Insignia

“Not everyone can be a math genius. Don’t mock Tom’s grand achievements,” Vik said.

“Yeah, it’s not nice,” Tom said.

“Fine, I’ll put in the lawn bowling, okay?” Wyatt typed briskly on her keyboard.

Tom found himself staring at her left hand as her fingers danced over the keys. She had broad palms and long fingers. They looked too large for the rest of her.

“There,” Wyatt announced.

“It’s done?” Tom said, surprised.

“Yes, it’s done.” She stared at him flatly like he’d just missed something very obvious. “And tell Yuri this is the last time I’m doing this. Lieutenant Blackburn is still looking for the person who hacked the personnel database last promotion round. He’ll murder me.”

“Enslow, he won’t murder you,” Vik said. “He’ll just report you to General Marsh.”

Wyatt’s eyes widened.

“Thanks,” Tom said hastily.

“Don’t thank me,” Wyatt said earnestly, hugging her arm to her chest. “Just go away and don’t talk to me again. Both of you.”

The strange thing was, she didn’t say it viciously. It was more like she had no idea how rude it was. Tom and Vik went away and didn’t talk to her again.

“She’s friendly,” he said to Vik as they threaded through the crowd.

“That’s just Enslow. Man name, man-sized hands, but no real sense of humor. Also, she’s got this complete inability to relate to other people on a normal human level. There’s a reason Yuri’s the only one in the Spire who hangs out with her. I guess he feels sorry for her. But that hacking she just did? It takes her thirty seconds to do something anyone else would need hours to do. She’s that good.”

They reached the Alexander male plebe table, where Beamer was holding himself up on a chair, and Yuri loomed over his own spot. He greeted Tom with a friendly wave, his teeth so perfectly straight and white, his brown hair in such neat waves over his handsome, symmetrical features, that he really did resemble some android for a moment.

“Yuri, we took advantage of Wyatt Enslow and said you sent us,” Vik informed Yuri. “I think she’s annoyed at you now. You should go apologize.”

Yuri closed his eyes and sighed. “You are not very nice to Wanda, Viktor.”

“I’m fine with Man Hands,” Vik protested. “She just wouldn’t do it if I asked her. And do you really want poor Tom here to feel all embarrassed and unaccomplished?” He gestured to Tom.

“I wasn’t embarrassed,” Tom protested. He was just unaccomplished.

But Yuri was busy viewing Tom’s profile again. “Ah, a spelling bee champion. This is impressive.”

“Yeah, I spell things while lawn bowling,” Tom said. “You know. Words like ‘lawn.’ And ‘bowling.’”

He started to dip into a seat, but Vik waved him back up. “Don’t sit yet. We have to stand at attention until Major Cromwell puts us at ease. It’s a pain, but it’s only at breakfast and at formal dinners.”

There was a ping in Tom’s brain: Morning meal formation has now commenced.

Silence descended upon the room, and every trainee in the room straightened and snapped to attention. A group of trainees marched inside the room, unfolded a US flag, and hoisted it up a pole for the day. Then they formed two lines by the door.

Tom glanced around, trying to see if he was standing the right way. The computer in his brain was instructing him to relax his shoulders, puff out his chest, pull in his abdomen, keep his hands to his sides, and ensure his body was in perfect alignment.

A whippet-thin, tired-looking woman in an overlarge set of fatigues headed through the door. The woman halted there, looking around at them, her face set with heavy lines and her faded auburn hair streaked with gray, a hard, downward twist to her lips. Tom’s neural processor spun out her information:

NAME: Isabel Cromwell

RANK: Major

GRADE: USMC 0-4, active duty

SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-8

“At ease,” she said gruffly.

The bodies on all sides of Tom relaxed, and after Major Cromwell assumed her lone seat at the officer’s table in the corner, the trainees sank down in a massive black wave to their tables.

Tom took his seat. Around him, people lifted the metal lids from the food trays to reveal a standard breakfast of eggs, toast, bacon, and orange juice. Tom followed suit, but he only found two Snickers bars resting on his plate.

Vik, munching on his toast, noticed his puzzled expression. “Oh, yeah. You’ve gotta eat those.”

“Snickers? For breakfast?”

“Actually, Tom, that’s a meal bar. You’ve gotta eat about ten of those a day for a while. When you first get the neural processor implanted, your hormones go crazy. You get a spike in hGH.”

Tom’s neural processor identified that at once. “Human growth hormone?”

“Yeah. Major growth spurt comes next. It’ll go away on its own once you’ve finished your natural growth cycle. They give you the nutrient bars to help with the process.”

“But this is a candy bar. How does this help?”

“That’s what you see.” Vik took a hearty gulp of his orange juice. “Your neural processor’s configured to feed you sensory info for foods that you like. It looks like a candy bar, but it’s really a high-energy-density nutrient bar. When you look at the nutrient bars and see them the way they appear in real life, that’s when you know your hGH is done spiking.”

“What do these really look like, then?”

“They look like high-energy-density nutrient bars. You don’t want any more details than that. Trust me.”

Tom unwrapped the first Snickers and devoured it. It tasted like a normal candy bar. How odd to think his brain was fooling him. His eyes fell on the real food the others were eating. The sausages looked so delicious he could almost taste them. When he reached for the second Snickers, he saw with a start that the nutrient bar now resembled a greasy sausage link. Tom bit, and sausage exploded on his tongue. Intrigued, he turned the picture in his brain to a banana, even though he didn’t like bananas, and when he looked down, the nutrient bar was a banana.

“This is so cool,” Tom murmured.

He saved a bite of his banana/meal bar/Snickers thing to marvel at on the way to Calisthenics. He turned it into a dumpling, into spaghetti, into that French snail dish, escargot. He couldn’t believe his brain could be manipulated this easily. He was looking at one thing and seeing something else just because the computer in his head told him it looked like something it wasn’t.

Vik filled him in on the way. “Calisthenics is pretty straightforward. You work out. You get in shape. The first few times are pretty intense, but you’ll get used to it.”

“Oh. Great,” Tom said, pretending he meant it. He stuffed the last of the nutrient bar in his mouth and instantly regretted not turning it back from escargot into something else. He just barely choked it down.

“Calisthenics can be a bit intense right after three weeks in bed,” Vik warned, “but adrenaline will get you through it. Believe me.”

Tom followed him into a vast room, where the other plebes from various divisions waited. When he glanced at the sign overhead proclaiming it the Stonewall Calisthenics Arena, a blueprint unfolded in his vision, telling him the vast arena encircled the interiors of the second, third, and fourth floors. His eyes lit upon the various obstacles they’d have to overcome—ditches to leap across; sets of ladders and rocky walls to climb over; sand pits; water pits; long stretches of plain old running track with fake grass that twisted around and vanished from his sight with the curve in the Spire; stairs to looping, open platforms that featured more obstacles.