Kimara Brown leaned back in her computer chair and regarded the figure in the doorway with calm brown eyes. "It has been a long time," she intoned.

"Aw, cut the melodramatic bullshit, wouldja? You been watchin' too many cheesy B-movies late at night when you're not blowin' up American computers?" Bev Sinclair pushed through the piles of cords, computer parts, and user's manuals that lay strewn about the floor of Kimara's workroom. "Jesus, it looks like a Granny Smith warehouse threw up in here."

"Eddie threatened to divorce me if I took my work home, so I have to leave it all here. You see the result. I would throw things out if it hadn't been for the three times I've had to paw through dumpsters to find something I hadn't thought I needed until I needed it. It's just easier for me to do things this way."

"Ya can't sort it out instead of leavin' it thrown all over the floor?" Bev picked her way to an empty chair and sat tailor-style on it. "Trina says bonjour. Me, I say hello. I tell ya, she speaks better French than half the peeps on our block. I just know what I need to say and that's that."

"Ten years. I still can't believe it's been that long since we left." Kimara shook her head and sighed. "I never thought it would get as bad as it has down there. I thought it was bad, bad enough that Stat laughed at me whenever I told her what I thought was going to happen. Now all my nightmares have come true, and I can only be thankful that I did and am doing my part to ameliorate the effects."

"Speakin' of Stat, how is Mrs. Delegate LaRue?"

"Torn. She wants to be taken seriously as a researcher and statistician, but if people look at her for who she is, they see the leader of France's bronze medal team at the 2014 Worlds; if they look at her as her husband's wife, they just see her as a political pawn. I don't think she's getting to do all the good she thought she was going to do, and that's a shame. If she had to do it over again, something tells me she wouldn't encourage Jacques to run for the Assembly." Kimara sighed. "In some ways she was the best of us."

"Don't sell yourself short, Kimmy. Least you had the balls to stay when we needed ya. Hadn't been for you, I don't know what the hell we woulda done. But we're fightin' the good fight and that's what counts."

"Have you seen Nita lately? I don't hear from her very much anymore. It's not like we were the greatest of friends, but you'd at least expect a postcard every so often."

"She an' Marie are fine," Bev replied, referring to Nita's Quebecois girlfriend of three years. "Last I heard, she was drivin' a big rig cross-country, rackin' up miles an' bringin' in supplies. Marie got a promotion- she's head usher for the loge level now, she's hopin' to make it to the big time an' serve the suites." The Philly native rolled her eyes at the narrow scope of Marie's ambitions.

"I still can't believe that Angie has survived all these years in the States. I thought for sure Moore would kill her when they had their little heart-to-heart."

"LaTonya Moore was a pussy all her life. She was all talk, no walk. I coulda kicked her lazy ass without even workin' too hard at it. An' Angie was always hella tougher than she looked- whyja think she ended up with a big lug like Moore in the first place? Nah, I wasn't surprised when Angie whupped her ass- didn't think it'd come down to murder, but it makes sense, since the little bitch got Tina offed. Only thing that ever shocked the shit outta me was when Angie sent us the invite to her hitchin' with Shawn. Never thought she was the marryin' kind, much less the name-changin' kind."

"Well, be fair, they swapped last names."

"Yeah. Shawn Smith an' Angie Anderson. Christ, the alliteration fuckin' kills me."

"To be technical, Angie's new name isn't alliterative, it's assonant." Kimara ducked as Bev picked up a stray piece of computer paper, balled it up, and pitched it at her head; had she not moved, Bev's shot would have gotten her right between the eyes, and the velocity at which the paper moved indicated that it would have been a pretty hard hit. "She always did strike me as the kind to jump on the bandwagon for a new religion- what is that sect again, the Hunters?"

"Angie with a gun scares the shit outta me. I'd worry more 'bout her aimin' to the right an' hittin' to the left. Good-lookin' girl, but God, she couldn't hit water if she fell outta a boat." Bev chuckled.

Kimara's gaze fell on the team photo taken shortly before their flight to Canada. "Lynnette got lucky with Liz, you know that?"

"Well, yeah, same way you got lucky with Eddie an' I got lucky with Trina. Liz wasn't like most groupies, ya know? An' sure as hell she wasn't like most blondes. The way she got them to Spain was fuckin' genius, an' I'll bet Lynnette stopped fightin' her on it when the new queen came to power. Victoria, my sweet black ass; that bitch is just Britney in a new set of duds. Wouldja believe I got a letter from Lynnette just the other day- in Spanish? Guess she decided to go native- signed her name Linda an' everything, but her grammar needs a little work."

"And how do you know so much about Spanish grammar?"

"Damn, Kimmy, for a brain, ya don't know much. I useta play in the Spanish league before the CBL got started up. My first coupla years, I swapped with my small forward- she taught me to speak Spanish, I taught her some moves I learned in the locker room at Temple. I think I was good, 'cause she even got into the vosotros form with me, an' ya know those seņoritas get elite about their precious second-person plural."

"Remind me again what you majored in?"

"Comparative lit, double minor in English an' Italian when it was all done, 'cause I hadda take so damn many of the courses that I figured I might as well use the credits. If Coach hadn't taken her sweet time an' missed the redshirt deadline junior year, I mighta gone double-major, just for shits and giggles. Enough 'bout me. I'm a Goddamn point guard, even if I ain't touched a ball in five years, an' no one's s'posed to know that the show's 'bout me, 'cause a good point guard makes it 'bout everyone else. You hear from Monique lately? Last time I saw her was her official Canadian citizenship party after Manitoba, an' I don't think there's still two of her."

"Last I heard from her, Nita had gotten her into the same driving school, and she had taken a route to and from New York City. I should send a message down to the Refuge, see if they can get in touch with Angie." Kimara laughed. "I swear, sometimes messages between Toronto and 73rd Street are faster than messages between 73rd Street and 65th Street. I wish we could get a direct connection to the temple, but Sloan and Allen both insist on no technology more complicated than a pager, and the signal gets broken up once you go international. I hope she's okay- oh, man, what if she got caught up in all that weird stuff that started taking place when the government banned women's basketball? She's a former player, they could round her up and torture her or kill her or use her to out other players, or she could have been in one of those bizarre accidents, Stat told me there was a connection to her school-"

"You're babblin', quit it! If I wanna hear yakkin' that makes no sense, I'll go watch filtered Channel 1! Monique can take care of herself. Even if she can't, you sittin' here like a worried mama ain't gonna do one damn bit of good."

"You have lousy grammar for a comparative lit major," Kimara grumbled.

"I thought you were better than ad hominem attacks, Kimara. Honestly. Just because I prefer to speak in my native accent doesn't mean I'm an idiot. It allows people to underestimate me, something I guess you've forgotten in the three years since we last met. Besides, comparative lit majors often have bad grammar- it comes from trying to apply one set of laws to another language." Bev grinned, brown eyes glittering with mischief. Kimara was duly impressed; it had taken a long time for the political scientist and sometime tech expert to realize that Bev wasn't nearly as stupid as she let people believe, but only when they were both running for their lives had Bev ever mentioned that she was fluent in three languages and rather enjoyed a spot of Dante when she wasn't breaking ankles on the asphalt of a pick-up court.

"I surrender the point." Kimara put her hands up to indicate that surrender. In turn, Bev straightened up from her bent position and dropped the half-crumpled piece of paper in her hand.

"A'right then. You're gonna love the news I got from the States. Seems that Sameka- ya remember her, the shooter who couldn't stop runnin' her mouth on sin? Well, she changed her name to Samantha so she could be more godly, an' then she went into a convent, or whatever the hell they use instead of convents an' now she's Sister Mary Samuel."

"I hadn't heard about that. I do know that the McDonalds both went into the Army when they found out that Denise couldn't have children. The AIS reporter undercover there said that a Lieutenant Denise McDonald died in a night ambush in Manchuria in August 2014, and Lieutenant Bryan McDonald was a victim of friendly fire about a month later."

"We coulda saved them," Bev muttered darkly.

"They didn't want to be saved. If Denise had shown willingness to do something other than rearrange my face and talk shit about you and Lynnette behind your backs, then yes, we could have brought her and Bryan along, and in time the poison would have been defeated. But they had to have that desire to leave in the first place, or else it would have been kidnaping, and Sharlene didn't want to get involved with that."

"So it's better that they're dead? Goddamn, Kimmy, you know that shit ain't right."

Kimara raised her bowed head and shot Bev an agonized look. "If I'd had my way with this whole thing, we would have done it a year sooner, and we wouldn't have been the only ones. You weren't on an Olympic team- wouldn't have mattered anyway, we couldn't invite the Americans- so you didn't know about the accord we reached at Beijing, for every international player in any sport to get at-risk teammates out of the country by any means posible. The Aussies, for example, talked to their government and got a pile of refugee visas faxed over with blanks for them to fill in their chosen one's name. I wanted to invoke it for the 2009 season, but Sharlene and Ivanova from New York talked me out of it. They said it was too soon. You know what happened next. And to add insult to injury, that was Ivanova's last season, because she was never the same player after she had her daughter- blowing out her knee was one thing, ACLs are easy to come back from compared to pregnancy. Some of the big names got out, but not enough, not nearly enough. One year earlier, when there were more internationals in the league, and who knows? Ivanova might have been able to get Tina Washington out of the country, or even-"

"What did I tell ya 'bout beatin' yourself up 'bout stuff that's been and gone? Ain't no good. Can't change it, can't fix it, so why bother freakin' out?"

"Yeah, you're right, I know. And not everything got fucked up. I mean, we're still here, right? You still have Trina. I still have Eddie. Sharlene, Lynnette, Nita, Angie: they've all found someone right for them. It's played out almost like a movie, you know? The good guys get rewarded and the bad guys get punished. Right? That's what's going on here, right?"

"Yeah, mostly." But the silence that fell after Bev's assent gave the lie to her words. "Jordan woulda been proud of you, ya know. If she'd had a chance to see how it all came together, she woulda been pleased. She was always the mother hen type."

"She was more under than she knew. I doubt she would have been pleased after all. She saw the truth and couldn't face living with it. At least she wasn't cowardly enough to run back into Britney's embrace like some of the rookies did," Kimara said sharply. "I would have liked for the ten-year reunion to involve sitting in a bar with a lot of good drinks, a lot of good stories, and more people than just the two of us. I wanted it to have everyone, and not just those of us who left the first time around. Maybe I'm a little too soft-hearted, but I kept hoping that Denise or Sameka, or even some of the old rivals, would snap out of it and come up here. Ten years, that's a big deal. Shouldn't it be more than the two of us swapping gossip in my cluttered office?"

"Well, we covered mosta the good stories, an' I can't produce the rest of the team, but..." Bev unhooked a flask from her belt and passed it to Kimara. Once uncorked, it smelled of brandy. Kimara reached for a glass on her desk, but recoiled when she saw the layer of dust on the inside of it. Instead, she took a long swig from the flask and passed it back to Bev. "Ya forgot to toast. Why do ya always leave the tricky things to me?" Before Kimara could form a suitable retort, Bev raised the flask into the air and said, "Here's to all the ones who weren't as lucky." She took a deep swallow of the brandy as Kimara nodded her approval of the toast, thinking about her colleagues: the ones who had fled to other countries, and the ones who had chosen to return to the most dangerous country in the world; the ones who had watched the world turn upside-down, and the ones who hadn't lived to see it; the ones whose lives were given over to God, and the ones whose lives were given over to some other cause; and the three of them, her and Bev and Nita, who had committed themselves to the resistance in Canada and could not rest until Britney was defeated.

"To all the ones who weren't as lucky, indeed," she murmured.