Page 23

“Get up, Regillen,” Coach Gallus yelled from the sideline. “Walk it off.”

I tried to put weight on it. The ankle didn’t argue. It just folded quietly, and the turf came back up at me before I caught myself on my hands.

I looked for Felix standing five yards away. He had seen it happen. He had seen the unnatural angle of the fall.

“Felix,” I grated out.

He froze, eyes going wide. He stared at the sole of my shoe, at the empty holes where the studs used to be, and for a split second his hand twitched at his side, reaching to pull me up. He took a step forward, lips parting as if to speak. A crack in the porcelain mask where the human being peeked through.

Then the shadow of the drone fell over us and a grid of red laser light swept across my body, hunting for the injured ankle.

SCANNING FOR CRITICAL DAMAGE. ELIMINATION PROTOCOL STANDBY.

Felix stopped dead.

He looked at the red laser painting my skin. He looked up at the Director’s tower in the distance. A calculation flickered behind his eyes at the same speed he read defenses at.

The crack in the mask sealed shut.

He pulled his hand back as if I was contagious and turned his back on me.

He walked away, unstrapping his gloves like nothing had happened, putting distance between his reputation and my failure.

“Stop the scan,” he said to the drone, waving a hand without looking back. “He’s faking it to get a foul. Reset the clock.”

The red laser flickered. SCAN ABORTED.

The realization hit me colder than the sweat drying on my spine.

The rule was a lie. If they fail, you fail. Tegula had stood at that podium and stapled our papers together, and I had let myself believe the leash ran both ways. But if I washed out, the Director wasn’t going to flush Felix. Felix was the Golden Boy. They would scrub the experiment, assign him a new partner, and forget I ever existed. The blame would roll downhill onto whoever was already at the bottom. He knew it and he was banking on it.

I glared at his back.

He walked away with the easy grace of a man who had never once had to scrape for survival, the white uniform gleaming under the floodlights, unstained and perfect, a stark contrast to the dirt ground into my skin. He was moving toward the water station, toward safety, leaving me to rot in the mud like a prop that had served its purpose, and the worst part was that I couldn’t even call it betrayal, because betrayal requires a promise, and the King had never made me one. One night over a tactical screen, one accidental we, and I had put my weight on it like it would hold. Sector 9 should have beaten that out of me by age ten.

Heat coiled in my gut, hotter than the fire in my ankle. This was the Academy. This was the truth under the polished speeches. The strong eat the weak, and the King doesn’t look back at the bodies he steps over.

I watched him reach the edge of the shadow cast by the Director’s tower. He was almost clear. He thought he had won.

Then he stopped, hard, mid-stride. His hand flew to his left wrist, gripping the bio-monitor strap, and his shoulders hitched up in a violent spasm that ruined his perfect posture for a split second.

He looked at the readout on his wrist.

Was the motherfucker checking his heart rate? Checking his rank, making sure my failure hadn’t dragged him down yet?

He shuddered, a visible tremor running the length of his frame, and even from the ground, even through the pain whiting out the edges of everything, I clocked it. That was not a man checking a number he liked.

Then the mask slid back into place. He dropped his hand, straightened his spine, and kept walking without looking back.

“Medical assistance required?” the drone asked me.

“Get the fuck away from me,” I snarled.

I forced myself up. It took two moves, the good foot first, then the bad one dragged underneath me, and the pain arrived for each of them separately. It tore through me, black spots crawling across my vision like dead pixels. I locked the knee. I put weight on the bad foot just to test it, and the answer was everything, broken glass from heel to hip. The ankle held for exactly as long as pride could pin it, and not one second longer, so I made the seconds count.

I limped toward the locker room tunnel.

I didn’t look at Anatol. I didn’t look at Felix.