Insignia (40 page)

“No, no. You see, a few days ago, Dalton got the credit card bill for your last party.”

Tom gave an inflammatory laugh. He couldn’t help it.

“I’d thank you for the black eye,” Karl said, “but I guess I don’t need to. Let’s just say, Fido, you’re already dead.”

“Yeah, yeah. You say that a lot, but I’m still here.”

“Not for long. You’re going to be gone very, very soon. So I wanted to enjoy this. It’s like watching a guy you hate about to drop off the edge of a cliff.”

Tom felt a wave of foreboding at the veiled warning but forced a smile to his lips. “Yeah, the anticipation’s mutual. I keep looking at you, Karl, and thinking of how very excited I am about what Dalton’s going to do to you.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“I don’t care. It’s fantastic enough knowing what’s coming to you. And knowing you don’t know it.”

The first uncertainty flickered over Karl’s face. “What, Benji?”

“Dalton told me about the behavioral subroutines you’ve got coming your way. I wonder if he’ll have you gel your hair?” Tom considered him, then shook his head. “Nah. Let’s face it, he can’t play that same angle. I’m prettier than you.”

Karl’s face twisted like he tried for a sneer and couldn’t manage it. “He wouldn’t do that to me.”

“You have no idea, do you?” Tom said. “Dalton said the only reason they took you on was to get to Elliot, but that didn’t happen. So they’re going to—what was that word you used? Oh, yeah. ‘Neuter’ you. Don’t believe me? I could head right down to the census device. Send you a memory of it.”

Karl didn’t speak.

The elevator door slid open. “Rather live in the dark? Too bad.” Tom turned for it, pulsing with triumph, but Karl seized his collar and yanked him back.

“You’re lying!” Karl aimed a fist at him. Tom ducked his head, and laughed at Karl’s cry when his knuckles slammed the wall.

“Can’t believe you fell for that aga—”

The second fist caught him mid-gloat, drove the breath right from his stomach. Tom doubled over, black spots in front of his vision, his legs sinking beneath him.

“Admit that you’re lying,” Karl snarled down at him.

“What—you want—me to lie—about lying?” Tom choked out.

“Karl? What are you doing?”

Tom had never been so happy to hear Elliot’s voice. Karl flung him to the carpet fast enough to make Tom’s head spin. He clambered to his feet, hearing Karl argue, “This isn’t your business, Elliot. He’s provoking me. He keeps saying—”

Tom staggered upright, fighting for breath. Elliot stood in the middle of the hallway, his steady, dark gaze fixed on Karl’s. “What could possibly justify beating up a fourteen-year-old kid?”

“But, Elliot—”

“Tom’s one of my plebes. I’d like you to leave him alone from now on.”

Karl’s cheeks grew crimson. “You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“Actually, I do, Karl,” Elliot said, his voice soft. “If you want to retain any influence in Camelot Company, you’ll listen to me when I tell you to leave Tom alone. Understand?”

Karl made a face like an angry pit bull. For all his talk to Tom about being the big man in charge, he suddenly looked like an angry little kid.

“Understand?” There was steel in Elliot’s velvety voice.

Tom watched, fascinated, the way Karl’s cheeks turned a dark shade of scarlet. Then Karl jerked a nod.

“That’s a yes?” Elliot said.

“Yes.” Karl’s teeth were gritted.

“Thank you, Karl. Now leave.”

Tom watched, awestruck, as Karl slinked away. He was like some vicious Doberman that had been admonished by his master. It had never occurred to Tom that Karl might listen to anyone. That Karl respected anyone enough to do what they said.

Tom looked at Elliot, understanding for the first time what the other guy had been trying to tell him. Some people didn’t have to fight to hold their ground, to get their way. There were other games to play, other competitions to win.

“You okay there, Tom?” Elliot said.

“Uh, yeah. Thanks.”

He heard the elevator slide open behind him. Before Elliot could disappear back into his bunk, Tom called, “Wait.”

Elliot glanced back at him.

Feeling foolish, Tom looked at the windowed wall. “Elliot, maybe you’re not vicious because you’re not messed up enough.” He darted Elliot a quick glance, saw the calm, thoughtful face. “Maybe you’re too”—he tried to think of an Elliot Ramirez–appropriate word—“too
self-actualized
to act all savage.”

Elliot smiled. “You think so?”

“Yeah. Anyway, that’s all.” Tom waved and bumbled into the elevator, hoping Elliot had figured out that this moment was as close as Tom would ever get to apologizing for never having given him a chance.

T
HERE WAS NO
policy against fraternization. They weren’t military regulars, after all, and Marsh was realistic enough to understand what happened when a large group of teenagers lived in one place. There was nothing to encourage it, though. No dances like in an actual high school. If people wanted to go on a date, they had to wait until the weekend and hit Washington, DC, or settle for the romantic glow of the Pentagon City Mall’s food court.

Every so often in the summer, though, the Spire held Open Evenings when the roof of the planetarium parted to reveal the night sky overhead. Officially, the Open Evenings were meant to help the older trainees who were studying astrophysics, but mostly they provided a nice view and the couples or potential couples migrated there whenever possible. Tonight, Yuri and Wyatt were going, and Vik was planning to go there to try to snag a seat next to a Machiavelli named Jenny Nguyen. She’d been “making eyes at him” in Applied Sims, he claimed, and he was going for it. He even had the perfect line ready.

“What line?” Tom asked.

“Not telling. It’ll jinx it.”

“It’s that bad, huh?”

“It’s all in the delivery, Tom!”

His roommate spent half an hour brushing lint off his pants and changing shirts while Tom made fun of him.

“Displace your Y chromosome?”

“Shut up. This is different.”

“Sure it is, buddy. Don’t let Jenny get past first base today. She won’t respect you in the morning.”

Vik swiped out a fist and socked his arm, but he was grinning, his crazy-eyed look back. “I look good.”

Tom pressed his hand over his heart, testifying to his honesty. “You look insane.”

“Insanely good,” Vik said. “She is going to be all over me.”

“Tell yourself that, Vik.”

“Die slowly, Tom.”

Tom waited until Vik left to wring out maximum embarrassment, then he started playing video games. Something kept bothering him, though—and when he started up a game that offered a two-player option, he realized what it was: he liked it better when he was playing games against Medusa.

The nagging emptiness of the bunk and the silence of Alexander Division pressed in around Tom. He couldn’t help imagining Medusa as some girl who lived just down the hall. She’d be someone he could play games with anytime. Maybe she’d even be someone he could ask up to the Planetarium some night … if he dared.

V
IK RETURNED TO
his bunk with a black eye and refused to tell Tom what had happened with Jenny. So Tom made up wild, and increasingly absurd, ways he could’ve gotten it, until Vik plugged in his neural wire to escape the conversation. Grinning, Tom hooked in for the night, too, and dropped off to sleep.

Early the next morning, he ventured through the crisp, morning darkness to the Metro. Pentagon City wasn’t open yet, so he hit another Arlington VR parlor. He had an hour to meet with Medusa before she needed to log off.

“So you want to know something stupid?” he said to her.

They were fighting as Siegfried and Brunhilde again today, because Tom had explored the sim enough on his own to figure out a new strategy for killing her. Unfortunately, Medusa had snuck in another add-on she used to full tactical advantage: whenever they stepped on certain bricks, fire spouted up around them.

She circled around him, sword gleaming in the burning chamber. “What?”

Tom concentrated on her sword rather than her avatar’s face. “We have this thing sometimes where people in the Spire look at the stars. It’s a thing where boyfriends and girlfriends go together. I had this weird thought. I wished you lived in the Spire so I could’ve asked you.”

He darted Medusa a quick look. Her smile had dropped off her face.

“Stupid, right?” Tom said with a forced laugh.

She didn’t say anything. Tom hacked at her with his ax, hoping to make her forget all about it. Medusa parried his blows, then with a violent slash, gutted him. She kicked his body onto one of the booby-trapped bricks and set him on fire.

Medusa didn’t speak again until she returned with a basin and dumped water on his burning body. “You wouldn’t like me in real life. I bet you like pretty girls.”

“Girls always say they’re not pretty when they actually are. I bet you are, too.” Tom just knew it.

Medusa considered him for a long moment. And then she did something unexpected: she leaned toward him and pressed a rough kiss onto his lips.

Tom wasn’t hooked in with his neural processor. He didn’t feel the sensation. It was VR, an illusion supplied by his visor of Brunhilde’s beautiful face inches from his, her eyes closed, her lips pressed where his would have been. His wired gloves vibrated with contact when he pressed his palms to where her virtual arms were. But when Medusa started to pull back, he clutched at her avatar, feeling chills all over like he’d actually kissed a girl for the first time.

“Not so fast.” He pulled her back to him, pressed his virtual lips to hers to return the kiss.

Medusa laughed and squirmed out of his grip. “Hey, I’m hooked in here. Your teeth just hit mine.”

“Sorry.” Tom didn’t even care that this was a public VR parlor, and people could probably see he was kissing someone through the gauzy curtain hiding him. Lightning bolts struck all through him. “Does this mean we’re boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“We don’t even know each other’s names.”

“Yeah, but we’ve killed each other so many times, I figure that counts for something.” Tom took a breath, then a daring chance. “Do you want to know what I look like?”

Medusa stared at him through Brunhilde’s brilliant blue eyes.

“We can both do it. Just drop the avatars.” The words strangled him, because he never did this if he could help it. He never went in his real skin into VR. But he wanted to see her, even if it meant she’d have to see him, and he knew, just knew, that Medusa wouldn’t pass his image on to anyone else. “It won’t give away our identities. I won’t show anyone if you won’t.”

Medusa retreated, her avatar slinking back farther in the sim.

“I’m not gonna show anyone what you look like if you’re worried about your identity,” Tom pledged, sensing her retreat. “I wouldn’t.”

Medusa gazed at him in the flickering torchlight. “You have to know something. Capitol Summit’s coming soon.”

“Um, yeah, I kinda know that,” Tom said. It was all over the news, after all.

“Elliot Ramirez will be fighting there, but everyone here knows he’ll have a proxy.”

“Yeah, the way Svetlana always does.”

“A proxy like Alec Tarsus.”

Tom’s heart stopped. How did she know that name?

Her next words made the blood drain from his cheeks. “Or Heather Akron. Or Cadence Grey. Or Karl Marsters.”

Those were Camelot Company people.

Their identities were classified. Medusa couldn’t know them. She wasn’t supposed to.

Unless there’d been some breach.

Some serious, serious breach.

“I’ve heard all of the Camelot Company names now. Their IPs, too. It’s going to be on the news today. Maybe you should go.” She gazed intently at him. “It might be safer for you.”

Tom understood her. He swallowed hard. “Yeah, I should probably go.”

He pulled off his VR visor. The humming voices around him weren’t soothing, reassuring. Tom saw the blank screen on the wall, his mouth dry, knowing there was no real privacy on the internet, even with all his planning, all his care to meet her only out of the Spire.

CamCo’s identities had been leaked. Something like this was going to be big.

He knew, just knew, that something bad was going to come of it.

T
HE NEWS BROKE
on his way back to the Spire. He heard snatches of those names on people’s lips in the Metro. The names the general population shouldn’t know. Heather … Alec … Ralph … Emefa … He’d heard all of them by the time he reached the Pentagon. Every Combatant in CamCo had been leaked.

And once he was in the Spire, it was as cataclysmic as he feared. The place was in chaos with the breaking news, trainees swarming around tables in the mess hall, the room buzzing with frantic voices. The screens built into the walls had all been turned on, the news playing.