Suho and Mark finished their meeting with the manager and got into a car driven by a club employee.

Five minutes of driving, maybe.

It pulled up in front of an ordinary two-story house.

“This is where you’ll be living. Three of you to a house, and one roommate has already moved in.”

Suho got out of the car behind the employee and stood looking blankly at the house in front of him.

So I get to go on playing baseball here.

He felt an unfamiliar relief at having somewhere to come back to.

That feeling would probably become another strong reason to play baseball here.

“Let’s go in, then.”

They followed the employee through the creaking front door and stepped inside.

Loud rock music filled the house and met them at the door.

On an old couch in the middle of the living room a man lay with headphones on, making motions in the air as though he were playing a guitar.

He seemed to have no idea Suho and Mark had come in.

Mark went carefully over and tapped him on the shoulder.

Only then did the man open his eyes, slowly, as though the whole world were a nuisance.

What showed between the slowly lifting eyelids was a pair of blue eyes too blue to look real.

His blond hair looked like it had been left to grow however it wanted, and it was nowhere near sweat or dust.

A sharp jawline and a straight nose made you wonder what he was doing in a place like this.

He had the kind of face a god had worked hard on, and its owner didn’t seem to care in the slightest.

Then he hooked the headphones loosely around his neck and ran lazy eyes over the two of them, up and down.

“Who? Oh, the new guys? I don’t care as long as you’re not loud.”

That was the end of it. He put the headphones back on and shut himself off from the world again.

“You can put your bags upstairs. There are three rooms, so take whichever you like.”

The employee finished his awkward tour of the place and left.

Standing there with him gone, Mark muttered like he couldn’t believe it.

“What the hell? Who’s that jackass?”

Suho gave him a faint smile, picked up his bag, and headed upstairs.

Of the three doors along the corridor, he opened the one at the far end.

The door creaked open on a dusty wooden floor and an old bed.

There was one desk in the room, and nothing else.

But Suho liked the plainness of it.

He opened the window and cool air poured in, along with the sunlight of an unfamiliar neighborhood.

It was a room entirely his own.

He set his bag down and sat on the edge of the bed, looking out the window.

Knock, knock.

Mark knocked at the door and stuck his face in.

His expression wasn’t the disbelief from earlier. It was astonishment mixed with excitement.

“Come out here a second.”

Suho followed him downstairs, where the man was still on the couch, sunk in a world of his own.

Mark lowered his voice to a whisper.

“I worked out who that guy is.”

“Who is he?”

Mark swallowed and said it.

“Cash. Cash goddamn Meyer.”

He went on as though he couldn’t believe it himself.

“Famous? Anybody in this business who doesn’t know him has been living under a rock. In high school they called him the kind of super-genius who comes along maybe once in a hundred years. The bat alone is an all-time monster.”

Suho’s eyes went back to the lazy figure sprawled on the couch.

Him?

Mark shook his head.

“Yeah. I don’t get it either. Why a monster like that is still down here in Low-A. What the hell happened to him… anyway, he does everything at his own pace, exactly like the rumors say.”

“Should we introduce ourselves properly?”

Mark shook his head.

“I heard he didn’t have a single friend in high school either. They say it’s better not to even try getting close. Let’s just leave him alone.”

The moment Mark finished talking, Cash sprang up off the couch.

Then he went into his own room without acknowledging either of them.

He really is something different.

The Americans Suho had met since coming here had all been cheerful and kind.

Even strangers talked to him like old friends, with no reserve at all, and said what they felt without hesitating.

Mark was the prime example.

But the Cash of a moment ago was different.

He had put up a clear wall of his own, and everything about him refused to let anyone through it.

It was a stone wall, not ordinary shyness or a blunt manner.

Not that it was really anything to worry about.

People’s temperaments are all different, and even in America not everyone can be like Mark.

Still, Suho was curious about him.

A genius who comes along once in a hundred years.

He wanted to know what the man would look like on the field.

Suho was thirsty for anything he could learn right now.

And watching other geniuses up close was learning, the way he saw it.

Well. I’ll find out soon enough.

As he finished the thought, Mark gave his forearm a light tap.

“Let’s unpack and get some rest for now. We’ve got a game tomorrow.”

A new house, and a first meeting with a genius nobody could explain.

And so the first night with the Quakes wore on.

Bang.

The door closed, and Cash leaned his back against it and let out a long breath.

When he took the headphones off, a silence heavy enough to make his ears ring came down over him.

He switched on the tablet he’d thrown down on the desk.

The league leaderboard was up on the screen.

But the numbers didn’t do anything for him anymore.

A .382 average, 25 home runs, 30 stolen bases.

His OPS was comfortably over 1.200.

Numbers that led the league by a distance, and not one of them made him happy.

Because to Cash this place wasn’t a competition. It was a giant fish tank keeping him penned in.

It had been that way since high school.

Anywhere below his own level there was nothing to learn and nothing to feel.

Boring.

He had already settled it with the club.

Promotion to a higher level was promised for the end of this season.

All he had to do was get through this meaningless stretch of time.

He had to climb higher.

Which was why he saw no reason to bother getting close to anyone.

They were faces that might vanish like ghosts in a month or two anyway.

There was no need to spend feelings on people who were only passing through.

Hm…

The faces of the new arrivals came to him.

He had watched their play at the ballpark without much interest.

Not bad.

The big one had strength, and the Asian one was smart.

But that was all of it.

Neither of them had played anything that could make his heart beat.

Still, the Asian in number 79 had played a little differently from the baseball he knew.

He’d laid a bunt down on a hundred-mile-an-hour pitch, then torn the pitcher’s composure apart with back-to-back steals.

It was unmistakably baseball played with the head.

Interesting, at least.

But so what?

Cash gave a short laugh.

That wasn’t proof of anything.

He could do it too if he felt like it.

No — he was confident he could do it more perfectly than that.

But why go through all that trouble?

Putting it over the fence was surer and simpler.

He just had no need to.

In the end, nothing today had made his heart beat either.

Cash put the headphones back on.

In a world where everything was trivial, the only interesting thing was a guitar loud enough to split his ears.

The next morning.

Mark hauled his stiff body up, and as he climbed out he noticed his roommate’s empty bed and rubbed his eyes.

“What? Where’d he go?”

He went through the house, but Suho was nowhere in it.

Right then Suho came in through the front door, soaked through with sweat.

His breathing was rough, but his eyes were bright and clear.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Out for a run.”

“Since when?”

“Three hours ago, about?”

Mark’s eyes went round.

“It’s nine o’clock now.”

“Yeah. It’s always been like that for me.”

Suho answered as though it were nothing and wiped the sweat off with a towel.

Mark let out a hollow laugh.

Talking about a three-hour run like a walk around the block.

It was one more moment of understanding where Suho’s iron stamina came from.

Is that guy human?

He’d have believed it if someone told him Suho was a machine.

Mark headed for the kitchen and pushed two slices of bread into the toaster.

“You’ll eat bread, right?”

“Yeah. I should eat.”

From the outside, a minor leaguer’s life looked glamorous.

You played baseball every day, you heard fans cheer even if there weren’t many of them, and you looked like a man moving toward a dream.

But the reality was cold.

Conditions had improved lately, people said, but against America’s brutal cost of living a minor leaguer’s salary was still no better than minimum wage.

Report to the clubhouse by ten in the morning, then morning work, lunch, afternoon work, and a game at night.

Once you’d poured the whole of a day into baseball, what was left was a wrecked body and an empty wallet.

A treat like steak was out of the question.

For most players, filling an empty stomach meant the dry sliced bread Mark was toasting now, or cereal, or cheap frozen food.

When the two of them had finished a simple breakfast and reached the locker room, yesterday’s chill was nowhere to be found.

Several players came over and spoke to Suho and Mark first.

“Hey, that was good yesterday. Going to be good today too?”

Suho and Mark took the greetings with awkward smiles.

This was a world where you proved everything with ability.

On the strength of one day’s play, the two of them had stopped being outsiders and started to be accepted as Quakes.

The reason the reaction had been cold at first was that they’d come through a tryout.

They hadn’t been drafted the way the rest of them had, so the assumption was that they might not be up to the level.

I suppose this counts as being accepted, too.

Suho was changing into his uniform in a good mood.

Then the dugout door opened and Taylor came in.

He came straight over to Suho.

“Get outside the training area right now. You’ve got a visitor.”

“A visitor?”

“That’s right. A very important visitor.”

Suho walked out of the ballpark with a puzzled look on his face.

A black sedan was parked at one side of the entrance lot.

And a man stood beside it, staring intently at something.

The man was wearing a sleek black suit.

He had a black fedora on, and blond hair showed underneath it.

To Suho he looked like a man with nothing to do with baseball at all.

More than anything, what he was doing was strange.

He was staring at his own palm as though it were the most interesting object in the world.

When Suho approached carefully, the man finally raised his head.

Then he ran his eyes down Suho from head to foot like a scanner.

Then, without a word, he walked one full circle around him.

“Hmm…”

Then he suddenly tapped at Suho’s shoulder and his pelvis, took him by the wrist and lifted it to measure the angle, and went on with more of the same strange business.

Suho could only stand frozen, with no idea what was happening.

After looking him over for a long while, the man finally spoke.

“You.”

His first words were neither praise nor criticism.

“You are very, very lucky.”

“…Sorry?”

When Suho asked again, the man lifted one corner of his mouth.

“Because you’ve met me. Which means all that’s left for you now is to fly.”

The voice carried a confidence close to arrogance.

The man held out his hand to Suho.

“I’m Alex Rivera. The craftsman who’s going to install the world’s most perfect mechanics onto that body of yours. No — the authority in this field.”

Suho’s face brightened.

Mechanics!

The time he had waited for so long had finally come.

And on top of that, the man who was to be his teacher had confidence to spare.

His expectations swelled.

But.

Then the next thing out of the man’s mouth left him stunned.

Alex raised his index finger.

“The time it takes to install perfect mechanics on that body of yours is one month. No. I may not even need that.”

He had been told that installing mechanics takes a very long time.

A player’s body isn’t a machine, so changing habits built up over decades is a fight of six months at the very least, and sometimes years.

That was common knowledge in baseball.

And now, one month…

Have the Dodgers given up on me?

At the time, that was all Suho could think.

End of Chapter 22