Tom decided he hated the census device. After they’d transmitted their source code to Blackburn, he ordered all four of them down for memory viewing just for this. Blackburn had played a vast number of humiliating programming failures for their entertainment and capped it all off with Tom and Karl’s epic duel.

“The last three days have confirmed it,” Blackburn said. “The vast majority of you, to put it gently, are pathetic. Hannibal Division is winning, with Machiavelli at a distant second. This appears to be solely due to the efforts of Nigel Harrison and, to my endless surprise, Wyatt Enslow.”

Cheers and whoops from the other Hannibals and Machiavellis rang through the Lafayette Room. Tom looked over and saw that Wyatt’s cheeks had grown bright red. She wasn’t used to being the center of attention—and certainly not accustomed to being celebrated by the other members of a division that mostly ignored her.

“What’s your secret, Enslow?” Blackburn said, leaning on the podium, gray eyes fixed on hers. “How did you turn into a prodigy on me?”

Tom saw Wyatt duck her head, letting her dark hair swing in her face. “I just really wanted to attack people before they attacked me, sir.”

Blackburn let her off with that, but Tom noticed Blackburn glancing at her from time to time even after he moved on with the lecture. “Now, I’ve caught word of a few attacks on Mr. Ramirez. General Marsh doesn’t want him to be in this conflict.”

Elliot rose to his feet. “Sir, I’m fine with—”

“Mr. Ramirez, you have a summit at the Capitol Building coming up. As you’ll appear to be representing the Indo-American forces, no one wants to risk messing up your software. And, let’s face it, you’re hardly a coding genius whose absence will have a devastating impact on this conflict. I think we’ll survive your nonparticipation.”

Tom could have sworn that Elliot looked embarrassed as he dropped back down.

“Ramirez is out, everyone. As for the rest of you”—Blackburn waved his finger in a circle, indicating the whole room—“you have one more day. I know this is asking a lot, but try to stop humiliating yourselves.”

AS VIK AND Tom headed up in the elevator to the sixth floor, Tom asked him, “What did Blackburn mean about Elliot ‘appearing’ to represent Indo-America?”

“Well, you know what the Capitol Summit’s really about,” Vik said. “Dominion Agra is allied with India and America, and it controls the patents on the food supply. Harbinger, Inc. is allied with Russia and China, and it controls the patents on the water supply. So this is the time of year when the Coalition of Multinationals meets and agrees that even if they’re at war in space, they’ll still enforce each other’s patents here on Earth. It’s also a big show for the public to keep them engaged in the war. Our best Combatant faces the best Russo-Chinese Combatant.”

“But Elliot’s the one who fights there,” Tom pointed out. “And he’s not the best one in CamCo.”

The doors slid open and they strode into the plebe common room, heading toward Alexander Division. “But we call him our best. And from the outside, it’ll look like Elliot and Svetlana are the ones fighting because they’ve got the pretty faces and the stage presence. So they go through the gestures of facing off for the cameras, while behind the scenes, proxies do the actual fighting. Elliot sure does, and everyone assumes Svetlana does, too.”

Tom sputtered a laugh. “Wait. Wait. So he just goes there and pretends to fight?”

“Yeah,” Vik said. “It’s kind of funny. See, the public doesn’t know about neural processors, so Elliot and Svetlana even have a wheel, a throttle, and controllers like they’re steering ships in space, while somewhere else their proxies are hooked in and actually navigating the ships.”

“Who’s the proxy?”

“Last year it was Alec Tarsus. But since Svetlana is sure to be proxied by Medusa this year, and Alec always gets stomped by her in space, I’m not sure who they’ll use this time around. I’m guessing Heather Akron or that Genghis Division guy Yosef Saide maybe? He won’t beat Medusa, but you’ve seen Yosef in action. He’s big on mass destruction. He might pull off something insane that’ll make them both lose.”

They passed Beamer as he left his bunk for the bathroom. “Hey,” Tom called, “who do you think will …”

But Beamer walked past them like they weren’t even there. A cold fist seemed to curl in Tom’s stomach, and it wasn’t until Vik tugged on his shoulder that he headed on his way again.

Once they were inside their bunk, Vik accessed the Spire’s internal processor and ran a cursory virus scan to try locating the other malicious attacks planted in neural interfaces. He pulled back with some shock when he was done and showed Tom the results: Wyatt Enslow had sabotaged everything. Everything. She’d planted attacks in the homework feeds, in the databases. She’d even manufactured firewalls that blocked other people’s viruses from infiltrating the feeds.

Vik sat back on his heels, blown away. “Doctor, you realize Man Hands has stomped everyone.”

“She needs a proper supervillain name. Man Hands isn’t doing it for me.”

“You’re right. How about ‘Evil Wench from the Darkest Reaches of Mordor’?”

“Too wordy.”

“Just Evil Wench, then. Look, I refuse to concede defeat here.”

“Every villain has a weak spot. What’s hers?”

Vik rubbed at his chin and frowned at the wall. Tom flopped down on his bed and propped his head up on his elbow, concentrating on the carpet.

Wyatt didn’t play games. They couldn’t sneak something into a VR sim. She liked reading, but Tom couldn’t think of any way to sneak her a Trojan in a book. She never hooked into those, so the text would just get memorized by the processor. She just read them word by word like a regular person without a neural processor did.

“Training room neural interface sockets?”

“How do you know what cot she’ll pick?” Vik pointed out.

“You’ll have to plant some virus in all of them.”

“You’ll get it, too.”

Tom waved that off. “I’ll take it just to score a point against her.”

“And Elliot will get it.”

“Oh.” Tom’s hopes faded. They couldn’t risk hitting Elliot. “Well, there’s gotta be some other …” And then, suddenly, he knew what Wyatt’s weakness was: “Vik, what about Yuri?”

Vik’s eyes shot to his. “The Android. Of course. He’s been her best friend since she got here. She trusts him.”

“So we get him to sneak her a virus,” Tom said. “He doesn’t have to understand any of it. We just tell him to show her something and send a file.”

Vik grinned. “She’ll get curious and look!”

It was perfect.

There was just one catch: Yuri was horrified at the very idea of helping them take Wyatt down. “I cannot do that.”

“You don’t have to do much of anything,” Vik protested. “Just ask her to take a look at a program of yours, have her hook in.”

“And bam. She’s in virus town,” Tom finished.