“Have you made a decision about the operation?”

The question was just a touch too innocent. She had been waiting for it, and was only surprised that it had taken so long to arrive.

“First, I want to see how I stack up.” She chose each word carefully. “Just me. No modifications. I’ve been working on some noninvasive techniques of my own, and I’m hoping.”

“Hope,” he laughed. “I remember hope.”

“It’s alive and well.”

“And living in obscurity.”

He pulled up to her dormitory, a three-tiered beige cube. Only a pink and blue trim of hyacinths around the base gave it any semblance of grace. “We’ll have a general meeting in about forty minutes.”

“I’ll be there. And thanks.”

“Thank you,” he said. Something that might have been pride flitted across that ruined face. “Thanks for asking for me.”

“You’re the best I could find, Abner. You were one of the greats.”

“I’m also a dinosaur looking for a tar pit. Some people don’t want me here. Maybe they don’t want to be reminded.” He ran thin fingers through thinner hair. “Anyway. Welcome to the death camp.”

She slid her rucksack out of the back seat, then leaned her head in. “Abner?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t resent it, do you?”

“I knew what I was doing, Jillian. Just..

“What?”

Abner seemed to fight with himself, deciding how much of himself to share. “Well, I had two silvers and a bronze. The guy who beat me in academics delivered a paper on the relationship between illiteracy and crime. He claimed we could cut the crime rate by thirty percent just by rearranging the educational priorities in grade school. He took gold, that’s how impressed they were.”

“That must have hurt.”

“That didn’t.” Some vast and distant pain floated behind his eyes. “The Olympiad is about finding the best and harvesting their knowledge and their genes. What hurt is that he was wrong. He had to have been wrong, because they never used it.”