“So I really don’t have a reason to be worried,” Medusa said.

“No. No reason apart from the obvious winning-too-much-so-must-be-stopped thing.”

“And you really wanted to warn me.” Her voice was wondering. “That’s all?”

“That’s all. That and the . . .” He fumbled a moment, feeling stupid. “And the horse thing.”

He shot the next trainee who ventured too near him, and looked up in time to spot the fleeting smile on her lips. It made him bold. “Tell me one thing. Just one. Is your name . . . Mulan?”

“Not even close. Good-bye, Mordred.”

“Visit me again,” Tom said on impulse.

She was silent. Then, “Maybe.”

She fizzled away, leaving Tom in the mud, bodies sprawled all around him, swirling clouds of poisonous gas in the air. She hadn’t said no.

Chapter Twenty

CHAPTER TWENTY

TOM AND MEDUSA didn’t fall into their old habit of meeting for fights in VR games, but she did take to inserting herself in his audiovisual feed during Applied Scrimmages. It was early morning in China whenever she came, and since the Chinese trainees only slept every other day. She was able to find time to visit him more often than he’d even hoped. So Tom went rogue from his group every simulation in hopes she’d show up. Since Yosef Saide cared only about kill ratios, and Tom liked to show off to Medusa by really piling up the bodies when she was there, the arrangement actually impressed his simulation group instructor, who told him to keep at it.

Medusa couldn’t participate in the sim or even kill people on the other side when she was entering Tom’s visual feed, but she took on something of an advisory capacity, which almost gave Tom the sense they were teaming up for rampages together. One extended simulation between the Mongols and the Russians, she caught up to Tom where he wandered alone in a Siberian forest, and found him hovering over a makeshift fire.

“You should put out that fire.” It was a chilly day dipping into evening in an extended sim. Tom was a rogue Mongol, prowling across Siberia. “I could climb a tree and look for their smoke, then you go kill them.”

“Maybe later,” Tom told her.

“You should at least put out this fire, Tom.”

“I don’t like being cold.”

“Do you like being dead? Because that’s what you’ll be when someone notices it, and hunts you down.”

Cold and dead were about the same thing in his mind now. But he held firm, and Medusa gave a wicked grin, then began to kick dirt over his fire. Tom couldn’t allow her to put it out, so he charged her unexpectedly and hoisted her over his shoulder.

“What is this supposed to accomplish?”

“I’m throwing you over my shoulder in a manly way,” Tom informed her. “I’m thinking of covering you in snow so you learn to appreciate my fire, too.”