They stepped through the door marked Alexander Division into an empty corridor with three hallways branching from it.

“Here’s Alexander Division, your home while you’re here. I’d call it a dorm, but I think the cruddiest dorms are actually nicer than this. Not much to look at, huh? Come on, we’re down here.”

In the third hallway, toward the far end of the division, they stepped into a small room with two low beds, stark gray carpets, and off-white walls. There was a small window about the size of Tom’s head that gazed right onto the roof of the Old Pentagon, one story below.

“Here we are,” Vik said. “Bare walls, and forget about posters or photos or anything. You earn more privileges with personalizing your bunk as you move up the ranks.”

“It’s perfect,” Tom said, meaning it, turning in a slow circle to see the room. His room. He’d never had a room that belonged to him before, even partially.

“Low standards. Good for you. You’ll like it here.”

Tom spotted a leg poking out from beyond one of the beds. He strode forward and saw that the leg belonged to an orange-haired kid in a uniform who was sprawled on the floor.

“Your bed’s that one,” Vik told Tom, indicating the other side of the room.

“There’s a dead guy on our floor,” Tom pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s Beamer, our neighbor.” Vik stepped over to Tom’s bed, and kicked open a drawer beneath the mattress. He swept down and yanked out a bundle of fabric. “Here’s your uniform.”

“There’s a dead Beamer on our floor,” Tom said again.

Vik dumped the uniform on Tom’s bed. “Not dead. He’s just being Beamer.”

The orange-haired kid turned in his sleep, showing that he wasn’t dead but more in a stupor. The round, freckled face triggered an information stream in Tom’s head.

NAME: Stephen Beamer

RANK: USIF, Grade III Plebe, Alexander Division

ORIGIN: Seattle, WA

ACHIEVEMENTS: Winner of the NFIB Young Entrepreneur Scholarship, member of National Association of Young Business Owners

IP: 2053:db7:lj71::342:ll3:6e8

SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-3

“See,” Vik explained, “Beamer made this mistake a few months ago where he snuck outside the DZ—the designated zone—to meet up with his girlfriend from back home …”

“Marsh said something about that!” Tom exclaimed. “The military went to DEFCON-2, right?”

“Yeah.” Vik laughed. “Then they descended on the girlfriend’s house with helicopters and tanks and a gunship, I think, and gave her dad a heart attack. Literally. So Beamer’s still trying to make it up to his girlfriend. He spends all night talking to her online instead of downloading homework. He’s on restricted libs—you know, restriction of liberties—so I don’t even know where he goes to do that. It defeats the point of the neural processors, though. We have computerized memory. We can put anything we want in our heads, but all that info’s useless if you don’t process it. You have to have time for your brain to make sense of all the data you’ve downloaded.”

Tom stepped over Beamer toward the clothes Vik had slung onto his bed.

Vik nudged Beamer’s inert leg with his boot, testing how awake he was. “Most people plug in the homework download during their sleep. Beamer crams the homework download into a few hours, so he doesn’t understand any of it. Then he comes staggering in here first thing in the morning and passes out on the floor to make sure I either trip on him on the way out, or drag him to morning meal formation.”

The inert, orange-haired boy’s eyes snapped open. Beamer sat up so quickly, Tom shot back a step, startled.

“I object to this discussion,” Beamer informed Tom, his pale face cloudy, making him look for all the world like someone sleep talking. “Vik is casting aspersions on my character. Catabolic processes oxidize carbon-containing nutrients.”

“What?” Tom said, confused.

But Beamer slumped back down to the floor and said nothing more. It took Tom a long moment to realize he was unconscious again.

“Moron,” Vik said fondly, his eyes dancing. “No processing, see? All that info in his brain, none of it in context yet.”

“Guess not,” Tom murmured. He could kind of sympathize with Beamer there. He felt rather information overloaded himself at the moment.

“Now hurry up with that uniform before the Android swings by to get us for morning meal formation.”

“An actual android?” Tom asked. He couldn’t tell what was real and what was science fiction anymore.

“Nah. That’s what we call Beamer’s roommate, Yuri. He goes jogging every morning even though we have Calisthenics three times a week, and he’s always in a fantastic mood. He’ll help you with homework or move heavy things for you, and he’s always trying to make friends with this weird girl Wyatt Enslow, because he feels sorry for her. Nicest guy you’ll ever meet. Beamer and I have decided he must be an android. An android slash spy.”

“Spy?” Tom yanked the dark tunic, with an Alexander Division sword on the arm, the Intrasolar Forces eagle insignia on the collar, and a single triangular point beneath it. He wriggled on the biker-guy type gloves, and then spotted the last item: a flat keypad.

His neural processor told him to clamp the metal prongs on the bottom of the keyboard onto the slots of the glove on his nondominant hand.

“Shove your sleeve over it,” Vik instructed him. “You won’t need the keyboard until later.”

Tom pressed the keyboard against his forearm, and found it was made of a flexible polymer that bent with his arm. He hooked the ends into the slots on the glove of his left hand, then pulled down his sleeve to keep it in place.

Vik went on, “So anyway, Beamer’s roommate, Yuri, is Russian, right? He also comes from a connected family. His dad knows this guy who practically founded the Intrasolar Forces. He got Yuri into the Spire, whether the US military wanted him or not. Since Yuri was born and raised in Russia, a lot of people think he’s a spy. The military must think he is, too, since Yuri became a plebe three years ago and he’s still never been promoted. Most plebes are promoted after a year or so. All the others who began the program when he did have advanced to Upper Company or gone off to work for another government agency by now.”

Tom tugged on the combat boots, did up the laces, and shoved the ends of his camouflage fatigues in them the way he saw Vik wearing his. “Do you think he’s a spy?”

“Nah. I told you, man. He’s an android.”

The doors slid open. In bounded a giant, wavy-haired kid standing at six foot eight, his body a coiled mass of muscle, a good-natured grin on his swarthy, handsome face.

NAME: Yuri Sysevich

RANK: USIF, Grade III Plebe, Alexander Division

ORIGIN: St. Petersburg, Russia

ACHIEVEMENTS: Chris Canning Award for Academic Excellence, Elsevier Woods Award for Young Humanitarian

IP: 2053:db7:lj71::236:ll3:6e8

SECURITY STATUS: Confidential LANDLOCK-1

Tom stared. He really did have a lower security designation than the rest of them.

“Why, hullo, fellows. Are you ready to head to breakfast soon?” Yuri’s gaze lit upon Tom. “Ah. And you. You are the new plebe. Timothy Rodale.”