Wyatt’s dark eyes flickered to his briefly, then she turned her full attention back to the liquid-filled, metallic cylinder containing a neural processor in need of reformatting. Since the spares were all from the old group of soldiers who’d died from them, anything left on the computers had to be erased—one directory at a time. Only then could they go into someone else’s head. Everywhere Wyatt went nowadays, she tended to carry one. She reformatted instead of eating and, Tom suspected, instead of sleeping or doing much else.

As he ate, Wyatt adjusted the magnifying glass she’d attached to the lid of the metallic storage cylinder. She was always so meticulous about using tweezers to pluck up one stringy thread of the spiderweb-shaped computer at a time.

It was like Wyatt believed repairing enough spare processors would pave the way for Yuri to get another one. Tom knew it wouldn’t happen, but when he’d pointed that out to her, she’d gotten up and walked away from him. He didn’t mention it again.

“Ms. Ossare told me to remind you to see her today,” Tom said, his mouth full.

Wyatt nodded a bit, acknowledging that she’d heard him.

Tom didn’t really get why Olivia was still bothering. If Wyatt hadn’t talked to her yet, she wasn’t going to anytime soon. The last time Wyatt talked to anyone was the morning after Yuri’s electrocution. Tom, Vik, and Wyatt were gathered around Yuri’s bed, still in shock from what had happened, together but already so far apart.

Wyatt had looked at them dry-eyed, and said, “This was all my fault.” And that was it. In the time since, she’d descended into a full-blown obsession with reformatting the old processors, even though it had been made explicitly clear to them that Yuri wasn’t getting another one, even to save his life.

There was no point, after all. Vengerov’s transmitter survived the destruction of Yuri’s neural processor. The military saw no reason to waste resources on someone who’d be of no use to them. If he received a new neural processor and recovered, Yuri would remain a walking security breach. Neural processors were too valuable to give away just to save a life.

Tom heard voices swelling across the mess hall, and saw Lyla punching Vik’s arm. Her face was flushed bright red, but Vik was shaking with laughter about something. He and Vik hadn’t talked for a while. Blackburn officially classified Yuri’s incident as a built-in hardware error, but the near miss with treason scared Vik. He obviously didn’t want to risk any more trouble by staying around Tom. It started with Vik not sitting with Tom in the mess hall or in Programming.