Blackburn seemed to realize what Tom was doing. “Don’t take those off here . . .” he began, but Tom had shucked off the bandage.

Now he saw what it had been hiding. Shock triggered in his gut as he saw the blackened fingers he couldn’t feel. He latched on to the other bandage with his teeth and tore it from that hand, and saw that those were blackened, too. His gut twisted. No. No, no, no . . . Wait. This couldn’t be right. He tried to curl them, tried to flex them. He shook his hands out, he pressed the fingers together. No sensation. Nothing.

A massive tourniquet seemed to be compressing him, the blood rushing in his ears. No. He needed these. He needed them for everything. Gaming. He couldn’t game without fingers. What if he didn’t become a Combatant? What if he needed to get by somehow?

Blackburn snared his wrists and set about replacing the bandages. “You’re going to get cybernetic fingers. They’ll work with the neural processor, and they’ll be almost as good as the real thing. Think of the exosuits. It’s like having one full-time.”

But exosuits hadn’t replaced something that was supposed to be there. They’d been something fun, something awesome to make him stronger, faster. They’d been something he could take off and decide not to use. Tom stared at his blackened fingers, denial blanking out his brain. This couldn’t be real.

Joseph Vengerov must have been satisfied that Tom understood the consequences of refusing him, because he at last turned around and strode away, disappearing off into the empty hallways of his mechanized fortress, as pitiless as any of his machines.

Chapter Nineteen

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“AT LEAST YOUR nose didn’t fall off,” Wyatt told him a couple days later.

Tom was sitting on the edge of his bed in the Pentagonal Spire’s infirmary, watching Vik inspect the new, cybernetic fingers. It was strange. They didn’t have any true touch receptors, not like real fingers, but whenever they came in contact with something—whether screwed into the stumps on his hand or not—Tom felt this prickling sensation. He hadn’t yet learned to sort out different electronic signals, even though Dr. Gonzales had assured him his brain would learn to identify them, associate them with heat, cold, soft, sharp, and so on.

Vik turned the finger over and Tom felt the nagging prickle in his hand. He felt like his head was going to burst.

“I looked up pictures of people with frostbite online,” Wyatt went on, from where she was sitting on the edge of his mattress, her dark hair drawn up in a high ponytail today, “and a lot of people’s noses fell off. So it’s really great that yours didn’t.”

Vik laughed. “Enslow, come on.”

“What?” she said. “It’s a good thing. I’m cheering Tom up.”