Page 70

The rations came through the slot at the usual hour. Felix looked at his and set it down on the desk, and I picked it back up and put it in his hands and stood there until he started eating. He ate it in precise bites, like he did everything, and I watched every one of them like it mattered, because it did.

Then he cleaned his cleats, which did not need cleaning. He laid the white match kit out flat on his bed with the armband on top and smoothed it twice at the shoulders.

I taped my ankles. The right one first, the one the bio-gel had rebuilt, wrapping it tight while it sat there feeling perfect. I stretched. I slept an hour in the afternoon with my back to the wall, and Felix sat on his bed with his knees up and watched me do it like it was a language he didn’t speak.

We moved around each other all day without negotiating any of it. He knew when I wanted the floor for stretching. I knew when he was headed for the window strip and cleared the lane before he asked. Two months of war in that room had taught us exactly where the other one stood at all times, and it turned out the same map worked for this. Once, passing behind me, he put his hand flat between my shoulder blades, just for the length of a step, and then he was past me. The sensors blinked green in the corner and made a record of nothing.

The window strip went white to gray to amber. At seven the screens went red and gave us a staging corridor and a report time. Felix stood up and dressed with the calm of a man who had been rehearsing the moment all day. I dressed fast, the same as always.

Now we were here.

Around me, the Tier 1 squad was falling apart. Sylla heaved over a trash can, while Varo sat on the floor staring at his cleats with glazed eyes, his hands fumbling uselessly with the laces.

They were Academy kids who had played for rankings and for pride. They had never played for their lives.

I had. Every cage night in Sector 9 had a corner that smelled like this room.

Anatol was the only other still thing in the room. The giant sat at the far end of the bench, fully dressed, working his fists into his gloves one finger at a time. When he caught me looking he held my eyes for a second and then went back to the gloves. He was keeping something for Felix and me, his corridor promise about accidents hadn’t been a mood, but whatever it was could not happen tonight. Tonight he wanted the same thing we did. That was the only safe thing about him.

“Pull it together!” Felix’s voice cut through the chaos.

He stood in the center of the room, fully dressed in the white and gold uniform, the captain’s armband gleaming on his bicep. He looked composed, the Ice Prince mask bolted down, but I could see the tension in the set of his jaw, and I knew now how much weight that mask was holding. He was trying to solve this with logic, because logic was the only weapon they had ever issued him.

“We stick to the 4-3-3,” Felix commanded, pointing at the tactical screen where red dots swarmed a blue defense. “They are heavy. They will be slow. We use speed on the wings to stretch them out and cut the lines.”

Four defenders, three midfielders, three attackers, the shape Felix had drilled into the squad until they could hold it asleep: spread wide, stretch the other side thin, and slide the ball through the gaps. It was a plan for a team that wanted to play the same game.

“They aren’t going to play formation, Felix,” I said.

I sat on the bench, tightening the studs on my cleats with a wrench until the metal groaned.

Felix turned to me. “They are trained assets. They follow protocol.”

“They are starving,” I corrected him. I stood up and tested the weight of my cleats against the floor. “Look at them on the feed. They aren’t in formation. They are a pack.”

I pointed to the screen where the Reserves were waiting, a loose cluster of black armor, rolling their necks and shaking out their limbs. Twitchy. Explosive. I had shared cages with that exact body language, and it wasn’t nerves. It was appetite, managed.

“You think you can dribble around them?” I asked the room, my voice riding over the hum of the ventilation. “You think you can do a step-over and they will watch you go? They are going to aim for your knees. If you go down, they won’t wait for the whistle, because they will step on you to get to the ball.”

Sylla lifted his head from the trash can, wiping bile from his lip. “So what do we do?”

“We hit first,” I said. “We stop playing soccer and we start playing nasty.”

Felix was holding his tactical pad, knuckles white, rearranging the digital players into a shape that would save us, the same red-against-blue he had been building and wiping.

“Put the pad away,” I told him.

“We need a strategy, Leander. We can’t just run at them.”

“The strategy is survival.” I took the pad out of his hand and tossed it onto the bench, where it clattered loud enough to break his focus. “Turn around.”

Felix blinked, but he turned. I grabbed the back of his shin guard and yanked the strap tighter until he hissed.

“Too tight,” he complained.

“Not tight enough. If it slides, your tibia snaps.”

I moved to his cleats, dropping to one knee, and for a second the chaos of the locker room faded out and the dark of the dorm came back, hours old, him looking at me with sweat matting his hair.