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“Contact slows momentum.”

“Contact creates openings.” I tapped the defender’s avatar. “Look at his stance. He plants his foot to block the outside lane because he expects you to run wide.”

That was the part they couldn’t teach here, because you could only learn it somewhere a loss came out of your body instead of your ranking. On a screen the defender was a dot with a closure speed. In a cage he was a man with mass, fear, and habits. Mass has to go somewhere, and fear always tells you where.

My finger dragged across the glass, drawing a jagged line that cut straight into the defender’s chest. I pressed hard, leaving a smear on the pristine surface. I wanted to dirty it up. I wanted to dirty him up.

“Step into him,” I said. “Use his mass. When he braces for impact, he shifts his weight, opening the legs.”

“A nutmeg?” Felix scoffed. “It’s risky. If I miss the gap, I lose possession.”

“If you miss the gap, you collide,” I countered, my voice dropping lower. “He fouls you, we get a free kick. Either way, we win.”

We. The word was out of my mouth before I could stop it, and Felix didn’t flag it. I let it stand, because it was also just true. His rank was chained to mine now, and a chain is only a problem if you’re not the one holding the slack.

Felix stared at the line I had drawn. It was Sector 9 logic, violence and error instead of the long prayer to perfection, and the disgust on his face was real, but behind it I could see the wheels turning, running the impact, testing the ugliness for load. That was the difference between us, laid out in blue light on a locked room’s wall. He read the field like an equation, angles and closure times, a proof waiting to be finished. I read it like a cage match, mass and fear and what a man’s body confesses half a second before his brain signs off. Neither read covered the whole game alone. I didn’t like what that implied about the next two weeks, so I stopped reading.

He turned back to the screen and adjusted the parameters, inputting the new vector, the risky cut into the defender’s space.

“Run Sequence,” Felix commanded.

The Felix-avatar moved, drove straight at the defender, forced him to shift his weight. His legs opened and the ball slipped through.

GOAL

Silence filled the room. Felix stared at the text, stunned that something so ugly could produce a result so clean.

“It worked,” he whispered.

“Yeah,” I said, stepping back toward my bed, satisfied.

He looked at me then, actually looked, and for a second the hatred slid off and something colder and more useful replaced it, a calculation. I watched it run in real time: not just slum meat after all, a weapon he could use.

“Again,” Felix said, resetting the board.

We spent the next hour in the blue light of the screen, dissecting the game. He gave things names, closure windows, pressing triggers, a whole vocabulary for instincts I had been eating off my entire life, and I gave the names weight, told him what the numbers felt like when they arrived as a shoulder in your ribs. I dismantled his perfect training one pattern at a time, stripping the Academy polish off to show him the meat underneath, and he argued every single point, lost most of them to the screen, but losing made him hungrier. I recognized the condition.

By the time we killed the screen, the silence in the room had changed. Two men who had stopped sizing each other up for a fight, and in my experience that silence was the more dangerous one.

I lay back down and pulled the blanket up to my chin.

The overhead lights died automatically, dropping us into the standby glow of the night cycle.

Across the gap I could hear Felix shifting, restless energy coming off him in waves. He whispered to himself in the dark, repeating the angles I had taught him, a machine reciting its new code.

I stared at the ceiling. I had wanted to pollute his perfection. But listening to the obsession in his voice, I realized I might have just sharpened the blade that was going to cut me tomorrow.

CHAPTER 8

FELIX

The room was lit only by the standby LEDs on the security panel and the faint blue glow of the digital clock.

04:00.

I lay rigid on the narrow mattress with the sheets pulled tight, military corners tucked with precision, because the bed was the one thing in the room I could still make obey. I had spent the first half of the night cycle running his ugly geometry, the mass shifting, the legs opening, until the numbers stopped being numbers, and then I had spent the second half with nothing at all, which was worse. The air in the room felt too heavy to breathe. On my wrist the bio-monitor logged the failure in clean five-minute intervals, and at the top of the hour all of it would sync to the Academy servers and land on somebody’s console with my name attached. Except as of yesterday’s assembly the file wasn’t only mine anymore. If they fail, you fail. Even my insomnia was shared property now.

Four feet away, Leander slept like the dead.