Sixteen
Rural Virginia
Late April brought a sudden warmth to the mountains, and the heat and clear skies drew every student at Valeran outside. They
sat on the lawn in small groups, stretching their legs and tipping back their heads, picking at the food they’d smuggled out
of the dining hall. The wind rustled the elm trees and carried their laughter through the air.
Julian sat alone, jacket spread out beneath him, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows and the face of his watch glinting in
the sun. He looked more at ease than he felt. In less than a month he had won his first simulation, climbed to second place
in the rankings, and established a positive reputation for himself at Valeran. When he caught the eyes of the other students
in the halls, they gave him deferential nods and appreciative smiles.
Yet his mind—seemingly as ever—was on Klaudia. He glanced solicitously around the lawn to see if he could spot her, but he
couldn’t. She was probably tucked in a corner of the library, head bent over her tablet and surrounded by a stack of books.
Julian tried to imagine her in the sunlight. He thought idly about how it would make her pale skin glow.
Admittedly, he had become the slightest bit obsessed. Just yesterday he had followed her up to the strategy classroom, keeping
a careful distance, and watched her through the window. She was alone with Professor Narendra, writing something on the chalkboard
that looked more like hieroglyphics than mathematical equations.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Klaudia to him was that she had so much stacked against her.
Her name, her gender, her looks. She was playing at an inherent disadvantage and she still managed to win cleanly, every single time.
And Julian, with all the privileges life had afforded him, couldn’t manage to beat her.
It felt wrong on some fundamental level.
This fact had spiraled him into an even deeper obsession. He stared at her during mealtimes whenever she wasn’t looking, always
briefly mesmerized by the way her tongue flickered over her lips when she spoke or how her dark curls turned glossy when they
caught the light. Even when she was not in front of him, he thought about her incessantly. Klaudia had successfully conquered
his mind.
Julian was considering these matters grimly when Mikhail suddenly dropped down onto the grass beside him.
“Working on your team?” he asked with a smile.
He hadn’t been. In fact, he was actively trying not to. Thymos had only become another arena in which Klaudia thoroughly confounded him. With Julian stuck with the other first
years, he hadn’t and would never be in a simulation with Klaudia again. They could continue winning against their peers and
only reinforce their rankings. Thymos should have been a welcome substitution—a proxy game. Once Mikhail had opened up PvP
mode, Julian had challenged her to a match immediately. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, he had been trounced.
“What’s the point?” Julian replied, sounding more surly than he’d intended. “Klaudia has already cracked the game.”
Her team was something of a sadistic booby trap. Unassuming at first, considering that it was built of seemingly mediocre
pieces with unimpressive statistics. But the way she piloted it was like a snake slowly strangling its prey.
The strategy consisted of two key pieces: Psycha, a humanoid creature dressed in a dark lace petticoat, eerily resembling a Gothic maiden.
Its ability, Spectral Trap, imprisoned all pieces on the field, disabling the switch-out mechanic.
The second piece, Marionette—with the appearance of a haunted doll—had a signature move called Ghostly Chorus.
When it used the move, all pieces on the field would be removed within three turns, unless they were switched out, which of course Psycha prevented.
Julian had tried everything. He had built a team of the strongest pieces, aiming to overwhelm her with damage. But Klaudia
had played carefully and defensively, slowing the pace of the game, and Julian hadn’t been able to knock out Psycha in time.
Raw power wasn’t enough—not in the face of such calculated and meticulous gameplay.
“You’ll figure it out,” Mikhail assured him.
“What about a balance patch?” Julian suggested hopefully. “You could nerf Psycha. . . .”
Mikhail grinned. “Where’s the fun in that?”
“There’s nothing fun about getting rolled by Ghostly Trap over and over again.” Julian had already given Klaudia’s strategy
an epithet. “You’ve tried playing her, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. And I got rolled, too.” Mikhail shook his head. “I did have another idea, though. I was thinking about sending the
game out to some other students. The neural net is already evolving. The more people who play the better the AI will get.”
Julian’s chest swelled. “So the AI will learn how to beat Ghostly Trap?”
“Ideally it will learn how to beat anything. Like a chess engine.”
“Then it sounds like a great plan,” said Julian, perhaps too emphatically. “Maybe someone else at Valeran can beat her.”
Mikhail gave him a look. “You wouldn’t like that. Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because you want to be the one to do it,” Mikhail said. “You’re not all that subtle, you know.”
Heat rose to Julian’s face. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Sighing, Mikhail just shook his head again. Julian, still flushing, quickly changed the subject.
After eating lunch with Mikhail, Julian climbed the stairs to the second floor of the main building. He was running over his
Thymos team in his mind, mentally adjusting stats and visualizing past games. It would have been easier to focus back in his
dorm room, but there was an advantage to being seen studying publicly. It strengthened the sense of camaraderie among him
in his fellow students. Despite the fact that he was wearing a $50,000 watch, he was just like them in the ways that mattered.
His campaign had taught him that, too. In lieu of typical in-person rallies, he had done livestreams on social media and gaming
apps. Letting his supporters play him in chess, letting them type their questions directly into the chat. It had made him
feel real. Relatable.
Not untouchable—as Klaudia strove to be. Her strategy was of another order entirely.
Admittedly, a small part of him was hoping he would see her in the reading room. He had learned from secretly following her
that it was one of her favorite haunts.
As Julian opened the door to the reading room, it was Klaudia he found there. But she wasn’t alone.
Carter Egan stood in the center of the room, his back to the unlit fireplace. Two of his lackeys, whose names Julian had never
bothered to learn, stood before him. Together, they had Klaudia pinned between them, her hair mussed and her lipstick smudged.
Julian’s blood turned to ice.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, crossing the room in brisk strides.
Carter turned slowly to face him. A languid smile stretched his lips thin. “I told you she needed to be put in her place. Since so far you’ve failed to do it, I’ve taken it upon myself instead.”
Klaudia struggled against the grip of Carter’s lackeys. All the coldness of her gaze, the set of her jaw—gone. Fear pulsed
behind her gray eyes, turning them shiny and wild, and her mouth opened with a stuttered sound of protest.
Julian felt like retching. “You hate her because she’s better than you, and whatever you do to her now won’t change that.”
But Carter didn’t bristle at the slight. Instead, he stepped forward and grasped the front of Klaudia’s blouse. With one swift
tug, he tore the fabric open. The buttons scattered all over the floor, exposing the white lace of her bra and the pale cleft
of her breasts.
Klaudia shrank back, trying to cover herself. Julian had to force himself not to look. His face was burning.
As he turned to Carter, his heart thumped with rising panic. He considered his options. Fighting? That was a nonstarter. The
only time he’d been bodychecked in lacrosse, he’d had his father write an incensed letter to Andover’s dean and the other
student had been suspended. He was bigger than Carter and both of his lackeys, but there were three of them.
But cleverness, maybe. Carter had all the transparent guile of a child, and the chip on his shoulder made him vulnerable.
“Dr. Iver sorts the professors’ reports and updates the rankings list himself,” Julian said. “You’re an idiot if you think
he’d reward you for assaulting his top student.”
“She won’t tell,” Carter said.
“She won’t,” Julian agreed. “But I will.”
Carter’s gaze flickered. “Crying foul over petty slights isn’t the way things work around here. You’ll look dishonorable.”
Julian almost laughed.
“I took bribes from a private prison magnate and used my constituents’ tax dollars to rent a private jet to Turks and Caicos,”
he said. “I don’t give a shit about looking dishonorable.”
Carter didn’t reply, but he didn’t make another move toward Klaudia. After a moment, he smiled again, slightly off-kilter
and more manic than before.
“Come on, Julian,” he said. “Don’t you want her?”
His cheeks grew white-hot. “What are you talking about?”
“We’ll hold her down for you,” Carter said.
Julian glanced down at Klaudia. Her chest heaved as she drew quick, panicked breaths, straining the lace of her bra. He felt
himself stiffen. He couldn’t help it. He turned his gaze pointedly away, digging his fingernails into his palms until blood
leaped to the surface.
“Leave her alone,” he said, straightening and setting eyes on Carter again. “Clearly you don’t understand the stakes of this
game. If I fail at Valeran, do you really think it’s the end for me? My father could pay my weight in hard cash without even
noticing his bank account had been bled. And even if my life amounts to nothing, I’ll get to drink myself to death with hundred-year-old
Macallan at a forty-acre estate in Martha’s Vineyard. Whereas you—I’m guessing that ‘drinking yourself to death’ is something
of a family tradition, only your father probably did it with cheap beer in some two-bedroom ranch in Worcester. If you fail
at Valeran, you will need a bailout, and to me it doesn’t look like you have the cash to spare.”
Carter’s face went pale. His lips quivered, but he didn’t speak a word. He took a step back, putting distance between himself
and Klaudia, and then nodded to his accomplices.
“Let’s go,” he said. “She isn’t worth the trouble.”
His lackeys released Klaudia’s arms, and the inertia sent her tumbling to the ground. Carter fled through the door, accomplices following. Only when all three were gone did Julian dare to look down at Klaudia.
She had pushed herself onto her knees and was grasping at the fabric of her torn blouse, trying to pull it closed over her
breasts. Julian took a tremulous step forward, extending his hand.
Klaudia ignored it, rising to her feet without his help.
“Are you okay?” he asked hoarsely. “Did they—”
“What are you doing here?” she bit out.
The angry quavering in her voice terrified him. Klaudia wasn’t supposed to quaver, and she wasn’t supposed to be angry, either.
It occurred to Julian, with a sense of horror, that maybe she thought he had been part of this, that he had helped Carter
stage it. The notion turned his stomach.
“I was just passing by,” he said. “I swear, I didn’t know. . . .”
Did she really suspect his involvement? No, Klaudia was too smart. She would have seen through him. But now her gray eyes
looked lit up from the inside with a kind of animal terror.
Not animal. Carter’s attack hadn’t made her weak; it was worse than that. It had made her human.
“I’m sorry,” Julian blurted. “Carter is disgusting and pathetic. . . .”
But he trailed off again. He hoped beyond hope that Klaudia hadn’t seen the fabric of his pants straining.
Klaudia’s eyes narrowed. Her shoulders went stiff and straight. She drew in a breath through her nose and it came out in a
cold exhale.
“Get out of my way,” she said.
Before he could move, she stepped briskly past, leaving enough distance between them that he scarcely felt the air shift.
When the door shut behind her, Julian sank into one of the armchairs. He was trembling with unspent adrenaline and a shaky
sort of rage. He put his fist against his forehead and bent over, squeezing his eyes shut.
But flashes of the scene kept returning to him. Carter’s leering smile. Klaudia’s wheeling gaze. Klaudia’s breasts heaving beneath her bra, Klaudia on her knees, Klaudia’s hair and lips—
Something crystallized in his mind, clear and bright, piercing the murk. It was a realization—stronger than that. It was a
resolution.
He never wanted to see Klaudia on her knees again. But if he wanted to win, if he wanted his name at the top of the list,
wouldn’t he have to be the one to knock her down? There was no soft landing for someone like Klaudia. Her position was more
precarious than even Julian had understood. The fact that she had made it this far was a testament to her brilliance.
And Julian knew, without really knowing her at all, that Klaudia Shimonova had been quite sure of the stakes all along.