Page 45

The armored transport hummed with a vibration that rattled my teeth.

I sat in the back of the hovercar and watched the city pass in streaks of neon and gray, the tinted glass filtering it down to something almost tasteful. The interior smelled of new leather and scrubbed air, the climate system laundering out every trace of the world outside.

Beside me, Leander took up too much space, sitting with his legs spread wide, straining the fabric of his midnight-blue pants, restless energy coming off him in waves while his calloused fingers picked at his jacket’s cuff. He looked trapped, a wolf squeezed into a tuxedo, waiting for the cage door to open so he could bite the first hand that reached for him.

“Stop fidgeting,” I said, keeping my gaze on the window. “You’ll wrinkle the silk.”

“This collar is trying to strangle me,” Leander grumbled. He tugged at his tie, pulling loose the knot I had perfected. “It’s too tight.”

He got it askew, exposing the top button of his shirt.

“Leave it,” I ordered, reaching over without thinking. I slapped his hand away and leaned in to retighten the tie.

The space between us vanished. My fingers brushed the warm skin of his throat as I worked the silk, and he froze under my touch. His pulse beat heavy against my knuckles, a thudding rhythm I could have read like a wrist feed if I had let myself. He smelled of the aftershave I had forced on him, but underneath it, unlaundered by anything the Academy owned, the scent of him was still there.

“The Director is watching the live feed from the car,” I murmured, adjusting the knot until it sat perfectly against his throat. “If you look disheveled, we lose compliance percentage before we even step onto the carpet.”

“You care a lot about your rank for a guy who sabotaged his own drill,” he whispered.

The accusation stopped me cold, my hands still on his tie.

“I didn’t sabotage it,” I lied, smoothing the lapels of his jacket to hide the tremor in my fingers. “I played the odds. The pass wasn’t clean.”

“Fuck you man,” Leander snapped. He shifted, turning his whole body toward me, forcing me to look him in the eye. “You didn’t pass because you couldn’t handle it. You couldn’t handle the idea of the ‘rat’ scoring the winner while the King played support. You’d rather fucking lose the point than share the glory.”

He thought it was ego, he saw a narcissist so obsessed with his own spotlight that he would burn the team down to stay in it, and the story held together beautifully, because I had engineered it to.

It was a safer lie than the truth. If he knew I had thrown that drill to keep him off a court-martial docket, his pride would take about four seconds to trace the sabotage back to Anatol. He would fight him. He would be liquidated for it, and no ruling in the Academy’s history had ever come down on the side of the boy from the trucks. So the story stayed, and I had to let him hate me, which had been easy back when hating was mutual. Lately it had started to sting.

“Believe what you want, Regillen,” I said, pulling back and settling into my corner of the seat. “Just smile for the cameras. That is all I need from you.”

Leander narrowed his eyes, studying my face like game footage. “I don’t get you, Felix. You act like a god on the field, too good to pass the ball, but yesterday you were carrying Getha’s luggage like a cunt.”

“I was leading by example,” I said, my voice tight.

“You were bowing,” Leander corrected me. “It doesn’t fucking fit the profile. You’re hiding something.”

The transport slowed, the deceleration pressing me into the leather and saving me from having to answer. He was one honest conversation away from all of it now.

Ahead, the Grand Hall rose from the concrete like a cathedral of glass and steel. Searchlights swept the sky, cutting through the smog of the capital, and a red carpet cut a bleeding line through the crowd of press, sponsors, and military officials pooled at the entrance.

The noise reached us through the soundproof glass, a wall of screaming voices chanting one word. Cento. Cento. Cento.

The Academy wasn’t just a training facility; it was the nation’s obsession. The internal feeds, the drills, the mess hall, the ranking ceremonies, all of it broadcast to the Sectors twenty-four hours a day. The citizens didn’t have bread, but they had the circus, and they bet their ration credits on our metrics and worshipped us because we were the only things in their lives that were allowed to be beautiful.

“Showtime,” I murmured.

I checked my reflection in the tinted window one last time. The platinum hair was perfectly disheveled, an hour of careful grooming disguised as none at all. The tuxedo fit like a second skin. The dress collar sat exactly high enough, two millimeters of margin over the fading thing at my pulse that no camera tonight was going to see. My face was a mask of bored perfection. I was the King. I was the Golden Boy. I was not a twenty-two-year-old terrified of a goalkeeper with a secret.

The door hissed open. Flashbulbs exploded. The light was blinding, a strobe that chopped the world into a stuttering nightmare of white frames. I stepped out, adjusted my cuffs with a rehearsed motion, and let the light wash over me. The crowd surged against the barricades.

“Felix! Over here!”

“Asset Cento! Look left!”

I waved, barely lifting my hand. It drove them wild. Rationing was the entire trick of celebrity; the less you gave them, the hungrier they stayed.

Leander stepped out behind me.