"Do you remember that match?" Jabari asked suddenly."The one where everything just… worked?"
Tariq's grin widened. "Against the school champs? Down one-nil until we flipped it?"
Kwame laughed. "You mean the day we finally pulled off my impossible play."
The café dissolved around them.Sunlight, heat, the hard echo of a ball on concrete—memory opened its gate.
Five years earlier, on the cracked court of Tete Secondary.First to two goals. Pride for currency.
They were unraveling. Fouls, taunts, dust in their eyes.Then Enzo, the quiet one, shouted from the sideline:
"Why are you playing like trash? Isn't this supposed to be fun?"
Something broke loose inside Malik, their keeper.He caught the next rocket shot bare-handed and barked, "Yeah—why are we?"
The rhythm returned like a heartbeat.Kwame's pass sliced the field; Tariq sprinted through a gap that wasn't there.Jabari met the cross mid-air; Rashid appeared from nowhere.
The volley screamed into the top corner.For one impossible second, the world stopped.
They had found it—the Zone—without knowing its name.