Insignia (37 page)

“I have to apologize for Karl, sir,” Dalton was saying as Tom headed off.

But Tom didn’t go to the bar. He strolled out the door and was beyond the portcullis when Karl began screaming from the bathroom about the sewage. Tom reached out and swiped the portcullis closed, and then modified its default password to a thirty-number password of his own.

Karl’s shouts were followed by Dalton’s, then by shouts from the other partygoers. The smell grew so nasty Tom fought back the urge to gag. He settled on the steps and watched the Dominion Agra execs through the bars. He listened to the cries of disgust as the sewage backing up in the toilets burst out of the bathrooms and seeped through the door into the club.

Mr. Carolac yelled at everyone to evacuate, and then when no one could get the mechanized portcullis open, yelled for someone to call technical support. Tom began to laugh. He laughed harder when he heard people shouting that their cell phones weren’t working. That must be Medusa’s touch. For a moment, Tom’s mind was blown. She’d hacked in and disabled satellites. Satellites! He wasn’t sure even Wyatt could do that.

Thanks, Medusa
, Tom thought with a grin.

But apparently, she wasn’t finished. Loud music began blaring. It wasn’t music so much as a shrieking of metal scraping along metal from the speakers, ear-piercing and painful. Fists began pounding on the exits, hands yanking on the portcullis.

Dalton appeared between the steel bars, his turn at trying to yank it up. Tom swaggered into his view. Dalton spotted him, and seemed relieved. “Tom. Tom! Thank God, it’s you. You’re not trapped in here. Go outside and get us some help.”

Tom dug his fists in his pockets and looked over Dalton’s predicament with a long, lazy sweep of his eyes. “Hmm. I don’t think I will.”

Sewage seeped up around Dalton’s leather shoes. Tom reveled in the shock on his face.

“Tom!” He hammered on the portcullis.
“Get us help right now!”

Tom shook his head, eyes on Dalton’s. He leaped down to the bottom of the stairs, his shoes squishing through the sewage bubbling across the floor.

“I might open it, Dalton.” Tom leaned in close to the portcullis, staying carefully out of arm’s reach. “You know, if you get on your knees and beg me.”

“OPEN IT NOW, TOM!”

Tom shook his head, knowing he was grinning like a madman. Dalton’s helpless outrage was so wonderful he couldn’t stop himself. “No, Dalton. Get on your knees and beg me. Beg me to let you go. Otherwise you can stay there in the sewage all night. And your boss along with you.” He made a show of scratching his head. “Gosh, what’s he going to think of tonight? First Karl’s digestive problems, and now this … Everything we do reflects on you, right?”

Dalton gaped at him, like he couldn’t get his head around to his obedient little Tom turning on him.

“Your choice, Dalton. Now, even if you don’t beg me, the sewage will stop backing up in about half an hour, so you won’t drown. You’ll have to endure the stench until someone out there realizes you guys need rescuing. And hey”—Tom winked at Dalton the way Dalton had earlier, like they shared an inside joke—“at least you’ve got an open bar.”

“Don’t you dare leave us!”

“Wrong thing to say.” Tom swiveled around and sauntered toward the stairs.

“Wait, wait! Tom, please.” A note of hysteria climbed into Dalton’s voice.

Tom swung a careless glance over his shoulder but didn’t come back. “You’re not on your knees, Dalton. I’m not negotiating that condition. I figure after a month of groveling to you, the least you can do is get on your knees for me.”

“This is a twenty-thousand-dollar suit.”

“That’s not my problem.”

Dalton stared at him, the music blaring from behind him, the stench of sewage thick on the air. Then he lowered himself to his knees in the muck. “Please open it.” His face was set with hard, furious lines, his voice a whip of anger and hurt pride. “Please let us out, Tom.”

Tom gazed at Dalton and thought of the smoke and the camera and how very close he’d come to being destroyed. “No.” He headed up the stairs.

The screams followed him: “I’LL KILL YOU FOR THIS, RAINES! YOU’RE DEAD, KID, DO YOU HEAR ME? I’LL KILL YOU! YOU’RE DEAD! I’LL MAKE YOU SORRY YOU WERE BORN, I’LL—”

But Tom just headed up the stairs as Dalton’s voice grew distant. When he hit the street, he made sure to lock the door behind him, and twisted the sign around to show
BEWARE OF DOG
so no one else would walk into the club and find the trapped Dominion execs.

Tom drove his hands into his pockets, kicked off the soiled leather shoes, and strolled down the Washington, DC street toward the distant dome of the Capitol. It was the time of year when the cherry blossom trees lining the concrete were blazing in full bloom. When Tom came across a fountain and dipped his head in, pink petals swirled into the gurgling water washing away his hair gel. He saw a vendor at a stand selling Washington, DC memorabilia to tourists. He traded the guy his eleven-thousand-dollar suit for a large “Made in the USA” shirt, American flag jogging pants, and the vendor’s own pair of sneakers.

And then Tom hit the subway, leaving Dominion Agra and the Beringer Club far behind him.

D
ESPITE
T
OM’S ACCOUNT
of what happened, and Karl’s supermurderous glare when he returned to the Spire the next morning, his friends were on alert for any reemergence of Zombie Tom. But Zombie Tom wasn’t the problem. Each day, old Tom grew more and more miserable like there was some storm cloud he couldn’t escape. He tried acting normal by laughing and joking around and throwing himself into sims. But it didn’t change the way he felt.

In Applied Simulations one day, he didn’t charge across the fields with the rest of the Roman legion to battle Queen Boudicca. Wyatt searched him out and found him slumped against a tree, sandals buried in the mud. “You’re not New Tom again, are you?”

“No.”

Wyatt shifted back and forth. “But people are fighting, and you’re here. You love fighting.”

“I’m thinking, okay? Am I not allowed to think?”

“You don’t generally do that.” She settled next to him, taking care to avoid the mud.

Tom watched her dully. She hadn’t been herself lately, either, and he was pretty sure it was because of what had gone down with Blackburn. He’d heard enough of their conversation in that office to get it: they’d had some sort of rapport. And then he’d gone and demolished it.

He rubbed at his forehead. “Did I ever say sorry? About making Blackburn think that—”

“I told you, that wasn’t you.” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “I still don’t even know what Roanoke means. You know, other than the obvious thing: that colony in early America.”

“Vengerov knew,” Tom muttered. “I heard him. He knew just what buttons to push. He put it there.” He shook off the thought. “Look, Wyatt, I’m going to tell him what really happened—”

“No! Don’t mention that again, okay? I’m sure Lieutenant Blackburn will start talking to me again one day, if you just let it drop. He has to, doesn’t he?”

Tom couldn’t answer that for her. So he raised his hands. “Fine. It’s all you.”

“Is that what’s been bothering you, then?”

“Nothing’s bothering me.”

“Something is. That’s why I’m here. It’s so we can talk about your feelings.”

Tom gave an incredulous laugh. “Talk about my feelings?”

She shifted her weight, practically squirming with how uncomfortable she was. “Elliot told me about using more emotional sensitivity. It sounds pretty straightforward. If you want to try it, you can use ‘I feel’ statements and I’ll listen in a calm and nonjudgmental manner.”

Tom snorted.

“He also said I could lead this discussion by saying empathetic things such as: ‘I feel like you are sad, Tom.’” She nodded. “Are you sad, Tom?”

“No,” Tom snarled, suddenly furious. “I’m not
sad
. I’m angry, okay? You want an ‘I feel’ statement? I feel like killing someone. I keep thinking of how completely snowballed I was by that whole thing, and I feel like I should have burned that club down with Dalton Prestwick inside it, okay? I didn’t even get that anything was wrong! I went for weeks on end gelling my hair and sucking up to Karl and I didn’t even know that anything was different!”

“The program had a rootkit. It was designed to hide itself from you.”

“That’s not the point, okay? I should’ve realized something was up because I just started trusting Dalton.
Dalton Prestwick
of all people! I hate this guy, okay? He treats my mom like garbage. He’s the reason I don’t have a family! And suddenly, what, I get one program in my brain and I think he’s the greatest guy in the world? I mean, I seriously thought he was doing everything for my own good! I thought that, and I didn’t even wonder about it!”

“Again, program. Designed that way.”

“I don’t do that, okay? I always know when people are scamming me. I just don’t do the blind devotion thing. I’ve never even trusted my dad like that!”

Wyatt looked at him sharply, then bit her lip, because this was something even she knew better than to ask about.

Tom glared across the field, feeling sick over it all. He kept thinking of Dalton showing him how to put on a tie—and he just wished he could go back in time somehow and strangle him with it. He felt like he’d done something awful, like he’d committed some terrible treason against his dad, because even now he could remember how it felt for that fleeting instant to trust someone so absolutely, to believe so unquestioningly everything Dalton did was for his own good....

And most shameful of all, he missed that feeling so much he felt hollow inside.

Tom thrust himself to his feet and drew his sword. “This is stupid.” He needed to fight. Some fake violence against fake people would cure everything. “Just forget it all.”

“So you don’t have any more ‘I feel’ statements?”

Tom laughed harshly and headed toward the battle. “Wyatt, no offense, but you suck at playing therapist. How about you go back to being you, I go back to being me, and we forget this ever happened, okay? But thanks anyway.”

A
WEEK LATER
, W
YATT
still received no sign of forgiveness from Blackburn. He deposited a curt message in her vision center, assigning her a room to work alone in the basement, and so much tedious reformatting that she had to start leaving dinner early every night to make headway on it.

Tom knew his payback was next.

The first few days back in Programming were agonizing, knowing something bad had to be coming. Blackburn confirmed it for him by veering off his planned discussion of compilers and introducing a repertoire of new weaponized viruses, which Tom studied with a mounting sense of unease.

And then the day came.

“Today in class, we’re going to apply the knowledge of the last week.” His eyes found Tom, promising death. “Consider this exercise like a fox hunt, though if you want a formal name for it, I’ll call it Crossing the Wrong Person Is Bad for Your Health.”

Confused mumbling filled the room, as people looked at one another, trying to figure out who this was aimed at. Tom slouched down in his seat. Well, they’d know soon enough.

“All of you are hunting down one target,” Blackburn went on, “one fox. Use whatever programs you’d like to take that fox down. Hopefully, this will teach that fox a valuable lesson.”

In other words, Blackburn was declaring it open season on him.

“Tom Raines,” he announced, “you have a very exciting job today. You get to be the fox.”

“I’m so shocked,” Tom said sarcastically.

“If you manage to evade your fellow trainees until the end of this class, you win,” Blackburn said. “Use whatever means of escape you want. The rest of you will be competing against one another to see who gets the fox first. The winner can skip a day of class.”

Everyone sat up straighter. Even Vik, next to Tom.

“Traitor!” Tom said.

“Call me Doctor Benedict Arnold,” Vik answered.

Tom waited for his neural processor to call up the reference.

“
You’re
the American here. What’s the matter with you?” Vik said.

“Look, Vik, you’re my buddy. You can destroy me before anyone else does.”

“That’s what friends are for,” Vik agreed.

“So, Mr. Raines?” Blackburn said, elbows on the podium. “Are you going to run for it? It’s really no fun for anyone if you make this too easy.”

Tom shrugged and stayed right by Vik, content to let his friend hit him with a virus first. “No point, sir. I can’t win. Almost every trainee in the Spire is here. I might as well not bother.”

Blackburn considered it a moment, and then nodded. “Fair enough. Let’s give you more of a chance. A good programmer on your side. Mr. Harrison? You’re fox number two.”

Nigel Harrison, closer to the front, sat up in his seat, horrified. “This is completely unfair!”

“Really?” Blackburn said drily. “I didn’t hear you screaming injustice to the skies just a few moments ago when it was just Raines.
Now
it’s unfair?”

The black-haired boy gazed up at him with open loathing.