Vortex

  “She’s really messed up.”

  A vein flickered in Blackburn’s forehead. He said nothing.

  “She won’t talk to me. To anyone. She looks up to you. If you said something to her—”

  He shook his head. “You’re asking the wrong person. Send her to Ossare.”

  “Wyatt made a mistake. That’s all. You don’t get to act betrayed here—she unscrambled Yuri when you weren’t even talking to her because you blamed her for something she didn’t even do. But she got over that. Are you just gonna turn your back on her now? I thought you were looking out for her.”

  It took Blackburn so long to speak, Tom almost thought he wasn’t going to bother. But then he said softly, “She’s very gifted, and she has no armor against this world. She doesn’t have anyone in her corner, not in her home, so I’ll admit, sometimes I feel . . . protective. And it fools me sometimes into remembering what it was like once.” He stopped.

  “What what was like?” Tom blurted.

  “Being a father. Having some investment in the future.” His voice took on a note like he was mocking himself. “Having a soul, deluding myself with hope. But at the end of the day, I know what I am, and that’s why I can’t help now. She needs something I’m not capable of giving to her, Tom. I can’t offer forgiveness. I simply don’t have any. Not even for myself.”

  AFTER THAT FINAL door slammed shut, a sense of bleakness sank over Tom. He grew oddly detached from the whole situation. Sometimes, mostly when he was sitting there fending off prying questions from Olivia Ossare during the counseling sessions they’d all been forced to attend since Yuri’s accident, Tom wondered if there was something wrong in how easily things had sort of dissolved away for him without destroying him. He wasn’t withdrawing like Wyatt, and he wasn’t moving on and cutting off any associations with what happened like Vik. Tom just sort of kept going forward.

  After the loss of all his friends, and his future, it seemed almost like things had finally become normal. Tom knew what it was to feel rootless. He knew what it was to have nothing ahead of him. He knew what it was to have no attachments. This thing he’d dreaded had finally come to pass, but it wasn’t some sharp shock to the system so much as a sort of familiar pall descending over everything. That other person—the Tom Raines who was the Doctor of Doom with Vik, who helped Wyatt understand other people, who marveled at any new superhuman feat of Yuri’s, seemed almost like some stranger he’d encountered in passing, already gone.

  Tom took up playing poker with Walton Covner and some of the older trainees. He still was an efficient killer in simulations. He’d gotten used to the fake fingers, but he didn’t play VR games. He picked up the gloves sometimes, out of habit, but he never put them on. They made his chest feel hollow.

  He wasn’t unhappy. As soon as it grew completely clear to him there was no way he was going to be able to change Blackburn’s mind, no way he was gong to be able to get into Obsidian Corp.’s systems—as soon as he realized there was no hope—he was finally able to accept a cold, hard truth about life: the world rewarded sociopaths like Vengerov and destroyed good people like Yuri.

  Tom finally understood why his father saw humanity as worthless. It was hard to see much fundamental value in anything when the bad guys always won.

  Maybe this was simply what it was like to grow up.

  TOM WAS FINISHING up the silent lunch with Wyatt when Heather approached their table. He felt her hand skim along his shoulder. “Hey, Tom! We’re battling today in Applied Scrimmages.” There was a note of excitement in her voice.

  He glanced back at her. “Huh. Great.”

  “I’m excited—aren’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  It was strange how something in the last few months had ignited Heather’s interest in him. She was constantly catching his eye and smiling at him in this inviting way that would’ve floored him once. Or she’d randomly reach out and straighten his collar or tousle his hair, or stuff like that. He wasn’t sure what to think of it, so he didn’t bother most of the time.

  “You’ll come fight me one-on-one later, won’t you?” Heather said with a wink.

  “Yeah.” He shrugged. “Why not.”

  “Wonderful.” She tickled his neck with her fingertips, to his great confusion, and swayed away from the table. She hadn’t said a word to Wyatt, not even one of those fake sympathetic ones she did early on. Her IP address had been changed in preparation for proxying Elliot at Capitol Summit this year. A victory there or even a close loss would assure her an official end to her disgrace and a true shot at front man of CamCo next year. That seemed to be all Heather wanted—a chance at riding high above all the others. Tom didn’t particularly care. At least she left Wyatt alone now.

  “Well, I’ve gotta go to Scrimmages,” Tom told Wyatt. He thrust himself to his feet. “Later.”

  He didn’t wait to see whether she’d acknowledge it. He knew she wouldn’t.

  DURING THE SPANISH Armada simulation that afternoon, Tom ditched the historical English strategy of hanging back and counting on superior guns and led a boarding party from one burning Spanish ship to another. He was wiping the blood from his sword when boots creaked down the stairs to the cabin, and Heather Akron emerged, decked out in the duke of Medina Sedonia’s armor, her dark hair spilling about her shoulders.

  “Just in time,” she told him. “I was worried we’d sink before you got here.”

  “I’m here.” Tom raised his sword. “You wanna do this or what?”

  Heather shook her head. “I lied earlier. I didn’t want to see you for a fight. There’s something I want to show you. I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Take a look through that porthole.”

  Tom shrugged, and crossed over to gaze through the rounded window. She must’ve tweaked the sim, because he didn’t see the ocean or battleships. Instead, he saw an image, a familiar one.

  An angle from above, Blackburn swathed in the projected light of the census device. “I want that memory, Raines!” And Tom trapped in the chair, refusing him . . .

  He reared up, his mind racing.

  “That’s surveillance footage. It should look familiar to you.”

  “So what?” Tom said, forcing a calmness he didn’t feel. “Everyone knows Blackburn used the census device on me.”

  Heather drew closer, and he felt her breath tickle the back of his neck. “Do you remember when Enslow and I had our little tiff last December? I slipped her a tracking cookie. For a while, I watched what she was doing in the system.”

  He smiled sourly. “All that effort to dig up dirt on her?”

  “Yes, and it paid off. I found this footage. It wasn’t complete. There were whole hours missing, and they weren’t in the system anywhere, but those big gaps made me curious about what happened in those missing minutes.”

  Tom leaned back against the wall, waiting for whatever she wanted to say.

  “That’s when I realized something, Tom,” she said. “There were two computers that still had that footage: Lieutenant Blackburn’s processor and yours. That’s the reason I invited you to that jousting sim.”

  Tom made sense of it. It was Heather. That weird message during the New Year’s simulation: Error: Connection lost. Download paused. 98% complete. That had been her. She’d plundered his processor.

  It hadn’t been Blackburn.

  So . . . she knew. Tom wondered what would happen from here. “You got me. I guess you know everything?”

  “Oh, I know all about what you can do,” she told him. “I also know Lieutenant Blackburn’s kept it quiet—he hasn’t told the military, or even Obsidian Corp., which is funny, because I bet they’d love to research you.”

  Tom knew she was mentioning this for a reason, to set him on the defensive. He supposed he should be alarmed, but he was just irritated. “You obviously want something from me, so spit it out.”

  Heather shrugged. “A mutually beneficial agreement. I won’t tell a soul what I know about you, if you help me
with something.”

  He laughed softly. “You’re blackmailing me, then.”

  “I tried making this pleasant for you, Tom, but you’ve been ignoring my attempts to become better friends with you, so, yes. I am officially blackmailing you. You see, I get to proxy for Elliot at Capitol Summit this year. But it’s very important that I don’t squander this chance. I have to win—and Medusa defeats everyone but you. Now that I know what you can do, I guess I know why.”

  Tom leaned his head back, thinking of Medusa. The unexpected remembrance felt like a sharp pain. For a long, aching moment, he felt alone in the world.

  And then Heather was pressing forward, her eyes boring into his. “I think if you caused an untimely malfunction or two for her while she’s controlling her ship, it would go a long way toward giving me a shot at beating her.”

  “Obviously,” Tom said wearily, and Heather’s eyes glimmered with fury at the casual nonchalance he was showing her. He tuned out Heather as she tried to make it very clear this wasn’t a laughing matter, that she’d give him away if he didn’t do what she asked. All Tom could think was, it always came back to Medusa. To him striking at Medusa. However much he avoided it, however much he didn’t want to, it was like he was meant to be the bane of her existence.

  TOM SAT SPRAWLED on the ground by Wyatt’s legs in the arboretum as she ignored him, working as usual on reformatting a processor. Olivia Ossare had given him a couple of dexterity exercises for his fingers. Apparently surgeons used them. It was rather odd, having an adult urging him along, trying to get him to play video games again. She seemed to think it would bolster his spirits or something.

  The exercises were actually okay. One involved flipping a quarter from knuckle to knuckle. The other was skinning an apple with a knife, trying to get as little of the yellow insides as possible. Tom inspected his latest attempt, where he’d gouged a small chunk out of the meat.

  “See, if I’d been doing surgery on someone now”—he showed Wyatt the apple—“someone would be hemorrhaging.”

  She glanced up briefly to see, which surprised Tom a bit. He took a big bite of the apple, considering her. That’s when footsteps crunched toward them, and Tom threw a careless glance through the hedges to see Elliot emerging.

  “Tom. Wyatt,” he greeted them. He pointed to the nearby bench. “Do you mind?”

  “Hey, man,” Tom said, nodding for him to sit.

  Apart from the Wyatt Earp Vendetta Ride simulation, they hadn’t spoken much since Yosemite, when Elliot had washed his hands of him. Elliot settled on the bench, propping his elbows on his knees. He studied the apple debris strewn over the ground. “Playing with your food?”

  “Long story,” Tom said. It wasn’t; he didn’t feel like explaining. He plunged his knife into the apple and left it there. “So Heather’s proxying you at Capitol Summit. I guess your diabolical scheme to anoint her queen is working.”

  “Hopefully.” Elliot drummed his fingers on his thigh, his dark eyes moving between Tom and Wyatt. “Should we go and speak somewhere private?”

  Tom raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think Wyatt’s gonna go talk to everyone after this. She’s not very chatty lately.”

  Elliot sighed. “Tom, I have to ask you something. I’ve put it off for so long, but you seem so glum lately, I have to do it now.”

  “Glum?” Tom wondered.

  Elliot rubbed the back of his neck. “In Antarctica when you walked outside like that . . . you weren’t trying to kill yourself, were you?”

  Tom stared at him. “What?”

  “I hoped refusing to work with you would teach you something,” Elliot said earnestly, “but I wasn’t giving up on you completely. I didn’t say that to take away all your hope. I think you can have a future here.”

  Tom finally made sense of his words. He started sniggering.

  “This isn’t funny,” Elliot said sternly.

  “Elliot, you think I tried to kill myself over you?”

  Elliot smiled a bit. “When you put it that way, it does sound rather silly.”

  “Yeah. Just a bit.” He glanced at Wyatt, and swore he saw a tiny smile on her lips, fleetingly. That cheered him up. “Nah, Elliot. I did not try to kill myself. And I’m not glum, okay? But if I am it’s because . . .” He looked at Wyatt, and she was staring intently at the processor she was working on like she was trying hard not to seem like she heard them. “It’s because of other stuff.”

  Elliot ruffled a hand through his black hair, then said, “For what it’s worth, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I have an idea about what you can do.”

  “Huh?” Tom said.

  Elliot leaned closer to him. “Do you know what people appreciate more than someone who makes a great first impression on them? Someone who has learned the error of his ways.”

  “The error of my ways?” Tom repeated.

  “Yes. Don’t you see, Tom? What happened at the meet and greets was ages ago. You’ve had a life-changing, near-death experience, and you’ve lost a . . .” He didn’t mention Yuri in front of Wyatt. “You’ve had other things happen. You can legitimately claim to have gained some wisdom, some insight. If you apologize to the CEOs formally, maybe in a handwritten note on some decent stationery, they might be persuaded to give you a second chance.”

  Elliot said this so earnestly, but Tom found himself remembering Dalton’s smug smile when he offered him the chance to get on his knees and make up for his wrongdoing.

  “Right,” Tom snarled. “Then they can frame my handwritten apology on fancy paper on the wall. Oh, and maybe add me to some other terror watch lists. What stops that, huh?”

  “That’s the chance you take,” Elliot informed him. “But your best opportunity lies in penitence. Believe it or not, an apology might—”

  “Give them a huge power trip?” Tom exploded, suddenly, unexpectedly furious, like some dam had burst. “Make them feel like they’ve broken me like some sort of animal? I would rather freeze to death than give them the satisfaction!”

  “And here you go again,” Elliot marveled. “What does it serve, letting them know at every possible opportunity how much you despise them? That hasn’t gotten you anywhere. Just look closer to home—at Karl Marsters!”

  “No way.” Tom slashed his hand through the air. “Karl is not my fault. Karl has been after me since I got here.”

  “That’s not how Karl sees it and it’s not how I see it.”

  “Fine. Fine, then explain. Tell me why Karl wanting to pulverize me is my fault.”

  Elliot leaned toward him. “You really wonder why Karl hates you? The first day you got here, you punched him in front of everyone.”

  “I was under the influence of a computer virus,” Tom protested. “Blackburn said so, too!”

  “Yes, Lieutenant Blackburn said so. In a way that shamed Karl for getting the slip from a trainee half his size. ‘Twice,’ I believe he said. What do you think Karl felt?”

  “Malice and homicidal urges, like Karl always does.”

  “Humiliated, Tom. It hurt his pride.”

  “What, so Karl went crying to you about this?”

  Elliot tapped his temple. “Photographic recollection. I can reason the rest out.”

  “He tried to beat me up a few days later, so he got his own back,” Tom groused.

  “I’m sure he tried, but I’m also sure he didn’t pull it off,” Elliot said. “I am very certain Karl’s never come out the winner with you, because if Karl had ever, even once, come away from a skirmish as the victor over you, he would’ve patched that gaping hole you’ve torn into his pride and left you alone a long time ago.”

  Tom drew a sharp breath to rip out the automatic reply that Karl had won here and there . . . like when he’d helped Dalton brainwash Tom, he’d definitely been the winner those times. Then something occurred to Tom: no, Karl hadn’t come out better in the balance of things. After the sewage bath in the Beringer Club, and the humiliation in front of those executives, Karl was d
efinitely the loser.

  “Your life would be considerably easier if, instead of aggravating your enemies intentionally to make very sure they know you don’t care what they think—if instead, you let them have the meaningless, easy victories here and there. That’s compromise.”

  Tom gave up on trying to tread lightly. “You know, Elliot, it’s hilarious hearing about compromise from a guy who gave up some person he felt strongly about because the Coalition said no. A guy who wanted to quit but again got told no. Now you’ve wasted a year putting all this effort into helping Heather Akron so she can take your place in that comfy little cage, when you know she’d stab you in the back if it would get her there, too, and it’s all because you won’t cross these people who think they have a right to be your overlords. I’ve gotta tell you, man, your definition of compromise seems a lot more like ‘outright surrender’ to me.”

  “You think I surrender too much? Well, I say you can’t give a single inch of ground to anyone. Even when they’re right.”

  “You’re right,” Tom said. “I can’t.”

  They sat there a moment.

  Elliot’s mouth lifted. “Now you’re being contrary, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “No, no. That’s exactly what you’re doing. I had a beautifully articulated point now about you being absurdly stubborn, and you had to go right away and undermine my point by agreeing with me. You did that on purpose.”

  “That’s how I operate. Sorry, man. It’s not personal.”

  Elliot’s smile faded. “I must seem very weak to you.”

  Tom shifted his weight uneasily, thrown by the turn in the conversation. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to.” Elliot rose to leave him.

  Tom almost let him leave on that note. Almost. But he couldn’t help thinking of Elliot coming in to rescue him at Dominion Agra; telling him he was recommending him for promotion to Middle Company. Tom didn’t want Elliot to walk away feeling like he saw him as a pansy. He didn’t.

  “Hey, Elliot . . . Wait.”