Yuri began to wake up for minutes at a time, and then for a full hour. Tom, Vik, and Wyatt were finally all there one day when he stirred. The large Russian boy blinked at them, dazed. Yuri’s memories had all been downloaded into the new processor, but they hadn’t spoken to him yet.

“Thomas? Vikram?” He hadn’t yet spotted Wyatt, lurking by the doorway.

Tom and Vik ambled over. “Hey, man. Welcome to the waking world.”

Yuri settled back in his bed. “I am pleased to return.” He raised his arm, then looked at it, wide-eyed. “My great muscle mass!”

“Sorry, man,” Tom said, feeling bad for him.

“Yeah, you’ve got work to do. That’s what you get for lying in bed for months on end,” Vik chided him. “By the way, Yuri, now seems an optimal time for you and I to have a weight lifting contest, winner gets a hundred.”

Tom socked Vik’s arm for Yuri. Yuri chuckled weakly.

And then his lingering distress seemed to melt away when Wyatt slunk forward and settled by his side. He craned his head back so he could gaze up at her adoringly, and for the first time Tom could remember, she looked back at him the same way.

As she leaned down to kiss him, Tom’s thoughts stretched to someone else.

He needed to see Medusa.

THE PENTAGONAL SPIRE was a tense place these days, so most people paid little attention to Yuri Sysevich’s miraculous recovery or his restoration to active duty status, pending his actual, physical recovery. Instead, everyone talked about Elliot’s dramatic, public defection. Or they whispered about the way Heather Akron had gone crazy at Capitol Summit, and now she was missing. Her GPS signal had even disappeared.

Tom knew the truth, and it made his stomach churn, knowing he was essentially covering up a murder . . . but he wasn’t sure what else to do. Too many of his secrets were tangled up with Blackburn’s.

Some things weren’t as complicated.

Tom owed Medusa his life, Yuri’s life, and Vik and Wyatt’s freedom. It seemed like forever before she popped into the system again. When he met her, there were no more avatars, no illusory setting, just a blank white room, a template unwritten. He swept her up into his arms and swung her around. “I owe you so incredibly much, and I’m going to pay you back somehow.”

She laughed. “I know. You seriously owe me. You’re lucky I saw your fond farewell note.”

“How did you find that so soon?” Tom asked. “I wrote it right before I left.”

“I told you, I’ve been monitoring your online activity to make sure you wouldn’t compromise our identities. I get an alert if your personal database references ‘Medusa.’ I also added ‘Murgatroid’ just in case.”

He laughed. “I should’ve addressed it to ‘the Troid.’”

“Then you’d be dead.”