DURING THE SPANISH Armada simulation that afternoon, Tom ditched the historical English strategy of hanging back and counting on superior guns and led a boarding party from one burning Spanish ship to another. He was wiping the blood from his sword when boots creaked down the stairs to the cabin, and Heather Akron emerged, decked out in the duke of Medina Sedonia’s armor, her dark hair spilling about her shoulders.

“Just in time,” she told him. “I was worried we’d sink before you got here.”

“I’m here.” Tom raised his sword. “You wanna do this or what?”

Heather shook her head. “I lied earlier. I didn’t want to see you for a fight. There’s something I want to show you. I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Take a look through that porthole.”

Tom shrugged, and crossed over to gaze through the rounded window. She must’ve tweaked the sim, because he didn’t see the ocean or battleships. Instead, he saw an image, a familiar one.

An angle from above, Blackburn swathed in the projected light of the census device. “I want that memory, Raines!” And Tom trapped in the chair, refusing him . . .

He reared up, his mind racing.

“That’s surveillance footage. It should look familiar to you.”

“So what?” Tom said, forcing a calmness he didn’t feel. “Everyone knows Blackburn used the census device on me.”

Heather drew closer, and he felt her breath tickle the back of his neck. “Do you remember when Enslow and I had our little tiff last December? I slipped her a tracking cookie. For a while, I watched what she was doing in the system.”

He smiled sourly. “All that effort to dig up dirt on her?”

“Yes, and it paid off. I found this footage. It wasn’t complete. There were whole hours missing, and they weren’t in the system anywhere, but those big gaps made me curious about what happened in those missing minutes.”

Tom leaned back against the wall, waiting for whatever she wanted to say.

“That’s when I realized something, Tom,” she said. “There were two computers that still had that footage: Lieutenant Blackburn’s processor and yours. That’s the reason I invited you to that jousting sim.”

Tom made sense of it. It was Heather. That weird message during the New Year’s simulation: Error: Connection lost. Download paused. 98% complete. That had been her. She’d plundered his processor.

It hadn’t been Blackburn.

So . . . she knew. Tom wondered what would happen from here. “You got me. I guess you know everything?”

“Oh, I know all about what you can do,” she told him. “I also know Lieutenant Blackburn’s kept it quiet—he hasn’t told the military, or even Obsidian Corp., which is funny, because I bet they’d love to research you.”