Shadow of the Hegemon, the - Book 2 (Ender)

reaching for a weapon under his coat, but he was shot twice and slumped over dead without touching it.
    The door from the cab opened the rest of the way. It was Achilles standing there, holding the gun in his hand. He said something.
    "I can't hear you," said Petra. "I can't even hear my own voice."
    Achilles shrugged. Speaking louder and mouthing the words carefully, he tried again. She refused to look at him.
    "I'm not going to try to listen to you," she said, "while I still have his blood all over me."
    Achilles set down the gun-far out of her reach-and pulled off his shirt. Barechested, he handed it to her, and when she refused to take it, he started wiping her face with it until she snatched it out of his hands and did the job herself.
    The ringing in her ears was fading, too. "I'm surprised you didn't wait to kill them until you'd had a chance to tell them how smart you are," said Petra.
    "I didn't need to," said Achilles. "You already told them how dumb they were."
    "Oh, you were listening?"
    "Of course the compartment back here was wired for sound," said Achilles. "And video."
    "You didn't have to kill them," said Petra.
    "That guy was going for his gun," said Achilles.
    "Only after his friend was dead."
    "Come now," said Achilles. "I thought Ender's whole method was the preemptive use of ultimate force. I only do what I learned from your hero."
    "I'm surprised you did this one yourself," said Petra.
    "What do you mean, 'this one'?" said Achilles.
    "I assumed you were stopping the other rescues, too."
    "You forget," said Achilles, "I've already had months to evaluate you. Why keep the others, when I can have the best?"
    11 Are you flirting with me?" She said it with as much disdain as she could muster. Those words usually worked to shut down a boy who was being smug. But he only laughed.
    "I don't flirt," he said.
    "I forgot," said Petra. "You shoot first, and then flirting isn't necessary."
    That got to him a little-made him pause a moment, brought the slightest hint of a quickening of breath. It occurred to Petra that her mouth was indeed going to get her killed. She had never actually seen someone get shot before, except in movies and vids. Just because she thought of herself as the protagonist of this biographical vid she was trapped in didn't mean she was safe. For all she knew, Achilles meant to kill her, too.
    Or did he? Could he have really meant that she was the only one of the team he was keeping? Vlad would be so disappointed.
    "How did you happen to choose me?" she asked, changing the
    "Like I said, you're the best."
    "That is such kuso," said Petra. "The exercises I did for you weren't any better than anyone else's."
    "Oh, those battle plans, those were just to keep you busy while the real tests were going on. Or rather, to make you think you were keeping us busy."
    "What was this real test, then, since I supposedly succeeded at it better than anyone else?"
    "Your little dragon drawing," said Achilles.
    She could feel the blood drain from her face. He saw it and laughed.
    "Don't worry," said Achilles. "You won't be punished. That was the test, to see which of you would succeed in getting a message outside."
    "And my prize is staying with you?" She said it with all the disgust she could put in her voice.
    "Your prize," said Achilles, "is staying alive."
    She felt sick at heart. "Even you wouldn't kill all the others, for no reason."
    "If they're killed, there's a reason. If there's a reason, they'll be killed. No, we suspected that your dragon drawing would have some meaning to someone. But we couldn't find a code in it."
    "There wasn't a code in it," said Petra.
    "Oh yes there was," said Achilles. "You somehow encoded it in such a way that someone was able to recognize it and decode it. I know this because the news stories that suddenly appeared, triggering this whole crisis, had some specific information that was more or less correct. One of the messages you guys tried to send must have gotten through. So we went back over every email sent by every one of you, and the only thing that couldn't be accounted for was your dragon clip art."
    "If you can read a message in that," said Petra, "then you're smarter than I am."
    "On the contrary," said Achilles. "You're smarter than I am, at least about strategy and tactics-like evading the enemy while keeping in close communication with allies. Well, not all that close, since it took them so long to publish the information you sent."
    "You bet on the