Outside, the street was loud and did not care.

Garcia stood on the pavement with the box under one arm while cars pushed past and people walked by talking into their phones about lunch and meetings. The sky was grey but not raining. Beyond the glass towers, the London skyline carried the cold shine of 2075 money.

His right hand throbbed where he had hit Holt. The knuckles were already swelling, and he was fairly sure he had split two of them open. Worth it, he thought.

He crossed to the car park, put the box on the passenger seat, and sat behind the wheel staring at nothing. His phone buzzed. A message from Torres: They’re already dividing up your clients. Holt took Paulo. Salcedo took David.

Garcia read it twice, then deleted the message and wiped the chat, because Torres did not need to get caught helping a man who was already blacklisted.

He pulled up Paulo’s contact and looked at the call button. Two years of scouting, late-night calls, and family visits all sat behind that single name.

He did not call.

The non-solicitation clause was already in effect, so calling would only hand them legal grounds to bury him for good, maybe even sue him for damages if Holt decided to be petty about it. And Holt would absolutely decide to be petty about it.

Garcia started the car and drove home.

His apartment was small and plain, the kind of place a man kept when he spent more time in airports and on training grounds than at home.

There were still two missed calls from Sofia that he had not returned.

He got in around mid-afternoon, with the city still bright enough outside to feel like an insult. He sat at the table and did not eat.

The silence was different from the silence in the elevator, heavier and more settled, the kind that arrives when you understand that nobody is coming to fix this and you either fix it yourself or let it stay broken.

He made one call.

Ramos picked up on the third ring. "Garcia."

"You heard?"

There was a pause, careful in a way Ramos had never been with him before. Ramos was an older scout who had been in football longer than Garcia had been alive, and he knew which agents were blacklisted before the word even went out.

"I heard some things," Ramos said.

"What things?"

Another pause. "You punched Holt."

"Yeah."

"That was stupid, Garcia."

"Probably."

"Definitely," Ramos corrected. "He’s already spreading it around. Says you’re unstable, says you breached protocol, says no agency should touch you. By tomorrow morning every major firm in Europe will have your name on a do-not-hire list."

Garcia shut his eyes. "And you?"

"Me what?"

"Are you calling to tell me you can’t talk to me anymore?"

Ramos sighed. "I’m calling to tell you to lie low for a while and let this blow over. Maybe in six months, when Holt’s ego isn’t so bruised, you can—"

"Six months?" Garcia cut in. "Ramos, I have rent due in two weeks. I have players I spent years building who are about to get screwed by people who don’t care about them. I don’t have six months."

"Then I don’t know what to tell you," Ramos said quietly. "I’m sorry. I really am. But this industry runs on reputation, and yours just got torched. There’s no quick way back from that."

The line went dead.

Garcia sat with that, the phone still in his hand and the call timer reset to zero. Ramos had always been straight with him, even when the truth was ugly, and the fact that he had sounded genuinely sorry somehow made it worse, as though he were already mourning someone who had died.

Six years deep. Three players on the edge of major moves. Closer than he had ever been.

He opened his laptop, looked at the empty screen, and closed it again. The thought of starting from zero at thirty-two, with a blacklist spreading through the industry like a virus, was exhausting, though it did not feel completely impossible.

He was broken, not extinguished.

He stayed at the table while the afternoon turned into evening and the room went dark around him.

Three months later, Garcia sat in his parents’ living room and looked like a man who had given up.

The apartment was gone, handed back when the rent came due twice and he could not pay it. The suits were gone, sold to a second-hand shop for a fraction of what they had cost, because he needed the money for food. The car was gone too, repossessed three weeks ago when the finance company finally stopped accepting his excuses.

What he had left fit into two suitcases and a duffel bag, all of it crammed into his old childhood bedroom in his parents’ house in the suburbs, where the walls still carried posters from when he was sixteen and thought he would be a footballer instead of an agent.

He had sent his CV everywhere, to major agencies and start-ups, to academies and scouting departments, even to consulting roles that barely paid. No one wanted him. The few that replied sent automated rejections within the hour, fast enough to tell him his name was flagged in some database that Holt had probably circulated himself.

He knew he looked like shit. His hair was longer than he had worn it in years, because haircuts cost money. His face carried three days of stubble, because shaving felt pointless when he was not meeting anyone. He had been in the same jeans and hoodie for a week, because laundry took an effort he could not find.

His mother kept asking whether he had eaten. His father kept suggesting he try for something outside football, anything stable while he worked things out. Both of them looked at him with a worry that made him want to shut the bedroom door and not come out.

And then there was Sofia.

His phone buzzed on the coffee table. A message from an old colleague: Saw Sofia’s engagement announcement. Congrats to her I guess.

Garcia stared at the screen. Eight weeks. That was how long it had taken the woman who once promised him forever to choose someone with a cleaner future, some finance guy who drove a Mercedes, worked in the city, and had probably never punched his boss in the face.

He deleted the message and tossed the phone onto the couch.

The TV was playing a sports documentary that he had barely been watching, until a name pulled his attention back to the screen.

JORDAN RIVERS: THE MAKING OF A LEGEND

Garcia looked up.

Jordan Rivers filled the screen, tall and impossibly athletic, with the kind of face that looked engineered in a lab. The narrator was talking about how Rivers had broken records once thought untouchable, how pundits compared his arrogance to Zlatan, his discipline to Ronaldo, and his finishing to the great strikers of the old era.

The year was 2075, and Jordan Rivers was the biggest name in world football.

Then the camera cut to his agent.

Damien Walter sat in an expensive office with trophies and signed shirts behind him, a man in his fifties who looked like he had built an empire and enjoyed every second of it.

"People think Jordan changed everything overnight," Walter said, leaning back in his chair. "He didn’t. It started with one phone, no office, and a player nobody else wanted. I found him in a third-division academy when he was sixteen. Skinny kid, fast but raw. Everyone passed on him, every major club and every big agency. They said he was too inconsistent, too risky."

The interviewer asked something off-camera.

Walter smiled. "That’s what happens when you trust your eye and do the work."

Something twisted in Garcia’s chest as he watched.

Walter had actually done it. He had built a standalone agency from nothing, scouted a player everyone else ignored, and turned him into a legend, with no corporate backing and no safety net, on nothing but knowledge and hustle and a refusal to quit when it got hard.

Why didn’t I start my own company? Garcia thought, sitting up straighter on the couch. Why have I been chasing jobs when I already know how to do this myself?

He grabbed his phone and opened a notes app, drafting a plan in his head before he had even started typing. Independent registration. Scouting networks. Lower-league clubs where the talent was raw but hungry—

Then reality landed on him like cold water.

Which club is going to deal with me? he thought, sinking back into the couch. Which player trusts an agent who’s blacklisted across Europe? Which parent lets me represent their kid when Holt has already told everyone I’m unstable?

No one.

Holt had wrecked his life completely, and starting an agency from scratch took connections he no longer had and a reputation he had destroyed with his own fists.

He reached for the remote to turn off the TV.

Then the screen appeared.

Not the TV screen. Something else.

A pale, glowing panel formed in the air in front of him, there but not solid, hanging between him and the documentary like a hologram that had no business existing. Clean white text sat against a dark background.

[WELCOME USER #123 TO THE CAREER SYSTEM]

[PLEASE SELECT A CAREER TO BEGIN]

Garcia shot off the couch so fast that he knocked the coffee table over with a CRASH.

"What the fuck?!"

The panel did not disappear. It simply hung there in the air, calm and impossible, waiting for him to do something while his heart slammed against his ribs and his mind raced to make sense of what he was seeing.

"What the FUCK?!"