Tom wondered why Marsh knew that. Tom didn’t know it himself.

“You’re going to get one of those companies to put up a few billion sponsoring you, and you’re going to be a Combatant. I believe that to my bones. I expect nothing less of you, Middle.”

TOM STILL FELT a bit odd when he walked into his bunk later. He’d expected . . . he wasn’t sure. He’d expected to be yelled at, at the very least, or maybe for Marsh to tell him what a failure he’d been.

Tom stood there in the darkness with the Gormless Cretin statue and the scroll displaying the five “would nots.”

Marsh had such utter confidence that he’d fix this. There was no reason for it, really. For a moment, the stress grew too overwhelming. Tom closed his eyes, feeling like the entire world was spinning about him, and he was a singularity at the center, absorbing more and more expectation until it was impossible, impossible to escape the crushing mass of it. He knew he couldn’t do it. He’d disappoint Marsh, he’d screw up, and he’d get sucked into that vortex because he was sure Marsh would give up on him, and he’d be done for, he’d be crushed.

Then he thought of Medusa.

He opened his eyes.

Medusa!

She flared through his brain, and it was like he’d discovered some passage through that vortex, freeing him on the other side. The weight slid away from him like it had never been there, and he understood that there was a way. There had to be a way.

Medusa had no sponsor. She had none, but she was in space. So it was possible.

Tom felt something hard and relentless grow inside him, and he looked up at those evaluations, determination surging through him. Sure, he knew she didn’t want him to contact her again, and he knew she’d threatened to blast him if he drew too much attention to them . . . but he’d never been good at heeding threats.

And then, typing rapidly on his forearm keyboard, he deleted the scroll of failures and gave the statue a massive, deadly sword instead. His fight wasn’t over yet.

Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

IN THE PAST, Tom had used a message board to get in contact with Medusa. Now that he knew she was like him, he didn’t need to. He stretched out on his bed, hooked in, and resorted to his old standby pipeline to the Sun Tzu Citadel: he interfaced with the massive current of power in the Pentagonal Spire’s central processor. He traced the pathway of zeros and ones he’d followed several times before.

His consciousness jolted into some satellites ringing Earth, with their electronic sensors. It took him effort to focus, to grab on to the next pipeline of signals, and jolt into the satellites ringing Mercury with its palladium mines.