Page 4

“ATTENTION CANDIDATES.”

The voice boomed from the speakers.

“OBSERVE PERFECTION.”

The screen cut to a highlight reel.

The camera panned over a player in the Tier 1 uniform, white and gold, the fabric clinging to a wiry frame built for lethal speed. Platinum hair fell over his forehead, messy in a way that looked effortless.

Felix Cento.

I stopped scraping and watched.

On the screen, Felix moved like water. He took a pass out of the air with his chest, spun around a defender, and volleyed the ball into the top corner of the net. The technique was flawless. The economy of motion was the frightening part; he didn’t burn a single calorie he didn’t have to.

The stats flashed up next to his face. Icy blue eyes stared straight through the lens, heavy with a lazy, dangerous confidence, the look of a god who had woken from a nap and decided to grace the field with his presence.

RANK: #1

POSITION: STRIKER

GOALS: 42

The crowd in the footage screamed his name. He didn’t smile. He raised one hand, distant, a king acknowledging subjects.

Then the camera dropped to his cleats. Custom-molded. Titanium studs.

I glanced down at the plastic trash in my hands.

“Perfection.” I spat the word out.

He was good. I couldn’t deny that. He played with a surgical precision I had never seen in the Sector leagues. But I watched the whole reel like I used to watch the other side warm up through the chain-link, hunting for the tell, the hitch, the flaw you save for the second half, and I found nothing. He played like someone who had never been hit. He played like someone who had never once fought for his dinner, clean and safe in his tower, eating real meat while we scraped for leftovers in the Pit.

The reel looped. Felix scored again, and again.

I gripped the shoe until the cheap leather creaked, because there was only one top striker spot on the National Team and he was sitting in it. The Golden Boy. The Regime’s favorite pet.

I ran a thumb over the stud I had just filed. The jagged edge caught the skin and sliced deep enough to draw a bright bead of red. The sting sharpened my focus. I wiped the smear across the gray leather of the shoe and picked up the stone.

Scritch.

I dug it into the plastic heel, harder this time, carving a serrated edge meant to tear up the turf. On the screen, Felix lifted a trophy, perfect and untouched, and I didn’t raise my eyes again. I just kept grinding the stone against the plastic until the next stud was sharp enough to cut.

The grinding got swallowed by a sudden deafening blast. The curfew alarm screamed from the speakers, vibrating in the metal frames of the bunks, shaking dust from the vents.

“LIGHTS OUT. CYCLE END,” the computerized voice barked.

The screens slammed to black, the halogen strips cut out, and the room dropped into a darkness so total it pressed on the eyes. I shoved the shoe and the stone under my pillow just as the emergency track lighting bled on, bathing the concrete in a sickly submarine red.

Around me, the day’s posturing dissolved into the rustle of cheap blankets and the groan of metal springs, twenty men settling into the hard truth of the night as the adrenaline drained out of them. I lay back on the thin mattress, close enough to the steel slats to count them through the padding, and stared up into the crimson haze.

Sleep was a lie down here. The Pit breathed. It wheezed through the rusted ventilation grates and rattled in the chests of the sleepers. The air sat on my skin like a film, recycled farts and industrial bleach, a sticky humidity that bred mold in the corners and aggression in the blood. It was still better than home, and I hated how fast I knew that. In Sector 9 the night air came off the smelters tasting of sulfur, and you slept with your boots on in case somebody decided they wanted what you had.

A snore ripped through the quiet from the bunk above me. I kicked the frame and the snoring stopped, replaced by a confused grunt and the squeak of springs.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said into the red dark.

I closed my eyes and tried to force my brain to shut down, because tomorrow was the first tactical evaluation and I needed to be sharper and faster than Academy-fed rich kids who had grown up on personal trainers and protein shakes. All I had to beat that with was hunger. It would have to do.