Insignia

  But Tom just headed up the stairs as Dalton’s voice grew distant. When he hit the street, he made sure to lock the door behind him, and twisted the sign around to show BEWARE OF DOG so no one else would walk into the club and find the trapped Dominion execs.

  Tom drove his hands into his pockets, kicked off the soiled leather shoes, and strolled down the Washington, DC street toward the distant dome of the Capitol. It was the time of year when the cherry blossom trees lining the concrete were blazing in full bloom. When Tom came across a fountain and dipped his head in, pink petals swirled into the gurgling water washing away his hair gel. He saw a vendor at a stand selling Washington, DC memorabilia to tourists. He traded the guy his eleven-thousand-dollar suit for a large “Made in the USA” shirt, American flag jogging pants, and the vendor’s own pair of sneakers.

  And then Tom hit the subway, leaving Dominion Agra and the Beringer Club far behind him.

  DESPITE TOM’S ACCOUNT of what happened, and Karl’s supermurderous glare when he returned to the Spire the next morning, his friends were on alert for any reemergence of Zombie Tom. But Zombie Tom wasn’t the problem. Each day, old Tom grew more and more miserable like there was some storm cloud he couldn’t escape. He tried acting normal by laughing and joking around and throwing himself into sims. But it didn’t change the way he felt.

  In Applied Simulations one day, he didn’t charge across the fields with the rest of the Roman legion to battle Queen Boudicca. Wyatt searched him out and found him slumped against a tree, sandals buried in the mud. “You’re not New Tom again, are you?”

  “No.”

  Wyatt shifted back and forth. “But people are fighting, and you’re here. You love fighting.”

  “I’m thinking, okay? Am I not allowed to think?”

  “You don’t generally do that.” She settled next to him, taking care to avoid the mud.

  Tom watched her dully. She hadn’t been herself lately, either, and he was pretty sure it was because of what had gone down with Blackburn. He’d heard enough of their conversation in that office to get it: they’d had some sort of rapport. And then he’d gone and demolished it.

  He rubbed at his forehead. “Did I ever say sorry? About making Blackburn think that—”

  “I told you, that wasn’t you.” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “I still don’t even know what Roanoke means. You know, other than the obvious thing: that colony in early America.”

  “Vengerov knew,” Tom muttered. “I heard him. He knew just what buttons to push. He put it there.” He shook off the thought. “Look, Wyatt, I’m going to tell him what really happened—”

  “No! Don’t mention that again, okay? I’m sure Lieutenant Blackburn will start talking to me again one day, if you just let it drop. He has to, doesn’t he?”

  Tom couldn’t answer that for her. So he raised his hands. “Fine. It’s all you.”

  “Is that what’s been bothering you, then?”

  “Nothing’s bothering me.”

  “Something is. That’s why I’m here—so we can talk about your feelings.”

  Tom gave an incredulous laugh. “Talk about my feelings?”

  She shifted her weight, practically squirming with how uncomfortable she was. “Elliot told me about using more emotional sensitivity. It sounds pretty straightforward. If you want to try it, you can use ‘I feel’ statements and I’ll listen in a calm and nonjudgmental manner.”

  Tom snorted.

  “He also said I could lead this discussion by saying empathetic things such as: ‘I feel like you are sad, Tom.’” She nodded. “Are you sad, Tom?”

  “No,” Tom snarled, suddenly furious. “I’m not sad. I’m angry, okay? You want an ‘I feel’ statement? I feel like killing someone. I keep thinking of how completely snowballed I was by that whole thing, and I feel like I should have burned that club down with Dalton Prestwick inside it, okay? I didn’t even get that anything was wrong! I went for weeks on end gelling my hair and sucking up to Karl and I didn’t even know that anything was different!”

  “The program had a rootkit. It was designed to hide itself from you.”

  “That’s not the point, okay? I should’ve realized something was up because I just started trusting Dalton. Dalton Prestwick of all people! I hate this guy, okay? He treats my mom like garbage. He’s the reason I don’t have a family! And suddenly, what, I get one program in my brain and I think he’s the greatest guy in the world? I mean, I seriously thought he was doing everything for my own good! I thought that, and I didn’t even wonder about it!”

  “Again, program. Designed that way.”

  “I don’t do that, okay? I always know when people are scamming me. I just—I don’t do the blind devotion thing. I’ve never even trusted my dad like that!”

  Wyatt looked at him sharply, then bit her lip—because this was something even she knew better than to ask about.

  Tom glared across the field, feeling sick over it all. He kept thinking of Dalton showing him how to put on a tie—and he just wished he could go back in time somehow and strangle him with it. He felt like he’d done something awful, like he’d committed some terrible treason against his dad, because even now he could remember how it felt for that fleeting instant to trust someone so absolutely, to believe so unquestioningly everything Dalton did was for his own good . . .

  And most shameful of all, he missed that feeling so much he felt hollow inside.

  Tom thrust himself to his feet and drew his sword. “This is stupid.” He needed to fight. Some fake violence against fake people would cure everything. “Just forget it all.”

  “So you don’t have any more ‘I feel’ statements?”

  Tom laughed harshly and headed toward the battle. “Wyatt, no offense, but you suck at playing therapist. How about you go back to being you, I go back to being me, and we forget this ever happened, okay? But thanks anyway.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A WEEK LATER, WYATT still received no sign of forgiveness from Blackburn. He deposited a curt message in her vision center, assigning her a room to work alone in the basement, and so much tedious reformatting that she had to start leaving dinner early every night to make headway on it.

  Tom knew his payback was next.

  The first few days back in Programming were agonizing, knowing something bad had to be coming. Blackburn confirmed it for him by veering off his planned discussion of compilers and introducing a repertoire of new weaponized viruses, which Tom studied with a mounting sense of unease.

  And then the day came.

  “Today in class, we’re going to apply the knowledge of the last week.” His eyes found Tom, promising death. “Consider this exercise like a fox hunt, though if you want a formal name for it, I’ll call it Crossing the Wrong Person Is Bad for Your Health.”

  Confused mumbling filled the room, as people looked at one another, trying to figure out who this was aimed at. Tom slouched down in his seat. Well, they’d know soon enough.

  “All of you are hunting down one target,” Blackburn went on, “one fox. Use whatever programs you’d like to take that fox down. Hopefully, this will teach that fox a valuable lesson.”

  In other words, Blackburn was declaring it open season on him.

  “Tom Raines,” he announced, “you have a very exciting job today. You get to be the fox.”

  “I’m so shocked,” Tom said sarcastically.

  “If you manage to evade your fellow trainees until the end of this class, you win,” Blackburn said. “Use whatever means of escape you want. The rest of you will be competing against one another to see who gets the fox first. The winner can skip a day of class.”

  Everyone sat up straighter. Even Vik, next to Tom.

  “Traitor!” Tom said.

  “Call me Doctor Benedict Arnold,” Vik answered.
br />   Tom waited for his neural processor to call up the reference.

  “You’re the American here. What’s the matter with you?” Vik said.

  “Look, Vik, you’re my buddy. You can destroy me before anyone else does.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” Vik agreed.

  “So, Mr. Raines?” Blackburn said, elbows on the podium. “Are you going to run for it? It’s really no fun for anyone if you make this too easy.”

  Tom shrugged and stayed right by Vik, content to let his friend hit him with a virus first. “No point, sir. I can’t win. Almost every trainee in the Spire is here. I might as well not bother.”

  Blackburn considered it a moment, and then nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s give you more of a chance. A good programmer on your side. Mr. Harrison? You’re fox number two.”

  Nigel Harrison, closer to the front, sat up in his seat, horrified. “This is completely unfair!”

  “Really?” Blackburn said drily. “I didn’t hear you screaming injustice to the skies just a few moments ago when it was just Raines. Now it’s unfair?”

  The black-haired boy gazed up at him with open loathing.

  “Go, you two,” Blackburn said. “You get a five minute head start.”

  Tom didn’t move. Neither did Nigel. Five minutes was nothing. Nothing.

  Blackburn looked directly at Tom again. “Or is the challenge too much for you?”

  Blood roared up into Tom’s head. Oh, that was it.

  “Don’t fall for it,” Vik warned in an undertone.

  Yeah, he knew Blackburn was just goading him. But the accusation—that Tom wasn’t getting up to fight because he was afraid—just wasn’t something he’d let stand. He was going to prove Blackburn wrong. Prove them all wrong.

  Tom leaped to his feet, ignoring Blackburn’s ferocious smile, and headed toward the front. “Come on, Nigel. Let’s get out of here.”

  Nigel Harrison’s face twitched. “Ten minutes or it’s no deal. Sir.”

  Blackburn waved his hand. “You can take fifteen, even.” His tone said, It will make no difference.

  Tom knew it wouldn’t, but he bolted for the doors. This time Nigel followed.

  sts

  TOM RACED DOWN the corridor to the elevator. “This is what I figure, Nigel . . . Nigel!”

  He realized suddenly he was alone. The slim, black-haired boy was following him at a maddeningly slow pace, his pale face blank. Tom rushed back to his side, and matched his steps.

  “This is what I think.” Tom practically hopped in place, fighting the urge to sprint, knowing he needed the other kid cooperating if they were going to win this sucker. “We should pick somewhere secure where we can control who gets in—like the Census Chamber—and then we make a stand. We can do it. We can stomp them all.”

  “No, we can’t,” Nigel said.

  “You and me, we’re going to be like those three hundred Spartans, okay? This is our glorious moment where we take on a vastly superior enemy force and win. Ever played that game, Sparta 300?” He fought the urge to grab Nigel’s arm and hoist him over his shoulder to move him faster.

  “You’re such a child,” Nigel muttered. “You and your dumb friend, Vik. Life isn’t a stupid video game. Do you realize that? And seriously, who calls themselves the Doctor Dooms? You stole that from The Fantastic Four.”

  Tom pounded on the button for the elevator. “First of all, we’re Doctors of Doom—there’s an ‘of’ and it’s plural. Second of all, that doesn’t have anything to do with the here and now.”

  The elevator doors slid open. Nigel slumped back against the wall, wasting precious time that Tom knew they couldn’t afford to lose if they were going to have a chance of surviving the class period.

  “Come on. Come on, Nigel—we’ve gotta go somewhere we can defend ourselves.”

  Nigel fixed him with cold, blue eyes. “Is it true you blew up the Beringer Club?”

  “You know about that?” Tom said, startled.

  “Dominion Agra did the whole song and dance with me, too,” Nigel said. “They acted like they were going to sponsor me, let me come to the club when I wanted to, then nixed my nomination to Camelot Company and banned me from the premises. So did you do it?”

  “I didn’t blow up the Beringer Club. I just flooded it with sewage. With the Dominion execs in there.”

  Nigel studied him, then his mouth quirked. He slid past Tom into the elevator, hit B for basement. “I’ll work with you. And I know how we can win this.”

  “Let’s do it, man.” Tom offered him a high five, but Nigel just shot his raised hand a slicing look, and Tom dropped it to his side.

  They emerged from the elevator. Tom started for the Census Chamber, but Nigel didn’t follow. Tom found the small boy standing instead before the Spire’s primary processor—a refrigerator-sized computer chip swamped by wires, blasted on both sides by cooling hoses. “First, let’s disable the tracking system so they can’t find our GPS signals, and—”

  An idea crept into Tom’s brain. “Wait. No, keep it on. The internal GPS system is the first thing they’ll access once they start hunting us, don’t you see?”

  Nigel looked at him, catching onto the idea. “So we plant a Trojan there.”

  “Exactly.”

  Nigel darted over to a computer fixed to the wall, began typing away at the keyboard. “I’ve got the perfect one.” A strange gleam appeared in his eyes. “It’s my own creation. Grand Mal Seizure.”

  “You’re joking, right?” Tom said. But Nigel was still typing. Tom grabbed Nigel’s skinny arm before he could execute the command. “You can’t plant that virus. That’s a serious medical problem.”

  “So?”

  “People die of seizures. You could kill someone.”

  Nigel’s smirk was nasty. “I know.” He reached for the keyboard again.

  This time, Tom shoved him away from it. Nigel crashed against the wall. He righted himself, staring at Tom like he had just betrayed him somehow.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Tom bellowed. “Do you think Marsh will let us get away with doing something like that?”

  “I wouldn’t use it on CamCo. That’s all Marsh cares about.” Nigel’s blue eyes glowed fanatically. “I’ll just use it on the others, the dead weight, and let Blackburn fix it later. He’ll know better than to mess with us again after that, and so will the rest of them.” His voice shook with hatred. “Don’t you get it? Neither of us have a chance to be Camelot Company now. Dominion Agra is going to blackball you for what you did, and I got nixed because of this defective neural processor.”

  “Defective?”

  “I didn’t have this twitch before,” Nigel railed. “It’s a hardware problem with my neural processor. They’d have to cut open my head again to fix it, so General Marsh has just decided for me that it’s too much of a risk even if I’m willing to do it. It ruins everything! I can’t get to CamCo because companies think I’d look bad on camera. And Marsh just thinks it’s fine and great. He even told me, ‘Son, you can just do something else for the military. Not everyone’s Combatant material.’ . . . But I don’t want to do something else. I want this. And now you’re in the same situation—you can’t be CamCo, either. So let’s go for it another way.”

  “What, by wiping out the competition?”

  “No, we show Marsh we’re ruthless.” Nigel’s fist clenched in the air, gripping something only he saw. “Don’t you see? Look at the Russo-Chinese Combatants. Medusa doesn’t have a corporate sponsor, but Medusa is a Combatant anyway because he’s just that good. We can be like that. They’re looking for people who are different, who aren’t mediocre like the rest. We’ll show them we’re so deadly, the military has to make us CamCo even without sponsors!”

  “Not this way.” Tom planted himself between Nigel and the keyboard. “I have friends here.”

  Nigel’s face twitched, his expression like a storm cloud. “Good for you.”

  “I wasn’t saying you don’t—”
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  “I don’t,” Nigel hissed. “I don’t have friends here.”

  Gee, I wonder why, Tom thought, but he just said, “Okay, so maybe you don’t, but that doesn’t mean I’ll let you hurt mine.”

  “What reality do you live in?” Spit flew from Nigel’s mouth. “In a few minutes, your so-called friends are going to be hunting you down. Your friends helped you mess with the entire board of Dominion Agra. That’s one of the chief companies in the Coalition of Multinationals, do you get that? Those are some of the most powerful people in the world, and you swamped them in sewage! If you had real friends, they’d have told you that you’re an idiot for even thinking about doing that!”

  Tom bristled, indignant. “My friends do tell me I’m an idiot. All the time!”

  “Fine, Raines. Play it your way.”

  Tom didn’t trust him. He turned to the keyboard himself, careful to block Nigel’s path to it, trying to call up from his memory Frequent Noisome Farts. He’d stick that in the tracking system, and maybe the others in the Spire wouldn’t be so quick to search for them if a few of them came down with some major flatulence.

  “That’s really an impressive firewall you’ve got,” Nigel remarked from behind him. “Enslow make that for you?”

  Tom ignored him. He was laboring to type in the correct source code.

  “Impressive,” Nigel went on, “but flawed. You should’ve sided with me. You might’ve stood a chance.”

  Tom whirled around, saw him raising his forearm keyboard. He leaped forward, but not in time. The virus initiated and his head thrashed back—and slammed into something hard. His vision blurred into darkness.

  TOM AWOKE LYING on the stage of the Lafayette Room, pain drilling behind his eyes. He gazed at the empty rows of benches, blurring in and out of his vision.

  He tried to push himself up, but found his wrists pinned against his chest. “Hey!” he yelled out, fighting to free himself. He could feel something bunched up against the back of his head, too, and the front of it slipped down over his face, and blinded him. . . .