Vortex

  This was in the bag. Tom leaped up in one great bound, flipping on the clamps so they instantly sealed to the pole. No problem. He’d be up and back before anyone was the wiser. . . .

  But he didn’t get another arm’s length up before a hand closed around the back of his exosuit and tore him down. Tom’s exosuit clanged against another behind him. He looked back, and his stomach sank as his neural processor identified Blackburn’s IP address.

  “See, Raines, when I said you’d do something reckless and phenomenally stupid?” Blackburn’s voice said right in his ear. “This is the sort of thing I was talking about.”

  “I wasn’t climbing it,” Tom lied quickly. “I was smashing this huge spider and the clamp accidentally turned on and stuck me to the pole.”

  Blackburn dragged him across the roof and shoved him down, by the door leading to the fifteenth floor. “You stay here. Sit. Don’t move.” There was a sort of dark fury in his voice.

  Tom wasn’t pleased about sitting. It wasn’t dignified. He shoved himself up, but Blackburn’s heavy hand anchored on top of his head and manhandled him back down. “I said don’t move!”

  Tom clenched his jaw and stayed on the ground.

  “Thatta boy,” Blackburn said. “I’m going to talk to Ashwan. You—stay here by yourself, don’t talk to anyone, and ponder how stupid that was. Think of it as a time-out.”

  “Time-out?” Tom blurted. “What am I, five?”

  Blackburn laughed unpleasantly. “Color me astounded that you are even vaguely familiar with that term, Raines. But if I can’t pound some sense through your thick skull by treating you like the other trainees, then maybe I should try treating you like an undisciplined young child, which is exactly the way you’re acting. Would that work?”

  “No!” Tom protested. “I’m fifteen.”

  “Then prove to me you have the attention span of a fifteen-year-old and sit there.”

  Simmering, Tom stayed there, until Blackburn seemed satisfied and his footsteps clanged away. But then Tom got to thinking, and he realized what must be going on: Blackburn was probably coming down hard on Vik. Maybe Vik had thought of some great excuse already? Tom knew he had to corroborate whatever story it was, so he eased himself to his feet and moved as quietly as he could back toward them, determined to hear what Vik said. He settled around the curve of the base of the pole, ears straining to pick out their conversation.

  He caught Blackburn’s words. “. . . really think this is a good idea, Ashwan?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Oh, but it sounded like you did. After all, you were rooting him on, so show me what a brilliant idea this is. Climb the pole.”

  Vik was silent a moment. “Sir?”

  “I said climb it.”

  Tom felt incredulous. That was not fair. Vik got to climb it? He leaned forward, and saw the wavering air in Vik’s location.Vik obviously wasn’t climbing.

  “Let me guess: it looks awfully high now, doesn’t it, Ashwan? Let’s say you climbed it. This thing”—there was a waver of air, and then a ringing of exosuited knuckles clapping on the pole—“sends transmissions to vessels in the neutral zone around Earth. One communication with a ship while you’re climbing this, and the signal will short out the centrifugal clamps and maybe send a good old shock straight through all this metal into your neural processor. Tell me, still sound like a good idea?”

  Vik sounded astonished. “No, sir.”

  “No, it isn’t. Odds are, nothing’s going to get sent in the time it would take you to pull it off—and even less likely, in the time it would take Raines . . . but what if something did get transmitted? Then I’ll tell you what would happen: the person up there falls to this roof or maybe to that one down there, and that’s it, Ashwan. They’re a pancake. How much did you bet over this? I didn’t make out the number.”

  “Uh, fifty dollars, sir.”

  “Your friend’s life for fifty dollars.”

  “I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known.”

  “Here’s the thing about you, Ashwan.” And Tom could see one shimmering form draw back as the other moved closer. “I’ve got this hunch you have a decent brain. I think there’s a voice of reason somewhere in that skull, and I’d be willing to make a bet of my own: that you suspected there was some sort of risk here. That must’ve made it all the more exciting, getting some vicarious thrill out of a friend doing something phenomenally dangerous that you are too smart to do yourself.”

  Tom felt a surge of outrage, and it was all he could do not to tear forward and tell Blackburn he was wrong about Vik. Vik must’ve felt angry, too, because he protested, “It’s not like that at all, sir.”

  “Uh-huh. Do you know how many times I’ve seen this same thing with you two? Back in the war games, I remember Raines raring to pounce, ready to give me a problem whether I outranked him or not. Let’s face it, that kid screws up over and over and over again, I’m surprised when he doesn’t at this point. But you? You don’t. You snapped to attention and said ‘sir, yes, sir’ to me like an obedient little drone, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, and you know it. You don’t step a toe out of line, and I know why: because someone, at some point, taught you better than that.”

  “But it’s not like . . . You’re wrong. Sir, you’re wrong. That’s my best friend. I wouldn’t set him up.”

  Tom hung back, feeling strange. He had this sense it would embarrass Vik a lot knowing he’d heard all this.

  “Then God save Tom Raines from his well-wishers,” Blackburn said. “You have to know you aren’t doing him any favors.”

  Tom returned to the spot where Blackburn had left him. He was still sitting there when Blackburn set up a few lines, giving the trainees a chance to rappel down the side of the Spire if they preferred to try that rather than exosuiting. Blackburn belayed Makis, Kelcy, and Vik down, but the rest preferred to climb down the same way they’d climbed up—clamp by clamp. Blackburn gathered up the climbing equipment, shoved it in a bag, then dumped it into Tom’s arms and popped open the door. “Walk down the stairs, and wait for me on the second-story flight of the stairwell. I’ll come as soon as the others are done.”

  “I can’t climb down?”

  Blackburn tore off the hood of his optical camouflage, giving Tom a glimpse of his face. “Get this through your head, Raines: this activity was a privilege, not a right. Actions have consequences. You messed around, you abused that privilege, so that means you’re out.”

  “Fine. Whatever. It’s not like I care.”

  Blackburn gave him a knowing look. “Oh yes, you do.”

  Tom stepped into the stairwell, and knocked the door closed with his boot. Dimness enveloped him as the door clanged shut. Fine. So he wouldn’t climb down. It didn’t matter; he still had the exosuit, and that was the awesome part. He tore off the last of the optical camouflage, leaned over to peer down the railing, and didn’t see anyone, so with a little thrill of excitement, Tom flipped forward down one flight of stairs, landing at the bottom with a clang. He did the same thing with the next flight, taking a ferocious pleasure at getting away with this.

  He would’ve flipped down the next flight of stairs if he hadn’t heard a door swing open below him and footsteps move rapidly up toward him. Tom checked himself and stepped lightly, careful not to let the metal clank against the steps.

  That’s how Yuri ran into him on the stairwell. A light sheen of sweat coated the larger boy’s face. The plebes were already at lunch while the Middles finished up Calisthenics, but obviously Yuri was taking advantage of the hour for an extra jog up the stairs.

  “Thomas,” Yuri said, surprise in his voice.

  For a moment, Tom halted, wondering if Yuri, as a plebe, could even see his exosuit. But Yuri didn’t react at all, so Tom figured it had to be censored from his neural processor.

  “Are you not supposed to be in Calisthenics?” Yuri asked him.

  Middles weren’t supposed to share particulars about exosui
ts with plebes. They hadn’t “earned the privilege.” Tom tried to think of a lie.

  Yuri guessed what the answer was. “Ah, I understand.” His face seemed to shutter closed. “It is not for my ears. Would you like assistance with the bag?”

  “Nah, I can handle it.” Even without the exosuit, this was no problem. He hoisted it up on his shoulder and took care with his steps, trying to stop them from clanging their way down the stairs. As they started talking about lunch, about the upcoming break, Tom couldn’t help the way his thoughts turned back to the conversation he’d overheard between Blackburn and Vik.

  God save Tom Raines from his well-wishers. You’re not doing him any favors.

  His gut contracted. He honestly hadn’t thought people saw him as a screwup here. Sure, people like Karl and Dalton and Blackburn saw him as some insolent, mouthy little punk who deserved a beat down, but he hadn’t realized everyone expected him to ruin his greatest chance to make something of himself. The worst thing was, he didn’t know how to fix it anymore. His mind turned back to General Marsh, ordering him to fix things with the CEOs. As if he could walk up to them on the street and make amends.

  Even if he could walk up to those CEOs somewhere, he knew he couldn’t fix things. He couldn’t do what Marsh expected him to do. Maybe Vik knew it, too. That’s why Vik had congratulated him and cheered him on. . . . It was just his friend keeping him from dwelling on the way he’d ruined it all.

  The realization staggered Tom. He stopped in his tracks, and Yuri thumped down several steps more before noticing he’d stopped. He peered back at him. “Thomas?”

  Tom gazed at his friend, realizing he’d been doing the same thing to Yuri. They all had. They’d avoided mentioning this, talking about it, helping him avoid reality. They hadn’t been doing him a favor.

  “Yuri, man, what are you still doing here at the Spire?” Tom blurted. “You have to know they’re not gonna promote you. You’re not going anywhere.”

  If he was startled, he didn’t show it. Yuri gazed up at him in the half-light.

  “You know that, right?” Tom pressed.

  Yuri dropped his gaze to the railing. “Yes.”

  “Why are you wasting your time like this? I love this place, too, and I know you’re into Wyatt. I get why you wanna stay, but, Yuri, man, you’re gonna become that guy who’s hanging around his high school when he’s twenty. You shouldn’t be him. You’re not some loser. Your glory days are the ones still ahead of you.”

  Yuri sighed. “You are telling me nothing I have not thought myself.”

  “Then what is it? What are you doing?”

  Yuri licked his lips, then raised his eyes, a determined glint in them. “You will think of this as very foolish, but I am always having this great feeling of certainty I must stay—a certainty it is necessary that I am here, as though there is some purpose I would be neglecting if I left.”

  “What purpose?”

  He shrugged his large shoulders. “I cannot say. ‘Purpose’ is the only way I can describe this sense as though I have a task here. Even so much as a contemplation of departure gives me great unease. I feel it, such wrongness, such a certainty that leaving would be a grave error. And when I try to reason it out, this wrong feeling gets worse—as though some terrible weight is pressing in on my temples.” He gestured vaguely to his head. “And I am aware this must seem quite crazy to you.”

  Tom leaned back against the wall. “No. No, man. It’s not crazy. Hey, come on, I know how it is. Like, I know where I’d have been without this place. There was nothing before.” He didn’t talk about this stuff, not even with Vik, and even now Tom had to drop his voice to a near whisper. “Literally, just . . . nothing. I don’t know where I’d have gone if I hadn’t been recruited. I probably would’ve ended up, I dunno, in prison or something.” He shrugged off the thought. “But, Yuri, this doesn’t have to be make or break for you. You’re not like me. You’re better. You can do so much, and people like you. People care about you. You could really do something in this world.”

  Yuri raised his eyes to his. “You are too hard on yourself, Thomas.”

  Tom was thrown a moment by his words, and he fell silent.

  “I hate to interrupt the touching moment.” Blackburn’s voice floated from the darkness below them as his footsteps scuffed their way up the stairs. Tom and Yuri both jumped, but then Blackburn rounded the turn in the stairs below them, and said very clearly to Yuri, “We are talking about Zorten Two for the next five minutes.”

  Yuri took his cue immediately, and his face grew cloudy like he was zoning out—just as Blackburn programmed him to do when he heard anything programming related.

  Blackburn jabbed his thumb down the stairs. “Stairwell is clear. That means we’re going to have a talk.”

  “Look, the roof—”

  “The incident on the roof is exactly what I’ve come to expect of you, Raines,” Blackburn said briskly as they headed down the stairs. “No, I’m here to talk about the neural processor you saw tampering with the drones—the person behind the breaches. I planned to use the climb to talk about this if you’d kept pace with me—like you were supposed to.”

  Tom darted a glance back up to Yuri, higher on the stairs. He saw that Yuri’s eyes had snapped open, a curious, razor-sharp intensity on his face. He wasn’t blinking, and as Tom twisted down the stairs, he mentally willed him, Close your eyes and pretend to zone out. What are you doing, man?

  “I hope you realize, I know you’ve been trying to talk to someone outside the Spire,” Blackburn said, his voice echoing off the walls around them.

  Tom stopped in his tracks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He saw movement out of the corner of his eye as he followed Blackburn down, and he realized with some disbelief that Yuri was quietly moving down the staircase, too, listening to them, just out of Blackburn’s line of sight.

  What was he doing? Did he want to be caught?

  “Don’t lie to me.” Blackburn whirled on him. “You have a friend in the Citadel. It makes me wonder about something: there’s no sign of a backdoor into our system, no evidence of external penetration of our server, yet there was a third neural processor interfacing with those drones, controlling those drones. If it wasn’t a neural processor outside the Spire, it was one inside our system, but if it was inside our system, I’d be able to trace it. I couldn’t.”

  “So? What does that have to do with—”

  “It means someone covered his tracks, Raines. He covered them thoroughly, and he did it within minutes of that assault on the system. There are only three people in the world capable of hiding their digital fingerprints so readily. One is my counterpart at the Sun Tzu Citadel—external to the Spire. One is Joseph Vengerov—again, external to the Spire. The third is me.”

  “Maybe it was you,” Tom flung at him, keeping a careful eye on Yuri, too. “Maybe you have another personality you don’t know about. I mean, you were schizo—” His voice cut off when Blackburn abruptly seized him and hauled him around.

  “Or maybe someone didn’t cover his tracks. Maybe he never left them. Maybe it was even a friend of yours who can move through a firewall undetected, purely by some quirk of his or her neural processor. If that was the case, it could be someone who entered our system and controlled those drones without leaving a shred of evidence. Just as he’s been tampering with my system without leaving evidence.” His eyes gleamed. “Is that who you’ve been contacting, Raines? Is it a ghost in the machine, someone from the Citadel who can penetrate my firewalls at will?”

  No. Medusa wouldn’t do something like this. Not the breaches, not the sabotage of the drones. “I don’t think so.”

  “I could get fired over this,” Blackburn said softly. “Obsidian Corp. is already leaping on the chance to lobby the Defense Committee for my removal. You’d be glad to see the last of me.”

  “Yeah,” Tom said honestly. He really would be. “But that doesn’t mean I’m lying about thi
s. I think you’re looking at the wrong suspect.” Then, giving into a spiteful impulse, he added, “Again.”

  Blackburn released him, but flattened a palm against the wall right in Tom’s path when he tried to ease by him. “You tell your friend something for me. Ghost in the machine or no, I can and I will retaliate against the person behind this.” With that ominous statement, he lifted his arm and finally allowed Tom to slip past him down the stairwell.

  Tom walked down and kept walking until he heard a door swish open and closed. When he was sure Blackburn was gone, he halted in place, and waited for the telltale thump of boot steps as Yuri made his way down to him.

  He’d heard every word. Every single word.

  Tom dragged his gaze up to his friend. He didn’t know how to explain this to Yuri. There were so many things he’d kept from his friends. Might as well find out how much damage control he had to do first. “Uh . . . you heard that, man?”

  Yuri stopped a flight above him. “Heard what, Thomas?”

  “What we were saying. Me. Blackburn. Just now.”

  His brow furrowed. “I looked down to see if you were okay, but I was not hearing your words.”

  “But you were . . .” Tom faltered.

  He’d thought Yuri was listening. Yuri had been keeping pace with them, following them down the stairwell. He seemed like he was listening. He had to have heard—he’d been close enough, hadn’t he?

  Tom shoved his hands into his pockets. “Um, good. Because there was nothing worth hearing. Nothing important.” Then he launched into an elaborate story about Blackburn being mad at him for messing around in Calisthenics. Since Vik could corroborate, it seemed the safest bet.

  Still.

  It was odd Yuri hadn’t heard, but at least it saved Tom the trouble of thinking up an explanation, and at the end of the day, that’s what mattered most.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AS WINTER BREAK approached, Tom and Vik grew very sad, because it was unlikely they’d end up in the same Applied Scrimmages group in January. They’d had a great time ever since Tom and Snowden achieved a certain peace by keeping their distance from each other. Snowden mostly stayed out of the sims; and when he did make his appearances, it was well away from Tom. In that way, they grew to tolerate each other, and Vik and Tom were free to wreak havoc.