frustrated by Tucker’s persistent clapp
ing
and hooting on his right and Cole’s more subdued cheers on his left.
Couldn’t they tell that something was wrong? Couldn’t they see that his team was not playing normally? They should be nervous—everyone here should be nervous.

He looked around, squinting, at all the lights. It was too loud, too bright inside. His head hurt. Cheers rang out as
a Nebraska player hit another three
-pointer. He realized that they were really cheering against him. The imbalance was against him.

He looked around again. The people in the audience seemed to blur together, and all he could see were the rows. The lines of seats became tiers that looked familiar, bigger. He looked down at the players on the court. It was hard to tell what was going on, but he could make out a ball and running. There were hoops, and as he watched, they rotated until they were vertical and thickened. He found himself trying to remember when he had returned to the Montezuma, and he thought how strange it was that Nebraska and Georgia had their own Ullamaball teams. Maybe Mr. Noh
had done
it.

By this time, the crowd was standing, cheering, and all Perry could think about was what would happen if he lost. The pattern would repeat, Noh had said. Fate. Noh knew.

He looked at the stairs by his seat
and saw a woman in black running up past him. Why was Tula running? The game wasn’t over yet. But he looked, and his team was losing. Maybe that was why. She had to get out before the Ahtzon came. Smart. Tula always seemed smart. It would be smart to leave right away too, he thought.

The Nebraska fans began to count down from ten. Something was wrong. He had lost, he knew that. He looked around the arena and could see the Ahtzon standing, poised to mow down the losers that tried to escape, waiting patiently for him at the exits. The floppy-haired kid was tapping him on the shoulder, asking him if he was OK, but he didn’t answer. They had to get out before the doors closed, didn’t they? A good leader knew when to run. The crowds were counting down.

3…2…1
..!

Perry pushed out from the seats and shoved by
the
others as he ran up the stairs to the tunnel.
He had to get out before they closed.
Someone was calling his name and he heard
heavy footsteps
.
The Ahtzon were coming. He shouldered past
exiting crowds
and through the tunnel. He was out! But they were still chasing him, and when he yelled for Killergremlin to send back-up, he heard no response.

He saw some stairs, long and tall and moving. The way out! He made it to the top and looked down and around for his next move. The stairway below him was black and gleaming, and suddenly he realized that he wasn’t out. He was at the top of the Central Temple.
If he were caught, he would be sacrificed.
Someone grabbed him from behind. He wheeled around and saw a big officer gripping him on the shoulder. No! He struggled and writhed, but he was too close
to the edge and felt the rails sliding against his back like a snake
.
He spun wildly and felt his back flip over the edge as hands tried to clasp onto him, but gravity had him. His entire mass flipped over, and then, in a moment of horrifying clarity, he understood that he was falling very far.

-[South Division]-

[
South Division
: Play-in Game]

[Wednesday, March 18]

Georgetown
University’s administration building stood grey and stark against the winter-white sky, an intellectually gloomy cathedral. The grassy area to the east, with its bare trees and a promise of shade in warmer months, hosted a small park bench. Sitting on the bench, eating handfuls of salted peanuts with gloved hands, was an unsmiling older man in a baseball cap. The man could have been a professor or administrator, and thus he attracted no notice from the huddled students moving between buildings. It was a skill that he had conscientiously nurtured: to be unimportant to a crowd but to command rapt attention from an individual. That day, the individual whose attention Mr. Graham wanted to command was named Carla.

Carla emerged from behind the grey building wrapped in a wool trench coat. She walked with her head erect while others were bent against the cold. She walked like someone who had been trained early to march under pressure. Graham waved discreetly to draw her attention.

“You’re Graham, right?” she began without overture, removing something black from her pocket. “So, here it is. Like I said, it’s a little scratched, but it still…”

Graham interrupted, his voice as even and quiet as a therapist. “Carla, I’m going to disappoint you right now and say that I don’t want to buy your phone.”

Carla paused, her hand instinctively going back to her pocket. “What?”

“I answered your ad so I could meet
you here and offer you a job. U
nless you think Langley is really paying you what you’re worth.”

Carla’s eyes flashed with momentary consternation that few would have noticed behind the perfect poker face. “I think you have
the wrong woman. I’m a freshman—
”

“Just a note, for the future,” Graham interrupted. “When you lie to someone who
already knows the truth,
it’s a mutual waste of time. From what I hear about you, you aren’t the kind of person that
has much time to waste.”

Carla looked at him cautiously. “And what have you heard about me, Mr. Graham?”

“That you’re smarter than the above average Georgetown student, that your analysis of the Many Hands operation in Bangladesh turned out to be better than accurate, and that you’re here taking college classes not because you actually need college, but because you work for a federal institution that pays you only what your diploma says you’re worth. Or was all of that just gossip?”

Carla looked around again, checking individual faces as they passed. “If you’re asking me to do something illegal…”

“I’m not asking anything. I’m offering. I’m offering you a chance to reach your potential. The organization I work for doesn’t care about degrees, doesn’t care about résumés, doesn’t even care about money. It’s a place where you can actually tell people what you think and it can go all the way to the top without the, ah, ‘incessant trumpet of politics mak
ing everybody deaf and stupid.’
Those are your words, right? Come work for us. You want to do analysis, fine. You want to be a spook, the kind they would never let you try to be, that can be arranged. There are no limits. And, if you agree right now, we’ll reimburse you the cost of your tuition.”

Carla studied her feet. “You know, the Agency is paying for this.”

“I don’t think I would need to mention that detail to our accountants.”

Carla continued to scan nervously
. “You don’t just leave the CIA, especially not for mysterious reasons.”

“Tell that to all the ex-CIA guys making six figures in the private sector. The Agency knows they can’t compete with that. Just tell them you got a better offer with a private company. It will make them mad, but by the time you walk out the door, they’ll be cursing the back-handed slap of capitalism instead of you. Just another big one that got away. We can make sure that we back it up with some legitimacy.”

The recruit stared at him. “Are you offering me six figures?”

Graham
raised an eyebrow
. “Not to start, but you do a good job, you contribute, there’s room for some upward mobility.”

Carla shuffled again. “Twenty-four hours to think, and I want a full job description e-mailed to my account tonight.”

Graham retrieved a mostly-blank business card and gave it to Carla. “When you decide, give me a call. Your first job is already waiting. You have your twenty-four hours, but don’t use them all.”

Carla began to walk away, slowly this time. She stopped after a few feet.

“So, why not just call and say that you wanted to meet with me? You know that even clandestine people like me can set up appointments.”

“We wanted you to know how important we think you are to the long-term progress of our group.” Graham glanced up at the gothic spires of Healy Hall. “It’s a competitive world out there; the most successful recruiters are the ones that stand out. And as I’ve recently re-discovered, we are not the only ones recruiting.”

Carla nodded, reached into her pocket for the phone, and lobbed it hard to Graham, who caught it reflexively. “You can add the twenty bucks to my signing bonus,” Carla said, and walked away.

Graham also stepped away from the bench
, t
he barest hint of a smile
on his face,
and began the long walk back to his car, dialing on his own phone as he went. It was time to give his superiors some good news. On the way out, he tossed Carla’s phone into the chest of an
oncoming student. Grabbing his coat around him, Mr. Graham walked away without looking back. It was starting to get windy.

[
South Division
: First Round]

[Friday, March 20]

The spacious lobby of the Corazon Resort on South Beach was sumptuously opulent. The board room, however, was bland, decorated only with an oversized watercolor of a coconut. Neeson Faulkner stood at the head of the table in the board room, a laser pointer in hand, mentally rehearsing the presentation that he was about to give. A projector beamed the slowly-moving image of a sailboat on the screen behind him. The boat oscillated up and down on the waves, noiselessly, the sail taut with a full, harnessed ocean breeze. Above the boat was an elegant corporate logo:
WindSkin
. The board room windows were open, and the sound of real ocean waves crashing just outside enhanced the projected image. Neeson practiced underlining the logo with his laser, going just slowly enough to permit vocal enunciation with all the necessary gravitas. He knew how important it was to hook them from the very beginning.