And yet she cringed as he sent her a copy. When a terrible computer virus failed to unleash on her, she gave him a pat on the head like she was very impressed by him. Despite her lack of confidence in him, Tom felt a warm glow in his chest, and long after she left, he felt like life wasn’t so catastrophic after all.

DEPOSITING A MESSAGE in Medusa’s vision center was a huge risk. Tom knew it wouldn’t please her, and she might retaliate. He did it anyway.

And indeed, when she surprised him by fizzling into the middle of a simulation during Applied Scrimmages, Tom braced himself for terrible revenge.

“Are you insane or just stupid?” she demanded. “We had an agreement.” She stood there with her hands on her hips, right in the middle of the cloud of fluorine gas in the World War I simulation.

“Are you really calling me insane?” Tom’s voice was muffled by his gas mask. “You don’t even have a gas mask. Anyone can see you here.”

She shook her head and picked her way over a tangle of barbed wire, then plopped next to where he was crouched. “No. I didn’t enter your general simulation feed. I’m only in your visual feed, and I’m keeping an eye out in case anyone taps into it to see how you’re performing in the sim. We’re safe. You’ll be the only one who sees me. So I asked again: insane or stupid?”

“Neither. Hear me out. I actually had a legitimate reason to contact you this time. But . . . Wait one sec. Let me kill these guys.”

At the very beginning of the simulation, he’d made his way as close as he could to the enemy lines, and buried himself in the ground. His plan was to shoot the enemy group members one at a time as they moved. Now he readied himself to take down the first two trainees who ventured from their trench.

“I don’t understand why they’re training you to fight with a World War One simulation,” Medusa remarked, surveying their surroundings. “It’s not relevant to space combat.”

When a sufficiently loud explosion rumbled nearby, Tom shot the first of the two trainees. “That’s not why our military has us fight these.” He shot the second trainee as another explosion rumbled. “Only a fraction of us go on to be Intrasolar Combatants, right? They use these to figure out how our minds work. They assess our strengths, see how we handle pressure, how creative we are, how quickly we make decisions, how well we work with a team . . . that sort of thing.”

“How well you work with a team?” she said ironically.

Tom knew she was referring to the way he was out here alone. “Yeah, I’ve got some weak points.”