“Vik says you do,” Tom countered.

Since Tom had stomped Yuri at VR games so many times, Yuri insisted on a game he was better at. That’s why tonight, he and Tom were hunched over a chessboard, with Wyatt observing them.

Vik wasn’t sitting with them; he was sprawled on the floor of the plebe common room. As soon as they’d driven out the plebes, Vik made a big show of dying of what he called a boredom seizure, with convulsions and gargling sounds and everything, because he thought playing chess was the most boring thing in the world, second only to watching people play chess.

By silent but unanimous compact, Tom, Wyatt, and Yuri had said nothing and pretended they didn’t notice the dramatics going on behind them. Vik committed to the theatrics, though. He’d thrashed hard enough to upend a table, and now he was lying mock dead on the floor.

“I mean it. I really don’t find Vik enticing,” Wyatt said, louder, and the three of them waited for Vik to break character and argue with her.

When he didn’t, she raised her eyebrows, reluctantly impressed.

“He’s determined,” Tom said.

Yuri cleared his throat, and Tom remembered to place his next piece on the board. He ignored the sad eep sound Wyatt couldn’t help making.

“Check,” Yuri said, making his next move.

Tom examined the board, then plucked up his bishop.

“No, Tom!” Wyatt cried. “Don’t.”

“Wyatt,” Tom exclaimed, “you wanna play against Yuri yourself, that’s fine, but stop telling me where to move things. He and I are doing this mano a mano, not a womano.”

“And no computero,” Yuri added.

“Computero?” Wyatt echoed.

“No computero, because Thomas and I have agreed that chess must be played between two human brains,” Yuri explained to her gently. “We do not let the neural processors do the work, or it will become two computers playing each other, which will not be rewarding.” He took Tom’s bishop.

Tom’s pawn was stuck, so he moved his knight. Wyatt made a sad eep sound again.

“Wyatt!”

“I can’t help it, Tom,” Wyatt said. “That was a bad move.”

Tom focused on the board. No computero. That meant no downloading anything from the Spire’s databases about chess strategies and no allowing the neural processor to calculate the merits of every move and the ramifications from there. Since Wyatt’s brain was already as close as a human brain would get to a superprocessor, she kept seeing his mistakes as he made them and making that annoying sad noise.

Sure enough, Yuri took Tom’s knight with his queen.

Wyatt grew very sad and shook her head tragically. “Tom, you lost the game. You don’t realize it yet.”

Whether she intended it or not, Wyatt was doing a fantastic job of psyching him out. Three moves later, her solemn pronouncement came true.