Soon, the water grew calm. Awe filled Tom as he marveled, not for the first time, that this was his life. He was sitting here on a rescue ship with his best friend, witnessing a devastating shipwreck like it was real. The raft was supposed to have two wooden oars, but it only had one. Tom and Vik steered their raft as best they could with it, and helped soaked, shivering trainees into it as they encountered them. Soon, they were sitting with Lyla Martin of Genghis Division, as well as two other Middles Tom had seen around: Walton Covner and Marrion Trout of Hannibal Division.

When Snowden Gainey appeared in the life raft with them, Tom realized the guy had actually been sitting out of the scenario until now, letting them undergo it by themselves. That was another huge change, because Elliot was a lead-by-example type.

“So,” Snowden said nervously, “is this it?”

“I saw some of our group drown,” Walton noted. He was a large kid with very dark skin, thick black hair, and an air of stoicism about him.

“Well.” Snowden rubbed his palms together. “Well, that’s unlucky for them. I should tell you, Yosef and I agreed together to run this scenario with the pain receptors on.”

Tom shrugged, but he heard Lyla sputter with outrage. “Why? Why would you do that?”

“Well, it’s a time-compressed scenario—” Snowden began.

Lyla seemed ready to punch him. Marrion groaned, too.

“What’s the catch here?” Vik asked them.

“Time-compressed scenarios,” Lyla explained. “Space combat takes place at machine-fast speeds, so the neural processor can be used to speed up your perception of time to keep up with it. Some training programs use that function to give you an artificially extended scenario.”

“Really?” Tom sat up, fascinated. “So wait. We could spend days doing this scenario?” Awesome. Fighting pirates for days on end . . .

“Weeks,” Lyla said. “And you’re not going to be happy about that soon.”

That’s when Snowden announced, “Looks like everything’s in order here. I’ll pop in later.” And his avatar vanished, leaving them all together in the life raft, bobbing listlessly on the ocean.

Tom stared at the empty space where he’d been. Lyla’s last words rang in his ears and it occurred to him that there might be a reason Snowden wasn’t participating in the sim.

As time passed and Tom grew dreadfully thirsty, he became certain of it. The problem with the scenario was, it felt true to life—like they were all on a life raft, floating in the middle of the ocean with no supplies but a canteen of water Walton salvaged that was rapidly being depleted. The worst thing was, they knew they could be stuck out here for weeks.

Tom swished the canteen grimly, hearing only a bit of water sloshing. “What happens now?”