The Fog Diver by Joel Ross

shifted underfoot as a breeze swirled through the Fog, and the miles-wide patchwork of floats and balloons and hoverfans heaved and creaked and popped.
    I didn’t mention the foghead again, even though I knew I had to tell them what he’d said. Kodoc knows you’re alive . Those weren’t just rumors we’d been hearing, they were rumors about me . I kept trying to say the words aloud, but I couldn’t. I was too scared. Sometimes I thought that when Kodoc had made me a freak, he’d also made me a coward.
    So I kept my head down, feeling ashamed as we picked our way through a thicket of chains tethering balloons to the slum platforms. They clattered so loudly that we had no warning. We had just turned the corner when we found ourselves facing down a street gang playing bootball in the dusky light.
    A boy missing his front teeth grabbed a sharp-edgedbrick and snarled, “What’re you doing here? This is our patch.”
    â€œJust passing through,” Hazel said, her voice almost steady.
    A scar-faced girl touched the pipe strapped to her leg. Gangs like this battled over food and turf and money. They fought over insults and respect, and sometimes just for fun. That was life in the slum—life and death.
    I felt the others tense behind me. We were salvage rats, not street fighters, but I didn’t see any way out of this without bloodshed. For once it didn’t scare me— anything was better than worrying about Kodoc.
    Even this.

17
    S WEDISH STEPPED IN FRONT of me and glared at the toothless boy. The gang tensed and reached for their weapons. When Swedish scowled, he looked pretty mean, and he was bigger than the biggest of the gang kids.
    Then Swedish toed a bootball from the ground into the air, catching it on his foot.
    He bobbled the ball from his foot to his knee, caught it with his ankle, then kicked it above his head. He hunched his shoulders, and the bootball landed on the back of his neck, balanced there for a second, then plopped to the ground.
    The gang kids laughed, and relief bubbled through my chest.
    Swedish popped the ball straight upward, then smackedit with his forehead toward the goal.
    The goalie swatted it away, and his team cheered.
    â€œWhat do you play?” the scar-faced girl asked.
    â€œGoalie,” Swedish said. “Or fixo.”
    â€œYou’re kind of big for it.”
    â€œHe used to be smaller,” I told her.
    Hazel gave a quick smile and nudged Swedish, “Well, we’ll get out of your way,” she told the gang kids, and started across the clearing.
    â€œIf you’re ever looking for a game,” the first guy called after Swedish, “you know where to find us.”
    Halfway down the next alley, Swedish started grinning like a goon. “Did you see that?” he said. “If everyone played bootball, there’d be no problems. No hunger, no fighting. Bootball—I’m telling you—it’s the solution.”
    â€œTo what?” Bea asked.
    â€œTo everything!”
    â€œIn the old days,” I said, trying to take my mind off the foghead, “they played a game called ‘golf.’ You knocked a ball the size of an egg into a little hole in the ground, using a club.”
    Swedish cocked his head. “You couldn’t use your feet?”
    â€œNo, just the club.”
    â€œWhat’d they call it?” Bea asked.
    â€œGolf,” I repeated.
    â€œNot that,” she said. “I mean, what’d they call the club?”
    â€œOh. Just a club, I think.”
    She giggled. “They did not call it a club! Might as well call it a cudgel or a beating stick.”
    â€œWell, that’s what it says in the scrapbook.”
    â€œHuh,” Swedish said, scratching his cheek. “So each team had a hole? It sounds too easy to guard. You just put your foot over the hole.”
    â€œUntil the other team starts beating you with their clubs,” Hazel