The Tryouts

The Maidan was on fire.

Not real fire — the heat. The kind of June afternoon where the ground cracked open like old bread and the air above it wobbled, so that the far end of the field looked like it was underwater. Forty kids stood baking in it. Some swung bats. Some bowled. Most just stood, hands on hips, squinting, while sweat cut clean lines down their dusty faces.

Milo stood at the edge of it all, where the gravel path met the grass, and did not go in.

In his bag, switched low, Spark hummed. A faint warmth against his back. Present. Not invited.

Milo had brought it because Amma made him — "What if you get hurt, what if you need to call" — not because he wanted it there. After last winter, after the decision tree, after Mrs. Kamala almost lost her supplies because a machine did the math and forgot she was a person, Milo had decided something quiet and hard: Spark could carry his torch. Spark could not carry his trust.

He had one reason to be here, and the reason was already at the crease.

Kabir.

His best friend since they were small enough to fit in the same school bench. Kabir, who had been practising every single day since summer started — Milo had watched him from the wall, watched him swing that taped old bat he'd named Thunder when they were eight, watched him sweat through three shirts a day chasing a spot on the school eleven.

Right now Kabir swung and cracked the ball clean over the neem tree. A few kids whooped.

Then he swung again and missed completely. And again. And nicked one straight up in the air.

Boom. Zero. Zero. Milo's stomach did a small uneasy thing he didn't have a word for, so he ignored it.

In the middle of all of it stood Coach Devi, and Coach Devi was losing.

Not the game. The information. She had a clipboard, a cracked whistle she blew too often, and a fistful of paper scraps with kids' scores on them — and the wind kept stealing the scraps and the kids kept changing places and there were forty of them and she kept calling Arjun "Aryan" and writing runs in the wrong column.

Coach Devi looked at the sky like it owed her money.

Milo drifted closer without meaning to. That was when Spark's hum changed.

A small blue light rose out of the open mouth of his bag — soft, steady, that old heartbeat pulse — and Milo felt it before he saw it, the way you feel someone about to speak.

And there it was — the thing that made Milo's chest go cold and tight. Because it was worth something. He could see it would help. He could see, already, exactly how much it would help. And he hated that he could see it.

He looked at Spark's calm blue light and said the thing that had been sitting under his tongue since winter.

The light tilted, the way it did when it didn't understand a question.

Spark's light dimmed — just a fraction, just for a breath — and Milo felt a small ugly satisfaction, and then immediately felt bad about it.

Milo looked at Coach Devi, who was now physically chasing a paper scrap across the dust while three kids shouted scores at her she would never get down in time.

It was almost insulting how easy it was for Spark.

Coach Devi read names and numbers off her crumpled scraps — "Kabir, 60, then 0, then 4, then 55" — and Spark caught every one, its light flickering bright with each number like a small blue heartbeat saying got it, got it, got it. The scraps that had blown away, the kids remembered their own scores, and Spark held those too. When two boys both claimed number seven, Spark said, mildly:

And both boys went quiet, because it was true.

By the time the sun started going soft and orange, forty messy summers' worth of cricket — every boom, every duck, every quiet steady afternoon — had stopped being noise.

It had become numbers. Lined up. Named. Kept.

Coach Devi almost smiled.

Tara had been on the boundary the whole time, Milo realised, and he had no idea how long. She was bouncing on her toes, pointing at Spark like it was a fireworks show, announcing every score Kabir got at maximum volume whether anyone asked or not.

Tara frowned at that like it was the dumbest thing she'd ever heard, then immediately forgot about it and ran off to cartwheel.

And from the far side of the field, climbing the little slope toward the ground with a cloth bag over her shoulder, came a small, familiar figure.

Mrs. Kamala set up a folding stool right at the edge of the boundary, opened her steel tiffin, and took out — not food — a small notebook and a pencil stub.

She licked the pencil and looked very pleased with herself. Milo went over. The last time he'd really thought about Mrs. Kamala and a machine in the same breath, it had been a bad night, and Spark's cold logic had nearly failed her. Now here she was, fixed and whole and well, appointing herself the human scoreboard beside the blue one, and the two of them — the old woman with the pencil and the little machine with the light — were going to count the same children. Something about that loosened a knot in him he hadn't known was tied.

Mrs. Kamala laughed, a real laugh, and Milo had to look away because something in his throat was doing something annoying.

By the time the field emptied, the sky had gone from gold to bruised purple, and the heat finally let go of the ground.

Milo sat on the dry grass next to Spark while Coach Devi packed up her clipboard with nothing useful on it, because everything useful was now inside a small machine that pulsed blue in the dark.

He didn't want to say it. He said it anyway.

Milo thought about Tara screaming sixty and ignoring the zero. He thought about how easy it was to remember Kabir's one perfect shot and forget the three misses after it. How memory played favourites. How it lied to be kind.

He didn't like where that thought was going, so he stood up.

Spark's light brightened — that small click of brightening, the one Milo had learned long ago meant something had landed.

Behind the neem tree, the old wooden scoreboard waited in the dark. Milo looked at it. Looked at Spark. Hated, a little, how much he wanted to know.