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And now I was going into the belly of the beast to take him back.

CHAPTER 29

LEANDER

Waking was like surfacing through wet concrete, consciousness returning in slow waves, dragging me up from the dark.

I tried to open my eyes and the light punished me for it, a hard white glare that went straight through the lids into my skull. I blinked the grit off my lashes. My mouth tasted of iron.

I tried to sit up.

I couldn’t.

Thick straps bound my chest and thighs to an inclined bio-bed. My wrists were cuffed to the rails. Panic spiked in my chest as I pulled against the restraints, the metal rattling against the frame.

“Heart rate elevated,” a synthetic voice announced from the wall. “Subject is conscious. Sedation reduced to forty percent. Distress response logged.”

I made myself stop. It took longer than it should have.

The chest strap allowed me maybe eighty percent of a breath. I tried to move my right leg.

The leg did not move, sealed into a heavy stabilization boot, immobilized and elevated on a metal rig, and the attempt went down into the bone and came back as a rolling bolt that whited out the ceiling and left me sweating into the sheet.

When my eyes cleared, I looked around. This was not a hospital room. It was a processing center.

The walls were brushed steel. There was no window, no chair for a visitor. To my left, through a glass partition, another recruit lay on a table like mine. Med-droids hovered over him, multi-jointed arms working with terrifying speed, stripping him of his gear, peeling the Academy uniform off his body like they were skinning a carcass. He was not moving.

“Relax, Asset Regillen.”

The voice came from the door.

Director Tegula stepped into the room, immaculate, the gray suit crisp, his hair slicked back without a single strand out of place, a tablet in one hand and a stylus in the other. He walked to the side of the bed and inspected the readouts on the monitor.

“Grade three fracture,” he said, tracing a line on the screen. “Complete ligament rupture. You did a thorough job of destroying the joint. But that isn’t the interesting part.”

He tapped the screen and enlarged a spectral analysis of my bloodwork.

“We found high concentrations of Class A nano-repair agents in the tissue surrounding the ankle. That is a proprietary compound, Leander, and I know exactly where it comes from.”

He looked at me, and there was no anger anywhere in his eyes. There was only calculation.

“You and Felix thought you were clever,” he said. “But biology always leaves a paper trail.”

My heart went loud in my ears. He knew.

“Felix used his own kit on you,” Tegula said. It was a statement of fact, not an accusation. “He burned a million-credit insurance policy to patch you up for the Symbiosis Drill. I suppose I should be angry about the misappropriation of State property, but honestly? I don’t care about the rules. I care about the waste.”

“It wasn’t a waste,” I rasped. My throat felt like I had swallowed glass. “We won the drill. We broke the record.”

“You won a drill,” Tegula corrected. “And then you broke your leg in the match that actually mattered. Felix invested in a bad stock, and now he has to write off the loss.”

“I am Rank 9,” I said, and pulled against the cuffs before I could stop myself. “I am Tier 1. You can’t just scrap me.”

“You were Rank 9,” Tegula said smoothly. “But durability is a metric, Asset. Your number is being recalculated as we speak.”

He tapped the stylus against the screen.

“I didn’t finish,” I rasped, the memory of the stretcher flashing in my mind. “The match... did we win?”