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I turned my back on him and pulled the scratchy blanket up to my chin. The sobbing stopped, replaced by shallow, terrified breathing. Keeping him alive was not my job.

I stared at the wall, at a spiderweb fissure running through the concrete from floor to ceiling.

A shovel.

My hand curled into a fist under the blanket. Speed was in my blood and violence was in my bones, hammered in by every soccer cage Sector 9 ever locked me inside. My hands knew how to fight, my feet knew how to break a defensive line, and I refused to use either one to dig my own grave.

Let the others dig. Let Elian dig.

I was going to climb out of this pit, even if I had to use their bodies as a ladder.

CHAPTER 3

FELIX

I sat on my bench in the Tier 1 section and laced my cleats with surgical precision, double-tying every knot and tucking the ends away. The adrenaline had been climbing since I woke, a low hum in the blood that the bio-monitor was no doubt logging, and the lacing brought it down to something usable.

Across the room, the Tier 3 recruits huddled by the overflow lockers, pulling on their gray uniforms in silence and trying to make themselves small.

“Nice shin guards.”

Anatol Getha’s voice rolled through the room with the low grind of a transport changing gears. He stood over a skinny midfielder from Sector 4, fully armored in his neon-green keeper uniform, looking less like a player than riot control as he loomed over the boy and blocked out the light.

The recruit froze with one shin guard halfway up his leg. The carbon fiber shell caught the light, gleaming in stark contrast to the dull gray Academy socks, the one thing in his kit that hadn’t been issued.

“They aren’t regulation,” Anatol said, reaching down to snatch the guard from the boy’s hand. “Where did a meat like you get elite gear?”

“My father,” the boy whispered, his voice trembling as he reached for it. “He saved up to buy them.”

Anatol smiled, but it wasn’t friendly. “Personal gear is a privilege, kid, not a right.”

He tossed the shin guard onto the concrete floor and brought his metal-cleated shoe down.

Crunch.

The expensive carbon fiber splintered into jagged shards under the heavy heel with one crisp sound.

“Oops,” Anatol said. He stepped over the wreckage and kicked the shards toward the recruit. “Looks like you’re wearing the standard-issue plastic today.”

I didn’t interfere, because the hierarchy was absolute. The Academy published no rule about defending your property in the locker room; it didn’t need to. Anatol was the rule, and if the kid couldn’t hold on to a shin guard against one keeper with an audience, he wasn’t going to hold a ball against eleven men with deferment on the line. Cruelty was the wrong word for what had just happened. Curriculum was closer.

I stood and checked my reflection in the chrome locker door. White and gold, spotless. The captain’s armband gleamed against my left sleeve and my hair was perfect. None of it was vanity, because appearance synced to the feeds like cortisol synced to the servers, and the Board graded everything it saw.

“Let’s go,” I said to the room.

The Tier 1 players fell in line behind me, and we marched toward the tunnel while the recruits scrambled meekly in our wake.

The air in the Colosseum was conditioned to a precise sixty-five degrees, but the floodlights pressed their heat down on my neck.

“Line up! High knees. Go!”

Coach Gallus blew the whistle, and we moved.

My lungs were burning inside the first five minutes. The air in the bowl ran thin, oxygen-scrubbed to simulate high-altitude play, making every breath a negotiation. Director Tegula called it forced evolution by design, and the design worked; while other nations gasped through the final ten minutes of a World Cup match, we would barely be breaking a sweat. Turning biology into a weapon looked visionary in the briefing decks. From inside, it felt like drowning on dry land.

“Higher, Sylla!” I screamed at the winger to my left. “Get your knees up or get off the field!”

Sylla grunted but picked up the pace, because he knew better than to argue. I set the tempo. I was the metronome of this team, and if I ran at a hundred percent, they had to run at a hundred and ten just to keep up.