“Not that it’s your business, Mr. Raines,” Blackburn said, gaze trained on the screen flashing text at a rate too fast for anyone without a neural processor to follow, “but Trainee Sysevich has a particular filtering program installed in his processor. Whenever he leaves the Pentagonal Spire, his processor switches to an alert mode. It logs any attempts that are made to tamper with his software. I would’ve run this scan as soon as he got back”—his eyes flashed to Tom’s—“if some trainee hadn’t been an idiot over break and created a cleanup job for me.”

Tom felt a surge of hope. They’d tampered with Yuri’s software well before vacation, while he was at the Spire, so Blackburn shouldn’t pick up anything.

And indeed, he didn’t. Blackburn tapped his forearm keyboard to shut off the scanning, then reached out to grab Yuri by the shoulder and pull him upright. “Carry on,” he ordered them, and headed back to the front

Tom slumped into his seat, soaked with sweat. He gave a relieved laugh when he was sure Blackburn was out of earshot and elbowed Vik. “Hey, man, it’s okay. We’re good.”

“Yeah, we’re good.” Vik slouched down in his seat. “This time.”

TOM’S SKULL BEGAN to throb during lunch, but it had less to do with Blackburn’s scan of Yuri and more to do with Walton Covner’s attempt to mess with his head. Tom was halfway through his cheeseburger when Walton strode past him, trailing a group of tiny gnomes. Tom gaped at him. Walton caught his eye and pressed a finger to his lips.

“No way,” Tom said flatly, shaking his head. “No, no, no. I was dying of dehydration, Walton, and that is the only reason I believed for a second that you had gnome minions. I’m never gonna buy it when I’m feeling fine!”

Walton gave him a decisive nod. “Keep that up, Raines. The more people hear it, the more they’ll believe it.” Then he continued onward.

Tom settled next to Wyatt and put his head on the table. She struck him several times, jolting his vision, and it wasn’t until Tom sat up, rubbing the back of his head, that he realized she’d been trying to pat his head comfortingly.

“Is everything okay?” she asked him.

He explained the gnome minion situation. She tapped a few buttons on his keyboard to give herself remote access to his processor, then she ran a flash scan. The words flickered before his eyes all the rest of lunch, and the results finally came when they were all gathered for Intermediate Tactics in MacArthur Hall, the planetarium on the fifteenth floor. Tom saw the scan complete, and straightened up from where he’d been gazing at the massive screen that curved overhead and the roof that could retract to reveal the sky.