The arena was in neutral mode, which was spinning about its axis to produce a twenty percent Coriolis gravity around the curving floor. Dellian always wished there was a window—the arena was attached to a skyfort’s assembly grid, orbiting 150,000 kilometers above Juloss, and the view would have been fabulous.

Instead he did what he always did when he came in, and studied the arena’s interior to see if the stewards had made any changes. Floating above him were thirty bright hazard-orange hurdles: polyhedrons of various sizes, also padded.

“They’ve bigged them up, look,” Dellian said enthusiastically, as he took in the hurdles, committing the positioning to memory. Alexandre had promised the senior yeargroup they would receive their databuds in another couple of months, uniting them directly with personal processors and memory cores that would handle all the mundane mental chores Dellian had to labor away at right now. He considered it monumentally unfair that all the clan’s adults had them.

“You mean they have enlarged the hurdles,” Yirella said primly.

“Saints, you’ve gone and joined the grammar police,” he moaned. At the same time he saw how intently she was studying the new layout and smiled to himself. They started to walk along the floor, necks craning up, his cohort studying the hurdle layout as attentively as he was.

The rest of Dellian’s yearmates started to show up. He saw the boys grinning at the larger hurdles suspended above them, relishing the extra bounce the wider pentagonal and hexagonal surfaces would give them—if they landed true, of course.

“Saints, we’ll reach the axis like lightning,” Janc said.

“Going to ace this,” Uret agreed.

“Is it going to be a capture the flag, do you think?” Orellt asked.

“I want to play straight takedown,” Rello said wistfully. “Just hit them and knock them out of the arena.”

“Inter-clan matches are flag captures,” Tilliana said loftily. “They allow a greater range of strategy options and cooperative maneuvers. That’s what we train for, after all.”

Dellian and Falar exchanged a martyred grin behind Tilliana’s back; the girl was always dismissive of any enthusiasm the boys showed to expand the tournament. Even so, she and her pair of muncs were reviewing the new arrangement keenly.

“Where are they?” Xante exclaimed impatiently.

They didn’t have long to wait. The visiting team from the Ansaru clan, whose estate was on the other side of the eastern mountains, came jogging into the arena in a single regimented line, their munc cohorts forming columns on either side. Dellian scowled at that; the Ansaru boys had discipline. With his own yearmates spread halfway around the curving floor, joking around, their cohorts scattered and jostling spiritedly, it already put the Ansaru team ahead on style. We should organize like that.