Page 36

From my gym bag I took a roll of thick white athletic tape, the same roll holding my ankle together, and if there was a joke in that, I was not in the mood to hear it.

I found the center of the floor tiles and pressed the tape down, dragging it in a stark line from the door to the window. It divided the room in half. My side. His side.

Felix stopped pacing and watched me, blue eyes narrowing at the barrier.

I tore the tape with my teeth, the ripping sound violent in the room.

“Cross it, and you bleed.”

The threat hung there, and it sounded right, it sounded like Sector 9. I told myself it was to keep Felix out, to protect my gear and whatever was left of my sanity, but the truth was darker. The tape was a cage to keep me in. If he stepped over that line, I would touch him, and I did not know if I would be able to stop, and I no longer trusted myself to know whether stopping was what I wanted.

Felix stared at the white line, but he did not argue. He turned his back and sat on his bed, crossing his legs, and the neatness of the retreat made it worse.

Night fell, dimming the lights to the blue standby glow.

I lay on my side, watching him through the shadows. Since we did not talk, I watched. I memorized him against my will.

I saw how he organized his vitamins on the nightstand, lining them up by color, white, yellow, blue. He took them in a specific order, swallowing them dry without a grimace. I watched him lie down, perfectly flat on his back, hands folded on his stomach, staring at the ceiling. He waited for sleep like a scheduled appointment that was running late.

He was lonely.

He was surrounded by admirers, by cameras, by the Director’s expectations, but in this room, stripped of the adulation, he was just a boy waiting for the lights to go out.

My internal clock jolted me awake at 05:00. The room swam in a ghostly, underwater blue while the air scrubbers hummed their steady bass note.

I rolled over, expecting to see Felix asleep.

He was not in bed.

He sat on the floor on his side of the white tape, back against the wall, knees drawn up to his chest, noise-canceling headphones swallowing his ears. A tablet propped on his knees threw pale light up into his face.

I shifted, squinting through the gloom, expecting the highlight reel, the goal he scored against the Sector 4 team in the regionals, the bicycle kick that made the news, the King reading his own legend to get to sleep.

He was watching a loop of errors.

A missed trap. A stumble in the midfield. He was watching his failures.

He tapped the screen, rewinding five seconds to watch the stumble again. And again. And again.

His lips moved.

I strained through the dark to read the shapes his mouth made.

Plant harder.

He rewound.

Turn faster.

He rewound.

Too slow.

He watched the mistake for the tenth time, his face twisting in a contort of self-loathing.

Garbage.

The word was for himself. Nobody in the building was awake to grade him. No coach, no drone, no feed. He sat on a cold floor at the bottom of the night doing the Regime’s work on his own body, for free, off the clock.