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“Live fire?” Sylla’s voice cracked. “We just came off the field. The session’s over.”

I looked toward the showers as Leander emerged from the gloom with a towel wrapped around his waist, his skin gleaming red in the emergency light. He looked like a demon rising from a pool of blood.

“What is this?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I whispered, and my heart was already climbing, the day’s whole warmth draining out of me at once. “Live fire means combat conditions. It means no safeties on the drones.”

“Are we under attack?”

“No,” I said, watching the red pulse begin its countdown on the screen. “This is a test I think.”

CRUCIBLE PROTOCOL INITIATED.

T-MINUS 5 MINUTES.

Initiated. The wrongness of the word told me everything. The Crucible had been running for weeks. We had been living inside it, bleeding rank points into it. If the system was only now stamping the protocol initiated, then everything we had survived so far had been the preliminaries.

“Get dressed,” I ordered the room, my voice snapping into command mode. “Now! Move!”

The locker room exploded into chaos, men scrambling in the dark, tripping over bags, cursing as they dragged gear back on over sweat-tacky skin. I grabbed my shirt with hands that were not as steady as I required them to be. The high was gone. In its place sat the familiar dread of the Director’s game.

Leander was already pulling his cleats on. He didn’t bother with socks. He laced them tight, his face set in a grim line.

“Stay close to me,” he said, not looking up.

“I’m the Captain,” I snapped, pulling my armband on. “I give the orders.”

He stood, grabbed my shoulder, and spun me around. In the red light his eyes were black pits.

“Not this time, Felix. Look at them.”

He pointed at the screen where the feed had switched to a live view of the field, the floodlights up at full match burn, and that told me something too, because nothing else in the building had power.

Waiting in formation in the center circle was a team I had never seen before. Not the white of Tier 1. Not the gray of the recruits.

Black.

Matte black uniforms with no names and no numbers. They stood perfectly still, arms crossed, staring up into the camera, and they were bigger than us, older, their faces marked with scars, their bodies carrying the kind of ugly muscle that came from years of survival rather than training plans.

“The Reserves,” I whispered.

“Who?” asked Leander.

“The Ghosts,” I said. “The graduates who didn’t make the National Team but were too valuable to send to the front. They keep them in the Holding Pens on the edge of the sector.” Every Academy child grew up knowing about them, the cautionary appendix at the bottom of the rankings.

On the screen, one of the players in black looked up. His eyes were hollow, starving.

“They’re hungry,” Leander said. “And the Director just rang the dinner bell.”

Before I could answer, the drone feed cut out, replaced by an ear-splitting feedback whine that made Sylla clamp his hands over his ears.

We made the field with seconds to spare, spilling out of the tunnel into the floodlight glare with jerseys half-tucked and laces trailing, and the Reserves watched us come.

ATTENTION ASSETS.

Tegula’s voice fell out of the speakers, distorted by volume, heavy with the weight of absolute authority.

CULLING MATCH SCHEDULED FOR 8 PM TOMORROW.