Vortex

  “Come on, Tom. I’m not . . .” Vik stopped and let out a breath. “Do you need the social worker?”

  “She came by before you did.” Olivia had been sitting by his bed as he recovered from the anesthesia. She’d pressed him to talk. He pretended to sleep.

  Vik rubbed his palm over his face. “I’ve got to tell you something. When you left the group at Obsidian Corp., I—”

  But Tom’s attention riveted to a faint shuffling sound, somewhere in the distance, and he sat bolt upright. “Is Yuri still here?” he demanded, on edge. “What’s he up to?”

  “Yuri?” Vik blinked a few times. “No, he and Wyatt went . . .” He stepped back to check and peered out the doorway, then said, “Hey, Yuri, man, I said I’d meet you in the mess hall.”

  Yuri’s voice was gentle, mild. “Of course, Vikram.” He peeped in. “Good-bye, Thomas.”

  Eavesdropping. Tom wasn’t sure why the word popped into his head, but he tried to force it away.

  FOR THE NEXT few weeks after he was discharged from the infirmary, Tom felt like a walking black hole. Everything seemed to have changed, and he couldn’t place why. The worst was his friends. He felt this wave of sickness whenever the four of them were together, something like dread. It was like he was poised for something awful to happen, and he didn’t know what.

  The other people at the Pentagonal Spire weren’t much better right now. They’d all heard what happened. A few sniggered at how stupid he’d been, blundering outside in Antarctica, but others were weird with him about it.

  Like Walton Covner, who’d been promoted to Upper Company. Instead of messing with Tom’s head, or otherwise acting like the strangest person Tom had ever met, as they stood in the elevator together one day, Walton said, “I’m sorry about what happened in Antarctica. Are you all right?”

  “I’m great,” Tom said vehemently.

  Walton looked so awkward that Tom felt an evil little thrill. It occurred to him that this was a prime opportunity to mess with Walton’s head for once.

  He leaned in close, dropping his voice. “Hey, Walt, thank them for me.”

  “Thank who?”

  “You know. Them.” Tom raised his eyebrows significantly. “Your gnome minions, man! They saved me. I was dying in the cold, and they came walking out on those tiny little feet and carried me with their tiny little hands all the way back into this tiny little cave they had. I thought you were messing with me before. I realize now—you truly do have gnome minions. Glorious, brave, miniony gnomes.” Tom was very careful to keep that fake innocent expression on his face, the one that used to serve him so well in VR parlors.

  He must’ve pulled it off, because Walton settled with, “I think you might’ve hallucinated that.”

  “Right.” Tom gave him a thumbs-up. “I know the official story. I ‘hallucinated.’” He made air quotes.

  “No, Tom, I mean it. You really did hallucinate.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get it. Look: give this to them.” He unscrewed a finger. “Take it.”

  Walton winced at the sight. “Ugh, Raines. I didn’t need to see you do that.”

  “Take it.” Tom thrust the finger right in his face. “Give it to them. As payment.”

  “I don’t think they’d want your finger.”

  “But it’s a token of my esteem!”

  “And you need to put that token of esteem back on your hand.”

  Walton spent the rest of the elevator ride backing away from him while Tom persistently tried to shove the finger at him. Then he scuttled out quickly when the door slid open and Tom cackled gleefully for the first time in days. He looked down so he could screw the finger back on . . . and went very still, arrested by the sight of his hand, the way his finger ended in a stub where the joint had been.

  His skin crawled.

  Back in his bunk, Tom dropped onto his bed, and unscrewed cybernetic finger after finger until he was left with a stubby mess of a right hand. His hand. It looked so strange.

  Freakish.

  Tom stared at it with morbid fascination. Then he replaced the fingers and did the same thing with the other hand. It was even more disgusting, some of the fingers ending above the knuckle. By the time Tom shoved them back on, his whole body was shaking. He felt like he was going to throw up, a terrible sense of wrongness spreading through him, like he’d made some awful mistake he could never rectify.

  TOM COULDN’T SHAKE the dreadful self-consciousness in the days that followed. The cybernetic fingers were slightly off, the tone too pink somehow. Even when they were on, he tried keeping his hands in his pockets. He kept turning suspiciously at every burst of laughter he heard, wondering with a sudden clenching of his stomach if people were laughing at him. He swore a couple of the other trainees looked at his hands, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was imagining it.

  It took a while to work up his courage to do that thing he’d been dreading. He’d avoided trying VR games in front of Vik, worrying about what might happen. He finally holed himself up in his bunk one day to play Samurai Eternity. He set it at Expert level, the way he always did with games.

  And then his worst fears were confirmed: the cybernetic fingers moved differently enough to throw off every slash of his sword, every blast of his weapons. In frustration, Tom tore off his VR gloves and hurled them across the bunk. The insane urge to stomp on them, break them, swamped his brain, and only the knowledge that he’d spent a month’s stipend on them held him back.

  But he felt a great ball of anxiety in his stomach. It felt like a much more tangible, aching loss than the sensory receptors he’d once had on those fingers.

  He was doomed. He was completely and utterly doomed. Gaming was how he got by before the Spire. It was how he survived. Now he’d completely lost his chance at Combatant status, he’d made an enemy of Joseph Vengerov—and he didn’t have a backup plan anymore.

  He wasn’t aware of Wyatt knocking on his door, and he was only dully aware of the moment she walked over to where he was standing above the gloves. Her large hands tugged clumsily at him, and Tom found himself sitting next to her on his bed.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m not upset or anything. I realized I suck at games now,” he told her. He held up his curled fingers. “These don’t work right.”

  “Your brain’s primed to use the old ones,” she said. “It’s like the exosuits. No matter how good they are, your brain uses slightly different neurons to move them. You’ll learn. Just practice.”

  He shook his head gloomily. “It’s never going to be the same.”

  “Fine. Then you can be awful at video games. They’re stupid anyway and a waste of time.” She nodded crisply. “You should read more books, Tom.”

  He stared at her. “Wyatt, this is not a good pep talk. You are not good at pep talks.”

  “Well, it’s not the end of the world. You don’t need to video game for money now.”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  And then her words registered in his brain.

  His muscles felt rigidly locked in place as he tried to make sense of it.

  “Um, wait. Wait,” Tom said. “Wait. How do you know about that?”

  Wyatt’s eyes shot wide, and she dropped her gaze.

  Tom scooted away from her. “Wyatt, how do you know I played games for money? I never told you that. The only person who knew was General Marsh. Or . . .”

  Or Lieutenant Blackburn, the guy who’d seen enough of his memories to know.

  For some reason, Tom felt like he’d been socked, realizing Blackburn had told her. He’d sort of thought Blackburn was discreet about the stuff from the census device. His brain felt all tangled up even thinking about Blackburn now, knowing the same guy who’d almost driven him insane had also saved his life and . . . and comforted him when he’d been hurting and sort of confused. But this was a surprise. Blackburn had talked about Tom’s personal stuff to Wyatt?

  Tom hadn’t told her what he knew about Blackburn and his family. This felt like
being stabbed in the back.

  “What else did Blackburn tell you?” he asked her roughly.

  “It wasn’t him, Tom. It was my fault.” She clutched her hands together in her lap. “It was right before vacation, after we got Jupitered. . . . That’s still a stupid term, by the way. Anyway, I knew something really bad had to have happened in the Census Chamber because you were acting so weird, so I downloaded the surveillance archives.”

  Tom froze up. Oh no. She’d seen stuff. She’d seen all of it.

  Yeah, he’d told his friends about his life before the Spire, sure. About those casinos where Neil raked in the money, and the crazy and colorful crowds, hopping trains and soaring from state to state in all the glorious freedom of it, or that high-rise suite over that pool with all the naked women in it, stuff like that. A bunch of things that were awesome and fantastic, the way things sometimes had been but usually weren’t.

  Never that other stuff. Never any of the bad stuff. That wasn’t the person he was here.

  “There were two days’ worth of footage,” Wyatt went on, her eyes darting to his, and skittering away again, “so I stuck it in my homework feed. I woke up knowing it all. But, Tom, I wouldn’t have sat and watched it all if I’d realized . . .”

  “What did you think?” he blurted. “I told you it was bad.”

  “I know. I didn’t know it would be that awful. That he could be that awful.”

  Tom felt sick. He couldn’t look at her.

  “I haven’t talked about it to anyone, you know. And . . . and I haven’t been talking to Lieutenant Blackburn, either. I’m mad at him. He was awful to you. He’s noticed, too. He ordered me to stop sending him ‘sad hurt puppy looks,’ whatever those are. Um, but I could say something, too. I’m going to say something. I’ll give him a talking to.”

  Tom barely heard her. His skin crawled all over. All those memories. Those fantasies. She’d been in some of those fantasies. Not only that, but she’d seen those hours when he’d begun falling apart. She knew all of them. She’d seen it all. She’d seen him. He couldn’t seem to move.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I am so, so sorry. I know why you were so mad at Blackburn now. I didn’t understand before. I do now.”

  Her words rang distantly in his ears. He felt like he was drawing breath through a straw. He swiped his hand through his hair, trying to get his head straight, but he couldn’t seem to think, he couldn’t.

  “You really saw all that?” was all he could manage.

  “Well, not all of it. I mean, there are things missing. Um, these segments. Big segments. It’s like they were erased. Like, at first you and Blackburn seemed okay and there’s this big blank spot, and everything got weird after that. You two were okay before that, and after, you were both acting . . . differently.”

  Tom closed his eyes, knowing that was when Blackburn had seen his memories of what he could do with machines. When Tom had made the fatal error of admitting he’d met Joseph Vengerov, leading to Blackburn jumping to all sorts of conclusions. So Wyatt had seen the aftermath of that, but none of the context or the reason for it.

  “I don’t understand what you were hiding from him.”

  “What was I hiding from him?” Tom burst out. “What do you think, Wyatt? Does the word ‘unscrambled’ ring a bell? How about ‘treason’?”

  Her cheeks grew white. “That.”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “I wouldn’t have asked you to do that. Yuri wouldn’t have, either. If we’d known . . .”

  Tom let out a frustrated groan and thumped back against the wall, exasperated. “Yeah, well, it doesn’t matter now. It’s over. It’s the past. Look, forget it all, okay? It’s over and done and let’s say it didn’t happen. So don’t talk about that stuff you saw. Don’t tell anyone.” The words tumbled out of him, so fast they were almost incoherent. “Not any of it. Just keep it to yourself. It’s personal. Not even Vik. Don’t tell Vik. You haven’t told Vik, have you? Wyatt, you can’t tell Vik about that stuff. Don’t tell him—”

  “I wouldn’t tell him anything,” she promised him.

  Tom’s head throbbed. He rubbed his palm over his face, his feelings all mixed up. He wouldn’t have shared those memories or those scenes from the census device with anyone if he’d had a choice. Not even his friends. Especially not his friends. He liked the way things were. He liked the way they saw him. He didn’t want them to think he was some sort of a wimp or a loser or pathetic. Or stupid. He couldn’t stand that. He wondered what she thought about him now.

  Wyatt gazed at him intently, her brow furrowed, biting her lip like she was contemplating some very difficult math problem. But what she did next caught him off guard. She leaned forward and awkwardly put her arms around him.

  Tom sat very still, feeling how rigid and uncomfortable her body was against his, since the gesture was entirely out of her element. For several seconds, they sat there like that, and amusement broke through his mortification. He met her solemn gaze. “What’s this for?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, keeping her arms around his neck. “It seemed like an appropriate moment. Is it okay?”

  “Yeah. It’s good.” Tom sat there a moment, then leaned his head back against the wall, and felt her chin rest on his shoulder. It really was kind of nice. He spread his hands palms up, between them, and dared to ask her the hard question. “Do my hands look really nasty? Be honest.”

  She peered at them. “No. They didn’t do a good job with the skin tone on the fingers, though. Those are made for someone who’s very pink. You’re not that pink, Tom. But they’re not hideous.”

  “Thanks,” he said with a soft laugh. The one thing Wyatt could always be counted on for was honesty. There were worse things than having unusually pink, fake fingers and a bunch of exposed memories, he supposed. Like if his nose had fallen off. Or if he’d never found friends.

  Or if he’d been through something like what happened to Medusa.

  His breath caught in his chest, and he understood it. For the first time, really, he comprehended what he’d done to her at Capitol Summit. He felt like a freak because of mangled hands, cybernetic fingers. But every single day, she walked around with her scars all over her face, somewhere they could never be hidden, never concealed.

  She was stronger than him. Without question. There was this crushing sensation in his gut. He got it now. And he knew he had to make it right. He knew where to start.

  “Wyatt, can you look at something for me? I don’t understand the code, but you would. It’s a computer virus. I can’t tell you where I got it or who gave it to me, but I need to know what it can do.”

  Wyatt was intrigued. “Ooh, yes. Send it over.”

  “Thank you,” Tom told her, pulling back his sleeve to bare his forearm keyboard.

  She caught his wrist, eyes wide. “Make sure it’s zipped and you’re not using it on me by accident.”

  “Aw, come on, Wyatt . . .”

  “Right. I know you’re not that stupid.”

  And yet she cringed as he sent her a copy. When a terrible computer virus failed to unleash on her, she gave him a pat on the head like she was very impressed by him. Despite her lack of confidence in him, Tom felt a warm glow in his chest, and long after she left, he felt like life wasn’t so catastrophic after all.

  DEPOSITING A MESSAGE in Medusa’s vision center was a huge risk. Tom knew it wouldn’t please her, and she might retaliate. He did it anyway.

  And indeed, when she surprised him by fizzling into the middle of a simulation during Applied Scrimmages, Tom braced himself for terrible revenge.

  “Are you insane or just stupid?” she demanded. “We had an agreement.” She stood there with her hands on her hips, right in the middle of the cloud of fluorine gas in the World War I simulation.

  “Are you really calling me insane?” Tom’s voice was muffled by his gas mask. “You don’t even have a gas mask. Anyone can see you here.”

  She shook her head and picked he
r way over a tangle of barbed wire, then plopped next to where he was crouched. “No. I didn’t enter your general simulation feed. I’m only in your visual feed, and I’m keeping an eye out in case anyone taps into it to see how you’re performing in the sim. We’re safe. You’ll be the only one who sees me. So I asked again: insane or stupid?”

  “Neither. Hear me out. I actually had a legitimate reason to contact you this time. But . . . Wait one sec. Let me kill these guys.”

  At the very beginning of the simulation, he’d made his way as close as he could to the enemy lines, and buried himself in the ground. His plan was to shoot the enemy group members one at a time as they moved. Now he readied himself to take down the first two trainees who ventured from their trench.

  “I don’t understand why they’re training you to fight with a World War One simulation,” Medusa remarked, surveying their surroundings. “It’s not relevant to space combat.”

  When a sufficiently loud explosion rumbled nearby, Tom shot the first of the two trainees. “That’s not why our military has us fight these.” He shot the second trainee as another explosion rumbled. “Only a fraction of us go on to be Intrasolar Combatants, right? They use these to figure out how our minds work. They assess our strengths, see how we handle pressure, how creative we are, how quickly we make decisions, how well we work with a team . . . that sort of thing.”

  “How well you work with a team?” she said ironically.

  Tom knew she was referring to the way he was out here alone. “Yeah, I’ve got some weak points.”

  He waited a moment, gazing toward the trench where the enemy group was peeking up, trying to figure out how their two allies had been taken down so quickly. They hadn’t seen him. Another enemy trainee was creeping out into the open. The distant explosions were dying down, and Tom grew irritated. He wanted to talk to her, but he had to take out this guy, too.

  “Why did you contact me?” Medusa asked him.

  “A couple reasons,” Tom admitted, eyes on the approaching enemy. “First of all, I’m sorry about what I said before about the avatars. I didn’t get it, I didn’t get how I’d upset you, but I understand now. I was a jerk, okay? And . . . and . . .” In a flash of inspiration, Tom recalled Yuri’s words of wisdom. He caught her eye, and said intently, “And I want you to know something: Medusa, if I met a horse that looked like you, I’d find that horse attractive.”