Tom’s laugh split the dead hush as trainees marched in with the flag, so he muffled it quickly with a fake cough, then tried to appear neutral and stoic again as everyone darted glances his way, wondering who had penetrated the solemnity of morning meal formation.

Evidently, Vik’s dislike of his new roommate was a mutual thing, because as Tom was stashing his tray on the conveyer belt, he overhead Giuseppe Nichols ranting to Jennifer Nguyen, “. . . and he actually programmed a giant statue of himself into our bunk template. Who does that?”

Consequently, Giuseppe didn’t sit with them in Programming. The trainees from all levels gathered twice a week in the Lafayette Room so Lieutenant Blackburn could teach them how to write code for their own processors; the reason the class was so tedious was they had to use their human brains for it. The neural processor couldn’t do the work for them. There was a law against self-programming computers.

Because human brains were needed, Tom knew he was hopeless at programming and didn’t really bother much with the class. He’d never been that great in school. So instead of concentrating, Tom kept searching for excuses not to focus on his work. He found his attention on Yuri, slumped over the bench in front of them, pretending to zone out like he was still scrambled. Wyatt had removed the program that used to hide classified information from Yuri, including all the names of his friends, but Yuri had to pretend to zone out whenever certain things were mentioned or whenever he was in Programming.

While fake zoning out, Yuri still heard Blackburn’s lectures. Apparently he’d been learning from them, too, since he startled Tom by nudging him and net-sending: You made an error in your code. One of his blue eyes peeked at Tom.

“How do you know?” Tom whispered, careful to turn his head toward Vik so no one would realize he was addressing Yuri. “You don’t even see what I’m writing.”

Yuri typed again: I can discern what you are writing from the movement of your fingers. Look at line ten.

Tom indulged him and scrolled back up the program.

Oh. Oh, okay. Yeah. He’d mistyped a segment of the code.

I will show you the correct code, Yuri wrote, then crooked a finger at him. Tom sneaked a glance up toward Blackburn at the front of the room, and casually flopped his arm over his thigh to hang in Yuri’s direction, giving Yuri access to the keyboard. Yuri leaned toward him and his fingers began dancing over the keyboard now between their bodies and the back of the bench in front of theirs. He typed from memory, modifying Tom’s code.

Sure enough, when Tom tried compiling it, it worked perfectly.