Insignia (53 page)

And suddenly, Tom’s brain was working again, and he found himself answering Heather with a shake of his head. “Sorry, I’ve got something I have to do.”

T
OM DIDN’T KNOW
why tonight would be any different. He’d hooked into VR every day since the Capitol Summit. He wasn’t sure why it mattered so much, this hope of finding her. He knew he’d destroyed whatever he had had with Medusa, and even if he hadn’t … if he hadn’t … that pretty Chinese girl he’d built up in his imagination didn’t exist. And she knew the guy she’d met over the internet didn’t really exist, either. What could have prepared her for the person he turned out to be? Nothing in their conversations, in their battles, in those moments when they smiled at each other over their bared swords, could’ve readied her for the truth about him: that he was someone who could do something so vicious, so personal, so cruel, just to win against her.

It bothered Tom to think about it, so he tried not to. And maybe he would’ve been a better person if he’d just left her alone after what happened. But whenever he closed his eyes, he still saw her flying, fighting with ferocious genius. He still remembered that kiss.

So he still returned to the internet. He hooked in straight from his bunk. Maybe it was reckless overconfidence, but he couldn’t bring himself to fear much of anything after the events of Capitol Summit. General Marsh had called him up to his office to congratulate him again. Members of CamCo suddenly waved to him in the corridors, and upper-level Alexanders had all started talking to him like he’d been inducted into some club he didn’t even know about. Lieutenant Blackburn was careful never to bother him in class, not even for demonstrations. He’d taken instead to watching Tom from across the mess hall, across the lobby, but still never breathing a word to his face.

So Tom lay on his bed and checked their message board, then he visited their simulations. Siegfried and Brunhilde’s stone castle stood empty, no queen of Iceland waiting, sword in hand. No luck in the old RPG of the Egyptian queen and the ogre, either. Prepared for disappointment, he hooked into the Renaissance England simulation, and found himself snapping into character.

He was facing her again.

She stood by a throne at the head of the English royal court, her back to him, simulated courtiers milling about on all sides. Tom stood before her, tension making his every muscle clench. He glanced down at his character, and the simulation informed him he was
Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex
. When Medusa turned toward him, he was greeted not by the pretty redheaded princess, but the aged face of what the program informed him was
The sixty-seven-year-old Queen Elizabeth I
. Her lips curled into a thin, downward twist and her cold eyes glittered like polished onyx, black and hard.

Tom closed his own eyes, the information spinning in his head.

The young Earl of Essex flattered and flirted with the much older Queen Elizabeth. He took advantage of her affection and betrayed her. As he began to fall from favor, he fought her guards and charged desperately into her chamber. He burst inside before she’d been made up for the day, and beheld her aged face, her white hair without a wig. All pretense of flirtation between them shattered in one instant. Shortly after, she ordered him beheaded
.

She must’ve edited it. It was too pointed. Tom opened his eyes again and faced her unflinchingly. “I need to talk to you.”

“What could you possibly have to say to me?” Her voice was cold.

He’d prepared for this. He waggled his fingers, accessed an image file from the Spire’s database. His guise as the Earl of Essex vanished, replaced instantly by another: the Tom Raines who had walked into the Spire. The short, skinny kid with terrible acne, flat blond hair, a slouched posture. Tom stood there as that guy, the guy he’d sworn not to show her, and then opened his arms wide to let her see him in all his complete lack of magnificence.

“This is me. Okay?”

“That’s not you.” Medusa waved Elizabeth’s wrinkled hand, and her own appearance morphed. A boy Tom almost didn’t recognize stood in her place.

The boy was him. Tom as he was now. A taller, clear-skinned guy with cold blue eyes, who stood there with a confident posture controlled by a neural processor, whose muscles had been honed during Calisthenics, whose self-assurance radiated from every plane of his face.

Tom stared at his other self, feeling like he was regarding a stranger. “When did you see me?”

“I peeked at the security cameras in the Beringer Club.”

Tom raised his eyebrows at her: she
had
to see the irony.

“Yes, I’m a hypocrite. It doesn’t change anything.” Medusa sagged back into the throne. “You can’t do this. You can’t pull a move like that, be cutthroat like that, and then come here and be nice.”

“I just want to make it right.”

“Then let me hate you.”

He felt like he’d been punched. “You hate me now?”

Medusa raised a finger, and Tom found himself standing there as his newer self. She morphed back into the girl he’d seen briefly, and he fought the urge to look away. He fought the urge to stare, too. He felt trapped by those eyes that gazed out from her ruined face. He couldn’t imagine moving through the world like that. Like a monster.

“Haven’t you ever, you know”—he blurted the rest—“tried to get it fixed?”

For a moment of silence, she just watched him squirm. “Eight surgeries. Five skin grafts, two face transplants. After the neural graft, I was done. I’d had enough. It was fine until you came. Until you let me pretend I could be normal.”

“I’m sorry.” It was all he could think to say.

Medusa shrugged. “I can’t blame you.”

She was walking away now, toward a door hidden in the far wall. Once she stepped through it, he’d never see her again: he knew it in his gut.

He took a sharp step toward her. “I had to win. I
had
to. They thought I was a traitor, so it was win or I was losing my neural processor and going to prison, okay? Come on! It’s not like I could’ve asked you to lose for me!”

She looked back at him, her eyes gleaming. “Maybe I would have.”

His throat closed. “You wouldn’t have.” People didn’t do that. They didn’t.

“I guess you’ll never know now. Just a word of warning, Mordred: next battle, I’m going to stomp you so hard that afterward, you’ll make
me
look pretty.”

Tom’s uneasiness melted away. Implicit in that remark was a promise, though maybe she’d meant it as a threat: they’d meet again.

He felt his lips pulling into a grin. He’d take it. Take it and run. “You’ll try.”

Medusa’s lips split with that challenging smile, and for a second he recognized her somehow, he knew her on some primal level, the same way he’d recognized her behind the face of Brunhilde, the helmet of Achilles, or in that ship maneuvering in space, and then she flickered away. The simulation darkened around him. Tom pulled out his neural wire, Medusa’s dangerous smile lingering in his brain.

A fist hammered on the door, and then Vik, Yuri, and Wyatt came piling in.

“Come on, man, we’re starving,” Vik said. “I’d estimate we’re ten minutes away from cannibalizing someone here.”

“This is true.” Yuri thumped Tom’s bed. “And it will not be me. I am paying for dinner.”

Vik nodded. “And it can’t be Wyatt, since we’d look like real jerks if we killed and ate a girl. It’s also not going to be me since this whole thing’s my idea. That leaves you, Tom. Death by Indo-Russian cannibals. Beamer would love it.”

“Indo-Russian?” Wyatt said. “Oh. So
I
don’t get to eat now, is that it?”

Vik threw up his hands, exasperated. “Come on, Enslow. What do you think? Of course you get to eat Tom with us. Death by
Americo
-Indo-Russian cannibals just sounded too wordy.”

Tom met their expectant grins with one of his own. He’d never expected to have a future a year ago. He’d never expected to have friends.

And he’d definitely never expected to ever have to tell someone, “All right, no killing and eating me, okay? I’m ready to go.”

F
IGURING OUT THE
dedication was the hardest part of this, because there are so many amazing people involved in this process. Specifically, I have to hone in on Mer and Rob, since you guys have been incredible to me both during this process and in life in general, and I really don’t have words to thank you enough. You both should be up front, too.

Meredith, you were the first person apart from my agent to give the book a read, and you’ve given me amazing advice and insight throughout this process. Thank you!

Rob, thank you, thank you for reading over so many things that were entirely over my head, and always providing another perspective when I was trying to understand things.

Thanks also to:

Jamie, for cowriting that first mauscript with me many moons ago that got me started, and for all the silly stories over the years. Oh, and for being around all this last year during various, unnecessarily angsty moments, and being a voice of reason.

Jessica, because you’ve been there since we were little and you put up with that whole year of me trying to convince you I was a Martian. It’s rare, I think, to find all of one’s childhood memories tied to another person, and I look forward to many adulthood memories, too. You are awesome, Jessie!

Betsey—I’m so lucky to have you as a sister-in-law, and I can’t wait to see the girls grow up!

Judy and the Persoffs (you’re a bit like having a second family), Toddaroo (for having firm opinions at exactly the right time), and the Hattens.

David Dunton, who pulled me out of his slush pile and stuck with me until we had a winner. You’ve always been such an amazing advocate for my novels and I am incredibly lucky to have you as an agent. Also, Nikki, for “lighting a fire” under him to read over that first manuscript, even in the middle of a very major event for you all. Thank you both.

Molly O’Neill, the only person who’s read the book over as many times as me, and honestly, you’ve been a dream editor. Your instincts are dead on, you’ve believed in the book wholeheartedly, advocated for it, and you always believed in my ability to shore up the weaknesses.

Katherine Tegen and the KT Books/HarperCollins team: Anne Hoppe, Sarah Shumway, Claudia Gabel, Melissa Miller, Katie Bignell, Laurel Symonds, Jean McGinley, Barb Fitzsimmons, Amy Ryan, Joel Tippie, Sammy Yuen (thank you for the cover!), Lisa Wong, Esilda Kerr, Kathryn Silsand, Lauren Flower, Megan Sugrue, Stephanie Stein, Alison Lisnow, and Casey McIntyre.

Thanks also to Sara Crowe and all the foreign publishers who have purchased rights to the story, especially Sarah Odedina and Hot Key Books, who put
Insignia
on their launch list. Thanks to Kassie Evashevski, Johnny Pariseau, Drew Reed, and Zander Bauman, and those at Fox who optioned the manuscript.

Thanks to Suzanna Hermans, Cathy Berner, and Jill Hendrix for being the first booksellers to read and support!

Also, there are lots of people who make this world more awesome: Alice & Tim, Christiane, Duncan, Maxine, Jan, Jackie, Shelley, Cristina, Allison, Amy, Stina, and Forever Tie-Dyed Blue Girls, Rachel, Ashley, Jennylle, & SDAP folks.

All the extraordinary teachers I’ve been lucky enough to learn from, and there are just a few here: Mr. Terry, Mr. Ott, Inna V., Mr. Shapiro, Ms. Stinner (who rendered the human body a perfectly logical thing), Mr. Sevilla.

Professor Muir: thank you for those study projects and discussions. Years later, and I can fully appreciate how amazing it is when a professor with your level of expertise takes the time for an undergrad. I was privileged to have a chance to study with you.

Ms. Pettigrew, because you encouraged a tenth grader to seriously pursue writing.

If I’ve left anyone out … Come on. Seriously? Look at the daunting list above. I really tried.

S. J. KINCAID
was born in Alabama, grew up in California, and attended high school in New Hampshire. She also interned for a politician in Washington, DC, and received degrees from universities in Illinois and Ohio, but it was while living beside a haunted graveyard in Edinburgh, Scotland, that she realized she wanted to be a writer. Several years, several manuscripts, and several jobs later, Ms. Kincaid now lives outside Chicago, and
INSIGNIA
is her debut novel. You can visit her online at www.sjkincaid.com.

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“
Insignia
expertly combines humor with a disarming and highly realistic view of the future. The characters are real, funny, and memorable. You won’t be able to put this book down.”

—Veronica Roth,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Divergent

“Hip, high-tech, and hilarious,
Insignia
made my heart soar and left me with impossible-to-shake questions about technology, reality, and war.”

—Rae Carson,
author of
The Girl of Fire and Thorns

“Fast-paced battles in a variety of virtual worlds will excite gamers of all ages. A popular series for readers who enjoy adventures, science fiction, and espionage.”