Allies
Author: S.J. Kincaid
Date: 2013-05-02 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Young Adult; Dystopia; Short Stories; Novella; Fantasy; Fiction; Military Fiction; Virtual Reality; Science Fiction Fantasy
Description: In S. J. Kincaid’s fast-paced and humorous sci-fi Insignia trilogy, the earth is in the middle of World War III when teen gamer Tom Raines is recruited to train with other young cadets as a pivotal member of the elite combat corps, the Intrasolar Forces. At the Pentagonal Spire’s training academy, he makes the best friends of his life—fellow government weapons-in-training Wyatt Enslow, Vik Ashwan, and Yuri Sysevich. In this 47-page prequel novella to the series, budding genius Wyatt Enslow—intensely loyal and hyperintelligent if occasionally, hilariously, socially awkward—takes center stage as
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Rights: Copyright © 2013 by S. J. Kincaid

Contents

Begin Reading

An Excerpt from Insignia

Chapter One

Chapter Two

About the Author

Also by S. J. Kincaid

Back Ads

Copyright

About the Publisher

Begin Reading

VOICES HUMMED NEAR the girl, rising and falling in idle discussion. She hunkered down on her bench in the solitary corner she’d claimed in the garden, cringing when her own name drifted to her ears.

“. . . where’s Esperanza’s daughter?”

“Wyatt? Oh, she’s probably skulking about somewhere.” The voice dropped to a whisper, and Wyatt could only make out those familiar words she’d heard applied to her too many times in her life. “. . . strange . . . bizarre . . .”

The voices drifted away behind the vast hedges, and relief washed through Wyatt in a great wave. She’d already “made an effort,” as her mother called it. She’d stood among the crowd and endured the conversations for several minutes. But soon, the press of noises, the wafts of perfume, and the casual brushings of shoulders against hers had mounted into a cacophonic onslaught to her senses, and she couldn’t bear to remain in the middle of so many people. She walked away, determined to escape the entire family, Garzas and Enslows alike.

She’d found shelter in the cool, dark corner of the grounds where drooping, green leaves shaded a stone bench near her mother’s stables. The occasional stray voices were her only company, and she might’ve passed the rest of the reunion mercifully alone if her cousin hadn’t remembered this spot from when they were both kids.

But inevitably, footsteps crunched their way over the gravel pathway, and a shadow blotted out the rays of sunlight piercing through the overhead leaves.

Wyatt braced herself, and raised her eyes to meet her cousin’s. She mentally reminded herself of what she was supposed to do during interpersonal interactions: Make eye contact. Return polite, superficial remarks with polite, superficial remarks. Say please. Say thank you. Compliment her hairstyle or clothing.

“Your hair is very well combed,” Wyatt said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Wyatt mumbled.

“So you’re Wyatt, huh?” Marissa said.

Wyatt frowned, recalling her aunt introducing them earlier in the day, and the way she’d said, “This is your cousin, Wyatt. Remember her? She’s thirteen, just like you!” Those were the exact words, so Marissa already knew the answer. That meant she was feigning ignorance, and this question was superfluous, and therefore Wyatt didn’t understand why Marissa was bothering to ask it. There had to be a reason she was asking it, though, and some correct answer Wyatt was missing here.

She shifted uneasily on the bench, wrought with uncertainty. “Yes. What do you want?”

“I’m just here to talk. We haven’t seen each other since we were little. Excuse me for being friendly.”

“You’re excused,” Wyatt said.

To Wyatt’s horror, Marissa seated herself onto the stone bench right next to her, so close the warmth of her arm seeped into hers. Wyatt scooted to the very edge of the bench, the scent of Marissa’s raspberry body spray stinging her nostrils. She couldn’t hold Marissa’s eyes at this close distance, so her gaze dropped down—to the other girl’s blouse.

Then she saw it: Marissa had mustard smeared on her shirt.

“I’m so bored,” Marissa complained, propping her palms on the bench, swinging a foot. “We’re the only people here who aren’t older than fifty or younger than five. They’re all talking about dead people I’ve never met.”

Wyatt didn’t answer her. She was still staring, transfixed, at the mustard smear. It was about three quarters of an inch long and shaped like the state of Oklahoma rotated clockwise at a sixty-degree angle—a bright, stark yellow against the white fabric of Marissa’s blouse.

“You don’t talk much,” Marissa went on. “That’s weird, because people talk about you a ton. Mom said you got a gold medal in a Math Olympics thing. Aunt Esperanza told her it’s a huge deal. Like, you could go to any university tomorrow for free if you wanted.”

“Olympi-ad,” Wyatt corrected absently. Her entire awareness was riveted to that mustard blotch, like it was an alarm blaring right in her ears. “It was the International Mathematical Olympiad.”

“Fine, okay. Congratulations on your Olympi-ad.”

Wyatt’s mind flashed over scenarios that might have resulted in that mustard so blatantly smeared on Marissa’s shirt, and she decided Marissa must have eaten something, and glopped on far too much mustard. As soon as she bit down, the mustard dripped out and splattered on her shirt. It explained the shape of the smear; it explained why Marissa hadn’t tried to wash it off yet.

She needs to wash it off. The thought seemed to compress Wyatt’s head, even as Marissa’s voice chattered on, “. . . don’t even live very far apart. Maybe our moms don’t really like each other . . .”

Wyatt grew desperate to tell Marissa about the mustard, but she knew it might “cause needless embarrassment,” the way her mother said she tended to do to people. This one time, Wyatt visited her grandmother in her nursing home and informed her that she smelled faintly of urine. She meant it to be helpful so her grandmother would know to clean herself, but her grandmother began to weep.

She didn’t intend to repeat that scene today. Even if the mustard was right there . . . Just right there in plain sight where Marissa should have noticed it already . . .

And it would stain.

“So if you’re a genius,” Marissa complained, casting a look around the garden, “then why don’t you say something smart instead of letting me do all the talking? Come on. I’m waiting.”

Here it was! Her opening, her moment! Wyatt sucked in a deep breath that made her head spin, and forced herself to meet Marissa’s eyes directly. She managed to hold gazes for a full second before she dropped her eyes to the ground again.

The words pounded their way out of her, too loud. “There’s mustard on your shirt!”

Her cousin was silent for several seconds. Then, “What?”

“Mustard,” Wyatt cried, agitation edging her voice. She made sure to point so Marissa couldn’t miss it. Her words came pouring out, rushed, but such a relief to get out. “Look! It’s right there. It’s so obvious. How haven’t you noticed it yet? You need to go and wipe it off or you’ll have to throw that shirt away. You need to go clean it as soon as you can.”

Marissa rolled her eyes. “You know, if you want me to go away, you can just say so. You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

With that, Marissa huffed out a breath that fluttered tendrils of her dark hair, slid off the bench, and walked away from her. Wyatt found herself alone again with the solitary bench and the overhead trees, wondering why people always got upset with her when she tried to help them. Confusion and a sense of hopelessness swirled through her.

It was a familiar sensation.

She understood numbers, but human beings were strange, mysterious entities whose actions seemed arbitrary and chaotic—puzzles with pieces that never quite added up to the logical whole. Whenever Wyatt interacted with them, she felt like a broken limb at the wrong angle, entirely out of place. Things that interested her bored them; things that interested them perplexed her. She invariably said something that she wasn’t supposed to, and then they left, angry at her, and never talked to her again.

That was why she avoided people. They were irrational, strange. They didn’t seem worth the bother.

She pulled her legs up to her chest and hunched down, hoping no one else would spot her, no one else would approach. She never truly got lonely, after all. She only felt right when she was completely alone.

WYATT HADN’T INTENDED to join the Intrasolar Forces.

Her mother spoke with the recruiter who assured her a boarding school–like environment would develop Wyatt’s social skills and “utilize her full potential,” and she was sold. Her father’s old college roommate from Princeton, George Styron, had a daughter who’d been recruited, and he assured them it was all on the up-and-up.

But Wyatt had no interest. She could think of nothing more unpleasant and aggravating than being locked in close quarters with people her own age full-time. She indulged her parents and accompanied the officers to the Pentagonal Spire, though, only vaguely curious about the stronghold of power that directed the war effort. The entire idea of World War III seemed silly, and a waste of money to her. The USA never seemed to hold the territory they won in space, which seemed to be the point of war in the first place.

Then the Pentagonal Spire officials told her about the neural processors.

Wyatt didn’t even care about seeing the facilities. She sat down in the infirmary and viewed a meshlike web of fine metal, a computer that interfaced directly with the human brain. The man who worked in there, Doctor Gonzales, seemed confused about why she had so many questions, but he answered all of them. The technology was decades ahead of what was officially used by the public, and the possibilities of enhanced brainpower made her head spin.

What could she do if she was machine-fast, if she had the precision of a computer, if she could slice through problems that still continued to elude her, elude the rest of humanity?

She could determine whether the Euler-Mascheroni constant was irrational.

She could find an Euler brick whose space diagonal was also an integer.

She could solve all the mathematical mysteries that the greatest minds in the world had yet to vanquish.

Suddenly, joining the Intrasolar Forces wasn’t an odd or irrational choice, but rather the only choice, the only way to achieve things beyond her capabilities, to become better than she could ever hope to be on her own.

WYATT HAD JUST swallowed her sedative when the large, uniformed man with short, dark hair burst into the infirmary.

“Don’t sedate her yet,” the man snapped, and Wyatt recoiled from the intruder.

But he was in uniform. He looked like an officer.

The newcomer brushed aside Doctor Gonzales’s objections that the infirmary was a sterile environment, and seated himself on the foot of her bed. There were two thin, white lines of scarring down the right side of his face. She looked at those rather than meet his penetrating, gray eyes.

“I looked at your fMRI,” he told her. “You’re not neurotypical, are you?”

Wyatt stared at him. “So what?” This wasn’t news. She was very aware her brain didn’t function the same way most people’s did.

“Your brain isn’t the standard, unlike most of the kids recruited for this program. That means someone in top brass”—he gestured upward with a big finger—“authorized your admission to this program as an experiment to see how a brain like yours will tolerate a neural processor. Did anyone tell you what these machines can do to a human brain?”

“She was warned about the risks, Lieutenant Blackburn,” said Doctor Gonzales. Then, to her, he whispered, “He takes these things very personally when it’s not his concern.”

Blackburn shot him a look that made Gonzales mutter something and leave them alone in the room. Wyatt was tempted to feel alarmed, but a haze began to creep over her brain as the sedative she’d swallowed kicked in. Blackburn’s voice kept lashing into her ears.

“Your brain is all you are, Ms. Enslow, and there’s nothing wrong with yours, whatever they might’ve tried to tell you. Most kids who come here, the neural processor is a tweak. With someone like you, the neural processor will register that your brain isn’t in homeostasis—within normal limits—and it will try to adjust it more in line with a typical human brain.”

“I know there are risks,” she mumbled.

“You won’t be you anymore. This could fundamentally alter you, do you understand that?”

“I know. I don’t know what you think you saw on my fMRI, but I’m not stupid.”

He blinked. “I didn’t say you were. I just want you to think about this a moment. It’s not too late.”

Wyatt closed her eyes, seeing faint, ghostly images swirling in the patterns behind her lids, the sedative taking hold. She found herself thinking, just as he asked. But she wasn’t pondering loss. Nor was she considering mathematics, the possibilities of cognitive enhancement. She found herself thinking of Marissa in the garden and her grandmother in the nursing home and the way she always had to plan everything she said to her mother in advance so she didn’t upset her . . .

Wyatt thought about finally having that thing she didn’t seem to have been born with like everyone else—a means of relating to other people. A means of connecting with them. She understood suddenly what lay before her, what this opportunity was. For the first time in her life, she had a chance to alter herself, to drastically and permanently shift her own personality, her own perception.

One computer in her brain, and she could obtain something most everyone else had been born with. She knew what this Lieutenant Blackburn was trying to tell her. She was uniquely gifted; she was capable in ways no one else she’d met was . . .

But intellectually, she knew she’d always wonder what it might have been like, being like everyone else. She’d always wonder what she could have become if she’d just tried.

She didn’t want to wonder.

She opened her eyes, and Blackburn must’ve seen the resolve on her face. He sighed and conceded it with a nod, then rose to his feet.

“You’ll see me around this place,” he told her.

He’d intended to help her. Wyatt understood that.

“Thank you,” she said, and for one of the only times in her life, she was sure she’d said the appropriate thing.

THE NEURAL PROCESSOR made her brain faster. One download and she could memorize a textbook, a language; and she simply knew information now that she’d never learned for herself.

But it wasn’t that jarring—not compared to the other thing.

For the first time in her life, Wyatt experienced loneliness.

Lieutenant Blackburn’s warning rang in her ears time and again: You won’t be you anymore. . . .

And she was sure she wasn’t. Surely she wasn’t the one who felt this aching emptiness, alone her in her bunk, hearing voices drift in from the hallway outside. Surely she wasn’t the one who couldn’t focus on her work, because she was wondering what the people she’d spoken to today thought about her.

People had always been strange to her, and she’d been able to remain safely across a chasm from them, separate, and glad of it.

It was all different now.

She noticed their faces, their eyes. She noticed changes in their voices. She noticed how they held their bodies, how they moved them. And she pondered what they were thinking. She cared about what they were thinking, and she’d never in her life imagined how painful that could be.

She got off to a bad start with her roommate, Marrion Trout, right away. Mostly because her lips twitched when Marrion’s personnel profile flashed before her eyes, and Marrion exclaimed in frustration, “Why does everyone think my name’s funny?”

Put on the spot, Wyatt tried pointing out the fact that Marrion was a fly-fishing champion and her last name was Trout, but Marrion wasn’t in the mood to hear it.

Later, in Programming class, Wyatt picked up on the subject right away. It was simple, logical, clean-cut to her. She felt this crawling anxiety inside her, knowing she’d already annoyed her new roommate, so she tried to be helpful. She pointed out an error in Marrion’s code. Marrion smiled tentatively at her, and Wyatt felt a strange sensation like warming inside her at the sign of approval.

Suddenly it was the opposite of the anxiety she’d felt all day. Instead of a cool draft, the sensation of acceptance was like a flower unfolding in her chest, soaking in sunlight. She’d never felt anything like it.

“You’re so good at this for the first day,” Marrion told her.

Wyatt fumbled for the right reply, her brain racing. She might feel sensations of acceptance, but after a lifetime of being isolated, she didn’t know the gestures, the words. “It’s really easy.”

“Speak for yourself,” Marrion said with a laugh. “I’ve been here four months and it’s like hieroglyphics.”

“Maybe I’m just smarter than you,” Wyatt suggested.

It had been the wrong thing to say. Wyatt only meant to be helpful, to assure Marrion there might be a reason for her failure to understand Programming, but the other girl’s toothy smile sprang shut like a trap, and that was the last time they talked civilly. Marrion complained about Wyatt going to sleep too early, about Wyatt opening the curtain when she wanted it down, about everything, until it all came to a head and Marrion stormed out, then requested a bunk reassignment. She received it.

Every morning meal formation, breakfast where they had assigned seating, Wyatt found herself alone at one end of the table, all the other girls in her level and division clustered at the other end. It felt like she’d been placed in quarantine.

Matters grew worse a few weeks later, when a new plebe, Vikram Ashwan, joined her Applied Simulations group. He was a good-looking kid with a high forehead over a long, broad nose, and full, mobile lips. His eyebrows formed twin bold slants over close-set eyes sparkling with humor. At first, he seemed nice enough, with such a huge grin, she could see his gums. Then he discovered that certain things in the training simulation—like alcohol—modified their perception of the sim just like the substances would in real life. Wyatt considered it a test: the military wanted to see if they were responsible enough not to abuse their opportunities. But like a lot of idiots who were new plebes, Vikram was not at all responsible. He downed a bottle of whiskey during a training simulation of the First Battle of Bull Run.

“I am drunk,” Vikram declared, stunned. “I am actually drunk.”

Wyatt shifted his arm irritably over her shoulder. She and another plebe, Stephen Beamer, were hauling the inebriated Indian boy out of the line of fire. He wasn’t going to be any use in battle, and was likely to just get in the way.

“I think I’m going to get impaled by a bayonet after this,” Stephen told Wyatt thoughtfully.

She eyed him warily, because the redheaded boy confused her immensely. He somehow managed to die in most every simulation. “Why?”

“Never done death by bayonet.”

He was very strange. Wyatt shook it off and helped ease Vikram down. He caught her arm, his eyes unfocused. She was alarmed for a moment as he groped her forearm clumsily, but he just rolled up her sleeve, mesmerized. “Are your hands like this in real life?”

“Like what?” She snatched her arm out of his grip.

“They could envelop whole planets,” Vikram slurred.

Stephen began giggling. “You are so wasted.”

Wyatt flushed and examined her hands. She’d shot up in height the first week at the Spire when the neural processor caused her hGH to spike. She’d grown to five foot nine, and her hands and feet had grown, too. It had never occurred to her before to be embarrassed.

“They’re giantess hands,” Vikram marveled.

“No, they’re not,” Wyatt cried.

“Man hands,” Vikram amended giddily.

Wyatt glared at him. “Shut up!”

But he kept giggling drunkenly, so she shoved him, hard, sending him crashing back to the ground. Vikram kept laughing where he’d fallen, murmuring about, “Can’t get up . . . got battered by Man Hands. . .”

“Hey, don’t manhandle him,” Stephen told her, then realized what he’d said and began laughing.

Vikram began laughing harder. “Manhandling!”

“I hate you both!” Wyatt cried, and left to fight the Yankees. With utter dismay, she realized a terrible new nickname might have been born.

Maybe Vikram was too drunk to remember?

HE HADN’T BEEN.

She wasn’t sure what was worse: the fact that Vikram sometimes liked to drop down next to her in the mess hall and tease her in a way he didn’t seem to realize was sincerely bothering her, or the fact that no one else was talking to her at all.

But there was something worse, though it seemed very innocuous at first.

Wyatt met Heather Akron.

Or rather, Heather decided to meet her. Wyatt was sitting alone in Programming, as usual, when she saw a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye, and then a girl flounced down right next to her.

“You don’t mind if I sit here,” she said to Wyatt. It wasn’t a question.

Her profile flashed before Wyatt’s vision:

NAME: Heather Akron

RANK: USIF, Grade V Upper, Machiavelli Division

ORIGIN: Omaha, NE

ACHIEVEMENTS: N/A

IP: 2087:db7:lj71::212:ll3:6e8

SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-5

Heather had a shining mane of dark hair, and slanted, catlike eyes fringed with dark lashes. A broad, gleaming smile lit her lips. She wasn’t just pretty—she was beautiful, and Wyatt couldn’t help it. She began contrasting her mental image of herself with Heather. Her lank brown hair with Heather’s vibrant, dark hair; her straight, solemn eyebrows with Heather’s graceful, arched ones; her long nose with Heather’s small, upturned one.

It was irrational, even comparing herself with this girl. It was as irrational as comparing her brain to this girl’s, when they were likely to be equally imbalanced. . . . But Wyatt had started to realize people spoke to people differently, depending on how they looked. She’d known that intellectually before, but now that she’d grown increasingly aware of other people, now that something inside her reacted depending upon the behavior of other people toward her, things took on an increasing importance.

And some things just hurt more.

“You’re Wyatt . . . obviously. And as you see, I’m Heather.”

“Yes,” Wyatt mumbled, her shoulders tight. She was ready to hear something cruel. She didn’t want to feel the knife of pain inside that came with knowing someone disapproved of her.

But Heather just smiled. “I’ve heard you’re brilliant.”

“Really?”

“Mmm-hmm. I figured I’d rather share a bench with an incredibly smart person than some of the idiots up there.” She rolled her eyes and gestured up toward the front of the room. “So how do you like it here?”

“I hate it,” Wyatt blurted out.

She winced, because it seemed like the kind of personal admission that would lead to ridicule, to disdain. She suspected even telling someone this was opening herself up to some sort of attack.

But when she dared to look at Heather’s face, the older girl’s expression had softened, her mouth an o of concern, her brows drawn together. “Oh, poor sweetie. Are people being mean to you?”

Wyatt nodded bleakly.

“Have you ever gone to school before?” Heather asked her unexpectedly.

She shook her head. “I had private tutors. I was too smart for other kids.” She wanted to clap her hands over her mouth, because that’s what got her in trouble with Marrion. She’d be eviscerated.

But then Heather’s hand squeezed her shoulder. Wyatt jumped at the unexpected contact. She held herself rigid, but as Heather’s hand stayed there, it took on a new quality. It became comforting.

“I’m so sorry. It has to be hard, your first time with other people your age, and here of all places.” She rolled her eyes. “People are bastards here. I’ll be honest: there’s this weird, quasi-machismo culture where everyone has to act invincible and unflappable, but half the people here are just dumb, hormonal adolescents who think they’re geniuses simply because they have computers in their heads. Add in the fact that we’re all essentially competing with each other for a chance at Combatant status, and, well, you’ve got the Pentagonal Spire in a nutshell. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with you; it’s just because you seem like an easy target.”

Wyatt’s eyes stung, and to her horror, she realized she was tearing up.

“No, no, don’t cry,” Heather warned her softly, her hand tightening on her shoulder. “Never cry here. That’s rule one. Rule two: never go to the social worker. They say she’s here to help us, but really, going to her is like an admission you’re too much of a wimp to cut it. You don’t want the vultures to start circling.”

“I should just quit,” Wyatt whispered.

She thought of getting the neural processor removed, going back to herself. Going back to the comfortable space where she was never lonely, even when she was alone.

But Heather was still stroking her back, which made her feel slightly less alien, slightly less strange, slightly more a part of something. “Oh, but you’re missing rule three.”

“What?” Wyatt said hopelessly.

“Rule three is listen to me, because I’m going to help you, Wyatt. I’m taking you under my wing.” She winked. “I can be like your mentor.”

Wyatt looked at her, and she knew then she couldn’t go back. Not really. She would know she’d lost this. She’d know she’d left this behind, those rare moments when she felt connected to people. She would always know she’d chosen comfortable isolation rather than overcome pain.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” Wyatt asked her.

Heather smiled, still stroking her back. “Oh, sweetie, it’s just because you seem to really need it.”

REALLY, THOUGH, IT was because Heather had figured out Wyatt was the best computer programmer among the trainees.

And an easy target.

Later, Wyatt reflected bitterly upon how easy it had been. All Heather had to do was sit with her in class sometimes, and Wyatt was pathetically grateful. All she had to do was be nice when she talked to her, and Wyatt felt this great rush of affection like she’d found a best friend. She told Heather everything, and Heather always knew the thing to say to make life seem a little better.

So when the day came that Heather confided one of her own problems, Wyatt was pathetically eager to return the favor.

“I can’t get into CamCo. I have no future here. I just have to accept it,” Heather lamented.

“Why not?” Wyatt said, upset on her behalf. “You deserve it.”

“Because I don’t have rich, connected parents. My dad’s dead, and my mom hates me—but whatever, I hate her, too. She couldn’t control her boyfriends.” They were sitting alone in Wyatt’s bunk, and to Wyatt’s shock, tears sparked bright in Heather’s eyes. “Don’t ever tell anyone this, Wyatt, but there’s this politician from my hometown. Al Heinz. He’s in the senate now, but whatever. My mom worked in his office and he was a skeeze. He liked pretty and young, emphasis on ‘young.’ ‘Pretty’ was negotiable. He certainly didn’t mind when I had big glasses and ugly sweatshirts.”

Wyatt caught her breath.

“Needless to say”—Heather’s voice shook—“I had proof and he knew he’d have to buy me off. That’s why I’m here.” Her eyes glinted in the light. “I didn’t accomplish anything beyond that. I have nothing. I was poor; I had no connections. What could I have done? That’s what the N/A in my personnel profile means. Accomplishments: none available.” She gave a bitter, tearful laugh. “I don’t know why I bothered coming here to make a better life. How can I? The companies won’t even consider sponsoring me because I have no accomplishments. There’s no one advocating for me.”

Wyatt was horrified. It was so unfair. “Couldn’t you . . . do something now?”

Heather tossed her hair. “Come on, when do we have time? The only hope I have . . .” Then she stopped and laughed. “No, not hope. Stupid, wild fantasy that will never happen.”

“What?”

Heather gave a tortured sigh. “If by some freak accident, somehow my profile just got wiped out of the system or maybe doctored somehow . . .” Then she shook her head, and smiled sadly at Wyatt. “Forget it. It’s stupid. I’m just going to go to bed.”

Wyatt stared after her friend as Heather sadly slunk out of her bunk. She felt almost sick for Heather. It wasn’t fair that someone so great should get penalized for nothing.

And then the idea struck.

It took her a solid two weeks, accessing the system, studying the codes. She couldn’t download neural processor–specific computer languages and just learn them automatically, because of federal regulations prohibiting self-programming computers, but she could learn the languages encoding the Pentagonal Spire’s systems.

It was with a transcendent sense of joy that fifteen days after their conversation, Wyatt whispered to Heather in Programming that she needed to show her something. That night, when Heather appeared in her bunk, Wyatt worked her magic, and then twisted around a computer screen, showing Heather’s personnel profile.

“Here. This is for you.”

Heather’s eyes widened. “Oh my God, can I modify this file?”

“You can change it however you want.”

Heather flashed her a magnetic smile. “Wyatt, this is so sweet of you!”

“Or if you want to do it later, you can just think of things to write. I can suggest some stuff . . .” Wyatt’s voice trailed off, because Heather was already typing.

She already knew what she wanted to add to her personnel file. It was like she’d known in advance she’d get the chance to modify it.

THE PROFILE CHANGES didn’t stop with Heather, though.

Heather had an endless array of friends who wanted something more, a bit of an adjustment—but they were always Middles, never Uppers like Heather. Later Wyatt realized Heather didn’t want direct competition; she just wanted a bunch of trainees who were promoted to Upper Company because of her, due to her, who owed her a debt for it.

“I’m worried I’ll get caught,” Wyatt finally told Heather one day.

They were sitting together in Programming again. Wyatt had been glad at first, because Heather had been sitting there less and less, and she’d stopped swinging by Wyatt’s bunk altogether. The hours that had been full grew empty, and she began to feel that terrible chasm creeping between her and everyone else again.

She was desperate not to lose the only friend she had, but Heather didn’t seem to understand that Wyatt was at risk every time she altered a profile.

“One last person,” Heather pleaded. “My friend Nigel. He’s right on the cusp of making Upper Company, but he needs a few more perks in his profile. He’s been threatening to do it himself, but I know he’ll get caught because he’s not as good as you, and if he gets caught . . . well, let’s just say he won’t go alone. Please, Wyatt? Please? For me? You know promotions are soon, and I’m up for CamCo. I really don’t want to stress about Nigel.”

“This is the last one,” Wyatt mumbled.

“Of course.”

HEATHER DIDN’T COME to see Wyatt hack the personnel database that night. Neither did Nigel. She gave her a list of things Nigel wanted programmed in. Apparently, Nigel wanted to come across like some sort of brilliant linguist.

She’d just finished erasing her tracks in the system and was about to sign out when text flashed across her vision:

I know what you’re doing.

Wyatt gasped, her heart tripping in her chest.

Who are you?

She hastily logged herself out as the last part of the message came:

I’ll find you.

She pulled the neural wire out of the access port on the back her neck, her heart pounding, breath coming in frantic gasps. The text faded before her vision, but the chill stayed in her heart.

“WELL?” LIEUTENANT BLACKBURN’S gaze combed the room, and even where she was sitting in the back of hundreds of people, Wyatt was sure guilt and terror radiated like a beacon from her face.

But she dared not speak, and when she so much as twitched a muscle, Heather’s grip pinched her arm, talonlike.

“I’ll find out who you are sooner or later,” Blackburn warned them, pacing the stage. “Better for you if it’s sooner. Someone hacked the personnel files. I am sure of it.”

Wyatt’s mind raced frantically. He couldn’t compare before and afters of the profile, because she’d deleted the cache of the old. He couldn’t figure out where she’d logged in from, because she’d anonymized herself, disguised her port.

She was pretty sure.

At the end of class, she mechanically moved to turn in her program, but Heather said, “Don’t you see? You can’t do that.”

“Do what? Turn in my work?”

“Turn in that work,” Heather said.

“I have to,” Wyatt protested. They’d been working on these programs since she’d come to the Spire. It was her first chance to really show what she could do.

Heather shook her head. “He knows someone had the skill to hack through his security; that means he’ll look at the best programmers—and if you turn this in, he’ll know you’re a suspect.”

“Then I’m going to confess. I have to.”

“No, you don’t.”

“He’ll find out it’s me.”

“No.” Heather’s teeth were gritted. “He won’t.”

She jabbed a button on Wyatt’s forearm keyboard and reversed all the changes Wyatt had made to her program in the last three days, then sent it in. Wyatt cried out in protest, but Heather rounded on her, her voice very low.

“If you confess, he will want to know who you did it for. That will lead to me. I’m your friend, aren’t I? You don’t want to get me in trouble.”

Wyatt stared at her. “You only sit with me now when you want something.” She stung with the realization. “You don’t want to be my friend; you just want me to do stuff for you.”

Heather rolled her eyes, her lips curling. “Oh my God, that’s so pathetic. Are you this out of touch with the way people work?”

Wyatt flinched.

“Welcome to reality. People make friends because those friends enhance their lives in some way. I enhance yours by talking to you, which no one else here bothers to do, and you enhance me by doing me favors now and then. This is how people work. If someone tells you they’re doing something out of anything other than pure self-interest, they’re lying to you.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is. I’m only stating the obvious here, which seems to elude you for some reason. I’m sorry to disillusion you.”

Wyatt felt a surge of outrage. “Maybe I don’t even want to talk to you, then. We don’t need to be friends.”

Heather cocked her head. “Fine, then here’s the alternative: you can be my enemy. You see, I have a lot more influence here than you do, and I’m really the only lifeline you have. If I wanted to, I could find a way to make your life completely miserable—if you’re stupid enough to breathe a word to Lieutenant Blackburn.”

Wyatt looked at Heather, and suddenly she saw how ugly she truly was. For the first time since she’d started noticing faces, she understood that smiles could be empty and eyes could be calculating; that a polished, glittering mask of friendship could hide the absence of anything underneath.

“How about this: let’s not be enemies.” Heather smiled with that poisonous, fake sweetness, and reached up to tuck a tendril of Wyatt’s hair behind her ear. “You know, you’d look so much prettier if you had a haircut that framed your face. This weekend, I’ll take you to my stylist—”

Wyatt jerked her head back. “Don’t touch me.”

Heather’s fake sweetness vaporized. “Have it your way, then. Just remember, if you think about doing something stupid: I warned you of the consequences. Don’t be stupid, Enslow.” She gave her a mocking smile and strolled off. Wyatt knew they wouldn’t sit together ever again.

I can’t stand this anymore, she thought.

Worse than that terrible, stabbing pain of rejection was the emptiness where once acceptance had been, and as Wyatt wandered numbly upstairs that night, she wondered that she’d ever been foolish enough to think she wanted this.

THERE WERE A few things around the Pentagonal Spire that everyone did once, and Wyatt suspected she may have missed out on something critical, not doing any of them. That’s what brought her up to the planetarium on the fifteenth floor for the Open Evening, when the roof would retract to reveal the stars.

She marched in and seated herself there as the roof cranked open and icy air rushed in, then just stared up at the distant, glittering stars, wondering what people saw in this. The view was terrible here. They were in Arlington, Virginia, and the light pollution drowned out most of the sky. She could barely even see anything.

Why were things so obvious to other people and utterly perplexing to her?

Because you don’t belong here, she answered herself.

She realized it now. With a burst of stark clarity, she understood that her original instincts had been right all along. She should never have come here. She threw a look around, and answered that question of why people liked Open Evenings.

The other people in the planetarium were couples.

Open Evenings were all about some sort of dating ritual.

Tonight had nothing to do with the stars for anyone. They were a mere pretense.

Wyatt rose, shoved her way clumsily past the people crowding the seats, ignoring their irate looks as she interrupted the make-out sessions. Just as she maneuvered blindly into the aisle, she collided with the large boy carrying a case. A solid shoulder sent her tumbling back, but powerful arms whipped out and caught her—though he lost his grip on his case. It clattered violently down the stairs. For a moment as she regained her balance, Wyatt found herself staring right into a pair of smoky-lashed eyes, a startling shade of blue. She’d seen this boy around, and called up his profile from memory:

NAME: Yuri Sysevich

RANK: USIF, Grade III Plebe, Alexander Division

ORIGIN: St. Petersburg, Russia

ACHIEVEMENTS: Chris Canning Award for Academic Excellence, Elsevier Wood Award for Young Humanitarian

IP: 2053:db7:lj71::236:113:638

SECURITY STATUS: Confidential LANDLOCK-1

“Are you all right?” His voice was low and soft, smooth like a river. She became aware of his broad shoulders, his towering height, the chiseled panes of his face, and just the lightest dusting of freckles over his nose.

“I’m fine,” she breathed, and looked back down at the stairs, where his case had tumbled and popped open. She’d heard something crunch. She imagined herself falling down the stairs between the aisle, and realized he’d caught her—at the expense of his case. She wrenched back. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. This was my fault.”

“It is fine.”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

His full, expressive mouth quirked, gaze searching her face. “There is no need to be.”

“But your thing broke.” She didn’t know what his thing was, but when Yuri moved past her, she followed to survey the damage for herself, full of dread, wondering how else she could screw things up tonight.

She crouched there and watched from the stairs as he gently lifted the lid. He had massive hands, as large as the rest of his tall, muscular body, but they handled the case with surprising delicacy. He pulled out a metallic cylinder inside, and she realized it was a telescope.

“I believe it was cushioned from the impact,” Yuri told her. His rich-brown bangs fluttered down over an eye as he leaned in to inspect the telescope carefully. “No harm has been done.”

“You came here to actually look at the stars?” Wyatt said wonderingly.

“Yes,” Yuri acknowledged with a ghost of a smile. She found it hard to meet his gaze suddenly, because he was intimidatingly good-looking. “I lived in Antarctica for several years as a child. The view here does not quite compare, but it makes me feel like I’m at home. . . . I suppose this seems strange to you.”

His earnest admission made something inside her crack, just a bit. She didn’t feel like an idiot now, coming here alone. Uncertainty still clutched her, because she hadn’t spoken to many boys other than Vikram and the ones who teased her. She certainly hadn’t figured out any ground rules for how she was supposed to act around them.

“You probably can’t see anything through that, anyway,” she told him. “The light pollution is awful.”

His eyebrows raised. “Would you like to test this out with me?”

Her breath caught.

Say no. Leave. This is a trap. Something bad will come of this.

She couldn’t help feeling a dreadful suspicion when anyone was nice to her. She’d already been fooled by Heather. She still hadn’t answered when Yuri began setting up the telescope. Wyatt noticed people looking their way, noticed the trainees who’d come there just to make out getting annoyed by the distraction of Yuri actually stargazing, the way they were supposed to. Suddenly protective, Wyatt drew closer to him.

“Yes,” she said firmly, “I suppose I will.”

AND IN THAT way, Wyatt managed to make a real friend. One that didn’t run away, one that didn’t have some motive. She never dared spill her loneliness, her feelings to him—she’d learned better after Heather had used those like a knife against her. But slowly she began to feel maybe Yuri would never do something like that anyway.

He was kind, and friendly, and always glad to see her, and in some ways, he was more of an exile than she was.

It was her inability to talk to people without offending them that isolated her, but Yuri had a much more crippling ailment.

She realized it the first time he called her “Wanda.” At first, she thought it was some sort of mistake, but then Yuri’s irritating friend, Vikram, sidled up to her and explained the popular theory.

“He calls me ‘Viktor’; he calls Beamer ‘Stefan.’ It’s too consistent.”

The Indian boy stretched out his legs as Wyatt sat awkwardly in Yuri’s bunk in Alexander Division. Yuri had invited her over, and she’d assumed he wanted help with Programming, or something similar. Instead, they’d just been sitting in his bunk together for twenty minutes.

Wyatt had spent the time racking her brain desperately for subjects people tended to discuss in casual conversation, wondering if Yuri noticed how awkward and unnatural she was at this. She’d already brought up the weather and baseball. Neither of them followed baseball, so that was a dead end, and the sky was a clear, crisp blue outside, so no luck there, either.

Much as she disliked Vik, as soon as he sauntered into the bunk, the talking thing became easier, because even though Vik mocked her, he mocked Yuri and sometimes himself, too.

Then Yuri ordered him, “Stop teasing Wanda, Viktor.”

Hence, Vik launching into his explanation. Right in front of Yuri.

“We think it’s malware,” Vik went on.

“Malware?” Wyatt said. She stared at Yuri, who was looking at them in a foggy manner like he couldn’t even hear them. It was creepy.

“Yeah, but official malware. Yuri’s Russian, okay? And we know how he got in here: his dad works for Joseph Vengerov, and Vengerov pulled strings for him.”

Wyatt nodded, recognizing the name of the CEO of Obsidian Corp. That was the company that designed all the neural processors, and most of the equipment used in the war effort.

“So the military had to take him or cross Vengerov, but they don’t trust a Russkie. That’s why Yuri is scrambled. He doesn’t hear things, or understand them. We can even talk about it right in front of him, like we’re doing now”—Vik nodded courteously to Yuri, who still gazed their way cluelessly—“and he doesn’t understand. You just get used to it.”

Wyatt peered at Vik suspiciously, alarmed by the fogginess on Yuri’s face. “So how much does he really see or hear?”

Vik grinned. “Sit with us in Programming class next time. You’ll see.”

Wyatt looked at Yuri uncertainly. “So when will he tune back in again?”

“Just move on to another subject,” Vik told her. He focused on Yuri and said, “Enslow has Man Hands.”

Wyatt glared at Vik, but that roused Yuri right away. “Her hands are excellently proportioned. Do not listen to him, Wanda.”

BEING INVITED TO sit with people in Programming rubbed a sore point, especially because she was terrified every time she walked into the class now that Blackburn was actively hunting for the Spire’s rogue hacker. It was a misery knowing she was better at programming than anyone in the room, but she couldn’t show it—she had to mess up her own code to draw suspicion off herself.

As Blackburn strode onto the stage, Vik caught her eye and mouthed, “Three, two, one . . .”

With that, Yuri abruptly slumped over. Wyatt’s heart jerked, but Vik and Beamer were both laughing, each catching a shoulder to reposition Yuri into a more comfortable spot.

“He’s okay,” Vik assured her. “Programming is confidential. On the dot, every day, he zones out. He’ll wake up after class with no idea what happened.”

Wyatt stared at Yuri. He couldn’t be a spy. It was cruel, almost, not even giving him a chance to prove himself.

Class ended early, but Yuri’s program only released its grip on him at the standard time. She stayed seated next to him on the bench after everyone filed out to lunch. She was there when he roused abruptly, and blinked about them groggily.

His eyes lit upon hers, and a sleepy smile crossed his lips. “Wanda.”

“Hello.”

“That was quite a class,” Yuri murmured. “Everyone left so quickly.”

She stared at him. He really had no idea he’d been unconscious through the whole thing. How much was the computer twisting his perception?

What if it wasn’t just names? Did he even look at her and see her? Or was it some other girl he saw?

Maybe he was so impervious to the things she did, the insults she accidentally said, the social blunders she made, because he didn’t perceive them.

With a pang, she found herself remembering the night in the Planetarium, when they’d taken turns looking in the telescope. She’d been telling him about one of the stellar phenomena that most fascinated her, the way the Wolf-Rayet star was primed to go supernova—and possibly emit a gamma ray along the line of its axis that could sterilize all life on Earth. She realized suddenly that her voice was the only one ringing out in the dim room, far too loud, and she was doing that thing she did when she got so interested in something: she rambled about it until other people grew upset with her. Mortification burned through her. But when her gaze shot to his, just for a moment, she realized Yuri was actually still listening to her, watching her face as though fascinated, his gaze like a caress on her skin. That made her stutter into silence, and hastily dodge his eyes, but she thought about it sometimes afterward. It always made her stomach flutter strangely.

Now she didn’t even know if he had really been there with her as she spoke of the Wolf-Rayet star, or if he was ever there. She didn’t even know if he was here with her now. That was the worst part. He was the only person she’d truly connected with here, and it could be that he just appreciated her because he couldn’t really perceive her.

Sitting next to Yuri now, a terrible emptiness flooded her, plunging her back into the bleak depths she’d felt after Heather turned on her. She felt more lonely than ever.

“I’m thinking about leaving,” she told him abruptly. “Quitting. They can do a phased removal of the neural processor, I heard.”

He straightened up. “Don’t.”

“We go on break in a week. I think I’ll quit before then. I heard Heather Akron is getting promoted. Wyndham Harks is sponsoring her now. I don’t want to sit through her promotion ceremony.”

He exhaled slowly, rubbing his wavy hair. “You should do what will make you happy, Wanda. But . . .”

She gazed at the bench in front of her, where the wood was splintering.

“I will be sorry to see you go,” Yuri noted. “I do not wish to lose a friend.”

He’d said “friend.” Her breath caught. She looked at him. “Do you mean that? Am I really . . . are we friends?”

“Of course we are,” Yuri said, and she wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be truthful. “We always will be friends.”

She felt it like a sharp stab, because they wouldn’t be. If she lost the neural processor, she’d go back to that place she’d been before. The isolated realm where people were strange, irrational puzzles she didn’t care to piece together, and she never mourned the empty hours.

It was a comfortable place, but Yuri could never share it.

THERE WAS A limited window for having a neural processor removed. The brain steadily grew more reliant on it, and there was no leaving the Intrasolar Forces once it was fully dependent. Wyatt knew she was getting to the point where she needed to decide once and for all what her path would be.

She waited until she visited home for winter break.

She expected to see her home through new eyes now that she’d been away for three months and her brain had undergone profound changes. Indeed, there was a certain musty smell to the place she’d never noticed before, and the shadows seemed darker at night. There always seemed to be something casting light in the Pentagonal Spire, but not here in Connecticut.

The starkest change was at the large dining table, where her father sat at one end, her mother at the other, and she right in the middle. Wyatt sat there as their maid served their dishes, and cast her gaze to the right, across the gulf of table to her mother, sipping at her wine. To the left, her father was already shoveling food into his mouth, crumbs sticking to his beard.

She’d never noticed the silence before. It was quiet as a tomb, with only the clink of silverware, and her father’s vigorous chewing. They’d only asked a few cursory questions when she first arrived, some about classified things Wyatt couldn’t divulge. They stopped asking.

Later that night, Wyatt was seated before the antique dresser, gazing at her own face. She’d never noticed it much, either, in the past. Somehow her mother’s dramatic Hispanic beauty and her father’s swarthy English features contrived to render her utterly unremarkable. Her nose was long and arrogant looking, her complexion sallow, eyebrows straight lines. Her hair hung flatly past her dimpled chin. The only thing she liked was the color of her eyes, a rich brown framed by a sweep of long, dark lashes.

Her mother surprised her by coming in and brushing her hair. Wyatt felt a flicker of . . . something, remembering this. From when she was little.

“Do you love me?”

Esperanza’s dark eyes met hers in the mirror, just briefly. “What a silly question.”

But she hadn’t answered, and Wyatt just wanted her to answer. She needed that answer if she was going to withdraw, to commit to leaving the Pentagonal Spire, leaving this person she was now.

The bristles crackled through her hair.

“Of course I love you. Your father and I both do.”

But her mother said it briskly, it a way that didn’t warm that part of Wyatt’s chest that needed it.

Wyatt didn’t know how to be what her mother wanted. She knew in her heart that however much she’d accomplished, even when she’d gotten a gold medal in the Mathematics Olympiad, when she blew people away in the area of her strength, she’d never been the daughter her mother had hoped for.

Maybe it was too late to change that.

SHE RETURNED FROM break reluctantly, knowing the clock was ticking down before she had to make her decision. The bleak visit home was a point for the Spire, but everyday existence at the Spire was a point for home. Was she doomed to be unhappy everywhere she went?

She’d been leery of Yuri ever since seeing him zone out in programming. There was something painful about being around him when she wasn’t sure how real his friendship was, or how much of it just stemmed from his inability to actually perceive her. Without him around, though, she was lonelier than ever.

She was afraid of staying in her bunk with her new roommate, for fear of alienating someone else, and spent the first couple days back wandering restlessly through the areas she was permitted in the Pentagonal Spire. She’d spend hours by herself tucked away in any corner she could, reading. Her favorite place to read was the arboretum, but there were people hanging out there today. That’s why she crunched into the vast, empty Calisthenics Arena the first Thursday night.

But it wasn’t so empty, after all. She’d been sitting on a low wall for a few minutes when someone emerged from the weight room.

“Ms. Enslow.”

Wyatt tensed up, recognizing the voice, low and rough, and glanced behind her. Even out of uniform, Lieutenant Blackburn was intimidatingly large, with wide shoulders, and fine lines feathering the skin by his eyes that lent him a certain appearance like he was squinting, or just focused very intently on whatever he was looking at. Frown lines carved deep grooves in his face, framing the hard slash of his lips, and she felt a terrible dread as his gaze rested heavily on her, certain everything she’d done was exposed on her face.

His next words made it worse. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

“Why?” Wyatt choked out, horrified.

His expression altered, becoming searching. “It’s been a few months. How are you holding up?”

She stayed rooted in place, wondering what he could possibly be talking about. Holding up . . . under his relentless scrutiny, as he searched for signs of who the hacker was? Under the pressure of total social isolation in a high-stress environment? What?

“How are you holding up?” he repeated, tapping his forehead.

She realized it. “Oh. Oh! You mean the neural processor. Great. I’m fine.”

She knew his neural processor had driven him insane. He’d made no secret about that fact to the students. Every adult brain was damaged by the computers; that’s why only teenagers could receive them. He’d returned to sanity by reprogramming his own processor—a slow and difficult task. If he didn’t frighten her, she’d want to ask him several dozen questions about that. She had a mental list of questions she knew she’d never get to ask.

“You’ve adjusted?” He wiped a towel over his face. There was a great V of sweat staining his shirt. “It’s a significant transition for you. I imagine it’s rougher for you than the other trainees.”

Wyatt peered at him, torn between the impulse to run, and the question she’d had ever since that day in the infirmary. Finally it just burst out. “Why did you say I was fine the way I was?”

He stared at her mutely a moment, like she needed to clarify the question.

“In the infirmary. Before I got the processor. You said there was nothing wrong with my brain the way it was . . . but there was. You know that.”

He slung the towel over his shoulder. “Intellectually, you weren’t impaired. There was absolutely nothing that would’ve prevented you from living a full, independent life. You didn’t have a disability. Your brain was simply different.”

“But I couldn’t relate to people. How can you exist like that? There’s something wrong with me.” There still was. She was sure of it. “People can’t just be alone.”

He shrugged his large shoulders. “There are millions of people in this world surrounded by friends and family who spend their days feeling lonely, Enslow. Aloneness is just another part of the human experience. There are others who are completely isolated and utterly satisfied with their lives. You don’t need other people to validate you or fill in the blanks you’re missing; you just need some faith in yourself.”

“Faith?” she echoed.

“If you’re satisfied now, feeling the same social impulses the rest of us do, then more power to you. If you were satisfied before without those needs, then that would’ve been fine as well. I don’t believe in fixing something that doesn’t need to be repaired, and you’ve never needed to be.”

For a moment, as the words rested on the air between them, the reckless impulse to blurt it all out to him, to confess to being the hacker, almost drove her into disaster. Then voices rang out as more people trickled into the Calisthenics Arena, and Wyatt remembered all those classes when she’d said nothing after Blackburn tried to get the hacker to fess up. So many times, she’d sat there silently, and those were terrible marks against her.

So she did the only thing she could—she hurried out and kept her secret.

“AVAST, YE SCURVY knave, prepare to meet yer maker!”

Wyatt sighed and turned to glare at the avatar of Tom Raines, wearing a big stupid grin in the doorway, sword in hand. Of course he’d come here. Apparently he’d confused Arthurian England with a pirate ship.

Something irritated her about the new plebe already, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was already fast friends with Stephen Beamer and Vikram Ashwan. When he’d strolled into the training room today, Tom had spun around and leaped backward up onto his cot, then settled there, looking more at ease his second day of Applied Scrimmages than she’d felt in months at the Spire. He couldn’t simply scoot up onto it like everyone else; he had to do things in some big, dramatic manner, then just sweep his gaze restlessly around the room, like he knew some private joke no one else did. He just seemed intent on bringing an element of disorder to everything.

She wasn’t the only one he rubbed the wrong way. In Programming class the day before, Tom must’ve done something to aggravate Lieutenant Blackburn, because Blackburn called him up for a demonstration, the way he always did to trainees giving him trouble, but never before to a new plebe. Tom and Blackburn went through computer virus after computer virus, and Tom could’ve stopped it anytime by showing the slightest bit of humility; instead he set his jaw and faced Blackburn in a willful, stubborn manner, always plastering on this lopsided smile and inviting something else onto himself like he’d win a prize digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. It ended up taking up the whole class.

She would’ve died of embarrassment if she’d been programmed into thinking she was a dog in front of everyone, but Tom began laughing about it afterward like it was funny. That’s when she realized he still hadn’t learned anything from it.

And then he did the same kind of thing this afternoon, in Applied Sims. Their group leader, Elliot Ramirez, always liked to give them a pep talk before their simulations, but today, Tom had subtly disrupted everything. It started innocuously with him sitting there, legs spread wide, boots dangling toward the ground, kicking first one foot, then the other. Then he shifted restlessly to the front of the cot, then to the back. At one point, he nearly tumbled off the side to the floor, and grinned sheepishly when Wyatt shot him an exasperated look. He raised his eyebrows at her in silent question, and she cut her gaze away.

She had not been staring, if that’s what he thought.

He wasn’t handsome at all—not with his light blue eyes, wide apart and pale-lashed above broad cheekbones that gave way to hollow cheeks, a wide mouth, and a stubborn jaw. When Wyatt first saw him trailing Vik in the mess hall, he looked small to her, almost defenseless. He struck her as someone the Pentagonal Spire would devour.

She’d genuinely wanted to help him, especially when Vik told her Yuri was requesting she do this. She might be staying clear of Yuri right now, but she felt like she owed it to him to do a favor for his friend.

So she hacked one last profile, and tweaked one thing—the N/A under his accomplishments. She asked Tom what he wanted listed under his accomplishments instead.

Tom’s eyes met hers, and she saw there was nothing shy or retiring there, just an electrified sort of animation that gripped his every moment, his quick, flashing grin. He wasn’t like Heather or her friends—he didn’t ask for grandiose or amazing accomplishments.

No. Instead, he treated it all like a joke.

“Champion lawn bowler. Founding contributor to the world’s largest ball of earwax.”

It was all Wyatt could do to type them in, embarrassment flushing through her. He obviously hadn’t even cared about the risk she was taking on his behalf. Sure, he’d breezily assured her he’d cover for her if Lieutenant Blackburn asked him about it, but she didn’t believe for a second he’d have her back if trouble rained down on her head over this.

He’d even refused to participate in the ritual of fealty—a part of today’s simulation—and gotten himself relegated to the Guinevere character, therefore trapped in the castle. She’d stayed behind, too, because she was too overwrought today, worrying about whether Blackburn had detected her in the system, to really focus on a dumb, simulated battle.

She’d hoped surrounding herself with reading material would repel the other occupant of the castle. Out of curiosity, she’d unrolled some of the scrolls, wondering what had been programmed in. Amusement flickered through her when she realized every simulated scroll in the library was Le Morte d’Arthur.

But Tom found her, anyway. And it became clear within moments that he intended to stay. Right there. In the same room. Talking to her. Anxiety twisted through her at the very idea of giving Vik’s new friend reasons to tell people how weird she was.

“Feel free to go somewhere else,” she tried desperately, but he ignored her and just hoisted himself up onto one of the tables.

“Look,” he told her, his eyes sparkling with good humor like he knew he was annoying her, but had decided to do it anyway, “Blackburn did that whole dog demonstration on me because I wouldn’t tell him who changed my profile. The least you can do is tolerate my presence for a bit.”

Shock sprang through her at the confirmation of her worst suspicions. “Blackburn asked you about me?”

Oh no. Oh no, I knew it was a mistake!

“About the person hacking the profiles, yeah. I didn’t tell, though, so don’t worry.”

Then the implications of his words sank in, and Wyatt felt a flicker of doubt, remembering the humiliating confrontation Tom and Blackburn had in front of all the trainees the day before. Her brain tried to wrap around the idea that he’d done that to keep his promise to her. She’d just thought he was being stupidly stubborn.

She eyed him uncertainly, wondering what the proper thing to say was, wondering if he was going to point out her ingratitude, but Tom was busy shifting around again just like he had on the cots. “Man, this girl stuff is throwing me off. A wolf is a completely different body, so you expect to move all differently, but a girl’s close enough that I keep trying to move the way I do normally.”

Even if she hadn’t known whose avatar it was, she would’ve guessed it was Tom, the way he spread his legs and sprawled there like he felt some pathological need to take up more space than his body naturally would. That, and the complete unselfconsciousness of his every movement. She tried to imagine sprawling out like that in front of someone and felt herself blanch.

“You won’t notice after a few more sims.”

He said nothing, and her eyes skittered back to his face. He was staring with openmouthed amazement and joy at his avatar’s breasts. To Wyatt’s disbelief, he began to examine them hands-on, right there in front of her. She felt compelled to clear her throat, and remind him she was actually still in the room with him.

“You aren’t just planning to sit there groping yourself in front of me, are you?” she asked him. “It’s kind of rude.”

To his credit, Tom looked a bit sheepish. She hadn’t been sure before whether he was even capable of feeling embarrassment. “What, come on, you’ve got some new equipment, too. You’re not curious?”

She was going to sink into the floor; she swore it. Yes, perhaps once, just once, she’d been slightly curious and looked in her male avatar’s pants. For two seconds. That was all. Just two seconds. She’d never done it again.

“It’s not like I haven’t played sims as men before,” she mumbled.

Tom flashed his teeth in a big, brazen grin like he knew exactly what she was thinking about, his eyes dancing in the flickering light of the nearby torches. “Right. So you’ve already done the groping thing.”

The words caught her throat in a sudden stranglehold, because she hadn’t meant him to take it that way. Her ears grew hot. “That’s not what I said!”

“You have to have wondered . . .”

“I am not having this discussion!” she burst out, frantic. Heat burned all over her face—over the back of her neck, even—and she tried moving to another spot in the room to escape his relentless pestering. She’d really only looked once, and she’d die of embarrassment if he figured that out.

She was spared, luckily, by the sound of a commotion from outside, thousands of voices and footsteps, then the first indications of a battle. She glanced back at Tom, and saw the expectant gleam on his face as he gazed out the window, like he knew exactly what was about to happen.

“Wait,” she called to him before he could leave. “What’s happening?”

His eyes found hers, almost absently, and then he explained to her what was going on, and she realized with dull surprise that Tom had just pulled off the most clever maneuver she’d ever heard a trainee pull off in a simulation. Elliot had forced him to stay in the castle rather than go off to battle the Saxons with the rest of the enemy group, so Tom was taking advantage of his role as queen.

“Queen Guinevere can lower the drawbridge and order the castle sentries to stand down. Just like this Queen Guinevere did about ten minutes ago.” His grin grew fiendish. “Oh, and she can also send a messenger to the Saxon king to let him know Camelot’s defenseless.”

Wyatt stared at him, at this boy who she’d dismissed out of hand as Vik’s new friend, someone sure to call her Man Hands and treat everything she did like a joke. She still found people so puzzling, yet it could surprise her when they surprised her.

She’d assumed the N/A in his profile meant he was like Heather, someone who’d manipulated or cheated his way into here. Especially once he treated the profile thing like a joke. Suddenly she understood that someone didn’t need achievements on paper to be frighteningly clever.

He really had told her he’d have her back with Blackburn because he meant it. He’d gone into that with eyes wide open. And she’d judged him so quickly.

Wyatt wasn’t sure what to say. She didn’t know how people handled stuff like this. “Sorry you looked stupid to me,” or “Sorry I thought you were like Vik” wouldn’t seem to cut it.

And for some reason, as Tom grabbed her unused sword and headed toward the door, she suspected that it wouldn’t even matter to him that she’d thought badly of him. She was the one who got pierced by others and felt the sting deep long after. She’d bet arrows just glanced right off him.

But she still felt compelled to say something. “Tom!”

He stopped and swung back around to look at her, eyebrows arched in question.

Wyatt felt strange, nervous somehow. “Thanks for not telling Blackburn. I’m sorry I got you turned into a dog.”

It seemed a paltry offering, but Tom took it with a cheerful wave of the sword. “Hey, I was a dog for you, and now you’ve given a glorious instrument of death to me, so I’d say we’re even.” And then, without a second thought, he charged off to fight the Saxons. Wyatt settled at the window as the sounds of battle drifted through the halls, as arrows rained down from the castle walls onto the attacking soldiers, as a gleeful Guinevere appeared over one of the nearby battlements, waving for hot oil to be poured on the attackers, throwing a torch down on them herself.

In less than an hour, Tom had transformed the dignified queen character into some crazed, psychotic warrior woman. Wyatt had a last glimpse of him before he disappeared back inside, Guinevere’s hair hanging undone and wild in all directions, dress in tatters, oversized armor hanging oddly off his body, a maniacal grin on his lips.

She wondered what it was like, being able to totally abandon oneself like that. Ever since getting the neural processor and becoming aware of others, she’d felt a virtual hostage to their eyes, to their judgment, to their opinions. She tried to imagine for a moment feeling so utterly impervious to people. It was like he was larger than her somehow. It was like he was invincible.

She pulled the curtain over the window, suddenly filled with a longing for even an inch of that invisible armor of confidence he seemed to have, the shield she felt like she lacked. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel like an open wound walking around the world, chafed by the slightest breeze.

But she didn’t even know where to start. She didn’t even know if she had that sort of strength inside her. All she could do was find some way to pay Tom back for keeping her a secret from Blackburn.

HER CHANCE CAME sooner than she expected.

Tom had somehow managed to make another enemy in Karl Marsters, a large Combatant who frightened most people with common sense into staying clear of him. As soon as Wyatt emerged from the elevator that Sunday, she found Tom in Karl’s death grip in the middle of the plebe common room, Karl’s friends encircling them. She felt a ripple of sheer happiness, because this was her chance, finally! This was her opportunity to pay him back for covering for her—and accomplish with a program what her attempts at saying thanks never could.

When her computer virus hit Karl and his friends, Tom jerked to his feet. She realized with some surprise that he was as tall as her now. He threw a frantic look around, obviously trying to put the pieces together about where his attackers had gone.

Then he saw Karl and his friends on the ground, and Wyatt explained, “They’re chickens.” She’d tried to mimic the computer virus Blackburn had used on Tom a few days earlier, the one that convinced the victim they were a dog. She’d modified it a bit, and just for fun, changed it to a chicken, but she hadn’t had the chance to test it out on anyone yet.

Tom looked at her with an amazed smile, like she’d just offered some present he’d always wanted but never expected to obtain.

“Wyatt, you seriously helped me out there. Thanks, I owe you big-time.”

She squirmed inwardly, uncertain how to handle genuine gratitude. Some part of her was soaring; another part of her knew she’d say the wrong thing from here and just wanted to flee. She settled with, “I just wanted to try the program. It’s not like I went out of my way to save you.”

But when she raised her eyes, expecting Tom to have cooled, she found him laughing, still gazing at her like she was something incredible. “This is where you say, ‘You’re welcome.’ It’s okay to take credit.”

The situation grew better when Heather Akron strolled out and tried to play innocent, even though she’d apparently handed Tom over to get beaten up by Karl. Wyatt stared on, amazed, as Heather spun the situation, claiming she’d actually tricked Karl by agreeing to help him grab Tom for beating-up purposes, but planning all along to call some of Tom’s friends to come help him.

She even had an excuse for not letting Tom in on her grand scheme beforehand. “You had to look all hurt and betrayed for Karl to trust me,” Heather simpered, gazing at Tom from under her lashes. “I didn’t know how good of an actor you were.”

Wyatt couldn’t stand to listen to another word; she couldn’t stand here and just watch someone get suckered by Heather the way she had once.

“That’s so easy for you to say now that it’s all over,” Wyatt cut in, “but if you were going to call one of Tom’s friends to tell them he needed help, why didn’t you do it at the same time you called Karl so they’d be ready to come help him? For all you knew, they weren’t even in the Spire today.”

There was something so satisfying about the anger flashing over Heather’s face. “I’m sorry, but I don’t really know you . . . Wyatt, isn’t it?”

Wyatt’s blood felt like it was going to boil into steam and come shooting out of her ears, because Heather was really going to do this. She was actually going to treat her like she was such a nonentity that she didn’t even remember her name, much less sit next to her in Programming every day for weeks, wheedling one profile change out of her after another. She was only half-aware of Tom looking blankly between the two of them, and Wyatt remembered then a scrap of what she’d told him the day before.

He knew she’d changed the profile for someone who’d gotten into CamCo, someone who’d never bothered talking to her again. Let Tom know the truth, she decided. Let Heather try to fool him once he hears about that.

“That’s weird,” Wyatt told Heather, staring directly into her eyes. “You knew my name a few months ago when I helped with your profile.”

She noticed the sharp swing of Tom’s head, because he was quick enough on the uptake to realize what she was referring to, and Heather turned white with anger. Even as she sputtered indignantly about Wyatt being presumptuous, Wyatt felt a sense of vindication. Heather had tricked her all those months ago, but she hadn’t let Heather trick him.

Later that night, Wyatt found herself in her bunk, closing her eyes and replaying for a moment Tom’s grin for her when she’d saved him.

Even though she hadn’t truly seen people before the neural processor, she was sure she’d never had someone smile at her like that before—not a smile just to humor her, not because they pitied her, not because they were amused by how strange she was . . . but simply because they admired her strength. And if she was totally honest with herself, she’d surprised herself. She’d taken down four trainees with one computer virus. Large as he was, even Yuri couldn’t have rushed in and easily pried them off Tom, especially Karl Marsters, who was as big as he was.

But she’d done it.

Wyatt remembered how pathetically grateful she’d been as a brand-new plebe when Heather Akron just talked to her, when she treated her like she wasn’t a freak. She was stronger than that girl now. She was sure of it.

Perhaps a day would come when she’d be stronger still—when she’d finally have faith in herself just the way she was.

THE IMPOSSIBLE IS JUST THE BEGINNING.
READ ON FOR A SAMPLE OF

INSIGNIA

AS THE ADVENTURES OF

WYATT, TOM, YURI, AND VIK CONTINUE.

Chapter One

NEW TOWN, NEW casino—same old plan. Arizona’s Dusty Squanto Casino made it easy for Tom Raines, since he didn’t even have to pay his way into their virtual reality parlor. He slipped into the room, settled onto a couch in the back corner, and looked over the crowd of gamers, taking them in one at a time. His gaze settled on the two men in the opposite corner, and locked onto target.

Them, Tom thought.

The men stood with VR visors on, wired gloves clenched in the air. Their racing simulation blazed across an overhead screen for anyone who wanted to bet on the outcome. No one would bet on this race, though. One man was a good driver—he navigated the virtual track with the skill of an experienced gamer—and the other was pitifully bad. His car’s fender dragged across the wall of the arena, and the fake onlookers were screaming and dodging out of the way.

The winning racer gave a triumphant laugh as his car plowed across the finish line. He turned to the other man, chest puffed with victory, and demanded payment.

Tom smiled from his solitary spot on the couch.

Enjoy it while you can, buddy.

He timed it just right, waiting until the winner started counting up his bills to rise to his feet and wander into his line of sight. Tom noisily rattled one of the VR sets out of its storage container, then made a show of putting on the gloves the wrong way, before painstakingly adjusting them so the cloth and mesh wiring clasped his arms up to his elbows. Out of the corner of his eye, he became aware of the winning racer watching him.

“You like playing games, kid?” the man said to him. “Wanna have a go next?”

Tom gave him the wide-eyed, innocent look that he knew made him appear a lot younger than he was. Even though he was fourteen, he was short and skinny and had such bad acne that people usually couldn’t guess his real age.

“I’m just looking. My dad says I’m not allowed to gamble.”

The man licked his lips. “Oh, don’t you worry. Your dad doesn’t even have to know. Put down a few bucks, and we’ll have us a great race. Maybe you’ll win. How much money do you have?”

“Only fifty bucks.”

Tom knew better than to say more than that. More than that, and people wanted to see it before taking up the bet. He actually had about two dollars in his pocket.

“Fifty bucks?” the man said. “That’s enough. This is just car racing. You can race a car, can’t you?” He twisted an invisible wheel. “Nothing to it. And think: you beat me, and you’ll double that fifty.”

“Really?”

“Really, kid. Let’s have a go.” A condescending chuckle. “I’ll pay up for sure if you win.”

“But if I lose . . .” Tom let that hang there. “That’s all my money. I just . . . I can’t.” He started walking away, waiting for the magic words.

“All right, kid,” the guy called. “Double or nothing.”

Ha! Tom thought.

“I win,” the man said, “and I’ll get fifty. You win, you get a hundred. You can’t beat that. Take a chance.”

Tom turned slowly, fighting the laughter rising in his throat. This guy must already taste his easy fifty bucks since he’d fallen for the act so readily. Most casinos had one or two gamers who practically lived in the VR parlors, fancying themselves gods among men who could beat any chump luckless enough to enter their territory. Tom loved the way they looked at him: as some scrawny, stupid little kid they could easily con. He loved even more seeing their smiles disappear when he wiped the floor with them.

Just to be safe, Tom kept up the act. He made a show of fumbling as he strapped on the VR visor. “Okay, you’re on, I guess.”

Triumph rang in the man’s voice. “We’re on.”

They were off. Their cars roared to life and tore furiously down the track. Tom mentally ticked off the laps, taking it all very deliberately. He made a few token mistakes here and there. They were never enough to slow him down much, just enough to ensure he was lagging behind the other car. The man, puffed up with confidence and certain of winning, whirled his steering wheel with great, lashing sweeps of his wired gloves. As the finish line appeared and the man’s car turned at the right angle, Tom finally let a grin blaze across his lips.

One flick of his glove did the trick. He rammed his car forward and clipped the guy’s back fender, then floored his gas. The man bellowed in rage and disbelief when his car swerved off the road in a rain of sparks.

Tom’s car sailed past the finish line while the other car crashed and exploded in the arena’s side ditch.

“What—what—” the man sputtered.

Tom flipped up his visor. “Whoops. I think I have played that game before.” He tugged off his gloves. “Wanna fork over my hundred bucks?”

He watched, fascinated, the way a vein began popping out and fluttering in the man’s forehead. “You little—You can’t—You’re . . .”

“You’re not gonna pay me, then?” Tom cast an idle glance toward the man’s recent victim, now sitting on a nearby couch. The bad driver was suddenly interested in their exchange. Tom raised his voice to make sure the man could make out every word. “I guess no one’s playing games for money in here. Is that it?”

The gamer followed Tom’s gaze to his victim, catching the implication: if he wouldn’t pay Tom, then the other guy shouldn’t have paid him.

The man spluttered a bit like the engine of his wrecked car, then jerked a hundred bucks out of a wad from his pocket. He crammed the bills into Tom’s hand, muttering something about a rematch.

Tom flipped through the bills, completely enjoying the man’s outrage. “You want a rematch, I’m game. Double or nothing, again? I could really use another two hundred dollars.”

The man turned a curious shade of scarlet, cut his losses, and fled the room. As for the newbie on the couch, he gave Tom a grateful thumbs-up. Tom returned it, then stashed the bills in his pocket. One hundred dollars. Usually he had to pull off the bet with a few more gamers to make enough for a night’s stay—VR sims involved such low stakes, after all—but at a dive like the Dusty Squanto Casino, a hundred would be enough for a room.

Tom’s mind already whirled with the promises of the night ahead. A bed. Television. Air-conditioning. A real shower. He could even come back here and play games just for fun.

The ghastly realization hit just as he reached the door: he was at a casino with a VR parlor.

He had absolutely no excuse for missing school this afternoon.

TOM STAYED IN the VR parlor and logged into the Rosewood Reformatory sim for the first time in two weeks. In four years at Rosewood, he’d never skipped such a long stretch of school before, and he’d already missed most of class today. Just the sight in his visor of Ms. Falmouth’s avatar and her virtual chalkboard killed any lingering satisfaction over his victory.

She immediately focused her attention on him. “Tom Raines,” she said. “Thank you for gracing us with your presence today.”

“You’re welcome,” Tom said. He knew it would just annoy her, but it wasn’t like she had a good opinion of him to be ruined.

To be fair, he missed class a lot. Mostly not on purpose. Mostly he missed school due to losing access to an internet connection. It was just another hazard of having a gambler for a father.

Tom’s dad, Neil, usually saved enough money to pay for a roof over their heads and some food at the gift shop. But some days he got totally cleaned out at the poker tables. It happened more and more in recent years as the last of his luck deserted him. When Neil squandered their money, and Tom couldn’t find any sucker to bet against him in the VR parlors, they had to skip on small luxuries like hotel rooms. They ended up in a park or at a bus station or lying on benches at the train station.

Now with Ms. Falmouth and his entire class watching him, Tom tried to think of an excuse he’d never used before to explain why he’d missed the last ten days. He’d missed school so many times, he’d repeated himself a couple times by accident. He’d already lied about going to the funerals of all his grandparents, and even a couple great-grandparents, and there were only so many times he could say he “fell down a well” or “got lost in the woods” or “got hit in the head and got amnesia” before even he thought he sounded like a colossal idiot.

Today, he tried, “There was this massive cyberattack on all the local VR parlors. Russo-Chinese hackers, you know? The Department of Homeland Security came in and had to interview everyone in a ten-mile radius. I couldn’t even access the internet.”

Ms. Falmouth just shook her head. “Don’t waste your breath, Tom.”

Tom dropped into a seat, irrationally disappointed. It had been a good lie this time, too.

The avatars throughout the classroom sniggered at him, the way they always did, at Tom the loser who never knew what assignments were due, who never turned in his homework, who couldn’t even manage to show up at an online class most days. He tuned his classmates out and occupied himself with twirling a pencil, which was trickier in VR than most people realized. The sensors of most standard-issue wired gloves had a strange lag time, and Tom figured honing his dexterity with them could only help him in future games.

He heard a whisper from beside him. “I liked your excuse.”

Tom threw a careless glance toward the girl next to him. She must’ve joined the class sometime in the last two weeks. Her avatar was a gorgeous brunette with striking yellow-brown eyes. “Thanks. Nice avatar.”

“I’m Heather.” She flashed him a smile. “And this isn’t an avatar.”

Sure it isn’t, Tom thought. People didn’t look like that in real life unless they were celebrities. But he nodded like he believed her. “I’m Tom. And believe it or not, this”—he gestured to himself like he was proud of how very handsome he was—“isn’t an avatar, either.”

Heather giggled, because his avatar looked just like him, with acne and scrawny limbs and all. It definitely wasn’t an image anyone would use to impress people online.

Ms. Falmouth turned back to face them. “Tom, Heather, are you done interrupting me, or do you need more time for your conversation?”

“Sorry,” Tom said. “We’re all through.”

Tom hadn’t seen eye to eye with Ms. Falmouth since he’d shown up for the first day of school a few years ago as Lord Krull from the game Celtic Quest. She’d yelled at him in front of everyone for being insolent, like he had done it as part of some elaborate scheme to mock her class. He’d just liked Lord Krull from Celtic Quest, that was all.

From then on, Tom always came to class as himself. He never signed on to the internet without an avatar if he could help it. It felt like he’d left his real skin behind, showing up at Rosewood as the same ugly, pale-eyed, and blond-haired Thomas Raines who tailed behind his dad in the real world. Never mind that he didn’t believe for a second that the new girl sitting next to him really looked like her beautiful brunette avatar, and Serge Leon, in the back corner, was way too blustering to be a hulking six-footer in real life. He was probably four foot something and fat.

But Ms. Falmouth didn’t seem to care about them. Whenever Tom was around, her radar was trained on him.

“Our subject’s the current war, Tom. Perhaps you can contribute to our discussion. What is an offshored conflict?”

His thoughts flickered to what he’d seen in the news and on the internet, the clips of the ships fighting in space, controlled remotely by the top-secret combatants identified only by their call signs. “An offshored conflict is a war fought somewhere other than Earth. It’s in space or on another planet.”

“And the sky is blue, and the sun rises in the east. I’ll need much more than the blatantly obvious.”

Tom stopped twirling the virtual pencil and tried to concentrate. “Modern wars aren’t fought by people. I mean, they’re kind of fought by people, because people on Earth control mechanized drones remotely, but the machines do the actual fighting. If our machines don’t get demolished by Russo-Chinese machines, our country wins the battle.”

“And who is involved in the current conflict, Tom?”

“The whole world. That’s why it’s called World War III.” She seemed to be waiting for more, so Tom ticked off the major players on his virtual fingers: “India and America are allies, and the Euro-Australian block is aligned with us. Russia and China are allies, and they’re supported by the African states and the South American Federation. The Coalition of Multinationals, the twelve most powerful corporations in the world, is split down the middle between our two sides. And . . . yeah. That’s about it.”

That was pretty much all he knew about the war. He wasn’t sure what else she wanted. He couldn’t list all the tiny little countries allied with the two sides if he tried, and he doubted anyone else in the room could, either. There was a reason Rosewood was a reform school—most of its students couldn’t cut it in a real, building one.

“Would you like to explain one notable characteristic about this offshored conflict, as opposed to wars in ages past?”

“No?” he tried hopefully.

“I wasn’t really asking. Now answer the question.”

Tom started twirling his pencil again. This was how Ms. Falmouth operated. She questioned him until he ran through all his knowledge, messed up, and looked like an idiot. This time he’d give it to her. “Dunno. Sorry.”

Ms. Falmouth sighed as though she expected nothing more, and moved on to her next victim. “Heather, you two look to be making fast friends. If you’re talking during class on your first day here, maybe you can list a notable characteristic for Tom.”

Heather gave Tom a quick, sidelong look, then answered, “By going to war on other planets, and avoiding fights on Earth, we resolve issues through violence, but we avoid most of the consequences of traditional warfare such as debilitating injuries, human deaths, disruption of infrastructure, and environmental contamination. That’s four notable characteristics. Do you want me to list more than that, Ms. Falmouth?”

Ms. Falmouth was silent for several seconds, perhaps stunned at how readily Heather had answered the question. “That’ll quite do, Heather. Very well articulated. Offshored conflicts are practical socially as well as ecologically.” She strode to the board. “I’d like you all to think of some ways the nature of conflict has shifted the consequences we face. . . .”

Heather took the opportunity to whisper to Tom, “I didn’t mean to get you in trouble.”

Tom laughed softly and shook his head. “You didn’t get me in trouble. This is just Ms. Falmouth letting me know how much she missed me.”

His gloves vibrated, signaling that someone was making physical contact with his avatar. Tom glanced down, startled, and saw her hand resting on his arm. Her voice was a breathy whisper. “You sure?”

Tom stared at her as Ms. Falmouth’s voice carried on: “. . . exported conflicts serve several purposes . . .”

“I’m sure,” he told her, so keenly aware of her touch she might as well have been next to him touching him in real life, too.

Heather’s hand trailed down his arm and then slipped away. She nestled it back on her desktop. Tom found himself wondering what she actually looked like. Her avatar didn’t even look like a ninth grader. Was she older than him?

“With the weaponry we use nowadays,” Ms. Falmouth said beside the board, “we could destroy the ionosphere, irradiate the planet, vaporize the oceans. By exporting our wars and engaging Russia and China on, say, Saturn instead of on Earth, we can hash out our disagreements over resource allocation without the devastating consequences of traditional warfare, as Heather explained just now. In ages past, people believed that World War III would end all civilization. A famous quote by Albert Einstein: ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ But we’re in the middle of World War III, and we’re far from ending civilization.”

Ms. Falmouth twitched her finger and the chalkboard morphed into a screen. “Now, I’d like to focus upon the current Intrasolar Forces. I want you to turn your thoughts to the teenagers who are out there deciding the future of your country. We’ll play a short video clip.”

Tom sat up straighter, watching the screen resolve into an outdoor view of the Pentagon and the tall tower jutting from the middle—the Pentagonal Spire—and then to a newsroom where a familiar teenage boy sat with a reporter.

It was Elliot Ramirez.

Tom slumped back down in his seat. Behind him, Serge Leon actually cried out in dismay, “Not Dorkmirez!”

Elliot Ramirez was everywhere. Everyone knew him—the handsome, smiling, all-American seventeen-year-old who represented the future of Indo-American supremacy in the solar system. He was in commercials, on bulletin boards, his bright grin flashing and dark eyes twinkling on cereal boxes, on vitamin bottles, on T-shirts. Whenever a new Indo-American victory was announced on the news, Elliot was trotted out to give an interview and to talk about how America was sure to win now! And of course, Elliot was front and center in Nobridis, Inc.’s public service announcements because they sponsored him. He was one of the young trainees who controlled American machines in outer space, one of the Americans dedicated to taking down the Russo-Chinese alliance and claiming the solar system for the Indo-American allies.

“How did you get the call sign Ares?” the reporter asked Elliot. “That’s the Greek god of war, I understand. It says a lot about your battlefield prowess.”

Elliot’s chuckle flashed his white teeth. “I didn’t choose ‘Ares’ for myself, but I guess my fellow soldiers thought it should be my call sign. They pleaded with me to take it. I couldn’t refuse the appeals of my brothers-in-arms.”

Tom laughed. He couldn’t help it. Several female avatars whirled around to shush him.

The image on the screen flickered briefly to a battle in space, where a vessel digitally labeled “Ares” was flying toward a dispersed mass of ships. At the bottom of the screen, the caption read “The Battle of Titan.” The reporter’s voice carried on over the image: “. . . great deal of attention these last few years, Mr. Ramirez. How do you feel about the public’s fascination with you?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t see myself as a great hero the way so many people do. It’s the machines that do all the fighting in space. I just control them. You could say”—and here the image flipped back to Elliot just as he threw a wink at the camera—“I’m just a kid who likes to play with robots.”

Tom kept remembering the only interview of Elliot Ramirez he’d ever sat through before this one. His father was in the hotel room with him, and he’d insisted on watching the entire thing several times because he was convinced that the famed Elliot Ramirez wasn’t a real person. He refused to change the channel until Tom was convinced of it, too.

“That’s not a boy. That’s a computer simulation,” Neil had declared.

“People have seen him in person, Dad.”

“No human being acts like that! Look how he blinks every fifteen seconds on the dot. Time it. And then look at his eyebrows. He raises them to the exact same height every single time. That smile, too. Always the same width. That’s a computer-generated simulation of a human. I guarantee it.”

“Who’s the reporter talking to, then?”

“She’s in on it, too. Who owns the mainstream media? Corporations. That’s who.”

“Right. So I guess cereal companies are putting a fake kid on their boxes, and Elliot’s big sponsor, Nobridis Inc., is also parading around a guy they’ve never met? Oh, and don’t forget all those people on the internet who say they’ve gotten his autograph. . . . They’re all in on it, too, right?”

Neil’s spit began flying. “Tom, I am telling you, this Elliot kid is not a real person. This is how the corporate oligarchy works. They want a pretty face to make their agenda look good for the masses. A real human being is unpredictable. Create a computer-generated human to be the representation of your organization? Then you control everything about that representation. He’s no different from a logo, an action figure, a piece of insignia.”

“And you’re the only one in the world who’s picked up on this.”

“What, you think the American sheeple are going to question the corporatocracy? They’re too busy doing their patriotic duty, gutting their own country to fund a war over which Coalition CEO gets the biggest yacht this year. Wake up, Tom! I don’t want any son of mine buying into the establishment propaganda.”

“I don’t. I don’t,” Tom had protested.

He wanted his dad to be right. He really did. Even now, he studied Elliot and tried to see something fake and computer simulated about him, but he just saw a cheesy kid madly in love with himself who laughed at his own jokes way too much.

“What message would you like to leave viewers with tonight, Mr. Ramirez?”

“I want them to know, we kids at the Pentagonal Spire aren’t making the big sacrifice. Saving the country’s pretty fun! It’s you, the American taxpayers, who keep the fight for our nation going strong. And thanks to Nobridis, Inc., the Indo-American alliance is more—”

“Saving. The. Country.” Ms. Falmouth flipped off the video segment as Elliot launched into promoting Nobridis. “The next time you think you have too much homework, I want you to consider the burden on this young man’s shoulders. Elliot Ramirez is out there forging a future for our nation, securing the solar system’s resources for us, and you don’t hear him complaining, do you?”

The bell filled the sim. Ms. Falmouth didn’t even get a chance to dismiss them. Students began fizzling away.

Tom was normally among the first to sign off. He wasn’t this time because just as he raised his hand to yank off the VR visor, Heather spoke up. “Are you signing off already?”

She sounded disappointed about it. Tom dropped his hand again. “Not yet.”

She scooted her desk over so they were sitting right next to each other. Despite himself, Tom felt his hands grow sweaty in his wired gloves.

“Can you believe Elliot Ramirez?” Heather said, tossing her dark hair out of her eyes. “His ego almost explodes out of the screen, doesn’t it? I felt like ducking and covering.”

“I can’t believe you’re a real girl and you’re not in love with Elliot Ramirez,” Tom said appreciatively. Then it occurred to him: she might not even be a real girl. For all he knew, she was a guy with a voice modifier who’d hacked the school feed.

“Let’s just say, I feel like I know enough about Elliot not to buy the hype.” There was something coy in her voice that made him wonder if he was missing a joke.

“And you really are a girl?” Tom couldn’t resist asking.

“I am so a girl!”

“Yeah, well, I won’t believe it till I see it.”

“Is this your way of asking me to video chat?” Heather bantered.

Tom hadn’t thought to ask her to do that. He recovered from his surprise quickly. “Yes?”

Heather twirled a lock of her dark hair around her finger. “So, this is an online school,” she said coyly. “Is video chatting Rosewood’s version of a date?”

Tom opened and closed his mouth. She didn’t sound like she hated the idea. He broke into a grin. “Only if you’re gonna say yes.”

Heather smiled. “What network address will you be at tomorrow, Tom?”

HE WAS ONLY half in the moment as he gave her his network address, as he promised her he’d be right at the same network address tomorrow when they met. He didn’t care if they were meeting at an obscenely early hour of the morning. Heather said it was because of the time zone she was in. Tom decided he’d stay up all night if he had to. His brain was whirling. He had a date . . . kind of. With a real, live girl . . . he hoped.

After she logged off, his avatar remained by his desk, his real body sitting stock-still on the couch in the VR parlor, the enormity of asking a girl out for the first time and having the girl say yes beating through his brain. He’d thought this would be just another ordinary day. . . .

A throat cleared.

Tom noticed suddenly that he and Ms. Falmouth were the only ones left in the virtual classroom.

“I was just logging off,” Tom said quickly, and reached up in the real world to snatch off his visor.

“Not quite yet, Tom,” Ms. Falmouth said. “Stay a moment. I think we need to talk.”

Oh.

A heaviness settled in Tom’s chest, because he’d half expected this, and it wasn’t good.

“Let’s go to my office.” Ms. Falmouth twitched her fingers to alter the program, and the landscape shifted around them into a private office. She settled at one side of the imposing desk. Tom navigated himself into the seat opposite, and waited for some hint of what she needed to hear before she’d let him off the hook this time.

“Tom,” she said, folding her hands on her desk, “I am concerned about this attendance situation.”

Tom let out a breath. “I figured.”

“You were referred to this institution because your father somehow let you reach age eleven without enrolling you in school. We’ve worked to catch you up, but I don’t feel you’re making the same progress as the rest of the class. In fact, considering that you’re very rarely in class, I am finding this situation outright unmanageable.”

“Maybe I need an alternative school,” Tom suggested.

“This already is an alternative school. This is the end of the line.”

“I try.”

“No, you don’t. And what’s more, your father doesn’t try, either. Do you realize you missed two quizzes and a history paper last week?”

“It couldn’t be helped.”

“Russo-Chinese hackers, right?” she said. “Or perhaps you were taken hostage by terrorists again, or washed out to sea and stranded on a desert island without internet access?”

“Not quite.” But he’d really get a kick out of using that one sometime in the future.

“Tom, you are not taking this seriously—and that’s your problem. This is not some silly game: this is your future and you are throwing it away with both hands. You promised me a month ago that you would never miss class again.” Ms. Falmouth’s avatar gazed at him with an unnatural, unblinking intensity. “We signed a learning contract, don’t you remember?”

Tom didn’t point out that she’d demanded that he promise not to miss class again. What had she expected him to tell her, the truth? Should he have outright admitted he probably wasn’t going to show up at school? She would’ve just yelled at him for “being insolent” or something.

“This is not about me,” Ms. Falmouth went on. “It’s not about your father, even: it is about you, Tom. You realize that whatever actions I take from here, they’re for your own good. I cannot sit back and allow a fourteen-year-old boy’s entire life to be sabotaged by an irresponsible parent who will not even ensure he gets a proper education.”

Tom sat up in both the sim and the VR parlor. “What does that even mean—‘whatever actions you take from here’?”

“It means you’re under court order to attend school, and you have not been attending. Last week, I reported your absences to Child Protective Services.”

Tom slouched back, feeling like he’d just been socked in the stomach. This was not going to end well. Maybe he wasn’t reaching great heights of achievement with Neil, but life in foster care wouldn’t be a land of hope and opportunity either.

And no way could he stay at his mom’s.

No way, no way.

Dalton, her boyfriend, paid for her fancy apartment in New York City. Tom had visited her once, just once, and he’d met him. Dalton Prestwick was this rich, yacht-owning executive at some big multinational company, Dominion Agra. His job was to talk to politicians or something.

Dalton had looked him over like he was something nasty smeared on the bottom of his leather shoes and said, “My attorneys have documented everything of value in this house, punk. The second something goes missing, I’ll have you in juvenile hall.”

Oh, and Dalton already had a wife. And another girlfriend. Yeah, and Tom’s mom.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go, Ms. Falmouth. I know that you think you’re doing me a favor, but you’re not. I promise you.”

“You’re fourteen, Tom. What do you expect to do with yourself in a few years when you need to make a living? Do you plan to be a roving gambler like your father?”

“No,” Tom answered at once.

“A roving gamer?”

He wasn’t quite sure how much Ms. Falmouth knew about his gaming, but he didn’t say anything. If she’d asked him what he planned to be, he might’ve said he’d make his living one day the same way he was doing it now.

Hearing it said by her made him think of living like this forever, of going nowhere in life . . . of turning into his father . . .

Suddenly Tom felt kind of fuzzy and clenched up inside like he was getting sick.

Ms. Falmouth leaned back in her seat. “You’re competing in a global economy. One out of three Americans is unemployed. You need an education to be an engineer, a programmer, or anything of use to the defense industry. You need an education to be an accountant or a lawyer, and you need connections to go into government or corporate work. Who do you think will hire a young man like you when there are so many high-achieving candidates out there who are desperate for work?”

“It’s years away.”

“Pretend it’s tomorrow. What are you going to do with yourself? What are you good for?”

“I’m good at . . .” He stopped.

“At what?”

He couldn’t come up with anything else, so he just said it. “Games.”

The word sat on the air between them, and to Tom it suddenly sounded utterly sad.

“So is your father, Tom. And where is he now?”

Chapter Two

BACK WHEN TOM was little, Neil seemed like a god to him. His dad didn’t have a boring job like other people. He was a gambler. He sipped at his martini like James Bond and bluffed his way into winning other people’s money. Tom grew up hearing stories about the way his dad used to get flown for free to tournaments for professional poker players, the way he used to get the largest hotel suites on the highest floors and then tip the maids a few thousand dollars. Women always found a reason to talk to him, but Neil waved them away like they were invisible, because he was in love with the most beautiful woman of all.

When Tom was a little kid, he’d believed in the dream. He was sure his dad’s glory days would return. Any minute, Neil was going to turn back into that winner he used to be, then they’d stay in one place and his mom would return, and she’d be so sorry she’d left them.

But now, at fourteen, Tom knew his dad didn’t even get invited to the same tournaments that used to fly him in for free, and his mother was still gone. They never stayed in the same place for more than a week or two, and they never would. He didn’t expect that to change. He was too old to believe in fairy tales.

Tom tucked the wired gloves back in the VR parlor’s storage container, his own words resounding in his mind: I’m good at games. He drove his hands into his pockets and ignored the fears until they became nothing more than an ache in his gut.

He tried to turn his thoughts toward the other thing that happened today: Heather. His brain buzzed with the memory of her words, the way she’d smiled when she thought he was asking her out. He was still thinking of her later that night when he paid for a double room at the front desk, and he was so wired up with anticipation for the next morning that he didn’t manage to fall asleep until well past midnight.

And then his father staggered in.

Neil flipped the light on, blasting the glare through Tom’s eyelids. Springs squeaked as he sagged onto the other bed. “Got our room again, Tommy? I can always count on you. You’re a real good boy. You’re a good kid.”

Tom opened his eyes a crack and squinted against the flood of light to see Neil clumsily loosening his tie. “Dad, could you turn the lights back off?”

“Gonna get out of this one day, eh, Tommy?” Neil slurred. “Next big win, s’all done. Finished.”

Tom clawed out of the covers and then headed across the room to turn off the lights himself.

“A hundred thou’s all I’m asking,” Neil rambled on. “Won’t squan-squan—lose it all again. Rent an apartment. Bigger than the one that chump Dalton’s got your mom living in. Maybe send you ter a real school someday. In a building, y’know?” He smiled sloppily at Tom. With his undone collar, mussed hair, and slack, unshaven face, he looked demented.

Tom flicked the light off. Neil was his family. And his dad had his back, he knew. But ever since those social workers confronted them the first time about the not-going-to-school thing, and Tom saw what the lives of other kids were like, he’d started thinking about stuff.

The truth was, he’d taken it for granted before Rosewood that living like this was normal. He thought that whole idea of houses and schools and dinners at a table were fantasies. Neil always called it “corporate propaganda manufactured to promote lifelong debt servitude.”

But it wasn’t propaganda. Not really. Sure, a lot of people had it worse. A lot. There were families on the streets, gathered in tent cities, squatting in derelict buildings and abandoned factories. But there were also guys like Serge Leon who’d lived in one place for years on end, and people who knew where they’d be sleeping tomorrow night. Tom couldn’t predict anything. All he knew was, he’d be somewhere with Neil. With this.

With this.

A nasty, dark feeling descended on him as his father’s wet snores saturated the hotel room. Even with the AC on high, the sound thundered in his ears. He shifted, turned, pressed his pillow over his head, trying to muffle it, but it was like ignoring a hurricane. The noise just grew louder and louder.

Finally Tom gave up on sleep and tore off the covers.

He needed to shoot something.

THE VR PARLOR was empty at five thirty in the morning, a lonely lounge of couches and dim screens. Tom settled on the center couch, strapped on a visor, and flipped through the game selection to Die, Zombies, Die. Two hours later, he’d blasted and slashed his way to level nine and upgraded to a bazooka. He was busy blowing a nice hole in the Queen Zombie’s torso when the game flickered and went black on him.

“Hey,” Tom objected and reached up to slide off his visor, but then it fizzled with another image.

The eyepieces lit with a slash of crimson that expanded into a stark red Martian landscape. Tom gazed around, surprised. It was like he’d unwittingly activated another game within the game.

He went with it.

First thing he did was look at his character’s attire and weaponry. He was in a space suit. Obviously his character was humanoid, then. Over the horizon, he caught sight of a tank jerking across the bloodred landscape. An information bubble popped up and informed him that his enemy was in this hydrogen-powered tank and his objective was to kill or be killed.

The cylindrical canon cranked toward him, and his heart leaped. He whipped around as swiftly as his character could move and dove into a ditch just before a bone-jarring blast hurled dust into the air on all sides of him. He crawled through the haze into the nearest artillery pit. Another blast missed him, and he dropped into the makeshift shelter.

There was a rumbling through the thin Martian atmosphere as that tank made its way toward him, the slow harbinger of his death. Thrills of excitement shot through him. He wasn’t used to going so blindly into a sim. The tank’s targeting would improve once it drew closer, and even this pit wouldn’t save him. He had to blow his enemy up before that.

He began to figure out what this was: an incursion. Incursions happened when gamers hacked into the systems of other gamers to challenge them in a sim. No one had ever incursed him before, and Tom couldn’t incurse anyone at all because he didn’t know how to do it.

He felt almost delirious with his good fortune. He desperately hoped this was some very awesome gamer, someone spectacular. Someone with a chance of beating him. He’d kill for a real challenge.

He hurled a look around. He was trapped in a gulley, at an utter disadvantage. The only weapon in reach was an iono-sulfuric dispersal rifle planted in the red dirt. He could see the other dugouts in the distance, the symbols etched in their sides telling him one held a batch of grenades, the other C29 antitank guns. According to the information bubble that popped up in the corner of his vision, those were exactly what he needed to take out that tank, but how could he get to them without being blown up?

The ground shook around him with another blast. His gloves vibrated with the rumble. Tom took advantage of the crimson haze and flung himself toward the iono-sulfuric weapon. He seized it and dropped back into the pit. Pretty straightforward rifle, this one, at least according to the next information bubble. Too weak to take out a tank, but it could generate a couple of little blasts, coat his surroundings with a white film, and create a distraction. He needed to fire this, use the haze as cover, and get to the antitank dugout, and then?

The tank rumbled closer, and Tom saw the error in his logic: whoever this gamer was, he probably knew the C29 dugout would be Tom’s assured path to victory. If he was the guy in the tank, he’d wait for the sulfuric haze. He’d count on it. He’d get the coordinates for the antitank dugout beforehand, wait a few seconds, and then lay down a line of fire right in the path to it.

No, Tom couldn’t play into his hands. He’d have to be trickier than that.

So he made a show of making a fatal error. He fired the iono-sulfuric rifle, coating the atmosphere around the tank in a white haze.

But he didn’t go for the antitank guns.

He leaped up out of the ditch and ran straight toward the tank, used his last glimpse of the tank and its velocity to assess position, and swerved to the side before the tank plowed through the haze to run him down. The blast of sound rumbling past him knocked his character over. Tom saw the stark metal through the white haze and charged after it

He leaped forward, fumbling for handholds, and hoisted himself up the back. A few scrabbling grasps with the wired gloves later, and Tom’s character was on top of the tank, above the latch. This was one thing an iono-sulfuric rifle could handle. He aimed for the lock, blasted it off, and had the hatch open before the guy inside the tank knew his doom was coming through the ceiling.

With an exultant laugh, Tom dropped through the hatch, his feet clanging on the floor. He stalked toward the thrashing body. No space suit. He wasn’t meant for the atmosphere. The gases inside him were trying to burst their way out of his skin into the thinner atmosphere of Mars.

“Nice try, buddy,” Tom said, and slammed the guy in the head with the butt of his rifle over and over until he went still.

Tom dropped the gun and settled down next to the dead body, waiting for the next level, hoping the incursing gamer wasn’t going to tuck tail and run.

But then the body morphed. Tom leaped to his feet and stared, fascinated, as it changed from a man in combat gear to a woman. A girl.

She sat up, tossed her dark brown hair out of her eyes, and gave him a slow, mesmerizing smile. Tom gaped at her, his brain blanking out with disbelief.

“Heather.” He realized suddenly that she was the incursing gamer. She’d been the one to challenge him to a sim. He wondered if the sense of awe and excitement sweeping through him was what it felt like to be in love. “You’re a gamer, too!”

“Not exactly, Tom.” There was a teasing note in her voice. “Congratulations. You passed.”

“Passed what?”

But she vanished and the simulation went black. Tom gazed into the darkness, confused, and then a slow, steady clapping filled his ears.

His real ears.

Tom flipped up the visor and shot to his feet to face the other person in the VR parlor.

The newcomer was an older man with graying hair; a long, pale face; bulbous nose; and full-on military fatigues. He rose from the couch across from him, and Tom realized uneasily that the man must’ve been there for a while just watching him.

“Well,” said the old man, “you’re everything I expected, Mr. Raines. Most don’t even make it into the tank on their first try.” He tapped on his ear and said to someone, “I’ve got visual confirmation that it’s Raines. You can log off now. The network address checks out. Fine work, Heather.”

The whole transition from virtual Tom to real Tom always made him feel weird and stupid even when he wasn’t taken by surprise by some stranger staring at him while he played. “Wait, you know Heather? You two set up that sim?”

“Ms. Akron was scouting you out for me,” the old guy said. “I’ve been looking for you for a month, son. You’re a hard fellow to track down. As soon as she secured your network address for today, I hopped on a plane. I wanted to run you through that scenario once before I made up my mind, but I was certain you wouldn’t disappoint. And you haven’t.”

Tom’s mind flickered to his dad’s constant assertions—The IRS would love to get their hands on me—and he edged back. Then again, this could be something to do with Ms. Falmouth’s threat yesterday about calling Child Protective Services. Either way . . . “Why have you been looking for me?”

“Let’s just say, I’ve been searching for young people who fit a certain profile, and you top my list. One of my officers discovered you on a gaming network, but you kept moving on to new places before we could make contact. I watched you face off with your opponent here in the lounge last night. Tricky move you pulled in that racing game.”

Tom froze. “Oh, you saw that?”

“I’ve also watched you several other times. Back in Southern California. In New Mexico.”

Tom fixed his eyes on the bulbous tip of the man’s nose, thinking quickly of some excuse. He hadn’t been doing anything illegal. . . . Well, anything illegal apart from the underage gambling. Actually, that was very illegal all by itself. What could he say? Maybe he could just deny he was doing it.

“I didn’t see you in person,” the man assured him. “I was given a feed of some of your old games. You’re quite the gamer. I’m impressed.”

Tom blinked. “Impressed?” That wasn’t what he’d expected. “Um, who are you?”

“My name is General Terry Marsh. As you may know, the government’s been monitoring the country for some of our most promising young people to be Combatants in the war.”

Tom said nothing. The words did not compute.

Marsh went on, “I’m here because we need someone like you at the Pentagonal Spire.”

The Pentagonal Spire.

The Pentagonal Spire. Where the Combatants for the Intrasolar Forces trained. Where people like Elliot Ramirez lived.

Tom realized what this was. “All right, did someone put you up to this? Because I’m not a total chump. Whatever this is really about, I’m not going for it.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Marsh noted drily. “Most teenagers would jump at the opportunity to join our Combatants.”

Tom spun back to face him, because the old man looked stern, and he was wearing military getup, after all. “You’re messing with me, aren’t you? You have to be.”

Marsh gestured for him to sit down. “Mr. Raines, you’ve heard of the current war situation. You must have.”

Tom stayed where he was. “I don’t live in a cave.”

“I’ll take that as a yes. You see, we used to give programmers control of the Indo-American machines fighting across the solar system. They created programs that determined the actions of those machines. Logical actions. The Russo-Chinese alliance adopted the same strategy, so combat became very predictable. The outcome was predetermined, and oftentimes, an outright stalemate. So we became clever. We inserted a human factor into the behavior of machines.”

“Combatants.”

“No, first hackers. They tampered with Russo-Chinese software. Russia and China deployed their own hackers, and we stalemated again. But the Russo-Chinese military went a step further, and gave human beings active control over their combat machines. Strategists. Unconventional thinkers. Risk takers. Mavericks. Young ones, because teenagers have certain attributes critical to this type of warfare. So now we, too, have young people on the front lines, young people playing a critical role in the war effort.”

“Young people like Elliot Ramirez,” Tom pointed out.

In other words, young people who were promising, talented, go-getters. Young people who were nothing like him.

“That’s right,” the general said, undaunted. “Elliot has a particular set of strengths he brought to our forces. Charisma, charm, and he’s an excellent figure skater.”

Tom snorted. He couldn’t help it, picturing the heroic warrior, Elliot Ramirez, in a sparkly unitard.

Marsh’s eyes narrowed. “Make fun all you like, young man, but that kid has golden DNA. He’d have been something spectacular wherever he went. If he hadn’t ended up with us, Ramirez would be competing in the Olympics. For us, it’s the potential that counts. We look for people who are promising, those who can deploy effective strategies against the Russo-Chinese Combatants. We can train our recruits, we can make them better than they ever imagined, but potential? It’s the single quality we can’t create. Ramirez brought something unique to the table. And we’re hoping you can as well.”

That sense of disbelief crept over Tom. This couldn’t be happening.

“Do you need to see proof, Tom?”

“Yes,” Tom answered at once.

“How about I show you a Challenge Coin?” Marsh slipped out a coin from his pocket. “Members of the Air Force—”

“Show this to each other to prove they’re military. I know. I’ve played about a million military sims.” Tom snatched the coin and turned it over in his hands, seeing the Air Force insignia, on the back.

Marsh took it back from him and pressed his fingertip over the logo. “Brigadier General Terry Marsh, United States Air Force,” the old man said. The coin’s surface flashed green, verifying his voiceprint, his identity, his fingerprint, and DNA all at once.

Tom looked at Marsh’s stubby fingertips, coin clenched between them, trying to figure out ways someone could fake Air Force technology. The very idea this general guy might be here for him was so incredible, he couldn’t get his head around it.

“Does that pass your inspection?” Marsh asked him, waving the coin in two fingers.

Tom stared at it, then dragged his gaze up to Marsh’s. “You’re really here for me? You think I could be a Combatant?”

“It’s a great opportunity, son. We give trainees an education in strategic theory, and if they’re good, we give them a chance to be the Combatants who direct our mechanized intrasolar arsenal. In cases like yours, the cognitive skills and reflexes fostered by these gaming simulations prime you perfectly for operating combat machines.”

“That’s why you picked me? Because I’m good at games?”

“Because you show a killer instinct in them.”

Tom thought suddenly of Ms. Falmouth. Her words rang in his brain: What are you good for?

For this, apparently. For saving the country just like Elliot Ramirez.

“Your quick victory in that test scenario?” Marsh went on. “That’s my icing on the cake, so to speak. It confirmed everything I suspected. You’d be perfect for us.”

Tom closed his eyes and opened them, expecting this to be some glorious dream. But Marsh was there, the VR parlor was real.

Marsh gave a crisp nod at something he saw on his face. “That’s right, son. Your country needs you at the Pentagonal Spire. The question is, are you man enough to win a war for us?”

“NOT A CHANCE,” Neil said.

Tom sat on the edge of his bed in their hotel room. Neil nursed a drink, since, as he always liked to say, a good screwdriver was the only reliable hangover cure he knew. The very mention of Tom’s encounter with General Marsh made every line stand out on his face.

“Dad, I can’t pass this up.” Tom flipped through the parental consent form Marsh had given him. “They’ll train me and I’ll be a Combatant. And it’s for our country—”

“You won’t be fighting a war for this country, Tom.” A wave of Neil’s hand sent orange juice sloshing over the rim of his glass. “Our military fights to secure first extraplanetary mineral rights for Nobridis, Inc. The Russo-Chinese alliance fights back to secure them for Stronghold Energy. War isn’t about countries! Multinationals use taxpayer-funded militaries to fight their private skirmishes, and then they sell the public on paying for it by donning the mantle of patriotism. This is all just a big fight between members of the Coalition to see who will become the richest CEO in the solar system!”

Tom had heard this whole antiestablishment thing many times before. Neil pulled it out every time someone asked him why he hadn’t ever held down a job—Why haven’t I jammed my neck in the yoke of corporate servitude, you mean?—or paid taxes—I’ve got better causes to support with my money than stuffing the coffers of Amerika, Inc.!

So Tom studied the consent form and tuned him out.

“You know how the military treats its people, Tom? They chew them up and spit them out, that’s how. You’re just another piece of equipment to them. And for what? Not for your country. For the wallet of some business executive you’ll never meet in some luxury suite you’ll never see!”

Tom looked over his father, with his sloppy morning drink, his rumpled clothes, and unshaven face. “Dad, this is a career. It’s a real life. Marsh said I’ll even get a salary.”

“You have a real life. Don’t let that rat general tell you—”

“I don’t need him to convince me of anything,” Tom burst out. “I’m sick of this. It’s the same thing over and over again. You lose all our money, and I miss school and have to deal with Ms. Falmouth. I bet this is why—” He stopped talking.

He’d almost said it. That dark thought, the one he never voiced.

I bet this is why Mom left us.

It took Neil a moment to speak, as though he’d heard the phantom words. “This is not the only way we have to live. If you’re tired of this, we’ll settle somewhere. You don’t have to join them. Next win and I’m done.”

Tom closed his eyes, blood beating in his head. There would never be a “next win.” And even if there was, it wouldn’t be enough, and the next win would be gambled away just as quickly as the other ones. He’d heard this all before. His dad would never give up this life. The promise was worthless. And Tom would be worthless, too, if he didn’t get away while he had the chance.

“I don’t have to join the military, Dad. I want to.” He opened his eyes and approached it from his father’s perspective. “Is it the money thing? My salary will be in a trust, but I get a living allowance. I can send some along. I can help you out.”

Why was Neil looking at him like he’d stabbed him or something? They both knew Tom was the one paying for their rooms lately.

Neil’s jaw clenched. “Fine. Fine, Tom. I’ll sign whatever blasted form you want. You want to throw your life away? Want to pledge yourself to the corporate war machine?”

“Yes, Dad. I want to pledge myself to the corporate war machine.” Tom’s voice grew ferocious. “It’s my choice.”

“It’s your mistake.”

“Maybe. But it’s mine.”

Neil yanked the consent form from Tom’s hands. “This isn’t how teenaged rebellion’s supposed to go. You’re supposed to shock me by doing something scandalous. Not by joining the establishment.”

“This is about as scandalous as I’m going to get, Dad. Sign the form.”

“I’d rather you got a tattoo.”

Neil scrawled his signature on the form and handed custody of Tom over to the US military.

LATER IN THE afternoon, General Marsh returned to collect the contract—and his newest recruit.

“Mr. Raines, you have no need to worry about Tom while he’s with us. We’ll take good care of your boy.” Marsh offered Neil a hand to shake.

Neil stared back at him with stony hatred. He ignored Marsh’s hand and instead reached out to envelop Tom in a rough, parting hug.

“Tom”—Neil ruffled his hand in Tom’s hair—“whatever happens, you take care of yourself. Got it?”

“Got it.”

Tom couldn’t help wondering at the look on his dad’s face when he walked away. Neil stared after him like he was sure this was the last time they’d ever see each other.

About the Author

S. J. Kincaid was born in Alabama, grew up in California, and attended high school in New Hampshire. She also interned for a politician in Washington, DC, and received degrees from universities in Illinois and Ohio, but it was while living beside a haunted graveyard in Edinburgh, Scotland, that she realized she wanted to be a writer. Several years, several manuscripts, and several jobs later, Ms. Kincaid now lives in Chicago, and Vortex is her second novel in the Insignia trilogy. You can visit her online at www.sjkincaid.com.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

Also by S. J. Kincaid:

Insignia

Vortex

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Copyright

Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Copyright © 2013 by S. J. Kincaid

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780062285096

ISBN: 978-0-06-228509-6

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