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I looked up at him, confused. “What...?”

Leander wiped his hand on his shorts. He looked at me, disheveled and panting.

“Fix your uniform, Felix,” he said. “You look like a mess.”

He turned and walked away.

He left me.

I listened to his cleats on the concrete, each strike a little fainter, and I counted them, because counting was a procedure and procedures were what I had instead of whatever was supposed to happen in a chest at a moment like this. Fourteen. Fifteen. Then the dark at the end of the tunnel took the sound, and the silence that came back was total.

He had broken me open, marked me, and walked away.

My legs quit like equipment quits, no drama, just a withdrawal of service. I slid down the wall until I hit the dirty floor, and the cold came up through the concrete immediately, through fabric, through skin. Above me the bulb flickered. I sat in a maintenance tunnel at the bottom of the building that owned me, and I could not make my body stand.

I touched my neck, and my fingers came away with a smear of blood, black in the yellow light.

The physios photographed me weekly. Every inch of this body was documented state property, and in a day or two somebody with gloves and a tablet was going to find a bite-shaped bruise above my collar, and I would need a lie ready. Every lie I drafted sitting on that floor was more plausible than the truth.

No cameras had seen it. That was the mercy, and I understood the size of it slowly: the only unmonitored minutes of my adult life, and this was what I had spent them on.

At some point I pulled my shorts back up and fixed my uniform. I was still aroused, right where he had left me, on an edge he had built and then declined to finish. The obvious protocol sat right there, the same maintenance I had performed a thousand times. But my hand didn’t move. I had developed a requirement overnight, and it had calloused fingers and a smug mouth, and it was currently climbing back toward the dorms without me.

I had come to put him in his place. I had found my own instead, a strip of wet concrete at the bottom of the Academy, and I was sitting in it, bleeding at the collar, hard and aching in the silence.

CHAPTER 7

LEANDER

The mattress had springs and padding both, and it gave under my weight when I sat on the edge of it. One brawl graded as compliance, forty-eight stenciled on my chest, and the Academy had lifted me out of the Pit into the Tier 2 dorms, into a room with a door and a bed that didn’t creak like a dying man.

I didn’t trust any of it. Somewhere upstairs somebody had decided I was worth fattening, and I learned early what happens to the animals that get fattened.

The room was quiet, unnervingly so. Down in the Pit the air never stopped moving, coughing and snoring and weeping, twenty men breathing the same recycled soup, but up here the silence pressed against my ears. One night above the waterline and I already understood the trick of it. They give you a door so you have something to lose.

My hand rested on my knee while my fingers flexed, remembering the weight of him. The heat. His hips bucking against my palm in the gloomy tunnel.

I hadn’t finished him. I had left him there in the dark, gasping and ruined.

A dark satisfaction coiled in my gut, heavier than the new Rank 48 on my chest. I had taken the King of the Academy, dragged him into a rat hole, and made him beg. But the victory felt hollow, because the hunger hadn’t left when I walked away. It had just woken the beast up.

“Regillen. Assembly Hall. Five minutes.”

The drone speaker in the corner cut through the silence, and I was almost grateful for it.

I stood and rolled my shoulders, working out the stiffness of the night. The new Tier 2 uniform fit better than the rags I’d worn yesterday, thicker fabric, cleaner, smelling of starch instead of industrial bleach.

I grabbed my datapad and headed for the door.

The corridors ran thick with players streaming toward the central hub, and they parted for me now. Eyes tracked the number on my chest. Yesterday I was trash; today I was a threat. I moved through the gap they made.

The Assembly Hall was wide as a cavern, holographic banners floating above rows of plush seats reserved for the Top 50, and the lower ranks stood packed in the galleries above, looking down at those chairs.

I found a seat in the back row of the designated section, stretched my legs out with my cleats on the empty chair in front of me, and crossed my arms to wait. Back row, wall behind me, exits counted. Two. Old habits. They had kept me breathing this long.

Then he walked in.

Felix Cento entered from the private VIP access tunnel, and the room went quiet. He looked pristine, not a hair out of place, his posture a straight line of white and gold defiance daring anyone to look away. He walked like he owned the floorboards under his feet, ignoring the hundreds of eyes boring into his back. It was a good performance, the kind Sector 9 could never have staged, because down there nobody had the calories to spare on pretending that hard.