Tom nodded. He knew from Tactics that Promethean Arrays were the devices in the Infernal Zone in close orbit around the sun. They collected energy with their solar panels, focused it in a concentrated beam, and shot it to other devices throughout the solar system. To launch battles in the Reaches, military logistics would send a command for hundreds of Promethean Arrays to shoot energy beams toward the outer solar system, and they’d do so anywhere from forty minutes to thirteen hours in advance, depending upon how far away the site of battle was going to be. The Indo-American vessels in the Reaches were all energy conductive, so when the beams hit, the vessels focused the energy into an atomic reaction. The resulting explosion propelled the ships to the site of battle.

“The point is,” Heather went on, “we’re not the ones who determine victory when it comes to the Reaches. The Promethean Arrays do.”

“Good luck, anyway,” Tom said.

Tom heard Elliot explaining something similar to Wyatt, his own Middle. “There’s not much spontaneity in the Reaches. This will be short. See you on the other side.”

Heather cast Tom a magnetic smile. “Later, Tom.”

He felt a jolt in the back of his neck, something hooking into his neural access port. . . .

And then he was walking through a corridor, blank white walls around him . . . or rather, Heather was, and he was seeing through her eyes. Weird. Where was this?

You’re not authorized to see the Helix yet, Heather thought to him, so this is all censored.

Heather smoothed her tunic, and Tom grew uncomfortably aware of her in that way he did quite often. He wondered why she’d leaked that stuff about the other CamCos when she could’ve gotten all the attention she wanted being herself, looking like herself. . . .

How do you know about that?

He’d forgotten she was tuned into his thoughts. Desperately, Tom thought, 1 . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 5 . . . Wyatt telling me about Heather . . . Wait. Wait, did I—

Enslow told you? There was nothing for a moment. How does she know?

Come on, Heather.

People are making such a big deal of this, Heather thought. Like the others wouldn’t have done it if they’d thought of it. Wait, I thought that. Tom, I was tricked. Those reporters tricked me. You have to know that, right? Silence, and, So was it Enslow who found out about it?

The Fibonacci sequence hadn’t worked, so Tom tried his own means of controlling his thoughts: Heather’s boobs. It worked. The subject consumed his mind and kept it away from Wyatt.

Heather thought, Boys are such idiots, and stopped prying.