“Disqualify her!” I said, yanking the probes from my arms. The simulation technician rushed forward, all fluttery hands and big worried eyes as he tried untangling me from the costly machinery before my temper could do any real damage. Usually I’d care about something like that, but at the moment I felt like nothing mattered except how unfair this all was.

A wire managed to get tangled around my arm and I flapped at it in frustration, only looking up when I noticed that the small group of test evaluators had come out from behind their panel of computer screens, where they’d watched every nightmarish detail of what had to be the worst simulation test in the history of simulation tests. There were only supposed to be six evaluators at a leveling simulation like this one, but of course Regan’s mom had decided to sit in as well, so there were seven. I wasn’t quite sure if she was participating in the final panel or not. All the members were wearing similar expressions of disapproval on their faces, although more than one looked like they were trying very hard not to laugh. My blood felt like it was boiling inside my veins. Nothing about this was funny. Nothing. Regan had not only hijacked my entire test, but she’d broken every single rule with the flippancy of someone who’d been getting away with it her entire life. Which, as the commander in chief’s daughter, she had. I gritted my teeth to keep from saying something else stupid and stopped moving so the poor technician could attempt to untangle the mess I’d made.

“Me?” Regan said, sitting up and pulling off her own probes in a way that made the technician still busy with me flinch. Poor guy was having a day. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me. You threw a chamber pot on me!” she yelled. “A chamber pot! After I saved your life!”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said. “You didn’t save my life. It was a simulation! I would have figured out how to stop the bleeding.”

“Well, you were doing a bang-up job of it,” she said. “Standing there staring at your bleeding leg like a moron. Brilliant strategy.”

“It was two chamber pots!” I shot back.