Free Insignia by S. J. Kincaid Page A

Yuri—but this you know.” He tapped his own temple.
    “Yeah, this I know,” Tom said.
    “I do not see your achievements listed.”
    “It’s a mistake. We’re getting that fixed,” Vik told Yuri.
    “Uh, yeah,” Tom agreed.
    A ping in his head. Morning meal formation is in five minutes . Tom was caught off guard by the sudden notice, plastered there in his brain like one of his own thoughts. The other boys in the room responded to the same notice. They all jumped to their feet. Beamer didn’t stay there long. He keeled right over again. Yuri caught him before he hit the ground.
    “Ready?” Vik said to Tom.
    Tom nodded eagerly, ignoring the butterflies fluttering inside him. “Ready.”
    Yuri hauled Beamer up from the floor and hoisted him over one broad shoulder for the trudge down Alexander Division’s corridor to the elevator. He hummed merrily the whole way.
    “I can walk,” Beamer protested blearily.
    “You said that last time, and then you bopped your head,” Yuri told him. “This is no trouble, Stefan.”
    Beamer raised his bleary head, and squinted back at Tom. “Huh. New guy doesn’t have any achievements.”
    That stupid profile.
    Vik sidled up to Tom. “Told you that would get annoying. Want it changed or not?”
    “You said there’s a girl who can do that?”
    “Wyatt Enslow,” Vik answered. “It’ll take some doing, but I can talk her into it.”
    “Why does he think I’m Timothy Rodale?” Tom nodded toward Yuri’s large back.
    Vik spoke in a normal tone of voice as though Yuri couldn’t hear them: “Well, there’s never been an official explanation for it, but Yuri’s scrambled. Something’s wrong with his software, and none of the officers want to fix it, which makes us think he’s scrambled deliberately. We figure the military thinks Yuri’s a spy, and they couldn’t keep him out of the Spire because he has family connections, so they admitted him and then planted a worm in his neural processor’s software so he can’t hear anything classified.”
    Tom glanced at Yuri’s wide back, but Yuri hummed and showed no signs of having heard them. “ His neural processor distorts the info he hears?”
    “Exactly. From what Beamer and I have figured, he seems to understand the basics of the Spire, but not our identities, IPs, strategies, or anything that might compromise the war effort. His processor’s rigged so he doesn’t hear our real names if someone mentions them. And forget confidential info. I’ll show him some code from Programming, for instance, and he’ll look at it and know just what it is, then remember it all wrong. You know how we’re talking about him right now literally five feet behind him? Yeah, the processor’s interpreting it as something else entirely, I bet.”
    “Seriously?” Tom was both impressed and disturbed. This was one thing he hadn’t even thought about. He should have realized having a computer in his brain made him susceptible to misprogramming like a computer. “Vik, if they mess with Yuri’s software, how do you know they can’t do something with ours?”
    Vik shot him a creepy, unsettling grin, and his eyes gleamed like a madman’s. “Why, Tom, we don’t.”
    “That’s reassuring. Thanks.”
    “Anytime, pal. It’s what I’m here for.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    T HE P ATTON M ESS Hall was already crowded. Meal trays sat at each place on the rectangular tables. Tom looked over the crowd, identifying the division insignias on the arms: a quill for Machiavellis, an ax for Genghises, a sword for Alexanders, a musket for Napoleons, and a catapult for Hannibals.
    Vik elbowed him, then nodded for him to follow. They headed toward what Tom’s neural processor identified as the Hannibal female plebe table. The girls all sat at one end of the table, talking to one another and ignoring a tall, gawky girl with flat brown hair sitting alone at the other end, her shoulders hunched, eyes darting furtively between the other girls and her