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I just focused on the hate. It was the only thing keeping me upright.

CHAPTER 10

FELIX

The vibration on my wrist felt like a wasp sting.

I stopped mid-stride at the edge of the tower’s shadow, and my hand was at the monitor before I had authorized it to move. I pulled up the sleeve of my compression shirt, shielding the screen from the drone cameras hovering over the field, because whatever the system had to say to me, it was going to say it to me alone.

The screen flashed red.

STATUS: PROBATION.

COMPLIANCE: -5%.

REASON: ASSET NEGLIGENCE.

The air left my lungs.

I stared at the readout, waiting for it to glitch, waiting for it to reset to the comforting blue of Optimal Status.

It stayed red.

Something went through my shoulders then, one full second of structural failure, a spasm I felt happen from the inside and could not stop, and then the training caught up and reassembled the posture around me. I kept walking, because the only thing worse than being penalized in front of the tower was being seen to feel it.

Cold dread pooled in my stomach. The Director hadn’t bought the act. He saw me walk away from Leander, but he didn’t see a leader making a tough call. He saw a defective product failing to maintain its components. He had been building me since I was small enough to mistake the process for affection, and he did not forgive cracks in his own work.

Asset Negligence.

The phrase kept burning after the screen dimmed, printed on the inside of my eyelids like a flash burn. I was liable. If Leander failed, I didn’t get a new partner to mold. I got a one-way ticket to the Front Lines right beside him.

The shudder caught me once more on the long walk to the tunnel, and then the shadows took me and I stopped performing for the glass.

I stumbled down into the service stairwell, letting gravity pull me away from the blinding light of the field, because I needed to be off the grid before the panic cracked through the finish, and the cameras upstairs could read a tremor at fifty feet. The stairwell was a dead zone, too cheap to wire, too ugly to matter. I leaned back against the cold concrete and dragged at air that would not go all the way down.

The logic was a noose, and it tightened every time I tested it. Leander couldn’t run. I had seen the angle of the collapse, and even if it was only a severe sprain, the swelling alone would bench him for a week. The Crucible didn’t give us a week. It gave us twelve hours until the morning session.

I paced the small landing, cleats scraping the concrete, and ran the options like I would scan a back line, desperate for the one gap the defense had forgotten to close.

Ice and compression. Useless. Three days just to bring the swelling down. Cortisone. It would numb the pain, but the structure was gone, and the ankle would buckle the moment he pivoted. The Med-Bay. A death sentence because the moment he checked in, the system logged the injury, and the moment the system logged the injury, we were scrubbed from the roster.

I slammed my fist against the wall. The pain radiated up my arm and it solved nothing. The timeline was impossible. Standard medicine could not repair a catastrophic failure in twelve hours.

Only magic could do that.

The thought stopped me cold.

A memory surfaced from my induction briefing. The Director’s private office with the blinds drawn. The weight of a sleek metal case pressing into my palms. Tegula hadn’t logged the exchange, and that was the first thing that told me what I was holding, because Tegula logged everything, and the only items missing from his records were the ones he considered personal. He had leaned across the desk, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, and explained that the technology inside did not officially exist. A shadow privilege. A disgusting class advantage designed to keep the Regime’s most expensive investments on the field while the rest of the Academy rotted in the infirmary.

“This is for catastrophic failure, Asset Cento,” he said, his eyes drilling into mine with lethal intent. “This is your lifeline. It is for your blood only. If you lose it, you die. If you share it, I will skin you alive.”

My breath hitched. It was sitting in the false bottom of my equipment case in the locker room, buried under spare laces and kinetic tape.

The Emergency Kit.

I squeezed my eyes shut against the nausea rolling up out of my gut, because I knew exactly what was inside that kit, and I knew who it was for, and neither answer had anything to do with Leander Regillen.

A single vial of Class A Bio-Gel. Experimental and expensive, and above all, irreplaceable. Everything else I had was issued. The suite, the uniforms, the diet, the body the diet built, every inch of it logged and filed as property of the State, recallable on a signature. Assets do not own things. Assets are things. I had been raised on the distinction, and then Tegula had put a metal case in my hands and, without meaning to, broken his own rule, because the vial was the one clause in my entire existence written in my favor. It was the answer to the only question that had ever kept me awake past lights-out: what happens to the asset when it breaks. Everyone else got the infirmary, I got a second chance in liquid form, three milliliters of resurrection with my name on it. My safety net. My guarantee that I could survive this hellhole.