THE FINAL NIGHT Tom spent with his dad, he couldn’t sleep. He ventured out onto the balcony into the neon embrace of Las Vegas. Lights bombarded him from every direction: the streets below, the buildings around, and even from skyboards overhead. Over Las Vegas, there were dozens of the mile-wide screens, all competing for attention from the tiny people so far below them.

Tom gazed upward, ignoring the ad from the DHS about hearing a whisper, giving them a whisper, and the ad from Nobridis about how its efforts to get rich off the war were actually beneficial to Americans. All he could think about were the possibilities ahead of him. He planned to be an Intrasolar Combatant who controlled the drones fighting the war in outer space, but now he was thinking he could also be a vigilante or maybe even a superhero.

Why not? He had the power to strike back at people like Hank Bloombury. He wasn’t traceable, and everything was digitized now.

Medusa and I could even team up. Tom leaned his elbows onto the rail, thinking of his greatest foe, his sort-of ex-girlfriend, and the deadliest warrior on the Russo-Chinese side . . . the single person he knew who could’ve pulled off the same revenge on Hank Bloombury that he himself had.

Oh, and Tom grinned at the thought of what he could do to his mom’s awful boyfriend, Dalton Prestwick, if he wanted to. Yeah, he’d find the guy in his Manhattan home and have some fun with that. Or maybe he’d do something to that Georgetown mansion of Dalton’s. There were so many possibilities, they made Tom’s head whirl in giddy circles.

He’d even get Karl Marsters.

No. No, wait. Maybe this was abusing his power. It probably was. So how about he only went after Karl once? After all, if he did the world-justice-vigilante stuff, he probably earned himself the right to follow up on a personal grudge just once.

At that moment, a loud roaring mounted in his ears, and with shocking swiftness, a black shape descended from the sky, blotting out the skyboards. Tom’s entire body grew rigid, and he stood there frozen in place, as one of the Centurion-grade drones used in outer space began to hover, right in front of his balcony.

It wasn’t a measly little police drone like the one he’d controlled. This wasn’t for surveilling individual suspects and subduing them; it wasn’t for breaking up crowds. This was built to blow things up in space. And it was close enough to touch.