Insignia

  “Look, Wyatt, if you want to be a bookworm Lancelot, that’s fine. Just lock the door to the library and maybe slide a table in front of it. I’m stealing your sword if you’re not fighting, though.”

  “What are you going to do with it? You said Guinevere can’t leave the castle.”

  “She can’t. But Queen Guinevere can lower the drawbridge and order the castle sentries to stand down. Just like this Queen Guinevere did about ten minutes ago. Oh, and she can also send a messenger to the Saxon king to let him know Camelot’s defenseless.”

  Wyatt gaped at him. “That sound outside . . . That’s the Saxon army, isn’t it?”

  “Yuri’s right. You really are smart.” Tom heard the screams starting, and started for the sound with a bounce in his step.

  “Tom!”

  He paused in the doorway, saw Wyatt running her fingers up and down the desk next to her. “Thanks for not telling Blackburn. I’m sorry I got you turned into a dog.”

  “Hey, I was a dog for you, and now you’ve given a glorious instrument of death to me—” he waved the sword “—so I’d say we’re even.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  Chapter Nine

  SATURDAY MORNING, TOM woke up and wished he hadn’t. Everything hurt. Everything. His joints, his bones, his brain. He pressed his face into his pillow and lay there. His thoughts reached back to the day before when Applied Sims ended. Elliot returned to the castle after King Arthur and his knights realized the Saxons weren’t showing up at the battlefield. He strode into the throne room and found Tom lounging on Arthur’s throne, his gown soaked in blood—the Saxon king’s head mounted on a pike beside him.

  He’d offered Elliot the head as fealty, but Elliot didn’t take it. He just gave Tom a stern, you’ve-disappointed-me-young-one look and ended the simulation.

  On the bright side, he hadn’t given Tom a long speech about teamwork this time.

  “Get up.” Vik swatted him. “We’re going to Toddery’s Chicken Barn and then maybe downtown.”

  “Toddery’s Chicken Barn?” Tom mumbled into his pillow.

  “They don’t just serve chicken. It’s way better than it sounds.”

  “It would have to be. Look, it’s too early.”

  “Come on, man. People with neural processors don’t need to sleep in.”

  “I do,” Tom said, even though that technically wasn’t true. He was wide-awake—just in pain. Each breath sent pinpricks racing through his rib cage, each movement an electric current down his limbs, like someone was holding a live wire to his joints.

  He gritted his teeth and crammed his pillow over his head. He’d try to get more sleep and hope that helped. Maybe he’d been beaten up by someone and gotten hit in the head so hard he’d forgotten it? No. He sorted through his memories of the previous night. He couldn’t seem to find any gaps. The neural processor had even helpfully time-stamped his recent memories with the date and hour, so he was certain he’d never been throttled and subsequently forgotten it.

  When another shift sent pain prickling through him, his neural processor kicked into scanning mode.

  “Huh?” Tom mumbled into his pillow.

  A series of statistics flashed through his brain: pH, CO2, HCO3, WBC, RBC, RDW, HR, RR . . . Tom pulled the pillow tighter about his head, hoping to smother himself to make the scanning mode stop.

  And then one number flashed before his eyes that shocked him to his core.

  He was 4.2 inches taller than he’d been on Wednesday.

  Tom rolled over onto his back, and pain shot through him in a blinding jolt. He ignored it and looked down at his legs. They actually looked longer. He wiggled his toes, just making sure he really was in his own body. His toes even looked longer. His feet were bigger.

  Tom raised his hands before his face, curled and uncurled his fingers, and marveled at the broadness of his palms. “Man hands,” he murmured.

  “What about Enslow?” Vik said, from the other side of the room.

  “Not her. Me.”

  Tom flopped his head back and decided it was okay that he was aching all over. After all, things couldn’t be so bad if he now had large, manly hands.

  IGNORING THE PAIN grew trickier after Vik, Yuri, and Beamer headed out. At first, moving slowly was enough to keep it at bay. But soon, Tom found himself sitting on his bed, using his forearm keyboard and his vision center as the monitor, surfing the internet—and still clenching his jaw at the sensation like glass grinding into his joints.

  The only thing that seemed to tear his mind from his physical discomfort was the thought of Medusa, the Russo-Chinese fighter. Tom had downloaded every last recording of Medusa’s engagements with Indo-American forces. He’d spent a couple hours last night with his eyes closed, accessing those files in his neural processor and playing them in his brain.

  Now he started watching a few more: Medusa blasting through the rings of Saturn and shifting the course of a comet to send it crashing into an Indo-American drilling platform on Titan. In another battle, Medusa evaded a trap the Indo-American fighters maneuvered the other Russo-Chinese into: a coronal mass ejection that took out most of the Russo-Chinese ships. Then Medusa dodged the weapons fire from a dozen ships, all focused on him, and still managed to lure the Indo-American forces to Venus. There, Medusa planted his vessel straight into a wind current that buffeted him back into the high atmosphere, while the pursuing Indo-Americans were forced down toward the surface, hulls melted and then crushed.

  Tom was so caught up in replaying that one that he barely registered the knock on his door. He jumped when the door slid open.

  A girl’s voice rang out: “Are you deaf or something? You didn’t hear me knock?”

  Tom cracked open his eyes, and saw Wyatt standing tall and gangly in the doorway with her customary frown.

  “Nice of you to just come in anyway. Ever occur to you that maybe I was ignoring it?”

  Her eyebrows sank down. “You could’ve taken two seconds to tell me to go away, then.”

  He felt like he’d just kicked a puppy. “I was caught up in something, or I’d have let you in.” He mentally ordered the files to stop playback, and the images of Medusa’s vessel vanished from his vision center. “Why are you around the Spire on a Saturday? You didn’t go out with Vik and the others?”

  “Yuri didn’t ask me this time. He’s the only one who ever wants me to go anywhere with him.”

  Tom thought about that. “Do you remember telling me to go away and never talk to you again the first time we met? Do you say stuff like that a lot? Because people generally assume you mean it.”

  Wyatt considered that. “Oh.”

  “Just a thought.”

  “Well, I came to ask if everything was okay yesterday. Did Elliot end up yelling at you for the Saxon thing?”

  “Yelling’s not his style. He’s more about the power of disapproving looks.” He gave a heavy sigh and shook his head, mock regretfully, to imitate Elliot for her.

  Wyatt’s lips pulled up in a quick smile. She was still hanging back in the doorway, shifting her weight awkwardly like she didn’t know the rules of conduct for entering someone’s room.

  “You can come in,” Tom told her.

  She took a few tentative steps inside. After several moments of her just standing there near his doorway, staring at him and him just staring back, he searched for a distraction. “Hey, you play any games?”

  Then he regretted saying it. She might stick around longer now, and then more awkward staring would ensue.

  But Wyatt just frowned, like the words did not compute. “Games?”

  “VR games,” Tom said, exasperated. “You know. RPGs—role-playing games. Strategy games. First-person shooters.”

  “I don’t like fighting.”

  “Strategy, then.” Actually, that worked for him, too. He didn’t have to move muc
h to play most strategy games, and he could pick a game they only needed keyboards for. He flipped through the Spire’s database and found Privateers.

  Privateers largely involved trading and negotiating. It wasn’t his favorite game, but it was more for brainy people, and he figured she’d be into it.

  Wyatt was. She wasn’t so great at negotiating, but she plotted courses like a pro.

  “You’re good at this,” Tom told her, when she reached the Polynesian Islands before he did.

  “It’s just math.”

  “Right. Math’s your thing, huh? The reason you got recruited.”

  She was sitting with her back against the leg of Vik’s bed, her arms curled over her bent knees, tapping halfheartedly at her forearm keyboard. “I was good at it. My parents were always entering me into competitions, and if I’d wanted to, I could’ve gone to college early. Of course, since everyone here has a neural processor, it’s not like being good at math means anything now.” Her eyes flickered over to him. “I guess it’s the same for you, with the spelling bee thing. Everyone can spell as well as you now that they have neural processors.”

  A laugh rose in Tom’s throat. He couldn’t help it. “Yeah, it drives me nuts hearing everyone spell correctly now. It really cheapens my talent.”

  “Well—” Wyatt smoothed her hair back behind her ear “—at least I found something else. I don’t see why so many people don’t understand programming. I think they just don’t know how to work anymore. They’re too used to just downloading something and understanding it, so it seems like too much effort actually connecting the dots and writing out a program.”

  “Blackburn seems to think that,” Tom said, remembering the stuff he’d said to Heather in class. “Too bad he’s hunting you. You’d probably have some great meeting-of-minds thing going on.”

  Wyatt pressed her lips together.

  “Or not?”

  “I hacked the profiles my first week here to help a couple people who were hoping to get promoted,” Wyatt said flatly. “It was a dumb thing to do, and ever since, I’ve had to mess up my own code before I turn it in so Blackburn doesn’t realize I’m the one who did it. And the people I did that for? None of them have even talked to me since.”

  “You didn’t do it to make friends or something, did you?”

  She didn’t answer that.

  “Look, Wyatt, they sound like jerks. Why would it make so much of a difference when it comes to promotions, anyway? The profile achievements are all in the past.”

  “Coalition companies have more interest in sponsoring people with great backgrounds. One of the people whose profile I changed got into Camelot Company a month later. She probably would’ve gotten sponsored anyway, but her new profile helped her get the company she wanted.”

  “Who was that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Wyatt insisted, and focused her attention back on the game. “It’s all over and done now, anyway.”

  ON SUNDAY, TOM was six inches taller than when he first arrived at the Spire, and something strange was happening. His neural processor ran scans constantly, one after the other. A message began blinking in his vision center: CA 7.3 (8.9-10.3).

  “Vik.” Tom said to his roommate, who was sprawled on the other bed, playing a game with wired gloves he’d smuggled out of the ground floor VR parlor. “What’s CA seven point three?”

  “CA . . . California?”

  “I don’t think so.” After a moment, Tom admitted, “My bones are kind of killing me. It’s kind of hard to move.” And his lips and fingers were tingling like he had bugs crawling below his skin.

  Vik studied him. “I don’t think that’s normal.”

  “Really?”

  “Go ask about it at the infirmary.”

  Tom groaned inwardly. That was all the way on the ground floor.

  But now that he thought about it, he was starting to wonder if something was very wrong with him, after all. He’d actually brought it up with Wyatt the day before, and she’d listed about twenty different fatal diseases he might have—which really didn’t reassure him. Vik’s words finally motivated him to grit his teeth and stagger down the hallway.

  He made it as far as the plebe common room.

  There, he found a group of Genghises playing pool. A familiar voice bellowed out, “Hey look, it’s Fido!”

  Tom sighed inwardly. It was Karl Marsters. The massive, jowl-faced Genghis straightened up from the shot he’d just made, the cords standing out on his thick neck, a grin on his face.

  “What do you want?” Tom asked him.

  Karl’s stepped forward to block his path when he made for the elevator. “He’s not very polite, is he? Not a good doggie.”

  Tom tried to shove past him, but one meaty blow to the chest sent him reeling back. He caught himself against the wall, then yanked himself upright, his heart thudding.

  “I hear you’re giving my boy Elliot a hard time,” Karl said.

  “Your boy, Elliot? Why do you care?”

  Karl looked at his buddies, three large guys and a skinny, ratlike blond girl. “You’re a spelling bee champ, aren’t you, White Fang? How do you spell ‘If I don’t learn to speak to my betters with more respect, I’m going to get my face smashed in’?”

  Tom laughed, unable to resist: “That one’s easy. It’s K-A-R-L.”

  In a flash, Karl’s fist flew toward his face. Tom ducked just in time. An ugly crack split the air as Karl’s knuckles met the wall. Karl screamed out, and Tom didn’t need any warning message to flash across his vision center this time—he knew this was trouble. He hurled himself past the large Genghis and made for the elevator. But it would never arrive in time—so he swerved around it, hoping he could duck into one of the other divisions.

  Luck was on his side. The first door he reached slid open. He stumbled through and locked it behind him. Thumps against the door, bodies crashing against it, people who’d pursued him coming to their sudden halt.

  Tom laughed, breathless, elated, the weird pain in his joints all but forgotten in the surge of adrenaline. He heard soft footfalls on the floor behind him, and then a familiar voice, “Take a wrong turn?”

  Tom jumped. He whirled around to catch gazes with a familiar pair of yellow-brown eyes. “Heather.”

  She leaned against the wall of the corridor, her dark hair loose about her shoulders. “You realize this is Machiavelli Division, don’t you?”

  Fists drummed against the door behind him. Tom jabbed his thumb toward it. “Any way to seek asylum? I’m being chased.”

  “Who’s chasing you?”

  “Genghises. Large, angry Genghises.”

  Heather propped a hand on her hip and made a tsking sound. There was a playful twinkle in her eyes. “Did you do something bad, Tom?”

  “No, I swear, I barely even know Karl Marsters. He got all in my face about me messing with Elliot.”

  “Oh, of course.” Heather swayed forward, then looped her arm through his and led him down the hallway to a living room area with a circular arrangement of chairs. “It’s because Elliot’s a Napoleon. Napoleons and Genghises are allies. They always look out for each other. You should’ve gone to Hannibal Division. They’re aligned with the Alexanders. They’d protect you.”

  She was pressed close up against him, her warmth seeping into his arm. “Huh,” Tom said, trying not to get too distracted by it. “It’s funny. I didn’t even think divisions mattered that much.”

  “Right now, for you, they’re just dorms. It’s really later on when it comes to potential corporate sponsors that divisions matter at all. Alexanders and Hannibals will introduce you to their company reps—those are the people in each Coalition company who determine which Combatants they want to sponsor. They pay for a Combatant’s airtime, supply ships for them to use in combat, and basically make it financially viable for the military to use them in space battles.”

  “So people aren’t CamCo because they’re good.”

  “Being good helps. But t
his isn’t a pure meritocracy, no. It’s also about knowing people.”

  “I thought this place was all about war. I didn’t expect it to be political.”

  She bumped him with her hip. “Tom, haven’t you heard that phrase—‘Politics is just war by other means’?”

  “What about Machiavellis?” Tom said, his eyes dropping to the quill on her shoulder. “Who are you guys aligned with?”

  “We Machiavellis shun permanent alliances. We’re free agents.”

  “Freedom’s good. I’m all for freedom.” He was all for Heather’s hands all over him like this, too.

  She tugged him around by the arm, then pressed on his chest. Tom moved back at her urging until his legs met the soft cushion of a chair. He dropped back into it.

  “Well,” Heather said, dropping back into her own chair and crossing her legs, “freedom has disadvantages. I’m the only Machiavelli in CamCo because the alliances stick with their own when they’re introducing potential Combatants to their sponsors. Alexanders and Hannibals introduce each other, and Napoleons and Genghises introduce each other. . . . It’s all about influence. When you have more people from your division in CamCo, you’re able to get more people from your division in CamCo. That’s why it was so hard for me to get in.”

  “Hard for you?” Tom said, disbelieving. Someone who could fly like her, and looked like her, and she didn’t have companies falling over each other to sponsor her?

  “I got in the program in the first place because I actually earned it. I didn’t have a rich uncle to connect me with Matchett-Reddy like Lea Styron, or a dad who used to work for Dominion Agra like Karl Marsters.” She tapped her fingers on the armrest of her chair. “Actually, it’s why I’m visiting the plebe floor. It has the biggest common area, and we’ve been plotting how to get another Machiavelli into CamCo. General Marsh agreed to approach the Defense Committee and nominate an Upper from our division, so now I have to figure out how to get a company behind him.”

  “Why don’t you just use your sponsor?”