“How . . . how did I get over here?” Yuri blinked in some confusion. He looked from Wyatt’s downcast eyes to Vik’s stormy face to Tom, then settled on Blackburn’s coldly satisfied expression. “Sir!” He straightened to attention.

Blackburn let out a slow breath. “I have bad news for you, Sysevich. . . .”

Tom didn’t want to see Yuri’s face as Blackburn delivered the bad news, so his gaze dropped down to Yuri’s hand, where his fingers were crawling over the computer keyboard controlling the census device. Confusion washed over him, because Yuri was still looking at Blackburn and seemed unaware of what he was doing.

Then Tom realized Yuri wasn’t the one doing it.

Someone else was.

With a hum that still made Tom’s blood turn to ice, the census device powered up. Blackburn’s voice died as all five legs of the metal claw activated, and the bright beams lashed out at Yuri’s head.

Yuri’s neck jerked back, exposing the long, strained tendons alongside his throat. The first terrible scream ripped out of him as the blue beams enveloped his temples, his arms flying out wide, his entire body convulsing like he was in contact with some live wire.

Tom started forward, but Vik’s hand closed around his arm, jerking him away. He saw Wyatt hauled back by Blackburn as Yuri convulsed to the ground.

“Don’t,” Blackburn shouted. “That’s an electrical discharge!”

The current overloaded the census device, and the unit sparked and fizzled. The beams died away, leaving Yuri limp on the ground, an awful silence descending over the chamber.

Joseph Vengerov had, indeed, surrendered to Blackburn’s terms. He’d removed Yuri’s processor from Blackburn’s reach, the processor Yuri depended on to live.

He’d obliterated it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

TOM WAS NEVER sure what to do when he visited Yuri in the infirmary during the months that followed. Mostly, he stood there looking at the slashing green line of Yuri’s EKG, his neural processor automatically assuring him it was a normal sinus rhythm. Today, he found himself listening to Dr. Gonzales and another physician discuss the case on the other side of the room, speculating about how Yuri had made it so long without the processor, even in his medically induced coma.

“Maybe he was born under a lucky star,” Gonzales said. Then he seemed to realize what he’d said, and began chuckling merrily.

Tom turned and walked out. He didn’t fool himself anymore. He felt a flicker of surprise each day when he found Yuri still lying there, a machine breathing for him, an implanted pacemaker keeping blood circulating through his veins. One time, he swore, he saw Yuri’s eyelids fluttering a bit like he was dreaming, but when he moved closer, he realized it had been the light playing tricks.

He grabbed a sandwich in the mess hall. He spotted Wyatt near the door and considered it. Why not? It had been a day or two since she’d had a chance to ignore him.

He tossed his tray on the table and slouched into the seat across from hers. “What’s up?”

Wyatt’s dark eyes flickered to his briefly, then she turned her full attention back to the liquid-filled, metallic cylinder containing a neural processor in need of reformatting. Since the spares were all from the old group of soldiers who’d died from them, anything left on the computers had to be erased—one directory at a time. Only then could they go into someone else’s head. Everywhere Wyatt went nowadays, she tended to carry one. She reformatted instead of eating and, Tom suspected, instead of sleeping or doing much else.

As he ate, Wyatt adjusted the magnifying glass she’d attached to the lid of the metallic storage cylinder. She was always so meticulous about using tweezers to pluck up one stringy thread of the spiderweb-shaped computer at a time.

It was like Wyatt believed repairing enough spare processors would pave the way for Yuri to get another one. Tom knew it wouldn’t happen, but when he’d pointed that out to her, she’d gotten up and walked away from him. He didn’t mention it again.

“Ms. Ossare told me to remind you to see her today,” Tom said, his mouth full.

Wyatt nodded a bit, acknowledging that she’d heard him.

Tom didn’t really get why Olivia was still bothering. If Wyatt hadn’t talked to her yet, she wasn’t going to anytime soon. The last time Wyatt talked to anyone was the morning after Yuri’s electrocution. Tom, Vik, and Wyatt were gathered around Yuri’s bed, still in shock from what had happened, together but already so far apart.

Wyatt had looked at them dry-eyed, and said, “This was all my fault.” And that was it. In the time since, she’d descended into a full-blown obsession with reformatting the old processors, even though it had been made explicitly clear to them that Yuri wasn’t getting another one, even to save his life.

There was no point, after all. Vengerov’s transmitter survived the destruction of Yuri’s neural processor. The military saw no reason to waste resources on someone who’d be of no use to them. If he received a new neural processor and recovered, Yuri would remain a walking security breach. Neural processors were too valuable to give away just to save a life.

Tom heard voices swelling across the mess hall, and saw Lyla punching Vik’s arm. Her face was flushed bright red, but Vik was shaking with laughter about something. He and Vik hadn’t talked for a while. Blackburn officially classified Yuri’s incident as a built-in hardware error, but the near miss with treason scared Vik. He obviously didn’t want to risk any more trouble by staying around Tom. It started with Vik not sitting with Tom in the mess hall or in Programming.

Living down the hall became more like living on another continent. Tom saw Vik hanging around with Giuseppe sometimes, like they were actually becoming friends. Most of the time, Vik was with Lyla, though. They’d gotten back together, for longer than twelve minutes this time. Tom usually saw them arguing, or sometimes being way over-the-top affectionate. She seemed angry a lot, which Vik always appeared to find hilarious.

Tom wasn’t upset. He was sure he wasn’t hurt. There was this strange sense of crystallization inside him, like something had grown very hard and still in his chest. Things were the way they were. Maybe even a close group like theirs couldn’t survive watching a friend get murdered.

Tom deleted his bunk template and the Gormless Cretin statue. He got rid of all of it.

OF COURSE, AT first, Tom was angry. When he learned Yuri wasn’t getting another processor—that his life wouldn’t be saved—determination flooded him. He would do what he could do—enter machines, go right through Obsidian Corp.’s firewall into Vengerov’s systems, and he’d blow out that transmitter on the other side. Failing that, he’d blow up Obsidian Corp. itself if he had to. That was his plan. Then Yuri wouldn’t be a security breach anymore, and he could get a processor.

But he tried. And failed. Obsidian Corp. had something he’d believed impossible: a firewall he couldn’t penetrate.

When Medusa showed up in his plane during the Battle of Midway simulation, Tom turned back toward her. “Medusa!” He’d almost forgotten to think of her lately, with everything that had happened. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I know I’ve been staying away,” she said. “I wanted to tell you—”