TOM COULDN’T SHAKE the dreadful self-consciousness in the days that followed. The cybernetic fingers were slightly off, the tone too pink somehow. Even when they were on, he tried keeping his hands in his pockets. He kept turning suspiciously at every burst of laughter he heard, wondering with a sudden clenching of his stomach if people were laughing at him. He swore a couple of the other trainees looked at his hands, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was imagining it.

It took a while to work up his courage to do that thing he’d been dreading. He’d avoided trying VR games in front of Vik, worrying about what might happen. He finally holed himself up in his bunk one day to play Samurai Eternity. He set it at Expert level, the way he always did with games.

And then his worst fears were confirmed: the cybernetic fingers moved differently enough to throw off every slash of his sword, every blast of his weapons. In frustration, Tom tore off his VR gloves and hurled them across the bunk. The insane urge to stomp on them, break them, swamped his brain, and only the knowledge that he’d spent a month’s stipend on them held him back.

But he felt a great ball of anxiety in his stomach. It felt like a much more tangible, aching loss than the sensory receptors he’d once had on those fingers.

He was doomed. He was completely and utterly doomed. Gaming was how he got by before the Spire. It was how he survived. Now he’d completely lost his chance at Combatant status, he’d made an enemy of Joseph Vengerov—and he didn’t have a backup plan anymore.

He wasn’t aware of Wyatt knocking on his door, and he was only dully aware of the moment she walked over to where he was standing above the gloves. Her large hands tugged clumsily at him, and Tom found himself sitting next to her on his bed.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m not upset or anything. I realized I suck at games now,” he told her. He held up his curled fingers. “These don’t work right.”

“Your brain’s primed to use the old ones,” she said. “It’s like the exosuits. No matter how good they are, your brain uses slightly different neurons to move them. You’ll learn. Just practice.”

He shook his head gloomily. “It’s never going to be the same.”

“Fine. Then you can be awful at video games. They’re stupid anyway and a waste of time.” She nodded crisply. “You should read more books, Tom.”

He stared at her. “Wyatt, this is not a good pep talk. You are not good at pep talks.”

“Well, it’s not the end of the world. You don’t need to video game for money now.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

And then her words registered in his brain.

His muscles felt rigidly locked in place as he tried to make sense of it.

“Um, wait. Wait,” Tom said. “Wait. How do you know about that?”

Wyatt’s eyes shot wide, and she dropped her gaze.

Tom scooted away from her. “Wyatt, how do you know I played games for money? I never told you that. The only person who knew was General Marsh. Or . . .”

Or Lieutenant Blackburn, the guy who’d seen enough of his memories to know.

For some reason, Tom felt like he’d been socked, realizing Blackburn had told her. He’d sort of thought Blackburn was discreet about the stuff from the census device. His brain felt all tangled up even thinking about Blackburn now, knowing the same guy who’d almost driven him insane had also saved his life and . . . and comforted him when he’d been hurting and sort of confused. But this was a surprise. Blackburn had talked about Tom’s personal stuff to Wyatt?

Tom hadn’t told her what he knew about Blackburn and his family. This felt like being stabbed in the back.

“What else did Blackburn tell you?” he asked her roughly.

“It wasn’t him, Tom. It was my fault.” She clutched her hands together in her lap. “It was right before vacation, after we got Jupitered. . . . That’s still a stupid term, by the way. Anyway, I knew something really bad had to have happened in the Census Chamber because you were acting so weird, so I downloaded the surveillance archives.”

Tom froze up. Oh no. She’d seen stuff. She’d seen all of it.

Yeah, he’d told his friends about his life before the Spire, sure. About those casinos where Neil raked in the money, and the crazy and colorful crowds, hopping trains and soaring from state to state in all the glorious freedom of it, or that high-rise suite over that pool with all the naked women in it, stuff like that. A bunch of things that were awesome and fantastic, the way things sometimes had been but usually weren’t.

Never that other stuff. Never any of the bad stuff. That wasn’t the person he was here.

“There were two days’ worth of footage,” Wyatt went on, her eyes darting to his, and skittering away again, “so I stuck it in my homework feed. I woke up knowing it all. But, Tom, I wouldn’t have sat and watched it all if I’d realized . . .”

“What did you think?” he blurted. “I told you it was bad.”

“I know. I didn’t know it would be that awful. That he could be that awful.”

Tom felt sick. He couldn’t look at her.

“I haven’t talked about it to anyone, you know. And . . . and I haven’t been talking to Lieutenant Blackburn, either. I’m mad at him. He was awful to you. He’s noticed, too. He ordered me to stop sending him ‘sad hurt puppy looks,’ whatever those are. Um, but I could say something, too. I’m going to say something. I’ll give him a talking to.”

Tom barely heard her. His skin crawled all over. All those memories. Those fantasies. She’d been in some of those fantasies. Not only that, but she’d seen those hours when he’d begun falling apart. She knew all of them. She’d seen it all. She’d seen him. He couldn’t seem to move.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I am so, so sorry. I know why you were so mad at Blackburn now. I didn’t understand before. I do now.”

Her words rang distantly in his ears. He felt like he was drawing breath through a straw. He swiped his hand through his hair, trying to get his head straight, but he couldn’t seem to think, he couldn’t.

“You really saw all that?” was all he could manage.

“Well, not all of it. I mean, there are things missing. Um, these segments. Big segments. It’s like they were erased. Like, at first you and Blackburn seemed okay and there’s this big blank spot, and everything got weird after that. You two were okay before that, and after, you were both acting . . . differently.”

Tom closed his eyes, knowing that was when Blackburn had seen his memories of what he could do with machines. When Tom had made the fatal error of admitting he’d met Joseph Vengerov, leading to Blackburn jumping to all sorts of conclusions. So Wyatt had seen the aftermath of that, but none of the context or the reason for it.

“I don’t understand what you were hiding from him.”

“What was I hiding from him?” Tom burst out. “What do you think, Wyatt? Does the word ‘unscrambled’ ring a bell? How about ‘treason’?”

Her cheeks grew white. “That.”

“Yeah. That.”

“I wouldn’t have asked you to do that. Yuri wouldn’t have, either. If we’d known . . .”