“So why are you packing up his stuff?”

Her eyes flickered. “It’s probably going to be more than a few days.”

“Is he as crazy as Blackburn now?”

Olivia made a sound, like she’d almost laughed and caught herself. “No. Stephen’s suffering from some anxiety. We’ve given him time, but he’s just been getting worse and worse. It’s time he left here and got some real help.”

“So what’s going to happen? Can’t they do that thing where they grow some new brain matter for him? Wouldn’t that fix him? I read about that somewhere.”

Olivia zipped up the suitcase. “Tom, neural grafting is only used sometimes, when for some reason brain matter is deficient in the frontal lobe at birth. It’s for sociopaths, psychopaths, the brain damaged. Beamer doesn’t need that.” She propped the suitcase up on its side. “I can’t guarantee you he’ll be back here, but I don’t think you should worry about him. He hasn’t had the neural processor for very long. Worst case scenario, he’ll have a phased removal and go back to his old life.”

Tom stepped back into the hallway of Alexander Division, feeling like a hole had opened up inside him. There really was nothing firm, nothing certain. Even here, even at this place where he thought he’d found something permanent, everything could change in a day. Everything could be lost so quickly.

He found Vik, Yuri, and Wyatt downstairs and broke the news to them.

Yuri was too intent on holding Wyatt’s hand, and Wyatt on enduring the hand-holding to really give thought to Beamer. Only Vik seemed to hear Tom’s bombshell. He nodded, unsurprised.

“Guess it was inevitable. What did you think when he started skipping classes?” Vik pointed out. “You can’t do that and get away with it.”

“They’re not punishing him, Vik. They think he’s crazy.”

“Look, Tom.” Vik scraped his hand through his hair. “Beamer’s a great guy. He is. He’s funny and he’s laid-back, but sometimes that’s a problem, too. He came here, and what did he do? People would cut off their arms to be here. Literally would cut off their arms if they could get the chance to do what we do. And what did Beamer do with it? He went online to meet his girlfriend. He binge downloaded. He died as soon as he could in sims, in Calisthenics.”

Tom stared at Vik, feeling like he didn’t know him. “You’re acting like he deserved this.”

“I’m saying, maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place. Maybe he was a lousy fit. You remember all those psych test we had to do, all those screenings before coming here?”

Tom looked at Vik, Yuri, and Wyatt. What tests? Why were they all nodding like they knew what tests these were?

“Beamer should’ve realized then that this was serious business,” Vik went on. “Maybe he finally realized it.”

The words didn’t make Tom feel any better.

A STRANGE SENSE of wrongness nagged at Tom throughout the following days. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt out of place. Sometimes something—a puff of smoke in Applied Sims, the steam in the shower room—triggered a memory of the Beringer Club, but always, those words popped up, Restricted Access, followed by the dissolution of the memory from his consciousness.

But the sense of something missing remained. He found himself retreating more often to his bunk, watching Medusa in the latest battles of the war. They were the only things that kept the sense of strangeness away. He thought often of their fight outside the walls of Troy and Medusa’s strange smile as he died, and just wondered what would happen the next time they met.

It could be years until he was Camelot Company, if he ever made it. It could be years until he faced Medusa in a real fight.

Tom decided it: he couldn’t wait years.

So he snuck onto the officers’ floor. He was clever about it. Wyatt told them at lunch that she and Blackburn were going to spend the evening in the basement with the Spire’s primary processor, configuring the reformatted neural processors for the network.

“How long does that take?” Tom asked her, making sure to sound offhand.

“Three hours. Maybe four.”

Three hours was more than enough time for what Tom wanted to do. When Wyatt disappeared down to the basement with Blackburn, Tom set his GPS signal to the router he’d gotten from Wyatt, left the router in the bathroom, and then headed upstairs to the officers’ floor. This time he didn’t go to the staff room, since anyone could come in there.

Only one person could interrupt him in Blackburn’s office, and Tom already knew where he’d be for the next several hours.

He hooked himself into the neural access port on Blackburn’s desk and tried to ignore the way his heart was suddenly slamming against his rib cage. He could do this. He’d done it twice.

He focused upon the neural processor, the buzz in his brain, the connection to the Spire, and it happened again. He jerked out of himself, fused to the Spire’s network. He let himself drift that way, his brain melding first to the satellites and then to those ships near Mercury and then to Stronghold Energy’s palladium mines. And back, he caught onto that stream of data leading to the Sun Tzu Citadel in the Forbidden City.

Through his consciousness, they flickered, the IPs of neural processors hooked into that network. He flipped through the directories, taking it all very deliberately, reminding himself every few seconds that he was a he not an it, a person and not one of those vast streams of 0s and 1s pressing in on all sides of him....

And then that IP registered, the same one the Spire’s databases logged as belonging to the Combatant Medusa: 2049:st9:i71f::088:201:4e1.

He flashed between his own body—that cold, numb thing slumped in a chair—and his consciousness in the foreign network. The net-send function in his neural processor triggered with a thought, and he locked onto Medusa’s IP just as it buzzed in his consciousness. Then he took the biggest risk of his life:

You dragged me through the dirt and killed me. I seek to avenge myself. Yours, the Deranged One. He enclosed the URL for his favorite VR sim dueling site and deposited it right there in Medusa’s neural processor.

Tom snapped back to himself, his body tingling all over with shock at the audacity of what he’d done. His hands were slick with sweat, his heart still pounding wildly in his chest. Had it worked? Had she received it?

There was only one way to find out.

He logged onto the internet and went to that URL, preparing himself for what might be a long, futile wait. His vision changed. Stone walls resolved into life around him, nooks set with rippling torches. Someone had already set up a duel, which meant Medusa was already here.

Tom started laughing, giddiness washing through him.

This was really happening. This was happening.

He shifted, and felt with surprise the rippling muscles across his skin. The neural processor was taking the ordinary parameters of the video game and interpreting it in three dimension for him. He looked down at his body. An information bubble registered the identity of his character: Siegfried, a legendary hero with unbeatable strength.

“I think you have a question to answer.”

The woman’s voice was deep, resonant. Tom whirled around to face her. The tall, muscular blond woman stood on the other side of the vast stone chamber, a curved basin with a fire between them. Her pale face flickered in the leaping flames, an information bubble identifying her for him: Brunhilde, a legendary Valkyrie who was forced out of Valhalla. She was queen of Iceland and the mightiest warrior in the world, apart from Siegfried, her true love and the one man capable of beating her.