Amat shivers in the wind, but stands still beneath one of the streetlights on purpose. He wants them to see him from a distance, so that no one else has to get involved. He will never be able to explain how he dares to do this, but perhaps you get tired of being frightened if you’ve been frightened long enough.

He doesn’t know how many there are as they make their way between the buildings, but they look so obviously violent that he knows he won’t manage to get a single punch in before they’re all over him. His heart is beating in his throat. He doesn’t know if they want to scare him, if they want to mark him to make an example out of him, or if perhaps they’re seriously planning to make sure he can never play hockey again. One of them is holding something—a baseball bat, perhaps. As they pass the last streetlight before his, a metal pipe glints in another hand. Amat shields himself from the first blow with his lower arm, but the second hits him on the back of the head, then a flash of pain shoots up his spine as the metal pipe hits him across the thigh. He swipes and bites and drags his way through the horde of bodies, but this isn’t a fight, it’s an assault. He’s already bleeding by the time he hits the snow.

Bang.

Bobo has never been good at much except fighting. That’s something it’s easy to be appreciated for when you grow up in the right surroundings. He isn’t just strong and disconcertingly resilient, his reaction time is pretty astonishing considering how sluggish and slow he is otherwise. But he’s never been very fit; he’s too heavy to run long distances, so he’s struggling to keep up with the other masked figures without wearing himself out before they get there. He knows he won’t have many seconds to show them who he really is. How loyal he can be, how brave, how selfless.

They slow down when they see Amat. The fifteen-year-old is standing alone, waiting for them.

“He’s got balls, I’ll give him that, for not running and hiding,” Lyt mutters.

When the first blow comes, Amat shields himself with his lower arm, but he doesn’t see much after that. Bobo has a couple of seconds in which to step forward from the back and punch Lyt just once in the face as hard as he can, knocking his scarf from his face and sending the huge young man’s body crashing into a wall. Bobo elbows another guy—one he’s played hockey with since they could barely skate—in the nose, making it explode in a shower of blood.

He only has those few seconds before his teammates realize what he is. A traitor. Amat is lying on the ground, and Bobo fights like a wild animal, headbutting and kneeing and whirling his hands around like hammers. In the end he succumbs to their superior numbers and the collective weight of his attackers. Lyt sits on his chest and rains down blow after blow after blow, bellowing, “You bitch! You bitch! You lying fucking cowardly little traitor bitch!” into the darkness.

Bang.

A car stops twenty yards away between the buildings. Someone who evidently doesn’t want to get involved, but who still puts the car’s headlights on full beam. For a few moments the whole scene is illuminated. A voice in Lyt’s ear shouts: “Someone’s coming! Let’s go! Let’s go!” And then they’re gone. Some are swearing, some limping, but the boots march off into the night and disappear.

Amat lies curled up in the fetal position for a long time, not daring to believe that they’ve stopped kicking him. Slowly, slowly, he moves his limbs one after the other to check that nothing’s broken. He turns his head slightly to one side; it’s throbbing with pain, his vision is clouded, but he sees his teammate lying in the snow beside him.

“Bobo?”

The huge boy’s face is as battered as his knuckles. At least a couple of their opponents must have been left barely able to get away under their own steam, they must have helped each other leave. When Bobo opens his mouth, a steady trickle of blood oozes from where there should have been a front tooth.

“Are you okay?” Bobo asks.

“Yes . . . ,” Amat groans.

Bobo’s mouth cracks into a smile.

“Again?”

Amat snorts. It takes an immense effort for him to hiss: “AGAIN!”

“AGAIN!” Bobo yells.

Smiling, they slump back on the ground, wheezing and shaking.

“Why? Why help me?” Amat whispers.

Bobo spits some red slime on the ground.

“Well . . . I’ll never get a place in Hed’s A-team anyway. But Beartown might actually be so bad next season that even I stand a chance.”

Amat starts to laugh, but he shouldn’t have done that, because only then does he realize that one of his ribs is probably broken. He screams, and Bobo might have laughed at him even louder if his jaw hadn’t been so painful.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

*

The car a little distance away, a Saab, switches off its headlights. There are two men in black jackets sitting in it. They hesitate for a few moments. It’s always hard to know who you can trust in Beartown. But the men in the black jackets have grown up in the Bearskin pub, where loyalty is perhaps prized above all else. And they’re violent men, they know how to terrify people, so perhaps they appreciate the courage of someone who knows he’s going to get a beating but still doesn’t run. So in the end they get out and walk between the streetlights. Amat squints through swollen eyelids as they lean over him.

“Was that you in the car?” he whimpers.

They nod almost imperceptibly. Amat tries to sit up.

“You saved our lives, thanks.”

One of the men leans closer and says gruffly:

“Don’t thank us, thank Ramona. Hell, we still don’t know if we can trust you. But you could have kept your trap shut at that meeting; you had a fuck of a lot to lose saying what you did about Kevin. And Ramona looked into your eyes. She trusts you. And we trust her.”

He hands Amat an envelope. As he does so, the other man fixes his eyes on the boy and says, perhaps in jest, perhaps not: “You’d better make sure you really do end up being as good at hockey as everyone thinks.”

When the Saab’s engine starts up again and the men disappear into the night, Amat looks down into the envelope. Inside it are five crumpled thousand-kronor notes.

*

It’s hard to know who you can trust in Beartown; the man in the black jacket who’s driving the Saab knows that as well as anyone else. So he judges people by what he can see: he saw Kevin’s dad go to the Hollow and give Amat enough money to pay his mom’s rent that month, and he saw the boy throw it in the snow. He saw the same boy stand up at the meeting in front of the whole town, with everything to lose, without wavering. And he saw the boy tonight, when he knew he was going to be attacked. He didn’t run, he stood out here and waited.

The man in the black jacket doesn’t know if that’s enough to trust someone, but the only person in the world he really trusts is Ramona, and he’s only tried to lie to her once. He was a teenager, she asked if he’d found a lost wallet on the pool table, he said, “No,” and she called him out on it instantly. When he asked her how she knew, she hit him in the head with a broom handle and roared: “Stupid boy, I own a fucking BAR! Don’t you think I’ve had a bit of experience when it comes to working out if men are lying or not?”