And then he realized he was doing it again: about to kill the guy—here, in real life, where he’d go to prison for it—and why couldn’t he think of anything nonlethal? His suddenly slack grip gave Karl the chance to snatch off the wire and seize him. Tom knew it was about to be over, so desperately he slammed his head forward into Karl’s as hard as he could and—

Ow. Owwwwww. Tom stumbled back, feeling like a mallet had whacked him between the eyes, his vision reeling. Across from him, Karl was stumbling, too, clutching his large, meaty fists over his nose, blood gushing between his fingers.

“You idiot! Why did you do that?” Karl cried.

“It works in video games,” Tom shot back. “Everything else I thought of was gonna kill you.”

Karl waved his arm. “That’s normal. You gotta relearn how to fight in real life after you get all the downloads about killing people. Beat up some kids, and it comes right back.”

Tom started laughing, half hysterical. “Yeah, great idea, except I don’t think it’ll work for me because I’m not a total psychopath who runs around beating up people! Well, other than you!”

For a moment, Tom and Karl glared at each other, cradling head and nose, respectively, and the drive to battle someone receded from Tom. It must’ve disappeared for Karl, too, because he cursed, shoved his sleeve against his nose, and left, muttering about the infirmary. Tom settled back down on his cot to clutch his aching head, and he remembered something. He took a moment to rewind his memory until he saw that message again, the message he’d only seen because Karl had ripped out his neural wire and woken him up early.

Error: Connection lost. Download paused. 98% complete.

What had been downloaded from his processor? He scanned through his logs, but whoever had done it had concealed whatever it was they were plundering from him. If he’d stayed in the simulation a bit longer, he wouldn’t have even realized it had happened.

AT MIDNIGHT, A number of the officers migrated to the fourteenth floor along with the trainees, to gaze through the large, windowed walls at the fireworks that began to splutter through the night to usher in the New Year. Lieutenant Blackburn was among them. Tom rubbed his hand over his sore head, certain he knew who’d been taking stuff from his processor.

Of course it was Blackburn. There was no one else who’d be intensely interested in his neural processor.

Had he done this more than once—plundered Tom’s brain during Applied Scrimmages before without his realizing it? He glared at Blackburn’s large back, but the lieutenant gazed out the window, talking to no one, not even the other soldiers.