“That’s going to travel across the floor, come on!” Tom shouted, and they swerved into the nearest doorway, slamming the door behind them. They found themselves heaving for breath, trapped inside an icy cold warehouse.

Tom needed more air. He tore down the hood of the optical camouflaging, and so did Wyatt and Vik. For a moment it was like they were three detached heads floating around, and Tom frantically spun in circles, searching for a way out, for something they could grab or do in here to escape. . . .

Nothing. Nothing. Not even a neural access port. There were only two doors. One led to a hallway rapidly filling with Praetorians, and the other led outside.

Outside. Tom shuddered.

“I don’t have any ideas,” he confessed. “Do you guys?”

“This was a bad plan. This was a bad, bad plan,” Wyatt whispered. “How did Obsidian Corp. find out we were here? We were so careful! She tangled her fingers in her hair. I must’ve missed something.”

“It’s not your fault, it’s mine. He noticed I was in the system,” Tom murmured.

“But I hid your IP! You shouldn’t have been detectable!”

No, he shouldn’t have been. And then a terrible suspicion swept over him.

He was looking for me.

Vengerov had called him “the ghost in the machine.” Tom remembered that term. Blackburn had said it first. His mind filled with the image of Yuri that day on the stairwell, following them down. The dots connected in his brain, making sense of it all.

Vengerov had been listening that day. He’d heard Blackburn, and he learned someone else like Tom and Medusa existed. Then he learned that the ghost was a friend of Tom’s. It couldn’t have been difficult from there, extrapolating the likeliest suspect. Tom had a notoriously extraordinary friend. Medusa.

That’s why Vengerov approached Tom about giving Medusa a virus. And Tom stupidly went to Medusa and told her LM Lymer Fleet had only been surveilling her because she was winning too much—he’d been passing along Vengerov’s lie. That wasn’t the reason Vengerov was watching her. Tom was the reason she wasn’t on guard anymore. Vengerov was hunting that ghost and he believed it was Medusa. Tom may have doomed her. He’d doomed them all.

Vik paced in a frantic circle. “There’s going to be more of those Praetorians soon,” he said, eyes on the door to the hallway. “We have to get out of here. We can’t stay! They’ll bust through that door any minute!”

“There’s nowhere to go, Vik.” Wyatt hugged herself, visibly shaking. “We’re never getting through those machines. That’s the only path. The only other way is outside.”

Outside. Tom had done that already, and it hadn’t been winter then. It would be colder. Outside was death. He knew that in his bones.