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“He’s rattled,” I whispered to Felix, a grin tugging at my lips. “He thinks he’s losing his mind.”

But Felix didn’t smile. He kept his eyes straight ahead, his jaw set in a hard line, his posture rigid.

“Let’s hope he stays that way,” Felix said.

He lifted his wrist, tapping the screen of his bio-monitor with sharp, irritated movements.

“Damn it,” Felix muttered. “The haptic sync is lagging. The latency is up to 2 seconds.”

His eyes stayed fixed on the data.

“Go ahead to the Nexus,” Felix said. “Secure a table. I need to reboot the local driver at the wall terminal before we hit the field. I can’t play with a lag.”

“Don’t take too long, Captain,” I said. “The food is bad enough when it’s hot.”

I was halfway down the corridor before it caught up with me. An order, given and taken. No fifteen-foot tether hauling me anywhere, just his voice and my feet agreeing behind my back, twice now in twelve hours. The suits were supposed to train that into us.

Nobody had said it would take.

CHAPTER 12

FELIX

I stared at the terminal readout embedded in the corridor wall, my finger hovering over the reboot sequence. The screen glowed soft blue against the brushed steel panels of the hallway, and every field on the diagnostic read green, because there was nothing wrong with the haptic drivers. There never had been.

I had watched the arithmetic fail behind Anatol’s eyes in that corridor, watched the smugness curdle into something that needed an answer. Anatol Getha did not live with open questions. He closed them, usually with his hands. Whatever he planned to do about the miracle of Leander’s ankle, he would do it today, and my one remaining move was to choose the ground where it happened. The ground had a single non-negotiable requirement. Leander could not be standing on it. Leander answered threats with his body, because that was the only answer Sector 9 had ever left him, and the Academy would liquidate a Tier 2 for one swing at a Tier 1 without pausing the morning broadcast.

So I had moved my own player off the board before the play and waited.

A heavy hand slammed into the wall next to my head.

I spun around. Anatol had me boxed against the terminal before my pulse finished its first panicked beat, and the confusion was gone from his face, replaced by a cold calculation.

“He shouldn’t be walking,” Anatol said. His voice was a dangerous rumble that vibrated in his chest.

“He’s resilient,” I said, keeping my face blank. “Sector 9 breeds them tough.”

“Toughness doesn’t knit a ligament in twelve hours, Cento.”

Anatol stepped closer, using his massive frame to seal off the corridor.

“I saw the angle,” he whispered. “I felt the snap. That leg was garbage yesterday. Today he’s walking on it like nothing happened. That isn’t resilience, that’s magic.”

My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trying to break the cage.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t lie to me. A Sector 9 rat doesn’t have the resources to fix this shit up, but a Tier 1 Captain does. Whatever you did, you doped him.” Anatol smiled. “You found a stash of illegal stims, or maybe something even better, and you pumped him full of it to save your ranking.”

He leaned in, his lips brushing the shell of my ear.

“It doesn’t matter what you used. It matters that it’s illegal. And it matters that I can prove it.”

My pulse stuttered and stalled, the rhythm of my heart seizing in my chest. He had sized the crime at stims because stims were the felony of his own weight class, the thing a Getha would have done, and the truth sat a full clearance level above his imagination. None of that helped, because he was right about the only thing the bloodwork would ever say.

“If a random drug screening happened right now, you know what they’d find. The scan would light up like a flare. You’d go to the brig for unauthorized enhancement, and the rat would go to the Front.”

Anatol pulled back, satisfied by the silence.