Tremaine shakes his head vigorously. His cheeks gleam wet under the light.
I can’t swallow. Any sound around me has now faded completely away behind the roar of blood in my ears, and the edges of my vision blur. No wonder Tremaine hadn’t responded to any of my messages tonight. He came here after all—and they’d known, maybe had even been waiting for him.
Taylor’s words rush back at me.And is that all you did tonight? I’m trying to warn you.I half expect her to step in and help him out, protect him from Jax and Zero. But she stays where she stands, screens still hovering around her.
They must have found out Tremaine was the one behind the hack into the institute’s files, that he had passed along the information—maybe even that he’d given it to me. How did they find out?
Through me. Maybe they were spying on our conversations; they’ve hacked into my accounts.Or they might have traced something Tremaine accidentally left behind.
Suddenly I feel a tidal wave of nausea—it’s the same feeling I have when I know danger is creeping forward, and all I want to do is push everyone else away from me so it can’t hook into any of them.
Tremaine has turned his face up to Zero now. Even in his terror, I can see the recognition registering on him—he’s never met Zero before, but he knows who he is. Jax leans down and removes Tremaine’s gag. Zero asks him something, but Tremaine’s lips don’t move to respond. All he does is stay silent. Jax’s shoulders shift as she sighs. Zero takes a step forward, but Jax shakes her head and holds a hand up.
Let me,she seems to be saying.
She takes her hands off Tremaine’s shoulder and stands back. The terror in me reaches a fever pitch. Everything around me seems to fade away as Jax pulls her gun from her holster and pulls it back with a click.
This should be the part when I scream something out, where one word from me makes everyone stop and look in my direction.
But instead, I can’t utter a sound. Jax points the gun straight down at Tremaine’s forehead. She fires a single shot.
Tremaine’s body jerks. He crumples to the floor.
My hands clamp over my mouth to keep me from letting out a cry. The shot rings in my ears.
The kill I’d once seen Jax make now comes back to me in a wave, and I double over, hunching against the wall as I try to brace myself against the onslaught of the memory.
We believe that there are too many people in the world who go unpunished for committing terrible crimes.
Those were Taylor’s words that had ultimately persuaded me to join the Blackcoats. She had told me they fought for causes they believed in. Their actions were justified because she—they all—feared what Hideo was capable of.
But in a single moment, every positive thing I ever thought about the Blackcoats, every word they’d plied me with, vanishes. Tremaine was alive just a second ago and now he’s dead, and it’s because of me.
Breathe.
Breathe.
But I can’t think straight. I can’t function in this moment except to crouch like some kind of coward, trembling uncontrollably against the wall. The glass room in front of me blurs and straightens. I think I see Taylor stepping back as two guards dragthe body away, another lingers behind to clean up the floor. Zero leans toward Jax to speak in a low voice, while Taylor tucks something into the hands of the other guards. No one looks concerned. It suddenly occurs to me that the guards here were paid to wait around and bring Tremaine’s body outside, so that they could drive it off somewhere. They were prepared to execute him.
My panic is cutting my breath short. I feel faint. The edges of my view are darkening, fading out, and I fight against it, the logical part of my mind telling me that if I collapse now,here, they’ll find me. And if they know I’ve seen all this, they won’t hesitate to do the exact same thing to me that they just did to Tremaine.
Jax looks bored—exasperatedwith that person who took up her time—she hadn’t even looked back at Tremaine’s body, which she’d left on the floor. How many has she killed this way?
The Blackcoats are murderers. Tremaine had warned me to stay away from them from the start—he’d only been here because he was looking out forme. And I’d gone ahead anyway. Now he’s dead. What if the Blackcoats are already out looking for me, having learned the connection between Tremaine and my work?
What have I done?
I can’t do this. I can’t stay here.I close my eyes and count, forcing myself to focus on the train of numbers in my head until they’re all I see. Hideo needs to know this. But what do I tell him? I don’t even understand everything I just saw. What is that robot that Zero had been commanding? And if he’s not here in person, where is he?
Get up, Emi.
I whisper the words over and over, until finally I unfreeze myself. I push my body off from the wall, rise from my crouch, and stumble back the way I came. Feverishly, I pull up my menus and set my maps for the hotel. I make my way far enough so that I’veleft the horrible room behind me and have reentered the soaring main lobby of the complex.
I swing my new board down toward the floor, ready to hop on it—but my hands are shaking so badly that I drop it with a clatter. I lunge in vain to catch it.
A click makes me whirl around. Jax is standing there, her pale skin stark against the black walls, her gun pointed directly at my head. Her gray eyes pierce through me.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she says.
