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Felix trapped the ball with a touch so soft it insulted the velocity of the pass. He accelerated, and I was forced to match him, my cleats digging into the turf as we carved a path through the midfield. The air in the Colosseum was thin, scrubbed of oxygen to test our endurance, and my lungs were already burning just from holding his sprint.

We wove through the holographic cones. Felix moved with a fluid grace, shifting his weight to ghost past the digital defenders, and for three ugly seconds running in his slipstream, I understood why the Regime had built its broadcasts around his face.

“Split!” Felix yelled.

He wanted me to draw the defender wide so he could take the lane, use me as a decoy.

I didn’t listen. He wanted to play the perimeter, flank the defense on pure speed, but I didn’t play for territory. I played for blood.

I cut inside, crossing his path, and slammed my shoulder into his, throwing his center of gravity off by an inch. That was all I needed.

“Mine,” I growled.

I stole the ball from his feet, taking possession with an aggressive touch.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Felix shouted.

I drove toward Anatol. The big bastard stepped up to meet me, organizing his line into a high press to crush the space. He was slow, but he was heavy, and I had spent enough years being the lighter weight in a cage to know exactly what a collision with him would do to me.

I needed to cut, and fast.

I planted my right foot to carve a ninety-degree turn to the left.

The new Tier 2 cleats bit into the synthetic turf. I loaded my whole weight onto the heel, torque winding up the leg from ankle to hip, the entire machine coiled to explode out of the turn, and for half a second the play was beautiful, because I could already see it finished, the line drawn clean through the middle of his press.

Snap.

The traction vanished.

The rear studs of my right cleat let go of the sole, and the ground’s grip on me let go with them. My foot slid out with all that torque still loaded and nowhere to spend itself except the joint, and the ankle rolled past the place where ankles stop.

Pop.

I felt it through my skeleton before I heard it in the air.

Then the pain arrived. It came up the inside of my calf like fire poured into the bone, tearing through muscle and ligament, and my leg stopped being mine.

I hit the turf hard.

“Fuck!”

I rolled, clutching my ankle. Heat first, a furnace of it packed under the skin. Then cold sweat breaking across my back, then my mouth flooding with the sour warning that comes right before a man vomits, and I swallowed it down because the cameras were live. The pain throbbed with my pulse, a jagged spike driven into the bone and dragged back out sixty times a minute, and my world shrank to the length of my leg.

The whistle blew.

“Asset down,” the drone intoned. “Pause drill.”

I gritted my teeth and forced air into lungs the Colosseum had already half emptied. Don’t scream. Don’t let them see you hurt. Old rules from another building.

The heel of my show was bare. Empty holes where the screw-in studs should have sat, the threads clean, nothing torn.

Studs that shear off leave metal behind. Studs that unwind leave nothing.

Anatol was standing ten feet away, looking at my foot. He winked.

The morning reassembled itself behind my eyes. Anatol drifting past the staging rack while we got strapped into the sensor suits, big and casual beside the row of gym bags.

That motherfucker had loosened them. He had waited until I was at full speed, knowing the torque would snap the threads, and I had carried his sabotage onto the field with my own hands and tied it on with double knots.