Tom was so caught up in replaying that one that he barely registered the knock on his door. He jumped when the door slid open.
A girl’s voice rang out: “Are you deaf or something? You didn’t hear me knock?”
Tom cracked open his eyes, and saw Wyatt standing tall and gangly in the doorway with her customary frown.
“Nice of you to just come in anyway. Ever occur to you that maybe I was ignoring it?”
Her eyebrows sank down. “You could’ve taken two seconds to tell me to go away, then.”
He felt like he’d just kicked a puppy. “I was caught up in something, or I’d have let you in.” He mentally ordered the files to stop playback, and the images of Medusa’s vessel vanished from his vision center. “Why are you around the Spire on a Saturday? You didn’t go out with Vik and the others?”
“Yuri didn’t ask me this time. He’s the only one who ever wants me to go anywhere with him.”
Tom thought about that. “Do you remember telling me to go away and never talk to you again the first time we met? Do you say stuff like that a lot? Because people generally assume you mean it.”
Wyatt considered that. “Oh.”
“Just a thought.”
“Well, I came to ask if everything was okay yesterday. Did Elliot end up yelling at you for the Saxon thing?”
“Yelling’s not his style. He’s more about the power of disapproving looks.” He gave a heavy sigh and shook his head, mock regretfully, to imitate Elliot for her.
Wyatt’s lips pulled up in a quick smile. She was still hanging back in the doorway, shifting her weight awkwardly like she didn’t know the rules of conduct for entering someone’s room.
“You can come in,” Tom told her.
She took a few tentative steps inside. After several moments of her just standing there near his doorway, staring at him and him just staring back, he searched for a distraction. “Hey, you play any games?”
Then he regretted saying it. She might stick around longer now, and then more awkward staring would ensue.
But Wyatt just frowned, like the words did not compute. “Games?”
“VR games,” Tom said, exasperated. “You know. Role-playing games. Strategy games. First-person shooters.”
“I don’t like fighting.”
“Strategy, then.” Actually, that worked for him, too. He didn’t have to move much to play most strategy games, and he could pick a game they only needed keyboards for. He flipped through the Spire’s database and found Privateers.
Privateers largely involved trading and negotiating. It wasn’t his favorite game, but it was more for brainy people, and he figured she’d be into it.
Wyatt was. She wasn’t so great at negotiating, but she plotted courses like a pro.
“You’re good at this,” Tom told her, when she reached the Polynesian Islands before he did.
“It’s just math.”
“Right. Math’s your thing, huh? The reason you got recruited.”
She was sitting with her back against the leg of Vik’s bed, her arms curled over her bent knees, tapping halfheartedly at her forearm keyboard. “I was good at it. My parents were always entering me into competitions, and if I’d wanted to, I could’ve gone to college early. Of course, since everyone here has a neural processor, it’s not like being good at math means anything now.” Her eyes flickered over to him. “I guess it’s the same for you, with the spelling bee thing. Everyone can spell as well as you now that they have neural processors.”
A laugh rose in Tom’s throat. He couldn’t help it. “Yeah, it drives me nuts knowing everyone else can spell correctly now. It really cheapens my talent.”
“Well”—Wyatt smoothed her hair back behind her ear—“at least I found something else. I don’t see why so many people don’t understand programming. I think they just don’t know how to work anymore. They’re too used to just downloading something and understanding it, so it seems like too much effort actually connecting the dots and writing out a program.”
“Blackburn seems to think that,” Tom said, remembering the stuff he’d said to Heather in class. “Too bad he’s hunting you. You’d probably have some great meeting-of-minds thing going on.”
Wyatt pressed her lips together.
“Or not?”
“I hacked the profiles my first week here to help a couple people who were hoping to get promoted,” Wyatt said flatly. “It was a dumb thing to do, and ever since, I’ve had to mess up my own code before I turn it in so Blackburn doesn’t realize I’m the one who did it. And the people I did that for? None of them have even talked to me since.”
“You didn’t do it to make friends or something, did you?”
She didn’t answer that.
“Look, Wyatt, they sound like jerks. Why would it make so much of a difference when it comes to promotions, anyway? The profile achievements are all in the past.”
“Coalition companies have more interest in sponsoring people with great backgrounds. One of the people whose profile I changed got into Camelot Company a month later. She probably would’ve gotten sponsored anyway, but her new profile helped her get the company she wanted.”
“Who was that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Wyatt insisted, and focused her attention back on the game. “It’s all over and done now, anyway.”
ON SUNDAY, TOM was six inches taller than when he first arrived at the Spire, and something strange was happening. His neural processor ran scans constantly, one after the other. A message began blinking in his vision center: CA 7.3 (8.9–10.3).
“Vik.” Tom said to his roommate, who was sprawled on the other bed, playing a game with wired gloves he’d smuggled out of the ground floor VR parlor. “What’s CA seven point three?”
“CA … California?”
“I don’t think so.” After a moment, Tom admitted, “My bones are kind of killing me. It’s kind of hard to move.” And his lips and fingers were tingling like he had bugs crawling below his skin.
Vik studied him. “I don’t think that’s normal.”
“Really?”
“Go ask about it at the infirmary.”
Tom groaned inwardly. That was all the way on the ground floor.
But now that he thought about it, he was starting to wonder if something was very wrong with him, after all. He’d actually brought it up with Wyatt the day before, and she’d listed about twenty different fatal diseases he might have. That really didn’t reassure him. Vik’s words finally motivated him to grit his teeth and stagger down the hallway.
He made it as far as the plebe common room.
There, he found a group of Genghises playing pool. A familiar voice bellowed out, “Hey look, it’s Fido!”
Tom sighed inwardly. It was Karl Marsters. The massive, jowl-faced Genghis straightened up from the shot he’d just made, the cords standing out on his thick neck, a grin on his face.
“What do you want?” Tom asked him.
Karl’s stepped forward to block his path when he made for the elevator. “He’s not very polite, is he? Not a good doggie.”