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“The ankle. He loosened the studs himself. Tell me you knew.”

“I knew before he finished his first sentence. He told me he felt the snap.” I watched the words land. “Keepers don’t feel ligaments give from the far end of a field, Leander.”

For a second I thought he was going to put his fist through the wall, and I understood, with a distant sadness, that this was exactly the version of him I had spent weeks keeping away from the truth. Then he hauled it back down, whatever it was, and swallowed it.

“You didn’t have to do this alone, Felix. You didn’t have to carry Anatol’s bag and play his little bitch and sacrifice your ranking to keep me safe. You could have trusted me.”

“Trusting you would have gotten you killed!”

“And what you did didn’t?” Leander stalked toward me. “You think Anatol’s going to stop? You think he’s just going to forget he has this leverage? He’s got his hooks in you, Felix. He knows you’ll fold to protect me. That makes you weak. That makes us both weak.”

“So what do we do?” I whispered.

Leander stopped inches from me, his eyes burning with something feral.

“We destroy him.”

“How?”

“We discredit him so completely that even if he somehow requests a scan, nobody believes a word he says.” Leander leaned in, his voice dropping to a growl. “Tomorrow on the field, we sync perfectly. We run the Symbiosis drill like a fucking surgical strike, and we put so many balls past him that the algorithm tanks his rating into the ground.”

“If we humiliate him, he’ll demand the scan out of spite.”

“Let him.” Leander’s hand came up, gripping my jaw. “We make him look so incompetent, so desperate, that when he starts screaming about illegal enhancements, Tegula dismisses it as a failed goalkeeper making excuses. We turn him into a joke before he can turn us into corpses.”

I stared at him. The logic was brutal. Elegant.

“It’s a risk.”

“Everything here is a risk.” Leander’s thumb pressed against my pulse point. “But you’re not fighting him alone anymore, Felix.”

Something shifted in my chest. It was the sensation of a burden I had been carrying alone suddenly redistributed across two sets of shoulders.

“Why are you doing this?” I whispered.

Leander’s eyes searched mine. For a moment, the aggression softened into something raw and honest.

“Because you gave me your only backup,” he murmured. “You left yourself exposed to save me. You threw your safety to protect me from a threat I didn’t even know existed.”

His forehead dropped against mine.

“No one has ever done that for me, Felix. No one in Sector 9. No one in this fucking Academy. Everyone I’ve ever known has been in it for themselves. But you—“ His voice caught. “You didn’t even hesitate. You just burned everything to keep me alive.”

“I had no choice.”

“You always have a choice.” Leander pulled back just enough to look me in the eye. “And you chose me. So now I’m choosing you back.”

The words landed hard, making my knees go weak.

“Tomorrow,” Leander said, his voice tough again, “we walk onto that field as a unit. And we put Anatol Getha in the fucking ground where he belongs.”

I nodded, my throat too tight to speak.

Leander released my jaw. He stepped back, putting space between us again, and the cold air moved into the gap where the heat of him had been.

“One more thing,” he said. “I’m still angry. I want that on the record, since we’re suddenly telling each other the truth.” His voice stayed level, which was worse than shouting. “You gave me weeks of hating a partner who was busy dying for me, and tonight doesn’t clear that. You don’t get to confess your way out of it. You want it gone, you work it off where you did it. On the field. One pass at a time.”

It was fair, and fairness was so rare inside these walls that I would have recognized it anywhere. I didn’t insult it by apologizing again.