Insignia

  Blackburn yanked the uniform tunic off his head. “Calm down,” he ordered.

  “Let me go!” Tom cried.

  “I’m freeing you right now. Stay calm.”

  He reached behind Tom and tugged at something—and the constriction loosened around him. He saw then that his bonds were all made of uniform tunics.

  “You were thrashing,” Blackburn explained.

  Tom jolted to his feet. The movement made his stomach turn. “What happened?” He swallowed against the dry ache in his throat. “Who won?”

  “I’ve been dismantling Mr. Harrison’s program. It seems he took you out before anyone else could get to you. You were one of the two foxes, so he won the competition.”

  That devious . . . Tom hadn’t even thought of attacking Nigel and winning that way.

  “What did he get me with?” Tom rubbed at his head. “Grand Mal Seizure?”

  “No. Who would program such a thing? He hit you with a nasty variation of Nigel Harrison. Your twitching manifested itself as a sustained thrashing, and you knocked yourself unconscious.”

  Tom laughed, his head whirling. His legs felt a bit funny beneath him. “You’re kidding. Nigel Harrison Nigel Harrisoned me?”

  “That’s right.” Blackburn sounded annoyed. “And if he’d written a self-termination sequence, I would’ve given him a day off. Since I was stuck dismantling it, I revoked his victory.”

  Tom’s eyes riveted on a smear of blood on the stage below him. He raised a shaky hand to the side of his head and pressed the stinging bump gingerly.

  “Don’t poke at it,” Blackburn warned, plucking Tom’s hand away

  Yeah, like he cared. Tom ripped out of his grip and jumped down from the stage. The floor gave way beneath him, and he tumbled to the ground.

  “Graceful.” A thump of boots behind him, and then a large hand seized the back of his tunic and hauled him to his feet.

  “Let me go. Stay away from me!”

  Blackburn steered him jerkily down the aisle. “You have a head injury, Raines. You’re going to the infirmary.”

  “I’m great. I’m perfect. Let go!”

  He turned Tom around and clasped his shoulders. “You were unconscious for fifteen minutes, Raines. Your pupils are uneven. You need to see a doctor.”

  Tom felt awkward, seeing him this close, hearing him actually speak softly. He turned his head away. “So you got what you wanted, huh? This was bad for my health.”

  Blackburn considered him. “No. This went too far. Come on.”

  Tom stopped trying to break away from him. Blackburn remained silent the rest of the trip to the infirmary.

  Tom swayed dizzily when Blackburn delivered him to Nurse Chang, who urged him into one of the beds and flashed a penlight in his eyes. Then Tom pressed his cheek against the mattress, and it felt solid and calm when his head was so jumbled. He was suddenly glad to be here. He didn’t feel like delighting Karl by puking all over himself in the middle of the mess hall.

  “Stay awake, Mr. Raines,” Nurse Chang ordered.

  Tom forced his eyes back open, watching the bedside table blur in and out. He felt so sick. The lights were too bright. He didn’t like that Blackburn was still there, standing over him. He tried to shut out the sound of his voice as he asked, “How long do you expect he’ll be here? I should inform General Marsh.”

  “I’ll let you know after his CT, but . . . he’s young. Something that would floor you or me for a few weeks, they can shake off in days.”

  “You don’t need to tell me. Two boys, one year apart . . . There were more than enough trips to the . . .” He was silent a long moment. “Just keep me informed.”

  Heavy footsteps, and then the hiss of a door sliding open and closed again. Like some dark cloud had dissolved, Tom was finally able to relax, certain Blackburn was finally gone.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  AFTER A COUPLE days, Tom was allowed to leave the infirmary, but he was ordered to remain on bed rest. That’s why his GPS signal was situated in his bunk, while he hung out in the VR parlor of the Pentagon City Mall.

  He’d spent all Saturday morning fighting Medusa in Pirate Wars. He was the leader of the Black Flag pirate fleet, and she was Ching Shih, the Chinese pirate queen leading the Red Flag Fleet. Despite the low, persistent headache—his last reminder of his concussion—Tom fought valiantly and managed to board her ship. Just as he set about massacring her crew, he noticed Medusa’s dark head bobbing in the water beyond the ship, her huge grin filled with expectation.

  She waved happily. It was his only warning.

  Her ship exploded, taking out Tom, the ship, and the bulk of his Black Flag Fleet.

  They met back in the RPG, and Tom slipped into his ogre avatar. Medusa’s Egyptian queen was turning a series of backflips on the couch, celebrating her victory.

  “You’re still celebrating?” he asked.

  Medusa laughed and spun toward him. “You’d be gloating much more if you ever won.”

  Tom laughed. “A hundred times more, at least.” His ogre tromped forward, and they started circling around each other, another duel in the making. “Tell me something.” He fixed his gaze on her avatar, as though a few megapixels could give him a clue to the real person behind it. “Did you grow up speaking Mandarin?”

  “Cantonese.”

  Tom congratulated himself for weaseling her nationality out of her. She’d conceded the girl issue—since her voice was a girl’s—and he’d figured she was Chinese, but he wanted to be sure. Now he was getting a mental picture of her—shiny black hair, lively black eyes. Short, he thought.

  “I figured you weren’t Russian.”

  “Russians only train in the Forbidden City two weeks a year, or we go to their underground facility beneath the Kremlin.”

  “Only two weeks a year, huh? Some of the Indians train here with us all the time. So do the—” Tom stopped before he could tell her about the handful of trainees at the Spire from the Euro-Australian block.

  Medusa was quiet a minute. They always had to walk a careful line between their strange friendship and the treason charges they’d face, giving away military secrets.

  “That’s probably not so classified,” Tom said, reconsidering it.

  “Everyone knows about the underground Russian facility,” Medusa said, sounding a bit uneasy. “Just like the Bombay facility for the Indians.”

  “What about the South Americans, the Africans, and the Nordic people?”

  “They tend to want to live in Moscow, not with us. You have to join our military to be in our program.”

  “Really? We’re not military here. Not till we’re eighteen.” Tom’s ogre leaped up onto the couch. His massive weight tilted it, and with a gale of laughter, Medusa’s avatar fluttered off, letting it unbalance and flip on top of Tom’s avatar. “Are the Russians military?” he asked.

  “Yes, but they don’t take it seriously. They can quit anytime they want. They have a real problem there, because so many rich Russians buy their kid a place in the program just to get a neural processor in their brains—and then have them drop out.” She began taking advantage of the way Tom’s ogre was pinned down to stomp on his head. “Most of the time, they don’t even get the neural processors taken back out of them, even if it’s early enough.”

  “Clever. So parents send them there to get turned into instant geniuses, huh?”

  “Well, you’d think that’s why they do it. But one time a family got investigated for it—and it turned out the girl who got the neural processor wasn’t even their kid, just some girl they paid to impersonate her. And by the time the military realized this, they’d already had the girl’s head cut open, and sold the processor on the black market.”

  “Wow.”

  “We just don’t approach things the same way they do. That??
?s why the Russians hate it when they visit us. This year they kept complaining because they wanted to sleep every single night.”

  Tom paused in his struggle to throw off the couch as her boot descended into his face over and over. “Wait, you guys don’t sleep every single night?”

  “You do?”

  “Sleep is good, Medusa. Sleep is great.”

  “We have scheduled slow-wave sleep periods. But daily sleep isn’t necessary with the neural processor.”

  Tom waved his gloves and resumed trying to move the couch. “But it’s sleep.”

  “We put the time to better use.” She bent down to smile tauntingly in his face, her dark hair wreathing her head in his visor. “Maybe that’s why we’re winning.”

  Tom laughed. “Maybe that’s why the foreign Combatants would rather live in Russia!” He hurled the couch to the side, and then leaped to his feet and punched her.

  “Are you from Texas?” Medusa asked him out of the blue, punching him back.

  “Why Texas? Do I seem like a Texan?”

  “Texas and New York are the only places I’ve heard about in America. Oh, and California.”

  “Not from Texas, but I know a guy from Texas. He’s named Eddie.”

  “Did he live on a ranch?”

  “Nah. He’s not a cowboy, either. I think he’s a doctor. He and my dad got in a fistfight once, and then they got beer afterward. They’re still buddies. I guess it’s how they make friends down there or something.”

  “Isn’t that how we made friends, too? Fighting?” She knocked him through the wall.

  Tom found his feet, charged back into the room, and tackled her. “Yeah, but we didn’t just fight. We wrecked the Beringer Club together. Oh, and I died horribly at your hands. Gruesome murder always builds the foundation for a beautiful friendship.”

  She laughed, and her Egyptian queen roundhouse kicked his ogre across the room, slamming him into the stone wall and collapsing it. Tom’s ogre got buried, and he couldn’t help the mental picture his brain was forming: a pretty Chinese girl who loved video games, shooting fire from her eyes, and fighting him. Oh, and who also happened to be the greatest warrior in the world.

  He was glad Medusa couldn’t see him right now, just his ax-wielding ogre avatar, buried in stones, because he’d feel embarrassed if she saw his huge grin.

  THAT TUESDAY, TOM received a ping as soon as Tactics ended: Report to Elliot Ramirez for semester evaluation.

  “Oh. Oh, great.” Tom knew how this was going to go.

  The plebes were all being evaluated for the promotions to Middle Company, a small but important step up the ladder. The decision was in the hands of Marsh, but their Applied Simulations instructors had a say, too. Tom had been avoiding Elliot, hoping to put off the inevitable lecture about his lack of teamwork, his inability to play nicely with others, and something else like his lack of self-actualization or something. But Elliot was obviously sick of waiting for Tom to come to him on his own time.

  He’d never been to the fourteenth floor where the Combatants in Camelot Company lived. He heard rumors the way everyone else did: that the CamCos didn’t have their own rooms, they all slept in one massive barracks type place. They also had a swimming pool, feather beds, a hot tub where all the CamCo girls romped about wearing nothing, a private bar, and a masseuse. When the doors parted to reveal a common room like on every floor, and private rooms like on every other floor, Tom felt a twinge of disappointment. He stepped out onto the soft carpet, his eyes trained on the slanted walled window overlooking the green expanse of Arlington fourteen stories below them. He turned in a slow circle, looking at the doors.

  “Tom.”

  Elliot’s voice made him jump. The dark-haired boy stood in the doorway to his bunk, and he gestured Tom inside.

  Tom followed him into the private bunk. Single occupant. Nice.

  Elliot must’ve been lounging on his bed, because he flopped back down and slung his legs across the sheets, a silent screen running on the ceiling over his head—the battle at Mercury from a few months earlier.

  “So, your first evaluation,” Elliot said, eyes trained on the ceiling.

  Tom shifted his weight. “Yeah.”

  “Sit.”

  Tom lowered himself into Elliot’s plush leather chair.

  “Sorry to rush this, Tom, but we’ve been busy trying to prep for Capitol Summit. General Marsh keeps sending me messages from India, telling me to urge CamCo along in nominating my proxy. And here I was, hoping maybe I could play as myself this year.”

  Tom looked up at the screen, because he wasn’t sure what to say to that. Of the members of CamCo, Elliot’s fighting was the most rote and predictable. There was a good reason Marsh never let him serve as his own proxy.

  Elliot was gazing at the image again.

  “Tell me something, Tom—what do you think I did wrong here?” Elliot waved his finger and rewound a segment where his ship grazed Medusa’s, swerved at the last minute, then caught a missile she blasted back at him. His ship exploded, a fiery mass of flames streaking toward the surface of Mercury.

  “Er, you got blown up.”

  “Obviously. But why did it happen? How did I mess up?”

  “You’re asking me to play armchair quarterback?”

  “Exactly, Tom. Armchair quarterback me.”

  Tom shifted in the chair. He’d be glad to tell Elliot why he’d messed up, but it didn’t seem like the right time to rub in his failings. Besides, ever since Elliot let him fight Medusa in Troy, he didn’t feel the need to do it.

  “Um, you would’ve gotten blown up anyway. Even if you’d done everything right there.”

  “But I might’ve taken Medusa with me if I’d played my cards right. What should I have done?”

  “You did everything by the book. You’d know better than me. You’re much farther along in tactics than I am.”

  “But . . . ?”

  “You should’ve kamikaze’d her,” Tom blurted. “You had the chance. Knock out Medusa and the rest would’ve been in shock. You could’ve just picked them off.”

  “Her?”

  Tom winced at the slip. “I think of Medusa as a girl for some reason.”

  “Me, too. Kind of funny. To be honest, ramming her didn’t even occur to me at the time. But it would’ve occurred to you, wouldn’t it have?” Elliot pondered him, rubbing his thumb across his chin. “That’s something about you, Tom. I’ve seen it time and again, the way you aim straight for the throat. You have the killer instinct. At the end of the day, I don’t. I don’t have teeth and claws and the hunger for it, I suppose.”

  “You’re not vicious like me, you mean.”

  “I suppose that’s one way to put it. Do you know why I wanted you to pay fealty?”

  Tom had theories at the time. Some need for power, some deep-seated egotism. It didn’t feel fair saying anything about that now.

  Elliot answered his own question. “Because that’s as much a part of advancing here as your battle performance. All the killer instinct in the world won’t get you anywhere if you’re not willing to play the social game. There’s not a person in history who achieved greatness without choking back some pride, without ever smiling at someone they despised, without—yes—playing along even if they hated the very idea of it.”

  “I get it. I’m not a team player.”

  “You could be.” Elliot leaned toward him. “You can be, Tom. A very valuable, effective team player. Exactly the kind of player who leads teams to victory. But you need to play that other game, too. You need to learn to—”

  “Suck up?” Tom said before he could stop himself.

  “That’s right. Suck up.”

  Tom stared at him, caught off the guard, the ships still dancing on the screen overhead.

  “You can think anything you want, Tom, but you won’t get anywhere unless you learn—on rare occasion—to act like a pathetic little suck-up. The way I do.”

  Tom wasn’t even sure what to say to
this. It had never occurred to him that Elliot was completely aware of the way he came across.

  Elliot went on. “I admire your integrity. I admire how you hold your ground. But I’d also like to see you win some ground, not just hold it. I’d like to see someone with your creativity, your drive, really get somewhere. You’re not going to do that unless you learn to bend.”

  For a moment, Tom was too caught off guard to reply. And then he remembered that this didn’t matter. Not really. “I’m not going to get anywhere, anyway.”

  “You’re referring to the Dominion Agra execs and the Beringer Club?”

  Tom started.

  Elliot smiled. “I’ve heard a few whispers. Your new infamy’s an obstacle to getting a sponsor. I’ll admit it.” He rose to his feet. “But, Tom, there are four other companies on the Coalition that invest in Indo-American Combatants. Dominion Agra is not the only act in town. Don’t give up hope this soon.”

  Tom rose to his feet, confused. This hadn’t gone as he’d expected. “Thanks for the advice.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Elliot paused by the door. “Tom, I’m going to recommend you for Middle. I want you to think about what I said, though.” He winked. “And good luck.”

  Stunned, wondering if he’d never understood this guy, Tom shook the hand Elliot offered. He was reeling when he left Elliot’s bunk and headed back toward the elevator—and that was how he missed Karl where he was sitting on a couch, downloading his homework.

  Karl yanked out the neural wire and bounded to his feet. “Lassie.”

  Tom wasn’t in the mood for this. He hit the button for the elevator, hoping it would get there soon.

  “What, trying to ignore me? Taking the higher ground’s so unlike you.” He heard Karl’s slow, steady footsteps drawing up behind him and turned his back to the elevator.

  But Karl didn’t attack him. He hung back in an unsettling manner, lips fixed in a strange, lopsided grin.

  “What?” Tom blurted.

  “Getting my last look at you.”

  “You going somewhere? Remind me to throw a party.”

  “No, no. You see, a few days ago, Dalton got the credit card bill for your last party.”