Karl’s big brow furrowed. His grip slipped away.

Tom straightened his collar and strode off into the Calisthenics Arena. He spotted the new Middles all returning their gear to the armory, and it was easy enough in the confusion for Tom to step in and don an exosuit, some optical camouflage, and a pair of centrifugal clamps.

Then he climbed to the very top of the Pentagonal Spire.

He stood up there on the roof. He was high enough now to glimpse the edges of a distant batch of skyboards glowing over Richmond, Virginia.

Tom delved in his pocket for the remote-access transmitter he’d already received for the upcoming vacation. He popped it onto his neck. He knew Medusa was incapacitated right now, incapable of hooking into the internet. More important, Vengerov knew it. Therefore the man who stood at the nexus of the security state, the man behind the surveillance and the drones and the secrecy who held together the world as it was, would realize Yaolan couldn’t possibly be the one who did what Tom was about to do.

If the Coalition executives thought Elliot Ramirez’s blasting all the skyboards in the middle of nowhere, Texas, was incendiary during Capitol Summit, if they saw them as a spark that could ignite something bigger, then Tom was about to give them an inferno.

He dove out of himself into the central subsystem controlling all the skyboards across the Western Hemisphere, and planted the code he’d written, moving from one hub to another. He jolted back into himself as the skyboards in the distance lit with the image he programmed for them, casting bright, white light across the landscape beneath them. Then he accessed the DHS server, the surveillance feeds, watching the images of people in cities all over the Western Hemisphere stopping in the streets, staring up at the skyboards. In every city, the walls of skyboards had gone blank of advertisements. Now they displayed stark black text trumpeting Tom’s challenge:

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

IS WATCHING

THE WATCHERS

Tom let that sit there, gazing into the distance where the skyboards beamed down the message tailored for Joseph Vengerov and the entire security state with its web of surveillance and control. Here was something they did not control. Here was something they had not seen coming.

He gave Joseph Vengerov enough time to call up his techs, to shout into the phone that he wanted the transmission traced. Just enough time to understand the girl he’d incapacitated in China wasn’t the internet entity he’d been hunting.

There you go, Vengerov. Here’s your ghost in the Machine, Tom thought vindictively. Now come and get me. Give it a shot.

And then the next phase of Tom’s virus triggered. The screens grew brighter and brighter, power spiking until they overloaded and erupted in haloes of debris, scattering fragments of skyboard like a curtain across the sky.

A soaring feeling swept through Tom. He knew he’d done something significant. He knew it could change everything, but he’d never before felt so right, like this was exactly what he was meant to do, exactly why he was here.

The plume of destruction spread over the land before thinning away. Soon there was no sign the Coalition of Multinationals had ever blocked the sky. When night came, all that was visible was the endless universe of stars.