He would’ve flipped down the next flight of stairs if he hadn’t heard a door swing open below him and footsteps move rapidly up toward him. Tom checked himself and stepped lightly, careful not to let the metal clank against the steps.

That’s how Yuri ran into him on the stairwell. A light sheen of sweat coated the larger boy’s face. The plebes were already at lunch while the Middles finished up Calisthenics, but obviously Yuri was taking advantage of the hour for an extra jog up the stairs.

“Thomas,” Yuri said, surprise in his voice.

For a moment, Tom halted, wondering if Yuri, as a plebe, could even see his exosuit. But Yuri didn’t react at all, so Tom figured it had to be censored from his neural processor.

“Are you not supposed to be in Calisthenics?” Yuri asked him.

Middles weren’t supposed to share particulars about exosuits with plebes. They hadn’t “earned the privilege.” Tom tried to think of a lie.

Yuri guessed what the answer was. “Ah, I understand.” His face seemed to shutter closed. “It is not for my ears. Would you like assistance with the bag?”

“Nah, I can handle it.” Even without the exosuit, this was no problem. He hoisted it up on his shoulder and took care with his steps, trying to stop them from clanging their way down the stairs. As they started talking about lunch, about the upcoming break, Tom couldn’t help the way his thoughts turned back to the conversation he’d overheard between Blackburn and Vik.

God save Tom Raines from his well-wishers. You’re not doing him any favors.

His gut contracted. He honestly hadn’t thought people saw him as a screwup here. Sure, people like Karl and Dalton and Blackburn saw him as some insolent, mouthy little punk who deserved a beat down, but he hadn’t realized everyone expected him to ruin his greatest chance to make something of himself. The worst thing was, he didn’t know how to fix it anymore. His mind turned back to General Marsh, ordering him to fix things with the CEOs. As if he could walk up to them on the street and make amends.

Even if he could walk up to those CEOs somewhere, he knew he couldn’t fix things. He couldn’t do what Marsh expected him to do. Maybe Vik knew it, too. That’s why Vik had congratulated him and cheered him on. . . . It was just his friend keeping him from dwelling on the way he’d ruined it all.

The realization staggered Tom. He stopped in his tracks, and Yuri thumped down several steps more before noticing he’d stopped. He peered back at him. “Thomas?”

Tom gazed at his friend, realizing he’d been doing the same thing to Yuri. They all had. They’d avoided mentioning this, talking about it, helping him avoid reality. They hadn’t been doing him a favor.

“Yuri, man, what are you still doing here at the Spire?” Tom blurted. “You have to know they’re not gonna promote you. You’re not going anywhere.”

If he was startled, he didn’t show it. Yuri gazed up at him in the half-light.

“You know that, right?” Tom pressed.

Yuri dropped his gaze to the railing. “Yes.”

“Why are you wasting your time like this? I love this place, too, and I know you’re into Wyatt. I get why you wanna stay, but, Yuri, man, you’re gonna become that guy who’s hanging around his high school when he’s twenty. You shouldn’t be him. You’re not some loser. Your glory days are the ones still ahead of you.”

Yuri sighed. “You are telling me nothing I have not thought myself.”

“Then what is it? What are you doing?”

Yuri licked his lips, then raised his eyes, a determined glint in them. “You will think of this as very foolish, but I am always having this great feeling of certainty I must stay—a certainty it is necessary that I am here, as though there is some purpose I would be neglecting if I left.”

“What purpose?”

He shrugged his large shoulders. “I cannot say. ‘Purpose’ is the only way I can describe this sense as though I have a task here. Even so much as a contemplation of departure gives me great unease. I feel it, such wrongness, such a certainty that leaving would be a grave error. And when I try to reason it out, this wrong feeling gets worse—as though some terrible weight is pressing in on my temples.” He gestured vaguely to his head. “And I am aware this must seem quite crazy to you.”

Tom leaned back against the wall. “No. No, man. It’s not crazy. Hey, come on, I know how it is. Like, I know where I’d have been without this place. There was nothing before.” He didn’t talk about this stuff, not even with Vik, and even now Tom had to drop his voice to a near whisper. “Literally, just . . . nothing. I don’t know where I’d have gone if I hadn’t been recruited. I probably would’ve ended up, I dunno, in prison or something.” He shrugged off the thought. “But, Yuri, this doesn’t have to be make or break for you. You’re not like me. You’re better. You can do so much, and people like you. People care about you. You could really do something in this world.”

Yuri raised his eyes to his. “You are too hard on yourself, Thomas.”

Tom was thrown a moment by his words, and he fell silent.

“I hate to interrupt the touching moment.” Blackburn’s voice floated from the darkness below them as his footsteps scuffed their way up the stairs. Tom and Yuri both jumped, but then Blackburn rounded the turn in the stairs below them, and said very clearly to Yuri, “We are talking about Zorten Two for the next five minutes.”

Yuri took his cue immediately, and his face grew cloudy like he was zoning out—just as Blackburn programmed him to do when he heard anything programming related.

Blackburn jabbed his thumb down the stairs. “Stairwell is clear. That means we’re going to have a talk.”

“Look, the roof—”

“The incident on the roof is exactly what I’ve come to expect of you, Raines,” Blackburn said briskly as they headed down the stairs. “No, I’m here to talk about the neural processor you saw tampering with the drones—the person behind the breaches. I planned to use the climb to talk about this if you’d kept pace with me—like you were supposed to.”

Tom darted a glance back up to Yuri, higher on the stairs. He saw that Yuri’s eyes had snapped open, a curious, razor-sharp intensity on his face. He wasn’t blinking, and as Tom twisted down the stairs, he mentally willed him, Close your eyes and pretend to zone out. What are you doing, man?

“I hope you realize, I know you’ve been trying to talk to someone outside the Spire,” Blackburn said, his voice echoing off the walls around them.

Tom stopped in his tracks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He saw movement out of the corner of his eye as he followed Blackburn down, and he realized with some disbelief that Yuri was quietly moving down the staircase, too, listening to them, just out of Blackburn’s line of sight.

What was he doing? Did he want to be caught?

“Don’t lie to me.” Blackburn whirled on him. “You have a friend in the Citadel. It makes me wonder about something: there’s no sign of a backdoor into our system, no evidence of external penetration of our server, yet there was a third neural processor interfacing with those drones, controlling those drones. If it wasn’t a neural processor outside the Spire, it was one inside our system, but if it was inside our system, I’d be able to trace it. I couldn’t.”