The game ended in under five minutes.

That was the thing nobody had predicted. Once Finn shot himself and the speaker announced the loophole, the entire field understood the new rules simultaneously and acted on them immediately.

Partners turning on partners. People running from their own numbers. The careful thirty-minute window was collapsing into something fast and chaotic and over before most people had figured out what they were doing.

The speaker kept announcing.

Name after name. Number after number. Bottom ten filling up fast. The top three are announced.

Ruaan stood in the middle of it all and didn’t move.

He didn’t need to.

He was already at the top one.

He stood there and looked at the unconscious Finn on the ground and tried to process what had just happened to him in the last four minutes. He had come onto this field as a bottom-ten grey uniform, second week in Blackmere, fully expecting to spend the entire thirty minutes hiding from Cullen and Yoon and possibly getting shot by one of them before anything useful happened.

Instead, he was top one.

’Top one.’

He had gone from the lowest rank in the facility to the highest in one game because Finn had pointed a gun at himself and pulled the trigger.

He felt scared.

He felt relieved.

He felt both things at the same time in a way that didn’t have a clean name and just sat in his chest being large and complicated.

Cullen’s spot. Seven months, apparently. Cullen had been sitting at top one for seven months and Ruaan had taken it on his second Thursday in Blackmere and was now standing here in his grey uniform while officers came onto the field and started moving the unconscious bodies toward the cells and calling out numbers for rank assignments.

"2525."

He walked forward.

The officer handed him three folded black uniforms and a new room assignment and said something about the transition process that Ruaan heard approximately none of because he was looking at the black fabric in his hands.

Black.

Full black.

Not grey. Not dark blue. Not black with blue trim.

Full black.

He stood at the edge of the field and held them and stared.

.

.

Cullen found him.

Of course, Cullen found him. Cullen always found him. The man had a specific radar for Ruaan’s location that operated independently of whatever else was happening in the facility.

Ruaan was looking at the corner of his new room assignment on the paper when he felt the presence behind him and turned and found Cullen standing there in his own black uniform, expression unreadable, looking at Ruaan with something that was almost impressed.

"Congratulations," Cullen said.

Ruaan stepped back. "I got lucky."

"Lucky." Cullen tilted his head. "Sure. You got lucky." The almost-impressed expression settled into something warmer and more dangerous. "Finn shot himself on purpose, you know. Not for you. For me. He thought if he ended up in the bottom ten, I’d pay attention to him again." He paused. "He won something. Thanks to you."

Ruaan looked at him. "You treated him badly for weeks and he still wants your attention. Why would anyone want that?"

"Maybe," Cullen said, stepping forward, "they like what they get from me. I mean, my cock."

Ruaan stepped back.

Cullen moved faster. His hand found Ruaan’s waist and pulled him in before he’d completed the step back, pressing close, his body against Ruaan’s with the comfortable confidence of a man who had been doing this long enough to consider it a habit.

"Would you like a taste," Cullen said quietly, close to his ear, "of what Finn keeps coming back for?"

Ruaan looked at him.

Then he deliberately raised the black uniform between them just to let Cullen see exactly what he was holding.

"Too bad," Ruaan said, and smiled. "I’m not entitled to your cock anymore. I’m top one."

He stepped back out of Cullen’s grip and this time Cullen let him go, looking at the black fabric with an expression that moved through several things quickly and settled somewhere between entertained and annoyed.

"Get changed and follow me," Cullen said. "We’re going to handle the bottom ten."

Ruaan turned around. "Is that a rule?"

Cullen blinked. "What?"

"Is it in the official facility rules. That top rank must torture the bottom ten." Ruaan turned back. "Did the officers write that down somewhere. Is it in the code of conduct?"

Cullen stared at him.

"It’s to prove dominance..."

"If that’s your kind of dominance," Ruaan said, "count me out." He looked at the room assignment in his hand. "I’m going to enjoy being the top one for however long I have it. Could be one week, it could be more. Either way, I’m not spending it beating up people who already lost."

He walked away.

He felt Cullen watching him go and didn’t turn around.

.

.

The new room made him almost fall over.

He pushed the door open and stood in the entrance and looked at it and his knees went slightly weak in the best possible way.

A real bed. Bigger than the officer’s room. An actual duvet. A small fridge in the corner with its light blinking on when he opened it, revealing snacks and cold drinks lined up like gifts. An air conditioning unit mounted on the wall that was already running and turning the room into the kind of cool that his cell had never been in two weeks. A working lamp on the desk. Clean walls.

He walked to the bed and fell onto it face-first.

He lay there and made a sound into the pillow that he would never repeat in public.

He rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling and giggled.

He covered his face with both hands and lay there being quietly delighted about the fridge and the AC and the bed and the fact that nobody was going to put anything on his sheets because nobody else was in this room because he was ’top one’ and top one got their own room.

He sat up.

The giggling stopped.

’How did Finn know he could fail by shooting himself?’

He hadn’t read that rule anywhere. The speaker hadn’t announced it. Nobody on the field had known about the loophole until Finn demonstrated it. That kind of information didn’t just occur to someone in the middle of a game they’d been losing consistently for months on purpose.

Someone had told him.

Ruaan sat on the edge of the bed and thought about it.

He thought about who in this facility had access to game planning. About who had been notably absent from the field today. About who had a pattern of intervening in ways that were deniable and indirect and always arrived at an outcome that kept Ruaan from being destroyed without ever admitting to doing it.

He laughed.

Short and disbelieving.

"No way," he said to the room.

He changed into his black uniform and pressed the front smooth with both hands.

He looked at himself in the small mirror on the back of the door.

"I look so hot," he said, and meant it completely.

.

.

He searched the whole facility.

But he wasn’t at the office or the shower block. He wasn’t in the training room, the field or the cafeteria.

He was almost back at his new room when he saw him.

Harolin was in the corridor near his quarters wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow and plain black trousers, hair not in its usual state, slightly loose and messy in a way that suggested he had been somewhere that didn’t require the full uniform. Glasses on, which Ruaan had never seen before, sitting on his face as if they belonged there.

Ruaan stopped walking.

His brain took an inventory it had not been asked to take.

The veins along Harolin’s forearms from the rolled sleeves. The white shirt. The glasses. The hair. All of it together in a corridor at midday doing something completely unreasonable to Ruaan’s attention span.

He caught himself and cleared his throat.

"Congratulations," Harolin said, looking at the black uniform.

"Thank you." Ruaan stopped in front of him. "Why are you in casual clothes?"

"I went out."

"Where?" 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Harolin pushed the door to Ruaan’s new room open and stepped inside. Ruaan followed and closed it behind them.

Harolin looked around the room the way he looked at everything, taking inventory, checking corners.

Ruaan stepped in front of him.

"I looked everywhere for you," Ruaan said. "Where did you go?"

"To see Mara," Harolin said.

The room went quiet.

Ruaan pressed his lips together.

"How is she?" he said.

"Fine."

After that one word, it became silent. Ruaan didn’t ask any more questions and Harolin didn’t say anything else.

Ruaan looked at him. Harolin was looking at the fridge now, at the window, at the AC unit, at everything except Ruaan.

He let the quiet sit for a moment.

Then he said, "Why did you tell Finn to shoot himself?"

Harolin looked at him. "What are you talking about?"

"You don’t have to lie. Finn told me."

Harolin’s expression stayed even for about two seconds. Then something shifted somewhere behind his eyes.

"That bastard," he said quietly. "I told him not to say anything."

He said it like a reflex.

Like something that had been sitting just behind his teeth and came out before he’d checked whether it should.

The silence that followed had a very specific quality.

Ruaan looked at him and Harolin looked back.

"When did he tell you?"

Ruaan’s mouth curved slowly.

"He never told me anything," Ruaan said.

Harolin said nothing.

"You just confirmed it yourself." Ruaan tilted his head. "You helped me. Didn’t you?"