“What what was like?” Tom blurted.
“Being a father. Having some investment in the future.” His voice took on a note like he was mocking himself. “Having a soul, deluding myself with hope. But at the end of the day, I know what I am, and that’s why I can’t help now. She needs something I’m not capable of giving to her, Tom. I can’t offer forgiveness. I simply don’t have any. Not even for myself.”
AFTER THAT FINAL door slammed shut, a sense of bleakness sank over Tom. He grew oddly detached from the whole situation. Sometimes, mostly when he was sitting there fending off prying questions from Olivia Ossare during the counseling sessions they’d all been forced to attend since Yuri’s accident, Tom wondered if there was something wrong in how easily things had sort of dissolved away for him without destroying him. He wasn’t withdrawing like Wyatt, and he wasn’t moving on and cutting off any associations with what happened like Vik. Tom just sort of kept going forward.
After the loss of all his friends, and his future, it seemed almost like things had finally become normal. Tom knew what it was to feel rootless. He knew what it was to have nothing ahead of him. He knew what it was to have no attachments. This thing he’d dreaded had finally come to pass, but it wasn’t some sharp shock to the system so much as a sort of familiar pall descending over everything. That other person—the Tom Raines who was the Doctor of Doom with Vik, who helped Wyatt understand other people, who marveled at any new superhuman feat of Yuri’s, seemed almost like some stranger he’d encountered in passing, already gone.
Tom took up playing poker with Walton Covner and some of the older trainees. He still was an efficient killer in simulations. He’d gotten used to the fake fingers, but he didn’t play VR games. He picked up the gloves sometimes, out of habit, but he never put them on. They made his chest feel hollow.
He wasn’t unhappy. As soon as it grew completely clear to him there was no way he was going to be able to change Blackburn’s mind, no way he was gong to be able to get into Obsidian Corp.’s systems—as soon as he realized there was no hope—he was finally able to accept a cold, hard truth about life: the world rewarded sociopaths like Vengerov and destroyed good people like Yuri.
Tom finally understood why his father saw humanity as worthless. It was hard to see much fundamental value in anything when the bad guys always won.
Maybe this was simply what it was like to grow up.
TOM WAS FINISHING up the silent lunch with Wyatt when Heather approached their table. He felt her hand skim along his shoulder. “Hey, Tom! We’re battling today in Applied Scrimmages.” There was a note of excitement in her voice.
He glanced back at her. “Huh. Great.”
“I’m excited—aren’t you?”
“Sure.”
It was strange how something in the last few months had ignited Heather’s interest in him. She was constantly catching his eye and smiling at him in this inviting way that would’ve floored him once. Or she’d randomly reach out and straighten his collar or tousle his hair, or stuff like that. He wasn’t sure what to think of it, so he didn’t bother most of the time.
“You’ll come fight me one-on-one later, won’t you?” Heather said with a wink.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “Why not.”
“Wonderful.” She tickled his neck with her fingertips, to his great confusion, and swayed away from the table. She hadn’t said a word to Wyatt, not even one of those fake sympathetic ones she did early on. Her IP address had been changed in preparation for proxying Elliot at Capitol Summit this year. A victory there or even a close loss would assure her an official end to her disgrace and a true shot at front man of CamCo next year. That seemed to be all Heather wanted—a chance at riding high above all the others. Tom didn’t particularly care. At least she left Wyatt alone now.
“Well, I’ve gotta go to Scrimmages,” Tom told Wyatt. He thrust himself to his feet. “Later.”
He didn’t wait to see whether she’d acknowledge it. He knew she wouldn’t.
DURING THE SPANISH Armada simulation that afternoon, Tom ditched the historical English strategy of hanging back and counting on superior guns and led a boarding party from one burning Spanish ship to another. He was wiping the blood from his sword when boots creaked down the stairs to the cabin, and Heather Akron emerged, decked out in the duke of Medina Sedonia’s armor, her dark hair spilling about her shoulders.
“Just in time,” she told him. “I was worried we’d sink before you got here.”
“I’m here.” Tom raised his sword. “You wanna do this or what?”
Heather shook her head. “I lied earlier. I didn’t want to see you for a fight. There’s something I want to show you. I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Take a look through that porthole.”
Tom shrugged, and crossed over to gaze through the rounded window. She must’ve tweaked the sim, because he didn’t see the ocean or battleships. Instead, he saw an image, a familiar one.
An angle from above, Blackburn swathed in the projected light of the census device. “I want that memory, Raines!” And Tom trapped in the chair, refusing him . . .
He reared up, his mind racing.
“That’s surveillance footage. It should look familiar to you.”
“So what?” Tom said, forcing a calmness he didn’t feel. “Everyone knows Blackburn used the census device on me.”
Heather drew closer, and he felt her breath tickle the back of his neck. “Do you remember when Enslow and I had our little tiff last December? I slipped her a tracking cookie. For a while, I watched what she was doing in the system.”
He smiled sourly. “All that effort to dig up dirt on her?”
“Yes, and it paid off. I found this footage. It wasn’t complete. There were whole hours missing, and they weren’t in the system anywhere, but those big gaps made me curious about what happened in those missing minutes.”
Tom leaned back against the wall, waiting for whatever she wanted to say.
“That’s when I realized something, Tom,” she said. “There were two computers that still had that footage: Lieutenant Blackburn’s processor and yours. That’s the reason I invited you to that jousting sim.”
Tom made sense of it. It was Heather. That weird message during the New Year’s simulation: Error: Connection lost. Download paused. 98% complete. That had been her. She’d plundered his processor.
It hadn’t been Blackburn.
So . . . she knew. Tom wondered what would happen from here. “You got me. I guess you know everything?”
“Oh, I know all about what you can do,” she told him. “I also know Lieutenant Blackburn’s kept it quiet—he hasn’t told the military, or even Obsidian Corp., which is funny, because I bet they’d love to research you.”
Tom knew she was mentioning this for a reason, to set him on the defensive. He supposed he should be alarmed, but he was just irritated. “You obviously want something from me, so spit it out.”
Heather shrugged. “A mutually beneficial agreement. I won’t tell a soul what I know about you, if you help me with something.”
He laughed softly. “You’re blackmailing me, then.”