His Enemies Left Him a Clear Path to First Place—He Turned Back for Every One of Them | HFY

























Emrys Kade is one of forty-one human cadets at Verrant's Reach, the Combine Assembly's most brutal officer proving ground, where a single eleven-kilometer freefall exam called the Hollow Descent decides who gets a real command and who gets shuffled into garrison duty forever. Emrys has spent three years mapping every gravity flip and hazard field in that maze, and on exam day he's cruising in the top thirty — until a rival's shove sends a Kethrax cadet tumbling into a closing wall with no way to save himself.

What Emrys does next costs him almost everything the exam is supposed to reward. Three times, in three different closing rooms, he turns back for classmates who aren't his species, aren't his friends, and have no reason to expect a human cadet to spend his own ranking on their survival. He crosses the finish line dead last out of four hundred and twelve cadets — and discovers that the Combine Assembly has been quietly measuring something the leaderboard never showed.


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