The rest of the hour, they rotated across the room to the other three decagons with CamCos stationed at them. Wyatt’s number sequences grew more intricate, and Tom, for his part, started learning a lot about the CamCos he hadn’t known before.

At the next decagon, Yosef Saide was pondering whether Tom would’ve succeeded in killing him if he hadn’t been yanked out of the shark scenario, and he was eager to face him in a samurai scenario next time. Cadence Grey had a creepily silent mind, and only the occasional “om” betrayed the fact that she was actively meditating. Emefa Austerley was impatient with this whole exercise, since she imagined herself as a Spartan-warrior type, not a teacher to a bunch of annoying younger trainees—and when were Combatants going to be treated like the serious national assets they were?

At the third decagon, Snowden Gainey wondered what people thought of him, and Tom let him know by pondering at length the stupidity of the simulation from Applied Scrimmages. Mason Meekins desperately needed to use the bathroom. Britt Schmeiser kept thinking about a girl he met on the publicity tour, which made Wyatt get the word “boobs” in her head again.

At the fourth decagon, the solemn, dark-haired CamCo Alec Tarsus began thinking right away that Tom was an uneducated simpleton. He also thought Wyatt was too intelligent to function on a normal human level and that was why no one really liked her. This hurt Wyatt’s feelings, which affronted Ralph Bates, who liked her long, beautiful legs. Wyatt thought about how Ralph had given her the initial tour when she arrived at the Spire, and how even back then, he smelled like onions despite the fact that he hadn’t been eating them.

She hurt Ralph’s feelings, so he consoled himself by thinking she had a horseface, which hurt Wyatt’s feelings and made Tom mad enough to think about punching Ralph’s face in. Ralph thought Tom was as deranged as he’d always heard he was, but Wyatt thought about how fantastic it was that Tom threatened people on her behalf. Lea Styron was annoyed by this because she felt that Wyatt shouldn’t be encouraging Tom’s behavior. Chivalry wasn’t charming, it was a weapon of patriarchy, and all in all, this felt like a waste of time to her because she’d already decided she wanted to work with Walton Covner. Tom spent the rest of the time thinking about gnome minions, which unfortunately, confirmed Alec Tarsus’s simpleton theory.

Soon, the entire group broke up, and the veteran CamCos gathered together to laugh over things they’d gleaned from the thoughts of younger trainees.

All except Heather. She stood apart from the group, glared at the rest a moment, then stalked out of the room. Tom remembered what Wyatt had said earlier and nudged her. “So what happened with her?”