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Ping.

The notification tone chimed on both our devices in unison, a high-pitched frequency engineered to be impossible to ignore.

MANDATORY ATTENDANCE: THE FOUNDERS’ GALA.

TIME: 07:00PM TOMORROW.

PROTOCOL: DRESS UNIFORM / FORMAL.

NOTE: PAIRS MUST DISPLAY UNITY.

My stomach dropped. Once a season the sponsors and the Breeding Commissioners descended on the Academy, drinking expensive champagne while they assessed our muscle density and genetic viability, a parade of flesh disguised as a celebration. I knew the format like I knew drill cards, because I had been shown at these things since I was small enough to be led out by the wrist and positioned under the good lighting. At one of them, I could not have been older than eight, a woman with cold rings tilted my chin toward a chandelier and told the Director I photographed remarkably well for a Sector acquisition. I said thank you like I had been trained to. The last line of the notification told me the format had been upgraded this year. They no longer wanted the exhibit alone. They wanted the stock displayed in matched pairs.

“What’s this shit?” Leander asked, reading his own screen with a scowl.

“It’s an inspection,” I said, my hand tightening on the doorframe. “And we are the merchandise.”

“Asset Cento,” the wall speaker buzzed, cutting through the tension. “Report to the Director’s office immediately.”

A summons landing on the heels of bad news was never coincidence in this building. I closed my eyes for a second, centering myself on the sterile air of the dorm, and when I opened them the mask was back in place.

“Don’t leave the dorm,” I told Leander.

“Don’t tell me what to do, Princess.”

“I mean it,” I snapped, turning to face him. “If you go out there and punch someone before I get back, we are both dead.”

I left before he could answer, the door sealing shut behind me.

The walk to the tower was a study in controlled anxiety. I passed the other recruits in the hallways, offering curt nods to the ones who saluted, ignoring the ones who whispered. The elevator lifted me out of the dorms and up through the administration levels, and I used the climb like I used ice baths, a fixed interval for getting my numbers down.

The doors slid open on the observatory. Director Tegula stood at the window, looking down at the field where the Tier 3 recruits were running drills. He held a glass of water, turning it in the light so the crystal threw a small rainbow onto the gray fabric of his suit. He didn’t turn around when I stepped inside. He never did. I had been walking into this office since before I could see over the console, and in all those years the view had never once been for me. An audience granted with the back of his head was the first line of every meeting: remember your place.

“I can hear your pulse from here, Asset Cento,” he said.

He couldn’t. What he could do was read my wrist feed off the console at his elbow, which amounted to the same thing and was intended to. The trick had terrified me at seven. Now it merely worked.

“Everything is under control, Director.”

“That’s not what your stats are saying, Felix.” He turned then, eyes scanning me, snagging for a fraction of a second on the high collar of my shirt before drifting up to my face. Asset Cento for the room. Felix when he wanted something. He had been alternating the two registers my entire life, and I had never stopped feeling the switch. “You are surviving the Crucible. That’s a start. But survival is not enough for the investors.”

He walked to his desk and set the glass down, then punched a code into the console to unlock the holographic display.

I watched the reflection of his fingers on the polished obsidian surface of the desk. 4-9-Delta-2. My brain cataloged the sequence automatically, setting it beside defensive formations and caloric counts, a habit I had never managed to break, finding patterns in the chaos.

“The board is worried,” he said, tapping the list that bloomed in the air between us, my season reduced to a cool blue column of deviations. “They look at your metrics and they see instability. They see a captain who cannot control his own team.”

“Leander is... difficult.”

“Leander is a dog,” Tegula corrected me. “He is a feral animal from the slums. We brought him here because he has teeth, Felix. But a dog that bites its master is useless.”

I kept my face at regulation neutral while something underneath it filed an objection with no standing. The dog had crossed a line at three in the morning to drag me out of a flush dream, and had asked nothing for it except the right to pretend it never happened. I put the thought where I put everything the Director could not be allowed to read. The pile there was growing.

He leaned against the desk and crossed his arms, and the casual posture made him look more dangerous.

“Tomorrow night, the founders will be watching. They want to see the future of the National Team. They want to see power, yes, but they want to see controlled power.”

He stepped closer.