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OPPONENT: RESERVE SQUAD A.

BOTTOM FIVE PAIRS LIQUIDATED.

RETURN TO QUARTERS TO PREPARE.

The message was clear. The Reserves were fighting for our beds; we were fighting for our lives.

Silence slammed down over the field. The Reserve players, faceless in their black armor, stood waiting, patient as the dead.

“Tomorrow,” Leander said.

One day before we are back here to battle, with a scoreboard that had just been converted into a gallows.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We walked off the field shoulder to shoulder, carrying the weight of the day like a physical load, and we didn’t speak to the others, because there was nothing to say that the screens hadn’t already said better. Behind us the floodlights shut down bank by bank, the Academy taking its light back now that the lesson was delivered, and the Reserves filed off toward their Pens in silence.

That was the last cruelty, and it was the Director’s favorite kind, the kind that left no marks. A day with nothing in it. No training. Nothing to do with our bodies but house the fear.

We headed for the dorms. To the silence. To the waiting.

CHAPTER 24

LEANDER

The door sealed with a pressurized hiss. The audio sensors in the corners blinked their steady green rhythm. Felix dropped his gym bag and stood in the center of the room, staring at the white tape line I had put on the floor days ago.

The adrenaline from the Symbiosis drill had burned off, leaving him pale and wired.

“They’re bigger than us,” Felix whispered. “The Reserves. Did you see them?”

“Size doesn’t matter if they can’t catch us.”

“They don’t have to catch us. They just have to break us.” He ran a hand through his platinum hair, messing up the strands. “If we lose... if I lose...”

“We won’t lose.”

“You don’t know that!” He spun on me. “You don’t know what they are capable of. The Holding Pen turns men into animals. We need a strategy.”

He was spiraling, pacing the small strip of floor, his breathing coming in short gasps. The ranking, Anatol’s parting promise about accidents, and now the Culling, all of it had crushed him.

I stepped over the tape line and grabbed his arm.

“Stop,” I growled.

Felix’s blue eyes were blown wide. “Leander, listen to me. If we flank the left side⁠—“

I covered his mouth with my hand.

“Shut the fuck up,” I ordered him.

His lips were warm and soft against my palm. He struggled for a second, his hands coming up to grip my wrist, but I didn’t let go.

“Strategies won’t save us,” I whispered, leaning down until our foreheads touched. “Instinct will. You need to get out of your head, Felix. You’re thinking so loud I can hear it.”

Felix stared at me as I removed my hand from his mouth, his chest heaving against mine. The fear in his eyes hardened into something reckless.

“If we die tomorrow,” he whispered, his voice cracking, “I am done following the rules.”