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Status: Deferred (Academy Trial In Progress).

Deferred. Not canceled, not commuted. Paused, like a thumb hovering over a switch. The paper weighed more than the cleats, and there was exactly one way to burn it: make the roster and become too expensive to shoot at.

Fighting didn’t scare me. I grew up in the cage soccer courts of Sector 9, chain-link bolted over cracked concrete behind the smelter row, where the score only mattered if you could still walk off the court to collect on it. I had been taking hits since before I lost my milk teeth, and I hit back better than anyone that sector ever fed through the fence. Dying didn’t particularly scare me either. But dying for the Regime, in their mud, on their timetable, was a different question, and my answer was no.

I shoved the paper deep into my bag and stripped down to pull on the gray uniform, the cheap fabric scratching against my skin. It fit badly, tight across the shoulders and loose at the waist, a reminder that everything in this place came standard-issue, including us.

The studs I could fix. I would file the worn plastic down myself, sharpen the nubs to a point, because a striker needs grip to turn on a dime and I did not intend to slip for anyone.

“Move it, Regillen,” a guard shouted, banging his baton against the doorframe. “Dorms. Now.”

I slung my bag over my shoulder and followed the herd.

The line moved down a covered walkway with the rain hammering the roof, and through a gap between buildings I got one last look at the residence tower, black glass stacked into the cloud, mirrored so it gave back nothing but weather. Earlier, standing in the yard with rain running down my collar, I had stopped and looked up at that tower. Old habit. In the soccer cages you find the spectators before the whistle, learn who is watching and what they came hoping to see. Behind glass like that, glass built to hide someone, somebody dry and well-fed had watched us spill out of the trucks.

Let them watch.

Then the walkway turned, and we went down. The air got heavier with every flight of stairs, the temperature dropping while the walls shifted from the clean white of the processing center to raw, unfinished concrete.

The Pit.

The Tier 3 barracks was a cavern of a room lined with metal bunks stacked three high, no windows, just halogen strips buzzing and flickering overhead. The noise hit me first, a wall of it, shouts, the clatter of lockers, and somewhere at the back the wet sound of a cough. The place smelled like Sector 9 with the sulfur filtered out, which I supposed was the Academy’s idea of an upgrade.

My assignment was bunk 409, bottom level. I threw my bag onto the thin mattress.

“Hey.”

A recruit stood behind me, big and heavyset, a defender out of one of the Mining Sectors judging by the calluses on his hands and the gray grime worked into the creases of his neck, the kind that never washes out.

“You’re in my spot,” he said, stepping closer, trying to make his height do the arguing. “Bottom bunks are for seniors.”

“There are no seniors here, dickhead,” I said, keeping my voice flat. “We all crawled out of the same transport sludge ten minutes ago.”

“Move.” He reached out to shove my shoulder.

Bad move.

I caught his wrist before it connected, twisted his own momentum past me, and drove a shoulder into his chest. He stumbled back, gasping, and I followed him in, already reading the angles. The cameras in the corners blinked red, every one of them live. In Sector 9 you learned to find the blind eyes, the dead cameras with the missing light, because that was where the real business got done. There were no blind eyes here, which took going for the face off the table. Break his nose and they’d ship me out for damaging state property. Break his spirit and they’d log it as potential.

I put a short, hard punch into his solar plexus.

He folded over it with a wheeze, and I grabbed him by the collar of his gray uniform and slammed him back against the metal locker.

“Listen closely,” I whispered, my face inches from his. “I am not here to make friends. I am not here to trade favors. Touch me or my gear again, and I will snap your wrist. Do you understand?”

He nodded, eyes wide and watering, trying to suck in air that wouldn’t come.

I let him go and he slid down the locker to the floor, clutching his stomach. Nobody in the bay said a word, which told me the Pit ran on cage rules too. Fine. Those I knew how to live in.

I turned back to my bunk, sat down and picked up the left shoe. From my sock I pulled the small flat stone I had palmed in the intake yard and started scraping at the plastic studs, working the edges toward sharp.

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

Nobody looked twice. Good.

Then the lights changed.

The halogen strips dimmed and the massive screens on the far wall flickered to life, the Academy logo spinning in high-definition gold.