Oh my God, I’m not in control of the ship, Heather thought. I think we’ve been hijacked.

Tom felt a thrill of excitement and worry.

Their own heat shields lit as they plunged into Jupiter’s outer atmosphere, the vessel jolting furiously, pressure mounting on a hull not designed for atmospheric travel. They burned hotter and hotter as they plunged deeper into Jupiter’s gaseous mass, gravity accelerating them to a lethal speed.

Soon, gravity began to buckle their hull, and the red clouds on all sides began to tear at them, battering them with vicious, six-hundred-kilometer-per-hour winds. In the fleeting moments before their destruction, Tom focused on the buzzing in his processor and leaped out into the vessel, interfacing with it, momentarily dazzled by the alarms blaring in every system as Jupiter consumed it.

And then, for a microsecond, maybe two, his brain met another person’s, a neural processor that wasn’t his, that wasn’t Heather’s, interfacing with their ship and directing its death plunge. Shock suffused Tom. Who was . . .

At that moment, their vessel was obliterated, snapping Tom back into his body in the Pentagonal Spire.

ALL THE TRAINEES were ordered to the cell adjoining the Census Chamber, and one by one, they were escorted in to have their memories of the event extracted.

The guard poked in his head, calling for the next trainee. “Covner, you’re up. Martin, you’ll be next.” Walton rose and followed him from the room.

Tom’s stomach was in knots. No one had used the census device on him since Blackburn had interrogated him for treason. The Middles around him chattered away.

“I’ve never had the census device used on me,” Jennifer Nguyen said.

“Oh, it’s straightforward,” Lyla told her. “You think about something, then the memory uploads. It’s sort of cool.”

Tom started laughing. He couldn’t help it. He ignored the dirty looks the two girls sent him and kept staring at that door, feeling like a mass of nerves. Yes, he knew this wasn’t going to be like the last time he’d sat under that metal claw with Blackburn at the controls. He really did. Intellectually. But the very idea of there being anything cool about the machine that had nearly driven him insane struck him as hilarious.

He forced himself to stop laughing and leaned back against the wall—the wall of the same cell where he’d been confined for two days. It was also the waiting room for those scheduled for memory viewing. His eyes kept straying to the spot he’d punched, over and over, while his mind was fraying.

“Guys, think,” Vik proclaimed, a crazy glint in his eyes as everyone swung their attention toward him. He spread his arms. “We became brave new pioneers in human history: we were all brutally Jupitered today.”

“Jupitered?” Lyla echoed.