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I looked up at the balcony again and found Felix watching me. He wasn’t looking at the screen anymore; his blue eyes were burning with humiliation from ten feet above, fixed squarely on my face.

He hated me. Good. Hate was fuel, the kind that kept you warm at night when nothing else would.

I picked up my plastic cup of water and raised it to him across the divide, holding his gaze while I did it, a toast between the trough and the High Table.

To the game.

Felix recoiled as if I had thrown a stone at him. He stood up so abruptly his chair scraped a scream out of the floor, then he stormed out of the VIP section and disappeared into the shadows of the upper corridor.

I downed the water in one gulp and crushed the plastic cup in my fist.

Up on the balcony, his steak sat where he had left it, real meat going cold on state china. Men in Sector 9 had bled out over less. He had walked away from a full plate because his feelings were bruised, and that, right there, was how I was going to take everything he had, because Felix Cento had never once been forced to finish what was in front of him.

I finished everything.

CHAPTER 6

FELIX

The door to the VIP suite locked behind me with a pressurized click that sealed the silence inside.

My tracksuit jacket hit the leather couch and slid off, pooling on the floor. I ignored it. The air in the suite was scrubbed and chilled, engineered to smell of absolutely nothing, but the taste of humiliation sat on my tongue anyway.

Rank 48.

The number burned because the algorithm had rewarded him. It had watched a street brawl, a display of undisciplined violence that belonged in a cage fight, and called it “Compliance.” It had watched me get put on the ground and docked me four tenths of a point. The hall had received the deduction with a murmur I could hear from the balcony, a low wave of shock with my name on it. Then he had raised a plastic cup of recycled water to me across the divide, like we were two men at the same table, and forty cameras had logged the asset in retreat from a boy who ate paste.

My reflection moved in the darkened glass of the window, a pale ghost against the night sky. Sleep should have been the priority, the recovery protocol demanded it and my body was state infrastructure with a maintenance schedule, but the thought of lying still for eight hours with the number 48 running laps behind my eyes was unbearable.

I tapped the wall screen.

“Replay. Training Session 1. Camera angle 4.”

Cold artificial light bathed the room as the footage of the scrimmage flickered to life.

The recording showed a blur of white and gold cutting through the defense with lethal efficiency. The cut, the nutmeg, the breakaway, textbook perfection frame after frame, until the shadow came in from the left and Leander entered the frame.

I slowed the playback to fifty percent.

He ran like a predator closing a distance, not like an athlete trained in an academy, wasting energy on aggression rather than aerodynamics, and the power output was terrifying.

The Academy had spent twenty years optimizing me. Sector 9 had spent the same years trying to kill him, and the results were on the same field.

On the screen, Leander dropped his shoulder and drove into me.

My chest ached. The weight of the impact came back at the exact timestamp, knocking my breath shallow just from watching.

“Pause.” I shouted at the wall display, louder than the empty room required, and the image froze at the moment of contact.

I stepped closer until the pixels began to blur. His face was twisted with effort, lips pulled back from his teeth, and his eyes were locked on me. Not the ball. Me.

High definition held every drop of sweat tracking through the grime on his throat. His forearm was jammed into my ribs, the muscle corded and dark against the pristine white of my jersey, and a phantom bruise throbbed on my side in answer, reviving the heat of the impact. My stomach turned at the raw mess of him. My pulse did something else entirely, picked up a rhythm that had nothing to do with the bruise, and I declined to cross-reference the two.

My fingers hovered over the screen, tracing the line of his jaw.

“Why?” I whispered to the empty room.

He’d had the ball. He’d had the angle, a clean line to possession that any academy product would have taken without thinking, and he had thrown it away for the sight of me on the ground. Nothing in two decades of match data had prepared me for an opponent whose objective function wasn’t the goal.