Dad pauses, afraid, his hand gripping mine tighter. When I look around me, the park is gone, and in its place is the Dark World, the towering nonsense skyscrapers reaching up into a black sky, the crooked dark streets and the neon red lights of exposed names hovering over us.
Wake up, Emika Chen.
An amused voice tugs me gradually out of the darkness.
When everything comes back into view, I’m in a dimly lit room with a white ceiling and floor. Tall glass windowpanes line every wall.
This is the room where I saw Jax shoot Tremaine.
We’re back at the Innovation Institute, only now I’m on the other side of the glass. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m strapped down tightly to a chair, and another moment to notice the figure standing several feet away from me.
Of course the voice had belonged to Zero. He’s shielded behind his armor, and when he glances casually over his shoulder at me, I see that his face is masked behind virtual steel and glass. His hands are tucked easily behind his back, his chin tilted in thoughtful curiosity. It’s such a Hideo-like gesture.
A note of fear cuts through my foggy mind.Hideo. Where is he? Is he here? Is he okay?
“What happened?” I say. My words still sound a little out of place, slower than my thoughts are coming to me.
“Stay still,” Zero says, his voice echoing in the space.
Nearby, a girl with short, silver-white hair has her back turnedto me as she pulls containers of lenses off a shelf and places them on a counter.
Jax.The name floats up to the surface of my groggy mind. Jax, who had been working with me. I watch her, wanting to scream. What if she has been in on it all along? Has played me for a fool? Hadn’t she shot Tremaine without a second thought? What made me think that she could possibly be trustworthy?
She turns around now, so that I can see her face, and takes a box of lenses to the sink. There’s something off about the way she glides from one activity to the next, as if she were on autopilot rather than conscious.
Zero must be controlling her, using the palette of his mind to move Jax—the girl he’d once loved, the one he’d given up his freedom to protect—around like a puppeteer would his marionette.
An icy claw grips my heart.
That means Zero must now be in control of everyone in the world who’d been using Hideo’s lenses, anyone who Hideo had originally connected to his algorithm.
Jax,I try to say, but my voice chokes, dry from hoarseness. Had I been screaming?
“I wiped your NeuroLink account clean and rebooted your connection,” Zero calls back to me as he walks toward the other side of the room. “It’s updating, and it will go more smoothly for you if you let yourself relax. This isn’t something you’d want to glitch, Emika.”
Central Park. My father. The boy with the blue scarf. What I thought were dreams were probably just a mash-up of all of my Memories and saved recordings, jumbled into a fray as they were deleted from my account.
And what I thought was me passing out—the darkness that had engulfed me—was actually Zero powering off my NeuroLink,so that all I could see in my view was a black field. Everything I had—my level, my Warcross account, everything in it—is all gone, downloaded into some external place I can’t access.
This isn’t something you’d want to glitch, Emika.
“What do you mean?” I finally croak out through my disorientation. “What kind of glitch? What are you doing to me?”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he replies. “Your lenses—and your connection to me—are just not as stable as I’d expect, given how much control I have over everyone else. I think you may have broken something when you launched the hack against me.”
The cube I’d used. A vague recollection of the moment comes back to me now, splintered and blurry, the brilliant blue-white flash followed by suffocating darkness. It hadn’t worked... I don’t have a pathway into Zero’s mind. Not that I can see.
But if I’m supposed to be completely under Zero’s control... then I don’t quite feel that, either. Something about the hack colliding with Zero’s mind must have altered my lenses, preventing me from being properly connected to him.
That’s what Jax must be doing right now—preparing new lenses to give me, replacing mine and finally, properly, connecting me to Zero and the algorithm so that he can have full control.
I struggle against my bonds, but they’re strapped so tightly that I can’t do anything more than wriggle my arms and legs by a fraction.I have to get out of here.
Zero pauses on the other side of the room beside a second raised gurney, to which someone else is tied tightly. I pause in my struggles at the sight of him.
It’s Hideo.
He looks drugged and barely conscious, his head leaning against his headrest, and a light sheen of sweat gleams on his face. It’s a sharp contrast to the last moment when we’d stood together.When he’d lifted his hand, his eyes black with fury, andwilledTaylor to die.
