Unless there’d been some breach.

Some serious, serious breach.

“I’ve heard all of the Camelot Company names now. Their IPs, too. It’s going to be on the news today. Maybe you should go.” She gazed intently at him. “It might be safer for you.”

Tom understood her. He swallowed hard. “Yeah, I should probably go.”

He pulled off his VR visor. The humming voices around him weren’t soothing, reassuring. Tom saw the blank screen on the wall, his mouth dry, knowing there was no real privacy on the internet, even with all his planning, all his care to meet her only out of the Spire.

CamCo’s identities had been leaked. Something like this was going to be big.

He knew, just knew, that something bad was going to come of it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE NEWS BROKE on his way back to the Spire. He heard snatches of those names on people’s lips in the Metro. The names the general population shouldn’t know. Heather … Alec … Ralph … Emefa … He’d heard all of them by the time he reached the Pentagon. Every Combatant in CamCo had been leaked.

And once he was in the Spire, it was as cataclysmic as he feared. The place was in chaos with the breaking news, trainees swarming around tables in the mess hall, the room buzzing with frantic voices. The screens built into the walls had all been turned on, the news playing.

Tom passed a few CamCos. Snowden Gainey of Napoleon Division was practically bouncing in place, and he was talking excitedly to Mason Meekins of Hannibal, who was scowling at the nearest screen. When Tom stepped into the elevator, he saw the news playing on its normally inactive, emergency-only screen. The reporter spoke as the image panned over photographs of various newly revealed CamCos taken from yearbooks, the internet, and other places. One yearbook photo of a bucktoothed girl with glasses and heavy bangs caught him up short. The caption said she was Heather Akron.

When Tom reached his bunk, Vik filled him in on everything people had been talking about for the last hour: the Chinese state news had aired all the identities of the members of CamCo, and even purported to have matched them to the “IPs of their personal computers.” Those in the military who knew about neural processors realized the true meaning of that statement: they could glean the real names of the Camelot Company Combatants just using their IP addresses now.

“Elliot Ramirez has to be dying inside,” Vik said. “He’s not going to be the only famous face here anymore.”

Tom’s head pulsed. “This is bad.”

Vik dropped onto his own bed, slinging his boots over his mattress. “Yeah, especially for Blackburn. Someone must’ve hacked into the Spire and gotten the identities.”

“You think so?” Tom knew he shouldn’t sound hopeful. If it was all Blackburn’s fault, maybe there wouldn’t be an investigation.

“That, or we’ve got a leak.”

A leak. Tom felt cold. If Blackburn wasn’t responsible, he’d be fanatical in investigating who that leak could be. This would be a thousand times worse than when he hunted down the person who hacked the personnel database. This was treason. Tom headed to the window and stared out bleakly onto the roof of the Old Pentagon. He was in trouble. His meetings with Medusa were like a gigantic red flag.

Vik’s hand clapped on his shoulder, making him jump. “Cheer up. Think about the Summit.”

“What about it?”

Vik sounded gleeful. “Russo-Chinese intelligence has got CamCo’s IPs and names. Don’t you see? There’s no deniability once they have the names. If Elliot gets proxied at the Capitol Summit, they can plaster the face of Elliot’s real proxy on the news. Either we’re going to get embarrassed at Capitol Summit, or Elliot’s got to have someone who’s still got a secret identity come and fight for him. One of us non-CamCos. There’s gonna be some movement up the ranks.”

“It’s not going to be us, Vik. We’re plebes. Nigel Harrison will probably get to do it because he’s next in line for CamCo.”

“Still, it’ll be someone. They haven’t promoted any new CamCo members in ages.” Vik flopped back onto his bed, his face dazzled. “Imagine that. Your first fight in space—against Medusa. Imagine fighting Medusa.”

It took all Tom’s self-control not to blurt out everything.

PEOPLE WITH NEURAL processors did not dream. They opened their eyes at a time preprogrammed, wide-awake. But when Tom opened his eyes at 0513 hours, he knew it was too early, and something was wrong.

He bolted upright in bed and realized what the problem was: Lieutenant Blackburn towered above him in full uniform, gripping the wire he’d pulled out of Tom’s brain stem. A pair of armed soldiers waited behind him in the open doorway.

Tom’s mouth grew dry. He’d thought about maybe confessing his meetings with Medusa before anyone found out about them, but he wasn’t going to have the chance.

“Mr. Raines, do you know why I had to drag myself up here at this ungodly early hour?” Blackburn demanded. “It’s because some establishment called the Beringer Club heard about yesterday’s leak, and they felt it was their patriotic duty to wake me up and inform me that you were on their property recently. They claim you were communicating with an online acquaintance while there. Someone in China.”

And then it all made terrible sense.

Dalton. Of course, it was Dalton. This was all Dalton.

Tom should’ve said something in his own defense. He probably should’ve done most anything other than start laughing, but that’s what came out of his mouth.

“Something funny about this?” Blackburn said.

He clamped his hand over his mouth, aghast at himself. “No, sir.” His voice came out muffled. But his brain kept connecting the dots, and that hideous impulse to laugh wouldn’t go away.

Dalton, who’d as good as told him a few months ago that CamCo would be going public soon.

Dalton, who’d warned him through Karl that revenge was on its way.

Now Dalton was doing his “patriotic duty” and setting Tom up. The Beringer Club must’ve had some way to detect Medusa net-sending him. The leak was out, and so was some incriminating information about Tom. It was all so very Dalton.

“Do you even have the slightest understanding of how serious this situation is, Mr. Raines? Whoever leaked those names committed treason. There’s a mandatory ten-year prison sentence for treason.”

The word “prison” did it. The horrendous urge to laugh dissolved. Tom dragged his gaze up to Blackburn’s. “Look, I do have an online friend in China, but it’s …” He hesitated, knowing this was just going to make his case look worse, but honesty was the only thing he could offer. “Sir, I was meeting Medusa, okay? But I can explain. I didn’t leak anything, I swear.”

“Medusa.” Blackburn scrubbed a big palm over his mouth. “The Russo-Chinese Combatant, Medusa. Even you can’t be this stupid, Raines.”

“We just hung around and talked and played games.” The words spilled out of him. “I was just curious about her, okay? But I never said anything classified. It wasn’t me.”

Blackburn knelt down so they were at eye level. His voice was softer. “And she never sent you a link to a third-party website? Never directed you somewhere online that required you to run a script? Raines, are you very sure she couldn’t have snuck a Trojan into your processor that opened a back door into our system?”