Vengerov closed the tablet computer, calmly tucked it in his pocket, and said in a deadly soft voice, “I think it was foolish of you to assume I’d simply let you walk out of here with this. Surely you’re not that careless.”

“You know me, after all. I’m touched. Of course I didn’t think you’d let me walk out with my plunder, no. That’s why I made sure the information already walked out of here. It left hours ago with the trainees. I distributed it between their processors as I stole it, and as soon as those kids were outside this building, they transmitted the data to one thousand different data storage sites.”

Vengerov seized the rail. “I will cull every last file location out of you!”

Blackburn rocked back on his heels, a ferocious grin on his face. “They’re set to a dead man’s switch. I have to send a password in . . . five hours and six minutes, or they’ll automatically open and reveal your double-dipping to the entire world. Oh, and here’s the best part: the password I wrote for them? It automatically deletes itself from my processor if I’m incapacitated, if any unauthorized code from, say, a census device finds its way into my brain, or if anything—and I mean anything—hinders my liberty of movement. You’re going to let me walk out of here, and you’re going to agree to my terms.”

A heavy silence sat on the air between them. Then Vengerov straightened. “I see you’ve been very thorough. So you’ll sit on this data, and in return . . . what? I assume you wish me to withdraw Obsidian Corp.’s bid for the Pentagonal Spire?”

“The breaches end today,” Blackburn said flatly.

“One is conditional upon the other, yes.”

Tom saw Blackburn’s face shift as he got the confirmation it had been Vengerov behind the breaches, behind the hijacked drones—and blurry as his head was, Tom felt vindicated. He’d been right. It hadn’t been Medusa.

“Now, Lieutenant,” Vengerov said, “I suggest you tend to your eavesdropping trainee.”

Blackburn jumped, and threw a startled glance toward Tom.

With a sigh, Tom abandoned the pretense of sleep and heaved himself up as far as he could in the bed. His entire body was exhausted, his mouth bone-dry. “Where are we?” His voice came out cracked.

“We’re still in Obsidian Corp.,” Blackburn said, moving closer to him. “The medical bay. We’re waiting for some of our own people to retrieve you. Do you remember what happened?”

Tom gave a shaky nod.

“Try to rest,” Blackburn ordered him, but his voice was oddly soft. “You need your strength.”

But Tom couldn’t rest, he couldn’t, not with Vengerov there at the foot of the bed. It was like closing his eyes with some venomous snake looming over him, poised to strike.

Vengerov had an unblinking gaze like a reptile’s. “I must apologize for your incident earlier, Mr. Raines. I never thought to assign any personnel to attend to the external surveillance cameras. No one breaks into a building filled with killing machines in the middle of Antarctica, after all. Your medical expenses are, of course, complimentary.”

Who was Vengerov even pretending for? Tom knew he was the one behind what happened. Blackburn had to have guessed.

“Yeah, I bet you’re real sorry,” Tom said, his voice raspy. He assessed himself, saw the swollen toes of his right foot where he’d kicked at the door. Bandages confining his hands. Restlessly, he shoved one under his opposite arm to work the bandage off, hoping to see how badly hurt his hands were. “Funny how that door swung open and closed a bunch of times.”

“No hardware is perfect. Certainly not our automated doors.” Vengerov’s gaze dropped to the bandage Tom was working off, a certain amusement gleaming in his eyes. “But it does trouble me to think while I was luxuriating indoors, a frightened child was trapped out in the cold, begging to be let in.”

Rage boiled up in Tom. His furious gaze flashed up to Vengerov’s. “I never begged.”

Vengerov had to know what he was really saying—Tom hadn’t broken. Even if it almost killed him. He wished Vengerov would reward him by seeming distressed or disappointed, but the Russian oligarch smiled, something like anticipation on his face.

Blackburn seemed to realize what Tom was doing. “Don’t take those off here . . .” he began, but Tom had shucked off the bandage.

Now he saw what it had been hiding. Shock triggered in his gut as he saw the blackened fingers he couldn’t feel. He latched on to the other bandage with his teeth and tore it from that hand, and saw that those were blackened, too. His gut twisted. No. No, no, no . . . Wait. This couldn’t be right. He tried to curl them, tried to flex them. He shook his hands out, he pressed the fingers together. No sensation. Nothing.

A massive tourniquet seemed to be compressing him, the blood rushing in his ears. No. He needed these. He needed them for everything. Gaming. He couldn’t game without fingers. What if he didn’t become a Combatant? What if he needed to get by somehow?

Blackburn snared his wrists and set about replacing the bandages. “You’re going to get cybernetic fingers. They’ll work with the neural processor, and they’ll be almost as good as the real thing. Think of the exosuits. It’s like having one full-time.”

But exosuits hadn’t replaced something that was supposed to be there. They’d been something fun, something awesome to make him stronger, faster. They’d been something he could take off and decide not to use. Tom stared at his blackened fingers, denial blanking out his brain. This couldn’t be real.

Joseph Vengerov must have been satisfied that Tom understood the consequences of refusing him, because he at last turned around and strode away, disappearing off into the empty hallways of his mechanized fortress, as pitiless as any of his machines.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“AT LEAST YOUR nose didn’t fall off,” Wyatt told him a couple days later.

Tom was sitting on the edge of his bed in the Pentagonal Spire’s infirmary, watching Vik inspect the new, cybernetic fingers. It was strange. They didn’t have any true touch receptors, not like real fingers, but whenever they came in contact with something—whether screwed into the stumps on his hand or not—Tom felt this prickling sensation. He hadn’t yet learned to sort out different electronic signals, even though Dr. Gonzales had assured him his brain would learn to identify them, associate them with heat, cold, soft, sharp, and so on.

Vik turned the finger over and Tom felt the nagging prickle in his hand. He felt like his head was going to burst.

“I looked up pictures of people with frostbite online,” Wyatt went on, from where she was sitting on the edge of his mattress, her dark hair drawn up in a high ponytail today, “and a lot of people’s noses fell off. So it’s really great that yours didn’t.”

Vik laughed. “Enslow, come on.”

“What?” she said. “It’s a good thing. I’m cheering Tom up.”

“He is not looking cheerful,” Yuri said, from where he was leaning against the doorframe.

“I’m fine,” Tom muttered.

Now Vik’s chair scraped closer to his bedside. “So what’s the deal? I heard the official story: you went looking for a bathroom and accidentally walked outside, but I don’t buy it. How’d you really get stuck out there?”