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He stomped, and the joint went sideways in a direction the human leg does not have.

I heard it before I felt it. That was the obscenity of it, that the sound arrived first, a crack cutting through sixty thousand screaming voices. The world flipped. The turf came up and hit me everywhere at once.

For one full second there was nothing. A cold white nothing, wide as the field, and inside it a single thought with no panic in it at all. That was my leg.

Then the agony arrived. It came up the bone, turning my vision gray at the edges and bleaching it white at the center. I curled around the leg and gripped my shin, because my hands knew better than to go anywhere near the ankle.

My shoe sat at an angle that belonged to no living body, the flesh above the cleats line already swelling tight against the sock. The gel had rebuilt the ligaments once. It had never been asked to hold the bone against two hundred pounds of malice arriving through a stud plate at a dead sprint.

Get up. Cage law. Down is where they finish you.

I put my palms on the turf and pushed, got one knee under me, and the leg answered with a bolt of white that blew the stadium out of my ears and dropped me back onto my side, gasping into the rubber crumb. And I understood that I was not getting up, that no version of this night ended with me walking off the court.

“Leander!”

Felix’s voice, screaming my name, closer than it should have been.

I tried to find him. I got my head off the turf and the floodlights doubled, and past them the drone hovered low, red eye blinking, patient as a clerk.

INJURY DETECTED.

The dark came in from the edges. I gritted my teeth and fought to stay above it, because the cameras were on me, and somewhere at that rail Elian was watching.

I was down.

And this time, I was not getting up.

CHAPTER 28

FELIX

The scream died in his throat, choked off by the pain before it could clear his teeth.

Leander curled into a ball on the turf with both hands locked around his shin, and below his hands the shoe sat at an angle nature had never issued.

“Asset compromised,” the drone intoned, dropping low over him. “Preservation protocols initiated.”

I froze, the world narrowing to a single terrifying focal point. Leander’s eyes were squeezed shut, his teeth locked, and he was fighting just to breathe.

Two Med-Techs sprinted onto the field with a containment pod slung between them. It looked like a coffin made of white plastic and glass. They stabilized the leg with a hiss of pressurized foam, lifted him, and slid him into the pod. The glass lid sealed shut.

“Leander!” I shouted, taking a step forward.

“Stay back, Asset,” a security drone warned, dropping a grid of red light across my path. “Play continues.”

They wheeled him toward the tunnel. His face was turned up toward the floodlights, wide open, eyes running with pain, but he gave the cameras no grimace for the slow motion. He was months out of a cage in Sector 9, and he starved every camera in the Colosseum on instinct, flat on his back in a sealed white pod.

The dark mouth of the medical tunnel opened ahead and the shadow swallowed him in. Gone.

And I just stood there.

Above me the screens ran it back. Of course they ran it back. The first replay showed the stud plate arriving at a dead sprint, the leg folding in a direction legs do not have, and the crowd made a sound that was half horror and half appetite. The second replay was worse, because the second replay showed the three seconds before the stomp, and in those three seconds Leander was running toward me.

My chest tightened until it felt as if the stadium’s air had been sealed out. The Academy was doing what it always does: taking what it wanted and disposing of what broke.

I should have moved. I should have reset. Captain. Mask.

My body didn’t listen.