Page 63

His leverage was gone, and he knew it. It had died twice today. Once on the scoreboard, because blackmail only worked while I was afraid of the Director, and after a 99 percent Symbiosis rating Tegula wouldn’t have cared if I’d burned down the medical wing. And once in the corridor an hour ago, when a Sector 9 rat looked him in the eye and lied about a locker full of broken screws with such perfect weight that the truth underneath carried it.

I held his gaze until he was the one who looked down, spitting on the floor between his shoes.

“Go shower,” I said to Leander beside me. “You smell like the Pit.”

“I smell like victory. Get used to it.”

He stood and peeled off his gray bib. Then he grabbed the hem of his t-shirt, the one with the sleeves rolled up to the shoulders, and pulled it over his head.

The locker room seemed to get smaller. I had seen him shirtless many times before, but here, under the harsh fluorescent lights, he looked like a map of violence. The scars on his ribs were white ridges against the natural tan he’d earned playing bare-chested in the streets, and the muscle was functional, dense blocks of power built for impact. He turned to toss his shirt into the laundry basket.

His tattoo sat low on his right hip bone, rising out of the waistband of his shorts. Stark and jagged, a black-ink jawbone. A skeletal wolf’s maw, open and ready to snap shut.

The Lockjaw.

I knew what it was. The mark of the Iron League, Sector 9’s cage circuit. It meant he didn’t just play to win. He played to consume. Once he bit down, he never let go.

I stared at the ink. It sat exactly where my hand would rest if I pulled him close.

Leander caught me ogling. He hooked his thumbs into his waistband, framing the tattoo, daring me to look.

“Like the art?” he asked softly.

“It’s barbaric.”

“It’s a warning,” he said. “Don’t put your hand in the mouth if you want to keep your fingers.”

He turned and walked toward the showers, the muscles of his back shifting with a hypnotic grace, and the other players parted to give him a berth wide enough for two.

I sat there and let the chatter of the room wash over me as it slowly returned, volume rising in increments, like sound coming back after a detonation. Water started running somewhere. A locker clanged. Somebody laughed at something.

And I sat in the middle of that ordinary noise and ran a systems check I had no protocol for, because for the first time since the Academy grew up around me, the crushing weight of the number one ranking wasn’t registering. I felt anchored, tethered to a bench in a room that smelled of mud and liniment.

It wasn’t peace. My baselines didn’t extend that far. But it was adjacent to peace, close enough to share a wall, and in the spirit of the day I decided not to stress-test it.

I reached for my towel with a simple plan. Shower, scald the sweat off my skin, then sleep for twelve hours.

As I stood up, the lights flickered.

Once. Twice.

Then they died completely.

Darkness slammed into the room and took the voices with it.

“What the hell?” someone shouted in the dark.

A low mechanical hum built in the walls. It vibrated up through the floor, shaking the benches. Then the emergency screens flickered to life, blood red, bathing the room in a sinister, submarine glow that turned every face into a hollow mask.

ATTENTION ASSETS.

The voice booming from the speakers was Director Tegula’s amplified to a deafening volume.

TRAINING PROTOCOLS SUSPENDED.

REPORT TO THE FIELD.

FULL UNIFORM. LIVE FIRE CONDITIONS.