Wyatt shrugged mysteriously. “He also said he knew I didn’t hack his profile and he tends to assume the worst about people, so he apologized for getting so upset about the Roanoke thing and discontinuing my programming instruction.”

“And, what, you forgave him?” Tom blurted. “After he yelled at you like that and ignored you for weeks, he just has to say sorry and you’re over it?”

Her eyebrows drew together in her long, solemn face. “He said he was really sorry.”

“You saw what a psycho he was, Wyatt. He turned on you for no reason before. You think that can’t happen again?”

“It was only because you said that Roanoke thing. That’s the only reason he acted that way. Obviously it was a sore point.”

“No. No, you don’t get it,” Tom said, agitated. “It’s not a sore point. It’s the only point. That guy you saw that day? That’s the real Blackburn. Trust me on this.”

“I know him way better than you do, Tom.”

“No,” Tom said, raking his fingers through his hair, frustrated. “You think you do. You see the way he pretends to be. He pretends to be reasonable; he pretends to be sane. He’s not.”

He stopped talking, since Wyatt and Vik were both looking at him strangely.

The thing was, they knew Blackburn had tried to “fry his brain in the census device,” in those exact words. Tom had never told them much more than that. He hadn’t told them Blackburn had set out to tear his mind apart when Tom had refused to show him his memory of Vengerov; they didn’t know Blackburn had threatened to wipe out the Spire’s systems, just to stop Marsh from freeing Tom; they didn’t know Blackburn had a vendetta against Joseph Vengerov, since Vengerov had intentionally implanted him with a neural processor that he knew would kill him or drive him insane. They didn’t know that during his psychotic episode, Blackburn had accidentally killed his own kids, and as a consequence, he’d thought nothing of destroying Tom in search of something he could use in his vendetta against Vengerov, the man he held responsible.

But Tom couldn’t even begin to tell his friends about this. Not any of it, because there were too many secrets, not all of them his, and they were all tied into the memories Blackburn had discovered in his brain. Blackburn miraculously turning around and forgiving Wyatt felt like a direct threat to Tom. Sure, he might’ve been the one who told Blackburn that Wyatt never hacked his profile, that she didn’t even know about Roanoke, but Tom hadn’t done that to reconcile them. . . . He’d done that to rub Blackburn’s mistake in his face.

He regretted it now.