# ZERO DRAFT
## Chapter 1 — *The Voice That Cost Everything*
---
Ren Shiro walked to practice the same way he always did.
Hands in his pockets. Eyes forward. The kind of deliberate stillness that looked like calm to anyone watching but was really just a sixteen-year-old boy holding a very full cup and trying not to spill it.
*Eight years,* he thought. *Eight years and it all comes down to today.*
The streets of his neighborhood blurred past him the way familiar things do when your mind is somewhere else entirely. He passed the convenience store. The cracked wall with the faded mural. The elementary school he hadn't thought about in years. None of it registered. His head was already inside the gymnasium, already running the play, already feeling the weight of what this evening meant.
*The team needs me,* he thought. *Quietly, without saying it out loud, they need me. And I won't let them down.*
He walked on. The cup stayed full.
---
Eight years ago, Ren Shiro had been a different person. Smaller in every way. Rounder in the face, louder in the laugh, still young enough to believe that wanting something very badly was the same as deserving it.
He was eight years old the first time he saw LeBron James play.
His father had found the game on television — a playoff match, full crowd, the kind of broadcast that made the gymnasium look like the center of the universe. His mother had brought snacks. The three of them sat together on the couch in their small living room, and Ren had barely understood the rules well enough to follow the score, but none of that mattered because the moment LeBron James received the ball in transition, something in Ren's chest simply *stopped.*
He'd never seen a human being move like that. Not fast in the way that looked desperate. Not big in the way that looked clumsy. LeBron moved like the game had been designed specifically around him, like every other player on the court was operating inside a system and LeBron was the system. He passed to a cutting teammate without looking. He absorbed contact going to the rim and finished anyway. He jogged back on defense and somehow communicated something to every player around him with nothing more than a glance.
"Ren." His father nodded toward the screen. "That's LeBron James. One of the best players alive right now."
Young Ren's eyes were enormous. "He's so *cool.*" A pause. A thought forming slowly the way important thoughts do in eight-year-olds. "Can I be like that?"
His mother smiled and reached over to ruffle his hair. "As long as there's a will, there's a way."
That was it. No ceremony. No thunderclap. Just a mother's casual reassurance and a boy's wide eyes fixed on a television screen.
But something had been planted. Something stubborn and quiet and entirely unwilling to be reasonable about its own survival.
A dream had been born in Ren Shiro.
---
What followed was not a montage of triumph.
It was a cycle, and cycles are only romantic in retrospect. Living inside one is something else entirely.
At nine, Ren tried out for his first organized team. The coach watched him for twenty minutes, made notes on a clipboard, and delivered the verdict with the particular kindness adults use when they are trying not to break something small: *You're not bad, son. But we're looking for something a little more specific right now.*
Not bad. The two most discouraging words in the history of human evaluation.
He went home. He was disappointed for a week. Then he went to the park every day for a month and worked on whatever he thought *specific* meant. Then he tried out for another team.
*You show real effort, and that matters. But not bad isn't quite what we need.*
Home. Disappointment. Park. Repeat.
At ten, the same. At eleven, a coach told him his handles were solid for his age and then selected eleven other players. At twelve, he made it through three rounds of a tryout before being cut so politely he almost thanked the man. At thirteen, a scout watched him play in a pickup game and afterward said something that lodged itself in Ren's ribs like a splinter he couldn't reach: *You're good at everything, kid. The problem is you're not great at anything.*
At fourteen he stopped telling his parents about every tryout because he was tired of watching them try to hide their worry behind encouragement.
At fifteen he almost quit. Not dramatically. Not in a single moment of despair. Just a slow, quiet almost — the kind that creeps up over months and sits with you at the dinner table and walks beside you to school and makes everything feel slightly heavier than it should be.
He didn't quit. He went back to the park instead. He worked on things he didn't have names for. He watched footage of players he admired and tried to understand not just what they did but why their bodies seemed to believe in it so completely.
He went home. He was disappointed. He came back.
The cycle turned.
---
When Ren Shiro turned sixteen, something changed.
He tried out for the **Takayu Basketball Club** on a Thursday afternoon with low expectations and slightly worn-down sneakers. The coach — a stocky man in his forties named **Ishida Motoki**, the kind of coach who communicated primarily through grunts and the specific angle of his cap brim — watched Ren for the full session without expression.
Afterward, he called Ren over.
Ren prepared himself. He knew the shape of this conversation by now. He'd lived inside it so many times he could practically write the script.
Coach Ishida looked at him for a moment. Then he said: "You aren't bad, Ren. Better than most of the losers who came through here today." A pause. "You're in."
That was it.
Ren stood very still for a second, certain he'd misheard.
"Well?" Coach Ishida raised an eyebrow. "You going to stand there or are you going to say something?"
"I'm — " Ren stopped. Started again. "Thank you. Coach."
He walked home that evening and the city looked different. Not larger or more colorful or any of the dramatic things cities are supposed to look when life changes. Just different. Like a familiar room where someone had moved the furniture slightly and now the light fell in new places.
*On top of the world,* he thought. And meant it completely.
How little he knew that feeling had an expiration date.
---
The months that followed were the best basketball of Ren's life and also, in ways he wouldn't understand until much later, the beginning of a problem.
He settled into Takayu as the Point Guard. It suited him — or rather, it suited the version of himself he'd constructed. Point Guards see everything. Point Guards give the ball. Point Guards make the people around them better and when things go wrong Point Guards can always say they were trying to serve the team. It was a position with a built-in defense mechanism, and Ren wore it comfortably without examining why comfort felt so important.
He contributed. He distributed. He made the smart play more often than not and when the smart play worked he felt the quiet satisfaction of being necessary, and when it failed the blame landed on whoever had been on the receiving end of his pass. The structure protected him. He became, without intending to, complacent — not in his effort, never in his effort, but in his honesty. In the specific honesty of asking himself what he actually wanted to do with the ball when it was in his hands.
The team began to silently rely on him. And he silently relaxed.
They were good together. Genuinely good. Good enough that by the time the season found its shape, the **Prefectural Championship** felt like a real conversation rather than a fantasy. Three years the older players had been trying. Three years of close calls and almost-theres and painful exits at the wrong moments. This year, with Ren running the offense, it felt different.
It felt like *finally.*
---
The night of the qualifying match, Ren sat on the bench watching his team struggle and felt the first real clench of something he refused to name.
Their opponent had an ace.
**Zeke Kurusagi.** Seventeen years old. Built like an apology for everyone who had ever called basketball a thinking man's game. He moved through Takayu's defense the way weather moves through a window you forgot to close — not aggressively, just *inevitably*, with total disregard for the barrier that was supposed to stop him. The sports media had already started calling him *The Gem of Japan.* Watching him in person, Ren understood why.
Takayu was losing by two points. The clock was entering its final minutes. The gymnasium was the loudest Ren had ever heard it.
Coach Ishida crouched beside the bench, cap brim angled forward, expression unreadable. He looked at Ren for a moment. Then: "Get in. Support roles. Offense and defense both. I trust you." A pause. "Somewhat."
Ren almost laughed. "Understood, Coach."
He stepped onto the court to no particular applause and didn't expect any. He was a Point Guard. Point Guards didn't get entrance music.
He got to work.
He was good. Genuinely, measurably good — better than he'd been all season, actually, as if the pressure had clarified something. He moved Takayu's offense with precision. He found gaps. He, remarkably, managed to slow Zeke Kurusagi through sheer positional discipline and court reading — not stop him, nobody was stopping Zeke Kurusagi — but slow him enough that the damage became manageable.
Then the final minutes arrived.
And the ball found Ren's hands.
He drove forward without thinking — first step, second, broke past a defender who hadn't been ready for how direct he was. The coach's voice cut through the gymnasium noise: *"That's right, Ren — now pass!"*
Ren saw his options.
To his left, a teammate open in the arc. To his right, another, also open. Both calling for it. Both good shots. Both the right decision by every principle of basketball that had ever been explained to him.
His brain processed this clearly and completely.
And then something underneath his brain — something older and more honest and far less diplomatic — *screamed.*
*They're in the arc. Two points. They'll just tie. But you're outside. You're outside and you're moving and you still have the angle and if this goes in it's over it's actually over —*
Ren's mouth moved. A single word, barely a sound. *No.*
He gathered himself. The motion came from somewhere that bypassed conscious decision entirely. He leaped. He released.
The ball sailed upward through gymnasium air that had gone absolutely silent.
*It's good,* something in him thought. *It has to be.*
It struck the rim.
Not the backboard, not a clean miss, not anything that could be blamed on poor mechanics. The rim. That thin, merciless circle of iron that converts hopeful into heartbreaking with a single contact. The ball bounced away and the other team grabbed the rebound and the world seemed to take a moment to understand what had just happened before rushing in all at once.
Zeke Kurusagi received the ball in transition. He broke past two defenders who were still psychologically inside the previous play. He rose and *dunked* and the sound of it was the most final sound Ren had ever heard.
Oh no.
The buzzer. The end.
Ren stood at the three-point line and did not move. Around him his teammates were processing it in different ways — some standing with their hands on their heads, one already crouching down, a few just staring at the scoreboard as if it might change its mind. One or two looked at Ren. Not with anger, exactly. With something worse. Something that already knew and was already done.
He walked to the bench. He said: "I'm sorry."
Coach Ishida looked at him for a long time. The gymnasium was still loud with the other team's celebration and the particular hollow noise of a stunned crowd dispersing.
"Three years," the coach said quietly. "Three years that group worked for that moment." He wasn't shouting. That was almost worse. "Down the drain."
"Coach, I — there was an opening, I had the angle —"
"I know what you had." Coach Ishida's voice didn't rise. "You had two open teammates and you didn't pass."
"The arc, both of them were inside the arc, a tie wasn't —"
"I don't want to hear it, Ren."
Silence.
"I don't want someone on this team who plays like that." A pause. "You're cut."
The words landed without drama. No music. No slow motion. Just words.
Ren stood there for a moment. Then he bowed his head slowly and deeply — the bow of someone who has accepted something they do not agree with and cannot currently argue because they are too tired and too hollow and too aware that at least part of it is true.
"Thank you," he said quietly. "For the opportunity."
He changed out of his kit. He walked out of the gymnasium. He did not look back.
---
He took the long way home.
He wasn't sure why. His feet just chose the pier and he followed them because he didn't have a better argument. The evening had turned that particular shade of orange that happens when the sun is leaving and hasn't quite decided whether to make a spectacle of it. On the waterfront, down near the lower walkway, a group of younger kids were playing basketball on a half-court that had seen better decades. Laughing. Arguing calls. One of them made a shot and threw his arms up like he'd won something.
Ren watched them and chuckled. The sound surprised him — a short, bitter thing that felt nothing like a laugh.
He sat down at the edge of the pier and looked at the water.
*I blew it.*
The thought wasn't dramatic. It was just accurate.
*Eight years. Eight actual years. Rejection and recovery and rejection and recovery and when the moment finally arrived I stood outside the arc and listened to a voice in my head instead of doing the right thing. Eight years and the punchline is that I trusted myself at exactly the wrong moment.*
He was quiet for a while. The water moved. The kids on the half-court argued about whether a foot had been on the line.
Then something started rising in his chest. Not grief exactly. Something with more heat to it.
"Damn it."
His voice came out louder than intended. He didn't care.
"If I had just *passed.* If I hadn't listened to that stupid voice — if I had just been a team player *that one time* — we would have had it." He pressed his hands against his eyes. "Eight years. Eight *damn* years I suffered through this. Through every rejection, every almost, every *you're not bad but* — and all I get is this? *This?*"
His voice cracked on the last word. He let it.
"The heavens are truly unfair to me."
Then, slowly, the heat burned itself out. What was left was something quieter. Heavier. The kind of feeling that doesn't shake you — it just sits down next to you and makes itself comfortable.
He stared at the water.
*It's over,* he thought. *It was never meant for me. This is where this dream ends.*
He stood up. Brushed off his trousers. Began walking.
Then — from somewhere he couldn't locate precisely, somewhere between his memory and his ribs — a voice.
*One more day.*
He stopped walking.
"No," he said, to nobody. "You're the reason this happened. You told me to take that shot."
*Just one more day.*
He stood there in the fading orange light for what might have been thirty seconds or five minutes. A man walking his dog passed him. The kids on the half-court were packing up.
Ren exhaled.
"Fine," he said quietly. To the voice. To himself. To whatever part of him was apparently not ready to be finished yet. "One more day. I'll give myself one more day. If I can't find a new team — " He paused. Let the weight of it settle fully. " — I'm done. This dream dies. That's the deal."
The voice was quiet after that.
He walked home.
---
The apartment was warm and smelled like whatever his mother had made for dinner. His parents were in the living room — his father with the newspaper, his mother with something on her tablet. Two ordinary people at the end of an ordinary evening who had no idea their son had just watched eight years of effort dissolve off a rim.
"How was practice?" his mother asked.
"Fine," Ren said. He kept his voice level because he had years of practice at this specific skill. "Nothing special."
"You look tired," his father said, without looking up from the newspaper.
"Long session."
His mother looked at him for a moment — the particular look that mothers develop, the one that processes information below the surface of whatever you're saying. "You know you can talk to us. If something's bothering you. We're here."
Ren looked at her. He almost said it. The whole thing — the game, the shot, the rim, the coach's voice, the pier, the kids playing basketball in the orange light, the deal he'd made with himself on the walk home.
"I know," he said instead. "Thanks, Mom."
He went to his room. He lay down on his bed without turning the light on. The ceiling was dark and uninteresting and perfect for staring at.
He had one day.
He wasn't sure what he was going to do with it. He wasn't sure, if he was honest, whether any amount of days would change the fundamental reality of what had just happened — that he was a player good at everything and great at nothing and the one moment he'd trusted the part of himself that wanted to be great, it had cost him everything he'd worked eight years to reach.
But he had one day.
He closed his eyes.
He slept.
---
*In the darkness outside, somewhere across the city, in a building that didn't advertise itself — a man in a white mask reviewed footage on a screen. Numbers. Statistics. Hours of game film from players across the country. He paused on something. Rewound it. Watched it again.*
*299 names on a list.*
*He needed one more.*
---
**End of Chapter 1**