Chapter Twenty-Four

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

WHEN TOM RETURNED to the Pentagonal Spire, he found Wyatt in the infirmary, sitting in the chair next to Yuri’s bed with her legs drawn up to her chest. Ever since she’d resumed talking—to Tom, at least—she’d finally started coming here again.

His gaze shifted to Yuri. The Russian boy seemed smaller now and far more fragile. Tom had an idea about what he could do for Yuri, an idea about how to get to that transmitter in Antarctica, but he couldn’t pull it off without help.

“Wyatt, I need a favor,” Tom said in a low voice. “There’s something I can’t do by myself, but you probably could.”

“There are a lot of things like that.”

“There was this one time when Heather Akron downloaded a memory segment from me. . . .”

“What segment?” Wyatt said.

He shook his head. “It’s not important. The thing is, it gave me an idea. There’s a specific time frame when I was stuck outside at Obsidian Corp. in January. Could you somehow do the same thing she did and get everyone’s memories of that time for me? Maybe during Applied Scrimmages?”

“Why?”

Tom hesitated. He wanted to create a mental map of sorts. If he accessed what everyone had seen at Obsidian Corp. that day, with all their photographic, perfectly detailed memories, he’d be able to put them all together into one image and create a comprehensive, three-dimensional layout of the place in his brain. Once he had that he could figure out how to break into Obsidian Corp. in person.

He couldn’t explain that to her without telling her what he planned to do, so he thought quickly of a lie. “Olivia Ossare wants me to do it. She thinks I’ll be able to make peace with what happened if I, uh, see it from another angle.”

She frowned. “Are you sure you want to do this? This won’t be like memories from a census device, Tom. They won’t be audiovisual. It’s a lot more intrusive. You’ll remember the actual experiences like they happened to you. It will be intense.”

“Look, no one else lost fingers that day, so I figure most everyone else had a better time than I did. I can handle it.”

AN HOUR LATER, they were in the last of the Middle training rooms on the thirteenth floor, and Wyatt was sprawled on the floor, accessing a processor right beneath a floor panel.

“The memories will feed directly to your processor in the middle of Applied Scrimmages,” Wyatt informed him. “Try to stay in the sim as long as possible without getting killed. They’ll only download into your processor as long as you’re hooked in.”