Page 2

Tegula stopped and took a slow breath, tasting the air, his eyes scanning like lasers searching for a flaw.

“I wanted to see you before the filth arrives,” he said, stepping too close. “Check on the asset.”

The asset. Not Felix. He had called me that since I was small enough to find it flattering. He reached out as my muscles locked to keep from flinching, and his fingers brushed the shoulder of the t-shirt, smoothing out a wrinkle that did not exist, before his gaze dropped lower, first to my chest and then my stomach.

“You are flushed, Felix.”

“Just focusing,” I lied, while under the shirt the mess started to cool, turning revolting against my skin.

“Focusing,” he repeated, tasting the word as he had tasted the air, his gaze lingering on my midsection long enough to make it clear he knew exactly what I had been doing.

He smiled, though there was no kindness in the expression. “You are perfection, Felix, the pinnacle of what we do here. Pure. Disciplined. Clean.”

The irony tasted like bile. I was standing there covered in my own filth, hiding it under a layer of cotton while he preached purity. “I aim to please the State.”

“See that you do.” He patted my cheek, the contact stinging. “The Board is watching closely this season. We need a star, Felix.”

The Board was always watching. That was what the Board was for. But “closely” was new, and “we need a star” from the man who had already built one was not a compliment. Even Rank One got re-tested eventually, and the Front did not check your goal count before it handed you a shovel.

He turned to the window to check on the recruits being herded like cattle toward the processing center.

“Don’t let them touch you,” he whispered.

The small, dark circle of dampness was spreading through the gray cotton of my t-shirt.

“I won’t let them near me.”

“Good.” Tegula turned back, his eyes flicking to the spot on my shirt. “Shower. You smell of musk. It’s unbecoming.”

He walked out and the door sealed behind him with a heavy thud.

All the air rushed out of my lungs at once as I peeled the shirt away from my stomach, wincing at the wet tearing sound it made against my skin. I cast one last look out the window, but the yard was empty and the dark-haired recruit was gone, leaving nothing behind but a smudge of irritation. By tomorrow he would have a number, a bunk in the Pit, and a statistical profile that would tell me everything about him that mattered, which, for Tier 3 meat, was usually nothing.

I stripped the ruined shirt off and shoved it into the incinerator chute, where the Academy sent everything that embarrassed it.

Then I scrubbed my skin until it turned red.

CHAPTER 2

LEANDER

The cleats landed in my arms with a heavy thud.

I stared down at the bundle. Gray leather, stiff soles, laces frayed at the ends where three or four recruits had worn them out before the Academy decided they were good enough for me.

“Next,” the Quartermaster barked. He didn’t look up from his datapad. To him I was one more barcode scanning into the system, and the man wasn’t wrong. The drones had numbered us in the yard before our boots hit the mud.

I stepped out of the line and gripped the cleats hard enough to test the give of the material. There wasn’t any. The leather was cheap and unyielding, the kind that flays your heels raw before it ever thinks about breaking in. I flipped the right cleat over to check the stud configuration and found nothing but plastic worn down to nubs on the heel.

“Garbage,” I muttered.

I carried them to the benches lining the Intake Sector, past recruits stripping off their civilian clothes, rags from the Industrial Sectors mostly, and pulling on the Academy-issue gray tracksuits. I sat on the cold metal bench and shoved my foot into the shoe. It fought me. The arch support was nonexistent, and on wet turf these things would be ice skates with laces.

The broadcasts had promised elite facilities, state-of-the-art tech, the machine that built champions. What we actually got, until we proved we were worth feeding, were the scraps the real players had thrown away last season. Something hot climbed my throat and I swallowed it back down, because anger with nowhere to go is just extra weight, and I had learned to travel light.

I reached into the pocket of my jeans before tossing them into the collection bin. My fingers found the folded edge of the paper, the crease worn soft from how many times I had opened it on the transport. I didn’t need to open it again. I could see it with my eyes shut.

Deployment Notice: Sector 9 Infantry.