Vortex (23 page)

“W-what’s w-w-wrong w-with m-m-my . . .”

Blackburn tucked his arm back under his coat. “Shh. Just close your eyes.”

Tom didn’t want to, but he sagged back, shaking all over, his teeth chattering, and his thoughts became blurred, hazy things as the warmth and almost foreign sense of total safety lulled him into darkness.

V
OICES ROUSED
T
OM.

“. . . the incorruptible James Blackburn.” Vengerov sounded amused. “I’m astonished you left the Pentagonal Spire, what with all the recent security breaches.
Anything
could happen to that system while you’re here, in my domain, completely cut off from your own server.”

Tom forced his eyelids open, the bright lights of what seemed a small hospital knifing into his eyes. His blurry vision focused upon an IV pole, standing nearby . . . and the two men facing each other at the foot of his bed.

“Oh, I wouldn’t throw around the threats too soon, Joseph.” Blackburn’s voice was harsh. “I took the risk of coming here for one simple reason: your employee intranet. I thought access to your internal company network might be worth the trip to the South Pole. I was right.”

Vengerov’s voice was deadly soft. “You penetrated our systems? That’s illegal.”

“Speaking of illegal”—enjoyment throbbed in Blackburn’s voice—“you should really take a look at something I found while the trainees were on their tour.”

Their hands gripped the rails on either side, though Blackburn’s were ferocious claws like he was ready to rip the bed frame apart, and Vengerov’s were casually skimming the metal. The faint smile on Vengerov’s lips reflected none of the tense hostility on Blackburn’s face, even as he reached into his pocket, pulled out a computer, and began examining the file Blackburn sent him.

Blackburn said, “I had this hunch that it wasn’t a coincidence our combat technology always seems to keep perfect pace with that of the Russo-Chinese . . .”

“A mere conspiracy theory. I thought better of you, James.”

“It’s not a conspiracy
theory
if it’s an actual, proven conspiracy. Thanks to this perfect opportunity to plunder your systems, I found proof. It’s all there. Bank account numbers, emails, electronic footprints—all the interesting material I need to convince any investigative body that there’s not
collusion
between Obsidian Corp. and LM Lymer Fleet, you’re outright double-dipping—getting paid to supply war machines to both sides. You might as well be the CEO of LM Lymer Fleet, not just Obsidian Corp.”

Vengerov said nothing. The slight smile had disappeared from his lips as he continued to examine the information Blackburn sent him.

Blackburn folded his arms and leaned back to gloat. “If that gets out, well, you can get away with a lot of it. I know
our
congressmen are so pathetically corrupt, a few bribes will send them eagerly looking the other way. . . . But there’s a funny thing about the Russians and the Chinese: they’ve both got that pesky national pride thing you can’t seem to drive out of them, and they don’t like being scammed. Let’s say I stick this info on the internet for the eyes of the eager public. That’s gonna lead to an outcry, and those princelings in China might have to make the best of a bad situation and nationalize LM Lymer Fleet’s assets. They’ll take them and hand them out to their kids. . . . What do you think?”

Vengerov closed the tablet computer, calmly tucked it in his pocket, and said in a deadly soft voice, “I think it was foolish of you to assume I’d simply let you walk out of here with this. Surely you’re not that careless.”

“You know me, after all. I’m touched. Of course I didn’t think you’d let me walk out with my plunder, no. That’s why I made sure the information already walked out of here. It left hours ago with the trainees. I distributed it between their processors as I stole it, and as soon as those kids were outside this building, they transmitted the data to one thousand different data storage sites.”

Vengerov seized the rail. “I will cull every last file location out of you!”

Blackburn rocked back on his heels, a ferocious grin on his face. “They’re set to a dead man’s switch. I have to send a password in . . . five hours and six minutes, or they’ll automatically open and reveal your double-dipping to the entire world. Oh, and here’s the best part: the password I wrote for them? It automatically deletes itself from my processor if I’m incapacitated, if any unauthorized code from, say, a census device finds its way into my brain, or if anything—and I mean
anything—
hinders my liberty of movement. You’re going to let me walk out of here, and you’re going to agree to my terms.”

A heavy silence sat on the air between them. Then Vengerov straightened. “I see you’ve been very thorough. So you’ll sit on this data, and in return . . . what? I assume you wish me to withdraw Obsidian Corp.’s bid for the Pentagonal Spire?”

“The breaches end today,” Blackburn said flatly.

“One is conditional upon the other, yes.”

Tom saw Blackburn’s face shift as he got the confirmation it
had
been Vengerov behind the breaches, behind the hijacked drones—and blurry as his head was, Tom felt vindicated. He’d been right. It
hadn’t
been Medusa.

“Now, Lieutenant,” Vengerov said, “I suggest you tend to your eavesdropping trainee.”

Blackburn jumped, and threw a startled glance toward Tom.

With a sigh, Tom abandoned the pretense of sleep and heaved himself up as far as he could in the bed. His entire body was exhausted, his mouth bone-dry. “Where are we?” His voice came out cracked.

“We’re still in Obsidian Corp.,” Blackburn said, moving closer to him. “The medical bay. We’re waiting for some of our own people to retrieve you. Do you remember what happened?”

Tom gave a shaky nod.

“Try to rest,” Blackburn ordered him, but his voice was oddly soft. “You need your strength.”

But Tom couldn’t rest, he couldn’t, not with Vengerov there at the foot of the bed. It was like closing his eyes with some venomous snake looming over him, poised to strike.

Vengerov had an unblinking gaze like a reptile’s. “I must apologize for your incident earlier, Mr. Raines. I never thought to assign any personnel to attend to the external surveillance cameras. No one breaks into a building filled with killing machines in the middle of Antarctica, after all. Your medical expenses are, of course, complimentary.”

Who was Vengerov even pretending for? Tom knew he was the one behind what happened. Blackburn had to have guessed.

“Yeah, I bet you’re real sorry,” Tom said, his voice raspy. He assessed himself, saw the swollen toes of his right foot where he’d kicked at the door. Bandages confining his hands. Restlessly, he shoved one under his opposite arm to work the bandage off, hoping to see how badly hurt his hands were. “Funny how that door swung open and closed a bunch of times.”

“No hardware is perfect. Certainly not our automated doors.” Vengerov’s gaze dropped to the bandage Tom was working off, a certain amusement gleaming in his eyes. “But it does trouble me to think while I was luxuriating indoors, a frightened child was trapped out in the cold, begging to be let in.”

Rage boiled up in Tom. His furious gaze flashed up to Vengerov’s. “I
never
begged.”

Vengerov had to know what he was really saying—Tom hadn’t broken. Even if it almost killed him. He wished Vengerov would reward him by seeming distressed or disappointed, but the Russian oligarch smiled, something like anticipation on his face.

Blackburn seemed to realize what Tom was doing. “Don’t take those off here . . .” he began, but Tom had shucked off the bandage.

Now he saw what it had been hiding. Shock triggered in his gut as he saw the blackened fingers he couldn’t feel. He latched on to the other bandage with his teeth and tore it from that hand, and saw that those were blackened, too. His gut twisted. No. No, no, no . . . Wait. This couldn’t be right. He tried to curl them, tried to flex them. He shook his hands out, he pressed the fingers together. No sensation. Nothing.

A massive tourniquet seemed to be compressing him, the blood rushing in his ears. No. He needed these. He needed them for everything. Gaming. He couldn’t game without fingers. What if he didn’t become a Combatant? What if he needed to get by somehow?

Blackburn snared his wrists and set about replacing the bandages. “You’re going to get cybernetic fingers. They’ll work with the neural processor, and they’ll be almost as good as the real thing. Think of the exosuits. It’s like having one full-time.”

But exosuits hadn’t replaced something that was
supposed
to be there. They’d been something fun, something awesome to make him stronger, faster. They’d been something he could take off and decide not to use. Tom stared at his blackened fingers, denial blanking out his brain. This couldn’t be real.

Joseph Vengerov must have been satisfied that Tom understood the consequences of refusing him, because he at last turned around and strode away, disappearing off into the empty hallways of his mechanized fortress, as pitiless as any of his machines.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“A
T LEAST YOUR
nose didn’t fall off,” Wyatt told him a couple days later.

Tom was sitting on the edge of his bed in the Pentagonal Spire’s infirmary, watching Vik inspect the new, cybernetic fingers. It was strange. They didn’t have any true touch receptors, not like real fingers, but whenever they came in contact with something—whether screwed into the stumps on his hand or not—Tom felt this prickling sensation. He hadn’t yet learned to sort out different electronic signals, even though Dr. Gonzales had assured him his brain would learn to identify them, associate them with heat, cold, soft, sharp, and so on.

Vik turned the finger over and Tom felt the nagging prickle in his hand. He felt like his head was going to burst.

“I looked up pictures of people with frostbite online,” Wyatt went on, from where she was sitting on the edge of his mattress, her dark hair drawn up in a high ponytail today, “and a lot of people’s noses fell off. So it’s really great that yours didn’t.”

Vik laughed. “Enslow, come on.”

“What?” she said. “It’s a
good
thing. I’m cheering Tom up.”

“He is not looking cheerful,” Yuri said, from where he was leaning against the doorframe.

“I’m fine,” Tom muttered.

Now Vik’s chair scraped closer to his bedside. “So what’s the deal? I heard the official story: you went looking for a bathroom and accidentally walked outside, but I don’t buy it. How’d you really get stuck out there?”

“Yes, what were you doing?” Wyatt demanded. “I was so sure you and Vik had some stupid bet over who could last outside longer, and it would be so like you to almost die trying to win, but Vik is denying it.”

“Yes, I’m denying it,” Vik erupted. “Because betting over that would be stupid and Tom and I are not that stupid. Well,
I’m
not.” When Tom didn’t laugh, Vik nudged him. “Joke.”

It took Tom a moment to reply. “I know.”

“Ah, I do not believe we should question him regarding this right now,” Yuri cut in.

For some reason, his voice set Tom on edge. His stomach ached. He didn’t want his friends here. He wanted them to leave.

“Tom, stop flipping Yuri off,” Vik said, holding Tom’s middle finger up at Yuri.

Tom’s gaze riveted to the finger Vik was holding, the prickling sensation registering in his mind like the finger was actually attached to him. He couldn’t breathe. They were all staring at the detached finger, and it gave him a sense like his skin was crawling.

“Give it back,” Tom said to Vik.

He felt like something was sparking inside him, fizzling, ready to explode. It wasn’t the detachable-finger thing bothering him, it was something else. Something he couldn’t pinpoint. Everything felt wrong here. He really, really wanted them to leave.

“So these are exactly like the old ones?” Wyatt asked him.

“No,” Tom said. “These are cybernetic, Wyatt. That’s fake skin. They detach and they’re okay. The old ones, well, they froze into blackened stumps, and when they detached, they didn’t work anymore. If you really wanna compare side by side, ask Dr. Gonzales for my real fingers.” He started laughing, then laughing harder and harder. It was hard to choke out the words, “I bet he’s got ’em in medical waste somewhere.”

He heard Vik mumble something about being loopy on pain medication programs. That confused Tom. Was he acting weird? Tom wasn’t sure. He figured the anesthesia program had worn off. He didn’t feel doped up anymore.

“Doctor,” Vik said, shaking the finger at him, “I see many, many glorious pranks in our near future. Think of all the ways we could pretend your fingers have come off, and—”

“Okay. Yeah.” Tom tried to muster a grin, but couldn’t. “Now seriously, give it back.”

“You sound puzzled.” Vik scratched Tom’s head with the detached finger.

Tom practically screamed it at him:
“Give it back!”

There was silence for a moment, and Vik handed it over. Tom shoved the finger into the attachment point at his knuckle, feeling stupid.

Vik nodded at the other two, and Wyatt and Yuri withdrew from the room.

Then Vik drew closer. “Tom, I know you’re—”

“Yeah, I’m being a pansy. I know. It’s the med programs. They’re messing with my head.” It wasn’t the meds or exhaustion making him feel like this, like some giant, exposed nerve, but Tom couldn’t seem to control what he was feeling and it was embarrassing.

“Come on, Tom. I’m not . . .” Vik stopped and let out a breath. “Do you need the social worker?”

“She came by before you did.” Olivia had been sitting by his bed as he recovered from the anesthesia. She’d pressed him to talk. He pretended to sleep.

Vik rubbed his palm over his face. “I’ve got to tell you something. When you left the group at Obsidian Corp., I—”

But Tom’s attention riveted to a faint shuffling sound, somewhere in the distance, and he sat bolt upright. “Is Yuri still here?” he demanded, on edge. “What’s he up to?”

“Yuri?” Vik blinked a few times. “No, he and Wyatt went . . .” He stepped back to check and peered out the doorway, then said, “Hey, Yuri, man, I said I’d meet you in the mess hall.”

Yuri’s voice was gentle, mild. “Of course, Vikram.” He peeped in. “Good-bye, Thomas.”

Eavesdropping.
Tom wasn’t sure why the word popped into his head, but he tried to force it away.

F
OR THE NEXT
few weeks after he was discharged from the infirmary, Tom felt like a walking black hole. Everything seemed to have changed, and he couldn’t place why. The worst was his friends. He felt this wave of sickness whenever the four of them were together, something like dread. It was like he was poised for something awful to happen, and he didn’t know what.

The other people at the Pentagonal Spire weren’t much better right now. They’d all heard what happened. A few sniggered at how stupid he’d been, blundering outside in Antarctica, but others were weird with him about it.

Like Walton Covner, who’d been promoted to Upper Company. Instead of messing with Tom’s head, or otherwise acting like the strangest person Tom had ever met, as they stood in the elevator together one day, Walton said, “I’m sorry about what happened in Antarctica. Are you all right?”

“I’m great,” Tom said vehemently.

Walton looked so awkward that Tom felt an evil little thrill. It occurred to him that this was a prime opportunity to mess with Walton’s head for once.

He leaned in close, dropping his voice. “Hey, Walt, thank them for me.”

“Thank who?”

“You know.
Them.
” Tom raised his eyebrows significantly. “Your gnome minions, man! They saved me. I was dying in the cold, and they came walking out on those tiny little feet and carried me with their tiny little hands all the way back into this tiny little cave they had. I thought you were messing with me before. I realize now—you truly do have gnome minions. Glorious, brave, miniony gnomes.” Tom was very careful to keep that fake innocent expression on his face, the one that used to serve him so well in VR parlors.

He must’ve pulled it off, because Walton settled with, “I think you might’ve hallucinated that.”

“Right.” Tom gave him a thumbs-up. “I know the official story. I ‘hallucinated.’” He made air quotes.

“No, Tom, I mean it. You really did hallucinate.”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. Look: give this to them.” He unscrewed a finger. “Take it.”

Walton winced at the sight. “Ugh, Raines. I didn’t need to see you do that.”

“Take it.” Tom thrust the finger right in his face. “Give it to them. As payment.”

“I don’t think they’d want your finger.”

“But it’s a token of my esteem!”

“And you need to put that token of esteem back on your hand.”

Walton spent the rest of the elevator ride backing away from him while Tom persistently tried to shove the finger at him. Then he scuttled out quickly when the door slid open and Tom cackled gleefully for the first time in days. He looked down so he could screw the finger back on . . . and went very still, arrested by the sight of his hand, the way his finger
ended
in a stub where the joint had been.

His skin crawled.

Back in his bunk, Tom dropped onto his bed, and unscrewed cybernetic finger after finger until he was left with a stubby mess of a right hand.
His
hand. It looked so strange.

Freakish.

Tom stared at it with morbid fascination. Then he replaced the fingers and did the same thing with the other hand. It was even more disgusting, some of the fingers ending above the knuckle. By the time Tom shoved them back on, his whole body was shaking. He felt like he was going to throw up, a terrible sense of wrongness spreading through him, like he’d made some awful mistake he could never rectify.

T
OM COULDN’T SHAKE
the dreadful self-consciousness in the days that followed. The cybernetic fingers were slightly off, the tone too pink somehow. Even when they were on, he tried keeping his hands in his pockets. He kept turning suspiciously at every burst of laughter he heard, wondering with a sudden clenching of his stomach if people were laughing at him. He swore a couple of the other trainees looked at his hands, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was imagining it.

It took a while to work up his courage to do that thing he’d been dreading. He’d avoided trying VR games in front of Vik, worrying about what might happen. He finally holed himself up in his bunk one day to play Samurai Eternity
.
He set it at Expert level, the way he always did with games.

And then his worst fears were confirmed: the cybernetic fingers moved differently enough to throw off every slash of his sword, every blast of his weapons. In frustration, Tom tore off his VR gloves and hurled them across the bunk. The insane urge to stomp on them, break them, swamped his brain, and only the knowledge that he’d spent a month’s stipend on them held him back.

But he felt a great ball of anxiety in his stomach. It felt like a much more tangible, aching loss than the sensory receptors he’d once had on those fingers.

He was doomed. He was completely and utterly doomed. Gaming was how he got by before the Spire. It was how he survived. Now he’d completely lost his chance at Combatant status, he’d made an enemy of Joseph Vengerov—and he didn’t have a backup plan anymore.

He wasn’t aware of Wyatt knocking on his door, and he was only dully aware of the moment she walked over to where he was standing above the gloves. Her large hands tugged clumsily at him, and Tom found himself sitting next to her on his bed.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m not upset or anything. I realized I suck at games now,” he told her. He held up his curled fingers. “These don’t work right.”

“Your brain’s primed to use the old ones,” she said. “It’s like the exosuits. No matter how good they are, your brain uses slightly different neurons to move them. You’ll learn. Just practice.”

He shook his head gloomily. “It’s never going to be the same.”

“Fine. Then you can be awful at video games. They’re stupid anyway and a waste of time.” She nodded crisply. “You should read more books, Tom.”

He stared at her. “Wyatt, this is not a good pep talk. You are not good at pep talks.”

“Well, it’s not the end of the world. You don’t need to video game for money now.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

And then her words registered in his brain.

His muscles felt rigidly locked in place as he tried to make sense of it.

“Um, wait. Wait,” Tom said. “Wait. How do you know about that?”

Wyatt’s eyes shot wide, and she dropped her gaze.

Tom scooted away from her. “Wyatt, how do you know I played games for money? I never told you that. The only person who knew was General Marsh. Or . . .”

Or
Lieutenant Blackburn
, the guy who’d seen enough of his memories to know.

For some reason, Tom felt like he’d been socked, realizing Blackburn had told her. He’d sort of thought Blackburn was discreet about the stuff from the census device. His brain felt all tangled up even thinking about Blackburn now, knowing the same guy who’d almost driven him insane had also saved his life and . . . and
comforted
him when he’d been hurting and sort of confused. But this was a surprise. Blackburn had talked about Tom’s personal stuff to Wyatt?

Tom hadn’t told her what he knew about Blackburn and his family. This felt like being stabbed in the back.

“What else did Blackburn tell you?” he asked her roughly.

“It wasn’t him, Tom. It was my fault.” She clutched her hands together in her lap. “It was right before vacation, after we got Jupitered. . . . That’s still a stupid term, by the way. Anyway, I knew something really bad had to have happened in the Census Chamber because you were acting so weird, so I downloaded the surveillance archives.”

Tom froze up. Oh no. She’d
seen
stuff. She’d seen all of it.

Yeah, he’d told his friends about his life before the Spire, sure. About those casinos where Neil raked in the money, and the crazy and colorful crowds, hopping trains and soaring from state to state in all the glorious freedom of it, or that high-rise suite over that pool with all the naked women in it, stuff like that. A bunch of things that were awesome and fantastic, the way things sometimes had been but usually weren’t.

Never that
other
stuff. Never any of the bad stuff. That wasn’t the person he was here.

“There were two days’ worth of footage,” Wyatt went on, her eyes darting to his, and skittering away again, “so I stuck it in my homework feed. I woke up knowing it all. But, Tom, I wouldn’t have sat and watched it all if I’d realized . . .”

“What did you think?” he blurted. “I told you it was bad.”

“I know. I didn’t know it would be
that
awful. That
he
could be that awful.”

Tom felt sick. He couldn’t look at her.

“I haven’t talked about it to anyone, you know. And . . . and I haven’t been talking to Lieutenant Blackburn, either. I’m mad at him. He was awful to you. He’s noticed, too. He ordered me to stop sending him ‘sad hurt puppy looks,’ whatever those are. Um, but I could say something, too. I’m going to say something. I’ll give him a talking to.”