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If I used it on Leander, I was naked. I was burning my only parachute to save a man who hated me.

“No,” I whispered to the empty stairwell. “I can’t.”

But the red light on my wrist blinked again, indifferent to my selfishness.

STATUS: PROBATION.

So I did what I was built to do. I ran the numbers.

Scenario one, I kept the vial. Leander limped into the Crucible on a shredded ankle, failed inside ten minutes, and Asset Negligence graduated from a five percent deduction to a verdict. I survived an injury I didn’t have yet and died of an elimination that was already in motion. The kit would ride to the Front in my luggage, insuring a corpse.

Scenario two, I used it. Leander ran tomorrow. We survived the morning session, and I played the rest of my career without a lifeline, one bad landing away from the end, with nothing between me and the shovel except the same luck I had watched fail every player I outranked. And if it was ever traced, if one milliliter of classified regenerative compound ever showed up in the bloodwork of a Tier 2 grunt, skinned alive would stop being a figure of speech, because embezzling State property was not a disciplinary matter. It was treason.

The logic was cruel and absolute. Keep the kit, survive the injury, die of the elimination. Use the kit, survive the elimination, live exposed to the next injury. A certainty against a probability. The math was not even close.

Then I caught the real problem, and it was worse than the readout.

Leander Regillen was lying broken and something in me that had never once appeared on a scan could not leave him there.

I pushed off the wall, and the decision settled over me. I hated this. I hated him for needing it, and I hated myself for giving it up, and underneath both of those, quieter and far more dangerous, I hated how little the giving weighed once it was decided.

I turned sharply on the landing, bypassed the exit to the dorms, and headed for the Tier 1 Locker Room. It was empty, the air still thick with the humidity of shower steam and the lingering scent of analgesic balm, and my footsteps echoed on the tile.

I went to my locker. The biometric scanner flashed green, recognizing my retina, and the door slid open.

My spare uniform hung there. I ignored it and reached into the back, prying open the false panel in the metal casing. My wrist monitor chirped once. A standard sync, I told myself, and my heart stuttered on the word standard because nothing I planned to do in the next hour was anything of the kind. The tactical belt sat in the dark recess.

It was heavier than it looked. I pulled it out, and I clipped the belt around my waist and hid it under the hem of my jersey. The weight was comforting. The weight was terrifying. It was the same weight.

I needed to find him. I checked the tracker on my HUD once I hit the shadows of the concrete corridor.

SEARCHING...

He wasn’t at the infirmary. He wasn’t in the dorm.

SIGNAL FOUND: SUB-LEVEL 4.

Of course. The rat was crawling in the dark.

I bypassed the elevators to the VIP suites and took the service stairs. Past the barracks, past the kitchens, down to the sub-basement where the air scrubbers hummed and the light fixtures wore cages of wire mesh. The deeper I went, the older the building got, the polish thinning with every flight, until the Academy stopped pretending anyone was watching, because nothing below Sub-Level 3 was worth a camera.

I stopped in front of a heavy steel door marked CRYO-STORAGE B and swiped my Tier 1 override card. The lock disengaged with a heavy clank.

The smell hit me instantly. Ethanol. Old blood. Dust.

“You’re not supposed to be down here, Cento.”

The voice came from the shadows in the corner. Julus Augur sat on a rolling stool, wiping a scalpel with a rag. He was Rank #72, a Right Back with garbage physical stats and intelligence scores that broke the scale. He had grown up in the Chem-Sectors and learned anatomy patching up acid burns and crush injuries before he ever touched a soccer ball, and he survived the Academy by being useful to people who couldn’t afford to be seen bleeding.

Salvaged shelving climbed the walls, stacked with whatever the infirmary had written off, expired coagulant, mismatched suture kits, saline bags labeled in three languages, all of it arranged by a system with no labels at all, because the inventory only needed to exist in one head. The Regime’s medicine had a black market, and I was standing in its central bank.

He didn’t stand up. He didn’t even straighten. Rank ran the upper floors. This far down, it apparently didn’t reach.

“Where is he?” I demanded.

Julus pointed with the scalpel.

Leander sat shirtless on a stainless steel exam table in the center of the room.