Page 97
Sylla stepped forward.
“Varo.”
Varo stepped up beside him, straightening a tie that was already straight.
“Crus.”
Crus came forward and planted himself at Sylla’s shoulder like a man answering roll.
I read all the names into a live microphone, and at every name a man in a dress uniform stepped out of the formation and put himself behind me, until they had closed the distance and become a solid wall of bodies at my back. Nobody in that wall had been asked to be a hero. They stepped up anyway, on their names, in front of the nation, where stepping up could never be taken back.
One name left.
In the dark under the world, he had asked me what happened if the Director never read his name. Then I will, I had told him.
“Leander Regillen.”
Beside me, Leander put both feet flat and carried his own weight for the length of his name. Nobody watching knew what that cost him. The name went out over sixty thousand heads and onto every screen in the country, and somewhere in a records office a standing requisition died with it, in the open air, with the nation for a witness.
I turned back to the Director. Tegula was watching me, his eyes wide. He knew I had him. I was giving the crowd the one thing he never could: the truth.
I addressed the stadium one last time.
“You want your stars?” I asked, my voice echoing off the concrete walls.
YES. The roar started low, a rumble in the foundation.
“You want a team that looks pretty in a picture?”
NO.
“Or do you want a team that will burn the world down to win?”
YES!
The noise exploded into a physical force.
“Then you take all of us!” I screamed, my voice cracking with the force of it. “Or you take none of us!”
The stadium detonated in a frenzy. The crowd was on its feet, stomping, screaming. The air was thick as the second before a lightning strike. They were chanting a rhythmic deafening war cry.
CEN-TO. CEN-TO. CEN-TO.
Tegula stared at me, his eyes tracking between my defiance and the frenzy in the stands. A red light flashed on his podium console, dragging his gaze down to the embedded screen. From where I stood I could see the viewership graph spike vertically, a green line climbing past the historical record to a peak the Academy hadn’t seen in a decade. He watched the numbers rise while the drones hovered closer, their lenses hungry for the next beat of the story.
Then the tension went out of his jaw, and he tapped the console, accepting the new reality, and arranged his features into a perfect practiced mask of approval, although the mask came up half a second late. Half a second, on the biggest feed of the year. It was the only honest thing he had given the cameras all night. He started to clap.
“Marvelous,” Tegula said, his voice booming as he stepped up beside me. He put a hand on my shoulder, his grip crushing.
“Absolutely marvelous.”
He turned to the cameras, embracing the narrative I had forced down his throat.
“Did you think we would make it easy?” Tegula asked the audience, spreading his arms wide. “Did you think the path to glory was paved with gold? No! We hunted them. We threw them into the fire to see if they would break.”
He raised my hand in the air. Pain shot through my shoulder, the muscle I had strained in the stairwell protesting the movement. I gritted my teeth and turned the wince into a snarl for the cameras.
“And look at them now! Hardened. Unified. Unstoppable! Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you... The National Team!”
