Then her face goes milk white. Her eyes roll back. Her legs give way like their bones have been crushed within her flesh.
She collapses hard on the floor, her head cracking with a horrifying sound. She lies there in a sickening, wrong way, and I’m reminded of the way I’d seen Tremaine fall to the ground, the spray of blood against the wall.
At the same time, the node that was her mind’s palette flashes a brilliant, blinding white—then vanishes, deleted from the restof the algorithm. The links to it snap back into place with other nodes, as if Taylor’s mind were never there. The command had instantly forced her brain to shut itself down.
She’s dead.
My mind is a blank slate, with only a single thought coming in through my shock.
Hideo killed her with a single command.
This is supposed to be the one thing that the algorithm was designed to protect against—it was supposed to cure humanity of impulsive violence, of inflicting pain and suffering on anyone else.
Yet in this single moment, in his rage, for everything she had done to his brother, everything she threatened to do to me... Hideo disproved everything he worked for.
Jax looks stunned. But Zero...
Zero turns to face Hideo. There is nothing on his face except for an icy smile. He isn’t shocked at all. He nods his head, like everything just went according to his plans.
He lifts a hand, waves it once, and brings up a bit of code I’ve never seen before. This is not the virus he had shown me. Before Hideo can react, Zero installs it into the algorithm.
The web of nodes around us shakes—and then, right before my eyes, the colors change, the millions of nodes of blues and reds and greens shifting, one by one, into black. It sweeps across them in a tidal wave. It reaches Hideo and, in an instant, severs his control of the algorithm.
Zero’s helmet folds back up, shielding his face from view once again. Then the algorithm shifts into placewith him.
I realize what has happened before anyone can say it.
Zero had no plans to destroy the algorithm. He has insteadmergedwith it. I watch in horror as the new algorithm solidifies with Zero at the center of it.
His artificial mind had managed to evolve, to circumvent Taylor’s control, and he had been developing it independently all along behind her back.
Hideo tries to wrestle his control back—but it’s too late. He has been cut entirely from his creation.
One look at Jax’s face tells me that Zero’s plan had never been the same as Taylor’s. He had never intended for her to take control of the algorithm or even to potentially destroy it, and his goal had never been to stop only Hideo from using the NeuroLink to control people.
He had done this solely to take control of the NeuroLink and the algorithm. He knew. He’d guessed that if Hideo saw Taylor, he would kill her himself. It’s the whole reason why he let me reconnect with Hideo in the first place, why he concocted this plan for me to cozy up to Hideo and persuade him to show me his algorithm. It’s probably why no one ever caught me doing what I was doing, because Zero knew and wanted me to go through with all my plans.
And that means, I realize, that Zero had alwayswantedTaylor dead. She had tortured his mind so severely that she had molded him into the same monster she became.
In one move, Zero has gotten rid of the person who took his life, has forced Hideo to show the folly of his algorithm, and has taken control. In one move, he has gained the most powerful instrument in the world.
My shock is reflected in the faces of Hideo and Jax. What have we done?
The cube.The virus I have. This is still the only moment whenI have a chance to break into Zero’s mind. I could hack him. I lunge forward, aiming to sync the cube into his account. It flashes a blinding blue-white.
But I’m too late.
Zero turns to look at me. “Thank you, Emika,” he says.
I don’t know what happens next, because everything goes black.
27
Sounds and sensationsaround me flicker in and out: Jax shouting at me, a din of voices I don’t recognize, and then the feeling of floating in midair. Maybe the shock is too much. Maybe Zero had uttered a command that killed me, and I just don’t know that I’m dead.
My dreams—they must be dreams, because they make no sense—are sharp and strange, switching abruptly from one scene to the next. There’s a small boy wearing a blue scarf, and I’m chasing after him, trying in vain to tell him to turn around. I’m a child again, holding Dad’s hand as we walk together through Central Park. Today he looks sophisticated, his hair smoothed into a slick shine and his jeans and black shirt switched out for a well-tailored blazer and trousers. We’ve gotten out of an afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall, and he’s in a bright mood, singing an off-key rendition of the concert piece as I twirl in a tulle dress. I want to lean into the familiarity of it, the loudness and the sheer joy.
He points out something in the distance, and I rise up on my toes to look at what it might be. There’s a dark spot in front of us, right on the park’s path, like a paint streak. When I stare at it longer, it starts to grow, expanding until it soaks the path and covers everything around us.
