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“Lift,” I commanded.

He lifted his foot and I checked the laces. I checked the studs. I ran my hand up his calf, checking the compression of his socks.

“They are going to target you,” I said, looking up at him. “You are the Captain. You are the pretty one. They think if they break the King, the rest of the army runs.”

“Let them try,” Felix whispered.

The anxiety was buried deep in the blue of his eyes, but the arrogance covered it like a shield, and his hand came down to rest on my shoulder for balance. The touch was heavy. Possessive.

“They will try,” I promised. I stood up, towering over him. “And when they come for you, you don’t look for the ref. You look for me.”

I turned to the room. The fear was still there, but now it had somewhere to point. They were looking at me, the rat. The guy who knew how to fight in the mud.

“They want your beds,” I said. “They want your food. They have been rotting in the Holding Pen for a year waiting for this ninety-minute window to kill you and take your place.”

I walked to the door.

“You can die scared,” I said. “Or you can make them regret opening the gate.”

I hit the release, and the tunnel door came open on its rails. The noise of the stadium hit us instantly, a wall of sound that shook the concrete floor under our feet. The stadium was full with sixty thousand people packed in the stands, a sea of screaming faces and waving flags, the citizens of the Capital, the elites from the Inner Sectors, the lucky lottery winners from the districts, all of them pressed together into one animal that had come to be fed.

Above them, the luxury boxes gleamed like jewels, housing the Directors and the Generals. The air was electric, charged with the manic energy of a mob that smelled blood.

We walked out. The floodlights were blinding, turning the night into a harsh, high-definition stage. The turf looked too green. The lines looked too white.

It was the block of gray I saw first, low in the stands behind the barrier nearest the tunnel. The recruit tiers, turned out in uniform rows to watch, because the Director believed in demonstrations and tonight’s lesson was for every floor of the building.

And at the rail, small enough that the men on either side of him looked like a different species, Elian.

The kid found me, same as his first night, like I was the only thing in the place that wasn’t going to eat him. He still looked twelve. His hands were white on the rail, and I thought of his brother, the winger, Top 50, fastest in his sector, who blew a knee in the prelims and never made it to a kickoff like this one, who went home to his family as a letter. The man who took his place had been a Reserve, pulled out of a Holding Pen through a window exactly like the one opening tonight.

I held the kid’s eyes for a step, maybe two. I couldn’t feed him this time, and there was nothing to say that the rail and the distance would let me say, so I gave him the only thing that had ever been mine to give, in the Pit or anywhere else. I nodded once, the nod you give a man before the cage door drops. Watch. Nobody gets a letter about me.

We lined up at the center circle. The Reserves were waiting in their black uniforms, holes cut in all that light. Their Captain stepped forward.

He wasn’t what I had expected. He wasn’t a hulking brute like Anatol. He was built like a coiled spring, all wiry limbs and twitching energy, his hair dyed a violent, chemical pink and shaved on the sides. He moved with a strange, undulating rhythm, like he was listening to music no one else could hear.

I knew the face from a year of grainy feed reels. Helier Merula. The rumored prodigy who got kicked off the National Team for breaking a Head Coach’s jaw during halftime.

He stopped three feet from Felix. He tilted his head, sniffing the air.

“Oh, wow,” Helier said. His voice was high, lilting, and completely deranged. “You smell expensive.”

He stepped closer into Felix’s space looking like a junkie about to get his fix.

“Look at that skin,” Helier crooned, reaching out a hand covered in black tape. “It’s so smooth. It’s going to look amazing when it bruises. I wonder what color you turn when you pop?”

Felix didn’t flinch. He looked at the hand near his face with absolute disgust.

“Don’t touch me,” Felix said. “You reek of desperation.”

Helier threw his head back laughing, his whole body shuddering with it. “Desperation! I love it! That’s the spice, right? That’s the flavor! I want to taste it. I want to feel your ego snap right here in the center circle.”

He licked his lips, his eyes dragging over Felix’s body with a sexualized hunger.

“I’m going to ruin you,” Helier whispered, giggling. “I’m going to crack you open and drink the juice. It’s going to be an explosion, a fertilization of violence!”

He bounced on the balls of his feet, unable to stand still. He was completely insane, and I revised my read of the Pens in real time, because I had assumed they would send us their hungriest. They had done something smarter. They had sent us their most unhinged.