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Emmett Yoon had priced professional athletes for six years. He had met none of them. That was not a policy he had ever written down, but it had the shape of one.

He was thinking about it at nine minutes past eight on the last Monday in January, standing on the shoulder of a snarling frost-blue wolverine inlaid in the floor of the Anchorage Frost arena lobby, two storeys of glass over the animal, with his laptop bag over one arm and his boots leaking a small grey lake onto its face, because there had been no mat inside the door and nobody had told him where to put the snow. That he was thinking about it at all was itself a data point about the morning.

The elevator had a mirrored back wall. He looked at himself for four floors — five-eight in boots, narrow, warm light-brown skin gone sallow under the elevator light, a grey sweater he owned four of, black hair he had cut himself on Thursday with the results Thursday deserved — and thought that somebody had made this decision about the wall and had never once had to stand in it.

The corridor upstairs was carpeted. He noticed the seam because his feet noticed it first: one straight cut across the floor where the tile stopped and the carpet started, at exactly the point, he understood a second later, where the building had stopped being about hockey. Everybody in this place crossed that line four times a day. He would find, over six weeks, that not one of them had ever mentioned it.

The conference room at the end was all glass and pale wood, warmer than the rink by thirty degrees and somehow twice as cold. Beyond the window the inlet lay flat and grey under a sky the colour of a healing bruise. Two levels down a plough was working the parking structure in long patient passes, and it went on doing that through the whole conversation, and nobody in the room ever mentioned it either.

On the table: a carafe of coffee nobody drank, a bowl of clementines nobody ate, and a single manila folder squared to the edge like it had been laid there with a level.

"Mr. Yoon." The woman who stood up was in her forties, small and unhurried, and she shook his hand once. "Priya Nair. General manager. Sit anywhere, they're all the same chair."

The other man was already up and coming round the table with his hand out and his other hand arriving on Emmett's shoulder before Emmett had finished getting his bag off it, and he was tanned, in Anchorage, in January.

"Garrett Pell," he said. "Cal's agent. Eleven years. I've read four of your reports and I liked three of them, which for me is a record."

"Which one didn't you like?"

"The one about my guy." Pell laughed at that, wide and genuine, and it was very hard not to like it. "Sit down, you're dripping."

Emmett sat down. He took a legal pad out of his bag and set it in front of him, and he did not open the laptop, because he had learned that a laptop in a first meeting makes people talk to the laptop.

Priya Nair slid a lanyard across the pale wood. A credential, his own name on it, EMMETT YOON in small square capitals under KESTREL VALUATION PARTNERS and under that, in a smaller type, VISITING STAFF — HOCKEY OPS.

"That gets you the side door, the barn, the video room and the bus," she said. "It will not call this floor. That's not a comment on you, the readers in this building have been inconsistent since the year they were installed and nobody has ever found the money to care. If you need to be up here, call Colleen and she'll come down."

"Understood."

"There's an onboarding pack on the shared drive. Twelve numbered items. Most of them are about where to park." She let a pause happen. "Item nine is the conflict-of-interest clause. Read that one properly rather than scrolling it. If anything develops during your term that item nine would have an opinion about, you tell me, in the first week, and it costs the club a one-page recusal and costs you nothing. If you tell me in the fifth week it costs considerably more, and the difference is not the conduct. It's the week."

"Item nine," Emmett said. "Twelve items. I'll read it today."

"Good." She squared the manila folder a quarter of an inch, which did not need doing. "Here's what the club wants, and I'm going to say it once so we're not doing the dance for six weeks. Cal Brennan is thirty-three years old and his deal expires on the thirtieth of June. His representation is asking three years at four point two. I have a number in my own head and I don't trust it, because I have watched that man play four hundred games in this building and I like him, and liking him is worth exactly nothing at a negotiating table. So I want a price I can defend. Not a low one. A defensible one. If your work says pay him, I will take that to ownership with your name on the front of it and I will fight for it."

"And if it says don't."

"Then it says don't, and I will still take it to ownership, and I will still have your name on the front of it." She did not blink. "I don't need you to be kind, Mr. Yoon. I have a whole building of people being kind to him. I need you to be right."

Something in Emmett went quietly, privately still. It was the sentence he had spent six years wishing a client would say, said by the first client who had ever meant it, and it landed on him with the peculiar weight of a thing you have wanted and have not prepared for.

"That's the job," he said.

"Then we're done." Nair stood. "Garrett wants to say his part. I've heard it. It's a good part."

Pell waited until the door had swung to. He turned his chair a little so it faced Emmett rather than the table, which was, Emmett thought, a practised move, and none the less effective for it.

"Here's the thing you're going to hear about me," Pell said. "You'll hear I bought this. Which is true — the agency's paying half your firm's freight on this engagement, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, because you'd find the invoice inside a week and then you'd wonder what else I was doing. So: a joint look. Both sides commissioned it, both sides live with it. No surprises in either direction."

"That's an unusual structure."

"It's an unusual player." Pell said it easily, and then he stopped being easy for a second, and the shift was small and completely convincing. "Cal Brennan came to me at twenty-two with a hundred and ten dollars in a checking account and a mother in Dorchester who thought agents were bookies. He is the third of five and the only one of them who got out. I have carried him through two bad seasons and one bad divorce that wasn't his, and there is no version of the next six weeks where I do anything other than what's best for him."

"I don't doubt that," Emmett said, and he didn't.

"Good. So — courtesy both ways. Priya gets nothing before I do and I get nothing before she does. You send it to both of us the same minute or you send it to neither of us." Pell put his palms up, open, a man with nothing in his hands. "And I'll tell you what I always tell the analysts, which is that early looks are useful to have early. Not to argue with. Just so that nobody in this thing gets handed a surprise in the last week of February and has to make a decision about a man's life in an afternoon."

Emmett wrote early looks are useful to have early on his legal pad, in his own shorthand, which looked like nothing at all upside down.

"My working numbers move," he said. "Sometimes a lot. They're not for reading."

"Understood entirely." Pell was already smiling again, and it was a real smile, and he meant it. "You're going to be great. Come on, I'll walk you down. He's on the ice till nine-thirty."

The corridor from the offices to the barn ran back over that same seam in the floor, and then forty feet of rubber matting between cinderblock walls, and the whole forty feet was framed team photographs going brown at the edges under the glass. Twenty years of them. Men with their arms folded in rows. Down near the tunnel end there were two of them barely into their twenties with their arms round each other, under a caption plate Emmett didn't get a chance to read.

Then the smell arrived, and it was the first thing about the building he would ever be able to describe to somebody who hadn't been in it: cold rubber, old coffee that had been old since September, a thin chemical sweetness off the resurfacer, and underneath all of it the honest funk of a barn a great many large men had sweated into for a very long time.

A kid of about nineteen went past him at the tunnel mouth carrying two coffees, neither of which appeared to be for himself, saying to nobody, "Line seventeen's still open, I'm just saying, it's open till Thursday." Somewhere out of sight a goaltender with a Québécois lilt was holding forth about a restaurant in Calgary, at length, to a room that had heard it.

Cal Brennan came off the ice at nine-thirty-one with his helmet in his hand.

Emmett had watched him on video for days and had built a fairly precise object in his head, and the object was wrong in the way that the object is always wrong. He was six-two, and going heavy with it through the chest and the thighs; pale, freckled skin gone blotchy red from the work, red-brown hair flattened to his skull and rusting to grey at the temples, a nose broken twice and set once. His gear made a small enormous sound on the matting. He was breathing through his mouth and had not yet gotten it under control, and the thing Emmett noticed — because noticing was the whole of what he had ever been paid for — was that he got it under control the instant he saw there were two of them standing there.

"Cal," Pell said, warm. "This is Emmett Yoon, from Kestrel. The valuation. We talked about this."

"We talked about it." Cal put his glove under his arm and put his hand out, and it was hot and damp and enormous and the grip was carefully moderate, the grip of a man who has learned what his hand does to other people's. "Mr. Yoon."

"Emmett's fine."

"Emmett." He said it once, like filing it. Then nothing.

Emmett waited, because he had done this two hundred times from a distance and never from four feet away, and he found that his sense of the length of a silence was not what he thought it was.

"I'll be at the video room whenever you want me," Cal said. "Marta's got me most days. I'll be wherever they tell me to be."

"Tomorrow, ten-thirty? I've pulled forty games."

"Ten-thirty."

And that was all. He nodded at Pell, and at Emmett, in that order and about equally, and went down the matting past twenty years of other men's photographs with his helmet swinging in his hand, and he had not asked a single question.

Not what the number would be. Not what it was based on. Not who was paying for it, or when it landed, or what happened to him on the eighth of March if it landed low. Emmett had sat across tables from general managers who asked nine questions before he'd finished a sentence, and from a coach in Winnipeg who had asked him what his mother did for a living, and he had never in his professional life met a man who was the subject of a valuation and did not want to know one thing about it.

Six weeks, he thought. Forty-two days, and the first one was not over yet.

He took his glasses off, rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist, and put them on again.

Then he opened the legal pad on his knee, standing there in the corridor with the cold coming off the sheet through the open gate, and wrote it down the way he wrote down everything: Subject asked no questions re: process, methodology, timeline, or outcome. He looked at it for a second. Then he underlined no questions, once, and closed the pad.

Data, he thought. It's data and it's nothing else.

He believed it all the way to the parking structure.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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