The court near Lâm's apartment had no crowd.
That was why he chose it.
No student section. No camera phones. No Thälmann colors moving in the corner of his eye. Only a bent hoop, cracked paint, and motorbike noise from the street beyond the fence.
He placed ten balls at the free throw line.
There were not really ten balls. There was one ball and nine chances he imagined because repetition was how basketball had always made fear smaller.
Shot one hit the front rim.
The sound was wrong.
Not metal. Not miss. A slap. The same boosted sound from the edited clip, the rim turned into laughter by someone who understood cruelty needed rhythm.
Lâm stood still until the echo died.
Then he shot again.
Short.
Again.
Flat.
Again.
The ball left his hand late, fingers stiff, wrist guarding itself before the motion finished. His shoulder tried to help. That only made the shot uglier.
"Stop compensating," he muttered.
His hand did not care.
By the seventh miss, sweat ran down his neck though he had barely moved. By the eighth, his fingers trembled. By the ninth, he hated the ball for being honest.
The tenth slipped before release and flew wide enough to miss everything.
Airball.
Lâm laughed once.
It sounded like someone else.
Behind the fence, Minh stood with both hands around the wire.
Lâm did not turn. "If you're going to look guilty, at least rebound."
Minh stepped through the side gate, picked up the ball, and passed it back carefully.
Carefully was worse than hard.
Lâm caught it with his left hand against his chest.
"Don't," he said.
Minh stopped. "I didn't say anything."
"Your face did."
Minh looked away.
That confirmed it.
Lâm bounced the ball once. The bounce came back clean. His shot did not.
"They keep saying I can use my hand again," Lâm said. "Nobody asked what I needed it for."
Minh's fingers curled.
Lâm saw the beginning of murder on his friend's face and hated that part of him liked it.
"Don't make that face either."
"What face?"
"Like you're choosing who to kill."
Minh said nothing.
Lâm swallowed around the ugliest truth in him.
"Part of me wants you to," he said. "That's why I can't ask."
The first miss had been physical. The second had been psychological. By the fifth, Lâm understood that the body could betray in patterns.
His wrist did not collapse every time. That was the cruel part. Sometimes the ball left his hand almost correctly. Sometimes the arc looked close enough that hope rose before the sound destroyed it. Iron. Backboard. Nothing. The rim became a teacher with no mercy and no explanation.
Minh collected the ball after each miss and passed it back without comment. That silence was friendship, but it also made the court feel like a hospital room. No one saying the obvious because the obvious had already won.
Lâm wanted to scream at him. Say something. Laugh. Tell me I look pathetic. Tell me this can be fixed. Tell me you will make them pay. Any answer would have been easier than the way Minh stood there with his anger trying to become useful.
Instead Lâm took another shot.
This one went in.
For half a second, both boys froze. The ball dropped through the net with the old clean sound, and Lâm almost smiled. Then his fingers cramped from the release, sharp and humiliating, and he bent forward before Minh could see his face.
"Don't," Lâm said.
Minh had not moved.
"I know," Minh answered.
That was when Lâm understood the real damage was not that he could never shoot again. The real damage was that every made shot would now ask permission from pain.
Lâm did not tell Minh that the made shot hurt more than the misses. Misses were honest. A made shot asked him to believe and then punished him for answering. That was why he kept shooting after Minh left, until the court lights blinked once and the old woman from the nearby house told him to go home before his mother worried.
Minh had never known how much silence lived inside a basketball court.
During games, there had always been shoes, shouting, whistles, boys lying about fouls, someone laughing too hard from the bench. Here, with only Lâm and a bent hoop, every sound had a moral weight. The ball hitting iron sounded like accusation. The ball rolling away sounded like abandonment.
Minh wanted to apologize, but apology was another kind of selfishness if it only existed to empty his own guilt. So he rebounded. He passed. He stood where Lâm needed someone to stand and nowhere closer.
Lâm noticed.
"You practiced that face?" he asked after a miss.
"What face?"
"The face where you pretend you're not feeling sorry for me."
Minh looked down at the ball.
Lâm laughed without humor. "Bad face."
The joke gave them both a second to breathe. Then Lâm shot again and missed short. His wrist bent late, as if the command had reached it through water.
"I used to know before release," Lâm said. "Good shot, bad shot. I knew the second it left."
Minh passed the ball back.
"Now?"
Lâm held it against his ribs. "Now the ball knows before I do."
That sentence stayed with Minh through the rest of the night. Not because of basketball. Because it sounded too much like what Huyền Tinh wanted from all of them: bodies that confessed before the person chose.
When Minh walked home, the sound of the rim kept following him through traffic. It mixed with horns, rainwater, and the hiss of buses braking at red lights. The city had thousands of metal sounds. His mind chose that one. He understood then that Huyền Kha did not need to invent new pain. Old pain repeated in the right place became new again.
At the apartment gate, Minh looked back once. He could no longer see the court, only the pale rectangle of its light beyond buildings and laundry lines. Still, he heard one more shot. He did not know whether it went in. That uncertainty stayed with him because it belonged to Lâm now: every sound waiting for judgment.