It’s the next morning, before training begins again in earnest, and Hideo’s virtual image is in my room, leaning forward in his office chair and resting his elbows on his desk. The single streak of silver in his hair catches some of the light filtering in from his windows. Beside him, Kenn is standing close to the deskwith his hands in his pockets in a way that tells me I’d interrupted a conversation they were having. He glances at me over his shoulder. Two bodyguards stand at attention behind them.
“Calling so soon with an update?” Kenn remarks. He glances back at Hideo. “Maybe you really did find your perfect bounty hunter.”
I try to feel professional in my bare feet and shredded black jeans. “You must’ve been busy since the opening ceremony party,” I say to Hideo. My eyes dart briefly to Kenn. “Am I interrupting some business?”
“You are the business,” Kenn replies. “We were just talking about you.”
“Oh.” I clear my throat. “Good things, I hope.”
Kenn grins. “I’d say so.” He pushes away from Hideo’s desk without explaining his words further. “I’ll leave you both to it, then. Have fun.”
Hideo exchanges a glance with Kenn. “We’ll pick up again in a bit.”
Kenn steps out of sight. Hideo watches him go, then gestures briefly at the door with one hand. Without a word, his two bodyguards bow their heads and head out of the room, leaving Hideo alone.
When they’re gone, he turns back to me. “I hope life has been pleasant since you took all the attention at the Wardraft.”
“I just figured that you’d instructed the Phoenix Riders to draft me first.”
“I didn’t tell anyone to make you the number one pick. Asher Wing did that on his own. You’re quite the commodity.”
So, Hideo hadn’t been involved in that, after all. “Well,” I say, “the Wardraft was interesting in more ways than one. Look what I found.” I bring up my screenshot from the Wardraft and hoverit between us. It rotates slowly, giving us a full view of the dome. The unmistakable shadow of the figure’s silhouette is perched prominently in the dome’s tangle of metal. Over his head is the word[null]. “On the day of the Wardraft, I saw someone watching from the Tokyo Dome’s rafters.”
This catches Hideo’s interest. He studies the screenshot, his eyes narrowing on the dark silhouette perched in the dome’s maze of beams. “How do you know it’s a he?”
“Oh, I know better than that. It’s Ren.”
Hideo’s stare darts from the screenshot over to me. “Renoir Thomas?”
I nod. “DJ Ren. A marker in the screenshot’s code pointed to him. Since then, I’ve hooked up all of the official players to my Warcross profile.” I pull up everyone’s accounts. “I may need to go through some of their Memories, see who else might be involved.”
Hideo’s gaze goes to the digital map I’ve created that shows where each of the Warcross players currently are. Most are in their dorms. A group of Andromedans are out in the city, while Asher has left the Riders’ dorm. Ren is still sitting in his room.
“You’re more dangerous than I thought,” Hideo muses, admiring my handiwork.
I offer him a smile. “I promise I’ll be nice to you.”
This time, I manage to coax a laugh from him. “Should I be even more concerned?” he says to me.
I let his question linger, and bring up Ren’s email. “I’ve been running a hack on Ren’s info,” I reply, pulling the email forward to hover between us as a dark, encrypted cube of data. “Found this yesterday, although I can’t seem to unlock it.”
Hideo scans the file once. Like me, his eyes go immediately to the red marker on the edge of the cube. “This was sent from the Dark World,” he says.
I nod. “And wrapped in a shield I don’t recognize.”
Hideo brings his hands slightly apart, then rotates the cube once. “I do,” he mutters. He expands his hands again. The cube grows larger, and as it does, he pulls one side of it so that I can see its surface in detail. I narrow my eyes at it. The surface is coated with an elaborate, winding series of endlessly repeating patterns.
“It’s called a fractal shield,” he explains. “A new variation on onion shields we’ve seen lately, except that the fractal shield’s layers loop endlessly, multiplying each time you burrow through a top layer. The more you try to break it open, the more secure it becomes. Your hacks will run in place forever without getting anywhere.”
No wonder I couldn’t break my way through it. “I’ve never seen this before.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to. This is mutated from security we developed inside Henka Games.”
I lean forward, my gaze running over the surface of the cube. “Can you break it?”
Hideo puts his hands against two surfaces of the cube. When he removes his hands, a copy of the top of the fractal shield floats above the cube. “An infinite shield requires an infinite key,” he says. “Something that multiplies at the same rate and type as the shield itself.”
“Every locked door has a key,” I murmur.
