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My lungs seized around nothing. I lay there for a second, gasping, waiting for my breath to come back online. My chest throbbed where his shoulder had connected. It hadn’t been a tackle. It had been a demolition.
I waited for the long blast of a red card.
Silence.
The drone referee hovered ten feet above us, its camera lens swiveling to focus on my face, and the light stayed green.
Play on.
“Get up, Princess.”
A shadow fell over me. Leander stood there, not even winded, looking down with a smirk playing on his lips as he offered me a hand.
“You fouled me,” I wheezed, the words scraping my throat.
“I stopped you,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
He leaned down, his voice dropping to a whisper meant only for me.
“You play pretty, Felix. But I can make you ugly real fast.”
He turned and jogged away, scooped up the ball I’d lost, and fired it past a stunned Anatol into the net.
I stayed down one second longer than my legs required and ran the damage check. Ribs intact. Skull intact. Vision clearing. Every reading came back clean except one. He had touched me. Don’t let them touch you, the Director had said, and I had promised I wouldn’t let them near me. One sleep cycle later I was flat on state turf with the shape of a Sector 9 shoulder printed on my sternum, on camera, in front of the coaching staff and the drones and whichever Board members skimmed the training feeds with their morning coffee.
I slapped the turf, ignoring the sting in my palm, and shoved myself up. My legs held, but my pride was bleeding out on the plastic grass.
Coach Gallus blew the final whistle. “Good hustle, Regillen. That’s how you use the body.”
The praise landed like a slap.
I kept my eyes locked on Leander as he high-fived a teammate, sweat running down his neck and soaking the collar of his gray bib, looking primal.
He thought he’d won. He thought that because he’d knocked me down, he’d proved something.
I turned toward the tunnel, because the locker room was waiting. The steam. The privacy.
He wanted to play rough? Fine. I would show him exactly what happened when you touched me.
I stormed off the field with my cleats clicking on the concrete path to the showers.
CHAPTER 4
FELIX
Steam choked the air, suffocating the room in a heavy mist.
I twisted the shower handle to its scalding limit and let the jets hammer against my chest until the pale skin turned a violent shade of red. I scrubbed at the spot where his shoulder had hit me, watching the soap lather and rinse away in frothy white spirals.
He had gotten dirt on me. Actual gritty earth, staining my skin.
Yesterday I had scrubbed myself red over my own mess. Today it was his.
My breath came in short bursts that echoed off the tiles. The locker room sat empty, the rest of the team still out on the field cooling down or absorbing Gallus’s postmortem. I should have been out there at the front of the huddle, modeling composure for the drones, as I had since before my voice broke. Instead I had walked off. I couldn’t stay, because I needed the smell of failure off my skin immediately.
Water ran into my eyes as I slicked my hair back, fingers digging into my scalp as if the memory of the tackle had lodged somewhere under the bone and could be pressed out like a splinter.
A heavy door creaked open, cutting through the hiss of the showers.
