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CHAPTER 1

FELIX

Boredom had a texture. It was smooth and cold, offering no purchase and no escape.

I leaned back in the leather chair, legs spread wide, head resting against the high backrest, while my hand moved on my cock in a steady friction. Up and down. No fantasy played behind my eyelids, and no face hovered in my mind, this was maintenance.

Cortisol levels were too high. The bio-monitor on my wrist had beeped at me ten minutes ago to warn of a stress spike, leaving me with only one efficient way to bring the number down.

My sweatpants hung low on my hips, caught on the jut of my pelvic bones. In the gray light of the afternoon, the muscles of my thighs tensed like steel cables under the fabric and my hand worked like a piston, a machine servicing a machine.

Outside the reinforced glass of the Level 4 VIP suite, the world was ugly. Rain lashed the window, blurring the intake yard below, turning the concrete into a slurry of gray mud. I watched the heavy steel gates grind open, the trucks roll in with their brakes screeching before the doors hissed and the fresh meat spilled out.

Intake day. Every season the Regime combed its Sectors for any boy who had ever kicked a ball well enough to be noticed, loaded them into transport trucks, and delivered them here to find out which of them were worth keeping.

They all knew the score, or they learned it somewhere on the drive over. Make the National Team roster and become a Strategic Asset, exempt, untouchable and too expensive to bleed. Wash out, your deferment evaporated, and the same trucks that delivered you drove you to the Front, where the Regime issued its failures a shovel instead of a rifle. The recruitment broadcasts for the Academy called this an opportunity. It was, technically. Terror is very motivating.

The war itself was thirty-one years old and had never come closer to the Capital than the feeds. The official account was that the Veskar Union had crossed the border to seize the ore fields of the Cinder Basin, the same ore that fed the smelters of the Sectors, and that the Regime was holding the line so the rest of us could survive. In practice the line had not moved in nine years. A war that ended would have ended the emergency, and the emergency was what the Regime governed under, so the war went on, and the draft with it.

My breath hitched, but only because the edge was close, the friction building to that familiar white-hot point of necessity.

Below, the recruits scrambled, slipping in the mud as they clutched their bags like they held gold instead of dirty rags. They flinched at the shadow of the overhead drones, hunching their shoulders, keeping their heads on swivels, as if ducking would help, as if the cameras hadn’t already scanned their faces and assigned them numbers before their boots touched the yard.

Pathetic.

Though I had never been given the chance to arrive pathetic. There was no truck in my file. The scouts pulled me out of a Sector schoolyard before I was old enough to understand what they were taking. My sprint times broke the curve, and small children are cheaper to rebuild than grown ones. The Academy grew up around me like a shell, and whatever had lived inside it before, some boy with a name, presumably a family, had been coached, measured, corrected out of existence years ago. There was nothing to miss. You can’t miss data that was never backed up.

My grip tightened, speed increasing. I needed to get this over with so I could shower and reset. My abs contracted, the definition hard under the hem of my lifted t-shirt. I was a statue of marble and wire built for one thing. Winning.

Outside, the crowd parted to reveal one of the meat not running or cowering under the drones. He stood in the center of the yard, dropping his bag in the slush, bigger than the others, broad shoulders, dark hair plastered to his skull by the rain.

He looked up. My hand faltered, a microsecond of lag interrupting the motion.

The glass was tinted black, mirrored on the outside. No one down there should have been able to find a window worth staring at, let alone the right one. But he stared right through the shadow, locking onto the exposure, and for one irrational second I felt found.

It was annoying. The rhythm was broken.

I glared down at him while the stroke became rougher and angrier. Who did this filth think he was?

Anger tipped the scale, my hips bucking off the chair as I gritted my teeth, throwing my head back. It hit hard, a violent spasm that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with release.

Warmth spilled over my hand, splashing onto my stomach, and I collapsed back as air rushed into my lungs and my heart rate dropped. Maintenance was complete.

The mess on my abs sat white against the skin of my stomach, thick and sticky.

Beep.

The door chime screamed through the silence.

“Felix? Entering.”

I had one second, maybe two, and I spent them dropping the hem of the loose t-shirt over the warm, slime-slicked fluid pressing against my skin. I stood up just as the door slid open.

Director Efrem Tegula walked in, immaculate, his gray hair slicked back without a single strand out of place. He had looked exactly like this for as long as I had known him, which was most of my life, and he had been walking into my room unannounced for exactly as long. The first thing the Academy teaches its property is that privacy is an inefficiency.

I forced myself to stay perfectly still, because stillness was the first performance I ever mastered, and because if I moved, he would see the wet spot darkening the fabric.

“Director,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “I wasn’t expecting you until the briefing.”