Page 14

The video restarted and I watched myself hit the turf, over and over. I watched him stand over me, offering that dirty, calloused hand with a smirk that said he knew exactly what he had broken.

A strange, hot coil tightened in my stomach, heavier than anger and sharper than hate. Unexplained data. It should have expired by now. It kept renewing itself.

I minimized the footage and pulled up the live surveillance grid. Rank One privilege granted me the eyes of God, and if I couldn’t sleep I could at least watch. Feeds scrolled past. The Nexus emptying out. The Tier 2 dorms quieting down for the curfew warning. Corridors, stairwells, the kitchens shutting off their lights.

There.

The feed for Service Tunnel B showed a solitary figure.

Leander, walking alone. Down past the kitchens, toward the maintenance shafts, moving like a man who knew exactly which doors would be unlocked and which eyes would be shut.

I stared at his back on the grainy black-and-white feed. He walked with a dangerous grace, shoulders set in a line of tension, and I watched until the frame nearly lost him.

I shouldn’t have followed him. The logic was not complicated: take a suppressant, sleep eight hours, crush him tomorrow on the field where the cameras could grade it.

But my hand grabbed the jacket off the floor, and the need to wipe that smug look off his face pulled me toward the door.

Rage made the blood hum in my ears, a static buzz that drowned out the ventilation fans.

I stalked down the service stairs, leaving the pristine white corridors of the upper levels behind, and the air changed as I descended, growing heavier, taking on rust and standing water. This was the underbelly of the Academy, the machinery that kept the surface perfect. I had never once been down here.

The lighting was sparse in the service tunnel, flickering yellow bulbs throwing long shadows across the concrete, and the floor was slick with condensation.

I stopped.

He was there.

Leander leaned against a bundle of insulated pipes halfway down the tunnel, head tipped back against the grime of the machinery, eyes closed. He looked exhausted, the feral charge he had carried through the Nexus drained off somewhere between the trough and this dead corridor, leaving a weariness that no camera upstairs would ever be allowed to see, and I understood without wanting to why he came down here.

I watched him. It violated whatever privacy meant in this building, and I had spent the whole evening observing him through screens with a clear conscience, but this was different, and I couldn’t look away. I studied the line of his throat, the deep rhythm of his chest. He looked solid in a way nothing in my life was solid, real in a way the holograms and polished surfaces upstairs had never managed.

He was a gravitational anomaly pulling my ranking down, and I needed to crush him.

I stepped forward, and my shoe scraped against the concrete. Leander’s eyes snapped open and he locked onto me instantly.

“You followed me,” he said. His voice was calm, bored even. “Careful, Princess. You’ll get your shoes dirty.”

I stopped ten feet away. The sight of him, arrogant, ranked forty-eight slots higher than he deserved, snapped the last thread of control I had been holding.

“How do you know about this place?” I demanded. “This is a blind spot. It isn’t on the student maps.”

Leander pushed off the pipes, stepped into the pale circle of light, and wiped his hands on his shorts.

“I know what a camera looks like, Felix. And I know what it looks like when the red light is missing.” He tapped his temple. “In Sector 9, you learn to spot the blind eyes. If you don’t, you don’t survive the walk home.”

He smirked and stepped closer.

“Or maybe I just sniffed it out. Rats know where the holes are, right?”

“You rigged the rankings,” I accused, ignoring the bait. “You played dirty on the field because you can’t match my technique. The algorithm is flawed.”

“The algorithm is all about dominance, Felix. And right now? You look fucking submissive.”

The word hung in the damp air between us. I lunged.

I shoved him hard in the chest, wanting to hurt him, wanting to knock him back into the filth where he belonged, and it was like shoving a wall of granite. He caught my wrist. The grip was a vice, halting my momentum cold, and he twisted my arm, used the leverage to wrench my body sideways, and had me off balance before the shove had even finished failing.

Gravity shifted violently. My back slammed into the concrete wall and the impact emptied my lungs in one hard pull. Leander’s body pressed against mine, pinning me in place. He trapped my wrists above my head with one hand, his fingers overlapping mine against the rough concrete.