The Wizenard Series

by Kobe Bryant

  Reggie was cut off as the floor suddenly gave way beneath him. The dot at center court plunged downward, pulling the hardwood planks with it, and his shoes lost all traction and began to slide. He threw himself toward the wall, trying to grab on to something, but he was too late.

  With a last, breathless scream, he tumbled into the darkness.

  THOSE WHO DARE

  A champion turns weakness into strength.

  WIZENARD PROVERB

  REGGIE SLID DOWN on the pitched hardwood floor, gliding over the wax. Panicked, he rolled onto his stomach, trying to slow his descent. But it was useless. He managed a look over his shoulder and saw that a flat surface was now in view. And it was coming up fast.

  He closed his eyes, feeling his body seize as he waited for the inevitable crunch of bones.

  But as he slid, he felt the incline begin to change, becoming flatter and flatter until he was lying horizontally again. He opened his eyes, almost warily. He was indeed on flat ground, though that was the only good news. He was lying at the bottom of a massive cone, as if the entire gym had warped into a funnel. It was gently curved into a bowl at the base of the cone, which at least explained why he wasn’t a Reggie-shaped splatter.

  Towering hardwood walls rose around him, smooth and growing steeper toward the top, surrounding this flat space about the size of his bedroom. Thin, weak light trickled down from the gym’s fluorescent panels, now distant overhead. Slowly climbing to his feet, Reggie saw the two hoops leaning over the edge way above him—little more than two orange specks from his vantage point. He was thoroughly trapped.

  “This is great,” Reggie murmured.

  He tried to think. His beloved basketball had fallen in with him and now sat loyally by his feet, though he wasn’t sure what possible good it would do.

  Reggie began to pace around his ball, staring up at the distant hoops.

  “Okay,” he said. “Grana didn’t kill me—yet—so this must be a test.” He rubbed his forehead, scowling. “Of course, it did drop me into a giant fifty-foot hole to starve—”

  Reggie caught himself, trying not to lose his temper. If he was going to talk to grana, he might as well be polite. Things had been going steadily downhill since he had called it stupid. Ha, he thought. Downhill. Very punny. Twig would have liked that one. Twig. The team!

  Practice was due to start pretty soon. Surely, they would rescue him.

  “Hello!” he called. “Guys! Rolabi! Kallo?”

  He knew he was feeling desperate if he was hoping for rescue-by-tiger. But though his voice was amplified a thousand times through the giant loudspeaker of the cone, there was no response. Just tiny distant hoops and tiny distant lights and a very long, impossibly steep climb to reach them. What if no one came? What if he was trapped down here forever? What if he could never leave? Reggie felt his throat clamping up. His knees wobbled.

  “You can figure this out,” he muttered. “It’s a puzzle.” During training camp, the walls of the gym had almost crushed the entire team, but the Badgers had stopped their terrifying advance by working together. There had to be something Reggie could do now too. “This is easy . . . I just need to . . . score a very long-range three-pointer?”

  He looked up. It seemed unlikely—actually, impossible—but he picked up the ball, cocked it back, and tried to heave it toward one of the hoops with all his strength. It flew about a third of the way up, lost momentum, and then began racing back down again, ricocheting off the hardwood cliffs.

  Without thinking, Reggie tried to catch it. He stepped onto the sloped wall, toppled forward, and then slid back down with a pitiful sigh as the ball eventually settled beside him.

  “Okay, so not a three-pointer,” he said.

  He stood up again and began to pace. It had to be a fundamental basketball skill.

  “I could pass it to myself . . . No . . . I’m going to dribble so hard that the floor rises . . . That doesn’t even make any sense . . . Okay, I simply box out whenever the ball comes back . . . and . . .”

  Reggie sighed. There was no lesson here. Well, maybe one, but he already knew that.

  Reggie was right where he belonged.

  “Boy at the bottom,” he said, sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Good one.”

  He sat there for a long time. Actually, he wasn’t sure if it was ten minutes or ten hours. He stared at the basketball across from him and realized that he probably wasn’t capable of getting out of this pit. It should have been scary. Instead, he just felt numb, the way he felt at the end of every game he’d ever lost.

  “Fine,” he said softly. “This is impossible. So I surrender. You win, grana, whatever you are.”

  Reggie closed his eyes. When he opened them, he was on level ground at center court. Fairwood appeared to be back to normal. He gingerly stood, scooping up the ball. Hopefully, grana had heard his surrender and given up on him for good.

  So why are you here? a voice in his head asked him. Why come early to every practice?

  Reggie shooed the voice away. His voice, though perhaps some rebellious offshoot.

  “Thanks for nothing,” Reggie said aloud. “Let’s just go our own ways.”

  “You talking to the gym?”

  He jumped and then spotted Rain by the front doors, smirking.

  “Sort of,” Reggie said sheepishly.

  Rain laughed and started for the bench. “You ain’t the first one, bro.”

  “What do you say to it?”

  “I tell it to watch closely,” Rain replied, taking a seat. “I tell it big things are coming.”

  Reggie smiled and went to go shoot around. He envied Rain. He envied his talent and his athleticism, but mostly, he envied Rain’s easy confidence. He belonged out on the court. Rain loved ball, just like Reggie. The important difference was that ball seemed to love Rain back.

  The warm-up only reinforced that belief. The hoop was still only visible when Reggie went to the corners—and yet Rain shot from anywhere. Sometimes it shrank for Reggie, but whenever Reggie’s errant shots bounced off orange iron, it quickly grew again, and Rain swished it easily.

  At one point, Reggie sprinted to the corner and saw that the hoop was mercifully a normal size. But in his haste to shoot before it changed again, he misfired completely and airballed it. His cheeks burned.

  “You need to take that shot more often,” Rain said, popping another turnaround jumper.

  Reggie grabbed his rebound and snorted. “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah, man. The corner is big for us. You have the right form. It will fall eventually.”

  “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  Rain stepped up to the corner and drained a three on his first attempt. “It will.”

  Reggie held back a sigh. And then he missed his next attempt. And another. Rain had the decency to pretend not to notice, and even better, to not say anything when Reggie finally hit one eleven tries later—well past the point of congratulations.

  While he was shooting, the rest of the Badgers filed in, and the court was soon crowded. Reggie tried to join them for free throws or layups, hoping their grana would overwhelm his useless, possibly sadistic version, but no such luck. He could either shoot corner threes or he could sit miserably on the bench and watch his teammates shoot from anywhere they wanted. But no one else seemed to notice the constantly changing rim apart from Reggie.

  As Reggie shuffled back to the nearest corner, Twig appeared beside him.

  “You look bummed,” Twig said, hitting a turnaround jumper.

  Reggie paused. “I’ve . . . been in a bit of a hole today.”

  “I would say that was a metaphor, but you never know these days. What happened?”

  “Don’t even ask,” Reggie said, prepping for another shot.

  “So you did fall in a hole?”

  Reggie sighed. “What did I j
ust say?”

  “Fine, fine. Well, we lost again. And I really thought we were going to wizenard them.”

  “You’re using wizenard as a verb now?” Reggie said.

  “Why not?” Twig pumped his fist. “Let’s get out there and wizenard those guys—”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  “Fine. Can we grana someone, then? I mean, admittedly I was kind of hoping that we were going to have superpowers or something when the game started. Like a ten-foot vertical or stretchy arms. Or, you know, a win, at least.”

  “Yeah,” Reggie said, eyeing the hoop. “Grana didn’t seem to be any advantage at all.”

  Twig patted Reggie’s shoulder, perhaps sensing how down he felt. “It’s just one game.”

  “Just like all the others,” Reggie mumbled.

  Reggie put up another three, and the net seemingly moved out of the way, letting it sail right past. They watched together as Reggie’s errant shot bounced off the wall and under the bleachers.

  “Are you seeing anything when I shoot the ball?” Reggie asked, frustrated.

  “Well . . . like an air ball?”

  “No. Like the rim moving. Shrinking, disappearing—”

  Twig shrugged. “I told you already. I think we can only see our own grana stuff. I’ve never seen anyone else’s. Why . . . have you?”

  Reggie glanced down the court and saw a Hula-Hoop rim waiting for Rain.

  “Sometimes,” he admitted.

  Twig stepped closer. “Really? Dude, why didn’t you tell me—”

  “It’s not a big deal. Just little glimpses.”

  Twig flushed. “Did you see anything around me? Reflections?”

  “No. I just see the hoops moving and sometimes the floor. What reflections?”

  “Nothing.” Twig shook his head. “I wish Rolabi would tell us more about grana. I mean, he’s a Wizenard. Oh . . . that reminds me. I checked another library for Wizenard info.”

  They had agreed that Twig would check his libraries in the nicer north end; there were no libraries left in the West Bottom, apart from the one at school, and Reggie had long since combed through that. They did have internet in the Bottom, though it was down more often than not, and always spotty. Twig had tried that on their behalf too, but he said search results were blocked for grana, Wizenards . . . everything. Books had been their best bet.

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  Reggie sighed and started for his ball. He had read a little bit about the Split that happened decades before Reggie was born—the nickname for the Loyalist Party’s takeover and their subsequent closing of Dren’s borders. All “dangerous” information from the outside world had been destroyed, supposedly to protect the population.

  “I told you that. The Loyalists would have been thorough—”

  “Except for a little book I found sandwiched between two shelves. Come on.”

  “You . . . what?”

  Reggie quickly followed him to the bench, where Twig withdrew from his bag a small leather-bound book, so old and cracked, it looked like it was shedding. The cover had a strange symbol with four distinct segments and a looping hand-drawn title: The Cosmological Connectivity of Spiritual Resonance and Transmutation.

  Reggie glanced up at him, raising an eyebrow. “Rolls off the tongue. What does this have to do with—”

  “Just flip through.”

  Reggie did as he was told. The book was speckled with unusual illustrations: pencil-shaded designs of “emotion machines” and “energy-storage vats” alongside elaborate watercolor symbols that seemed to represent the full spectrum of human emotion—all in incredible detail.

  “Twig—”

  “Almost there.”

  Reggie kept flipping, and finally, he saw a chapter titled “The Origin of Grana.” He looked up at a smiling Twig and then went back to flipping pages. The emotional resonance of grana in humanity. The peaks and pitfalls of hope. He flipped again, and his breath caught in his throat.

  “What is it?” Twig asked, frowning.

  There was a lone symbol dominating the page—one he had stared at for years.

  Below the symbol, the caption read: The Amplification of Emotional Strength.

  “Can I borrow this for a day or two?” Reggie managed, barely able to speak.

  Twig watched him for a moment, clearly wanting to ask more. Then he just nodded.

  “Sure.”

  Reggie tucked the book into his bag, thought of something, and then grabbed Twig’s arm.

  “You better not check out any more books about grana—” Reggie started.

  Twig nodded. “This book didn’t even have a code anymore. I just took it.”

  “Good. I am positive Talin and his cronies got rid of these for a reason. He doesn’t want people reading about grana. I have no idea why, since it seems intent on making our lives more difficult, if anything, but they wiped it all away for a reason. They wanted Dren to forget.”

  He was speculating, of course, but it had all begun to make sense. His parents, their criticism of the government, the fact that all traces of grana had been wiped away . . . it all pointed back to Talin. He and Twig had been sharing theories for weeks. Of course, if Talin was behind it all, and if he was trying to remove all traces of grana, then the Badgers had to be very careful.

  No one could find out they were using grana.

  “I know,” Twig said. “Unfortunately for him, he forgot about Rolabi Wizenard.”

  As if on cue, a gust of wind swept across the gym, bitter cold and carrying the fresh scent of salt and sand, like a beach wreathed in snow. The doors burst open, and Rolabi strode onto the court.

  “Gather round.”

  Reggie and Twig exchanged a knowing look, then joined the others in front of the professor.

  As Reggie approached, the professor turned to him, his eyes flashing sea green.

  “What does the storm say to the mountain?” he asked.

  The rest of the Badgers turned to Reggie as well, perhaps expecting him to have an answer. Reggie’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. He had no idea, and he was far too stunned to speak anyway. Rolabi almost sounded angry with him. It was absolutely terrifying.

  “I don’t know,” Reggie finally managed.

  “It says: Bend. And the mountain replies: Break. And so the storm flees the mountain.”

  Reggie stared up at the professor. “I don’t understand.”

  “I know. Twenty laps, then free throws. Five more for every miss. Reggie shoots first.”

  The team groaned and ran for the sidelines, jostling into a teardrop shape.

  Reggie started after the others, then glanced back. “Sir, if I did something wrong—”

  “You did,” Rolabi replied curtly. “But not to me.”

  Reggie wanted to ask more, but the look on the professor’s face sent him scurrying after the others. Maybe I shouldn’t have called grana stupid, he thought glumly. He probably heard.

  He still wasn’t exactly sure just how powerful Rolabi was—the picture book described Wizenards as teachers, but it didn’t get into much more detail. Sometimes it seemed like the professor knew about everything happening in Fairwood, whether he was there or not. Was he a scholar of grana . . . or more of a sorcerer? Whatever he was, he didn’t seem very happy with Reggie.

  Twenty laps in, Reggie made his way to the free-throw line. Feeling the eyes of his teammates on him, he missed, and the Badgers set off on five more laps. Rain moved to shoot next, but Rolabi shook his head and pointed wordlessly at Reggie. Reggie flushed, stepped up to the line, and missed again. His ears burned at his teammates’ groans and mutters as they broke into another run.

  Mercifully, Reggie hit his third attempt and then quickly melted back into the group, ashamed at the attention. Ashamed, but als
o agitated. Why did Rolabi have to call him out like that? Reggie worked just as hard as everyone else did. He tried to shake it off. It was probably just a quick reprimand. He had stunk out on the court last night, in fairness, and right after Rolabi had named him the unofficial “sixth man.”

  But, as it turned out, the free throws were just the beginning of a very long practice.

  The professor stayed close to him during the drills, pointing out Reggie’s errors. On defense, he sent Reggie to guard Rain off of screen plays, or Cash in the low post, or Peño in the open floor. Reggie was outmatched in every position and beat again and again.

  Reggie was crossed over and bodied hard and scored on. He fumed but said nothing. Whenever Reggie turned the ball over, Rolabi had them run. When Reggie missed a shot, Rolabi had them run. When Reggie didn’t collect a rebound or make a stop on defense, he had them all run.

  Two hours later—Reggie was thoroughly humiliated by then—Rolabi called them in.

  “I am your coach,” he said, “not your motivator. My job is not to tell you how hard to work. Or why you should. That is your job. Take a good look at yourselves this week. Either you want to be the best player you can be . . . or you don’t. It’s your choice. You alone know if you have the desire and the strength to reach your full potential. Be honest. Because only you can motivate yourself.”

  He gestured to the bench, dismissing them.

  “I’ll see you Monday night.”

  Reggie stalked right past Rolabi, pointedly not making eye contact with him.

  “Make your choice, Reggie,” the professor said. “And do it soon.”

  Then he left, the doors bursting open before him and thundering shut, propelled by another arctic gust. Reggie furiously changed into his boots and walked home, hands balled into fists.

  “Choice?” he muttered. “What choice do I have? I show up, don’t I? I’m trying.”

  Raindrops suddenly broke from the sky—and thickened into a cold, bracing sheet of sulfurous smog-water. Reggie put his head down and started running, splashing through puddles. A chill seeped through his clothes in an instant and made its way down into his bones. He pumped his legs harder, trying to outrun the rain.