“Haven’t you ever, you know”—he blurted the rest—“tried to get it fixed?”
For a moment of silence, she just watched him squirm. “Eight surgeries. Five skin grafts, two face transplants. After the neural graft, I was done. I’d had enough. It was fine until you came. Until you let me pretend I could be normal.”
“I’m sorry.” It was all he could think to say.
Medusa shrugged. “I can’t blame you.”
She was walking away now, toward a door hidden in the far wall. Once she stepped through it, he’d never see her again: he knew it in his gut.
He took a sharp step toward her. “I had to win. I had to. They thought I was a traitor, so it was win or—or I was losing my neural processor and going to prison, okay? Come on! It’s—it’s not like I could’ve asked you to lose for me!”
She looked back at him, her eyes gleaming. “Maybe I would have.”
His throat closed. “You wouldn’t have.” People didn’t do that. They didn’t.
“I guess you’ll never know now. Just a word of warning, Mordred—next battle, I’m going to stomp you so hard, that afterward, you’ll make me look pretty.”
Tom’s uneasiness melted away. Implicit in that remark was a promise, though maybe she’d meant it as a threat: they’d meet again.
He felt his lips pulling into a grin. He’d take it. Take it and run. “You’ll try.”
Medusa’s lips split with that challenging smile, and for a second he recognized her somehow, he knew her on some primal level, the same way he’d recognized her behind the face of Brunhilde, the helmet of Achilles, or in that ship maneuvering in space—and then she flickered away. The simulation darkened around him. Tom pulled out his neural wire, Medusa’s dangerous smile lingering in his brain.
A fist hammered on the door, and then Vik, Yuri, and Wyatt came piling in.
“Come on, man, we’re starving,” Vik said. “I’d estimate we’re ten minutes away from cannibalizing someone here.”
“This is true.” Yuri thumped Tom’s bed. “And it will not be me. I am paying for dinner.”
Vik nodded. “And it can’t be Wyatt, since we’d look like real jerks if we killed and ate a girl. It’s also not going to be me since this whole thing’s my idea. That leaves you, Tom. Death by Indo-Russian cannibals. Beamer would love it.”
“Indo-Russian?” Wyatt said. “Oh. So I don’t get to eat now, is that it?”
Vik threw up his hands, exasperated. “Come on, Enslow. What do you think? Of course you get to eat Tom with us. Death by Americo-Indo-Russian cannibals just sounded too wordy.”
Tom met their expectant grins with one of his own. He’d never expected to have a future a year ago. He’d never expected to have friends.
And he’d definitely never expected to ever have to tell someone, “All right, no killing and eating me, okay? I’m ready to go.”
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S. J. Kincaid, Insignia
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