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The red eye hovered over us, scanning the collision.

CONTACT: INCIDENTAL. PLAY ON.

“Incidental?” I choked out. “He aimed for the man!”

The stadium answered with a roar of pure bloodlust that shook the foundations of the Colosseum. They had cheered the nutmeg, intoxicated by the beauty of the game, and I had made the mistake of believing that was what they wanted, because beauty was the only thing an audience had ever asked of me. But this was the climax they had come for. They were on their feet, pounding the glass barriers, faces twisted in ecstasy as I lay in the rubber crumb.

Helier stood over me, soaking in the noise like it was sunlight, chest heaving, pupils blown wide with chemical joy.

“You break so pretty,” he whispered, bending down. He licked his lips, staring at the scuff mark on my white uniform. “I felt your bones rattle, Felix. Did you feel mine?”

He turned and sprinted away, abandoning me in the dirt. I scrambled up, ignoring the flare in my hip, and turned toward our goal in time to watch the disaster unfold in slow motion. I had lost the ball, so the midfield was exposed, and the Reserves launched their counter-attack through the hole where I had just been.

Sylla reacted first, because Sylla was the fastest man on the roster, and he closed on the ball carrier and went to ground in a textbook slide, perfectly timed, aimed at the ball exactly as ten years of Academy coaching had taught him.

The Reserve didn’t try to dodge. He stepped into the slide and drove his studs down into Sylla’s shin guard, and Sylla screamed, clutching his leg, and still did not let go; he grabbed the man’s ankle and dragged him down with him, and the Reserve kicked free, booting Sylla in the chest to break the hold.

The ball spilled to Varo, and Varo didn’t hesitate. He lowered his shoulder, slammed into the second attacker, won the ball back in a bone-shaking collision of his own, and turned to clear it, but he never got the chance.

Two Reserves converged from his blind angles, one high, one low, a pincer built to shatter ribs, and Varo went down hard in the crush, the ball squirting loose from under the bodies. We were fighting for every inch, trading skill for violence, but they had the numbers and the desperation, and they were climbing over the broken bodies of my teammates to get to the goal.

Leander was the only one left moving on the far wing, sprinting, a blur cutting across the field to intercept, fast enough to make it, and three Reserves boxed him out, building a wall of sheer mass across his line. He slammed into it, fighting, clawing, but could not get through, and I understood that they had planned for him specifically, that somewhere in the Holding Pen someone had studied the feeds and marked the transfer from Sector 9.

The ball carrier came out clean, one-on-one with Anatol. Anatol roared and came off his line to narrow the angle, a neon-green giant spreading his arms to blot out the floodlights, and whatever he had promised Leander and me in that corridor, none of it was on the field tonight. Tonight he wanted this ball stopped as badly as any man in white, and he threw every pound of that wanting into the charge.

The Reserve striker didn’t shoot, he passed. It was a simple, unselfish, perfect play, and it created a tap-in for Helier, who had sprinted the length of the field just to be the one to kill us.

Helier met the ball at the back post, threw himself into the air, and twisted into an acrobatic bicycle kick that defied physics. He connected perfectly.

Boom.

The impact echoed like a cannon shot, and the ball tore past Anatol’s ear and hit the back of the net hard enough to lift the frame off the ground.

GOAL

The word exploded onto the giant screens in letters ten feet high, burning blood-red against the night sky, and the stadium erupted in a shockwave that rattled the teeth in my skull.

ACADEMY: 0 - RESERVES: 1.

I stood frozen in the midfield, the air too thin to breathe. Above the scoreboard the sanctioned graphic rotated serenely on its loop, WINNER TAKES ALL, poster language, simple enough to chant.

Helier landed on his feet and ran for the corner flag, screaming at the sky, and the stadium detonated around him. He ripped his shirt off, exposing a torso mapped with tattoos, slid on his knees, arched his back, and thrust his hips at the air in a grotesque parody of copulation.

“I am life!” he screamed, his voice cracking. “I am the seed!”

He jumped up, grabbed the Reserve who had passed him the ball, licked the sweat off the man’s cheek, and shook him violently.

“We just fertilized them!” he howled, pointing at Anatol, who was still on his knees in the goalmouth. “We put it inside them! Did you see it?”

The mob fed on the spectacle, the noise rolling through the turf, and the noise worked on him like a drug; he thrust his hips harder, fucking the empty air in a manic rhythm that matched the chanting of sixty thousand throats.

Watching him writhe on the turf triggered a primal revulsion, my skin crawling with the urge to scrub myself clean just for having witnessed it, and under the revulsion sat a colder recognition, that the feed was giving him the close-up, that somewhere in the Capital a broadcast director was cutting between his hips and my face, and that at this exact moment I was the reaction shot.

Leander stood at the edge of the box, hands on his knees, chest heaving. He looked at the scoreboard. Then he looked at me.

There was no sympathy in his eyes, only the cold hard fact that the strategy I had drawn up in the locker room had just gotten us killed.

“Felix!” he shouted over the roar of the crowd, pointing at his temple. “Wake the fuck up!”