Wildcard

  Hideo reaches the door and shoves it open. We hurry inside. The last thing I see when I look back are the countless determined faces heading toward us. Then I slam the door shut, sealing them out.

  I’m trembling all over. Hammie’s gone. Asher’s gone. And if we don’t get to the end of this soon, if we don’t restore Zero’s mind to Sasuke’s, they may never come back.

  After the strange, wordless bustle of the Shibuya illusion, this street looks calm and quiet and dim, lit only with streetlights and the occasional stripe of golden yellow light streaming out from homes.

  It’s the street where Hideo’s parents live, but everything looks different at night, and a subtle mist floats around us.

  Hideo’s breath fogs in the air as he stares at the house. “This is before Dad planted the spruce in the front yard,” he says in a soft voice. “The door’s a different color, too.”

  I remember that. When I’d visited his home, the door had been painted a deep red, but in the Memory Hideo had once shown me of his younger self sprinting back home, the door had been blue. That’s the color it is here.

  Hideo hesitates, as if he were afraid to walk closer. This is a nightmare that he’s trapped in, just like how Zero had once used my worst memory against me.

  Roshan starts walking toward the house. “Emi,” he says quietly, “you and Hideo stay back. I have my shields; it’ll be safer for you both that way. No doubt there are security bots here, too.”

  Hideo shakes his head once and steps in front. “Watch Emi,” he replies, then sweeps a hand across the scene. A menu grid appears. “I’m such an integral part of this scene that I’ll blend in easily. Zero’s not going to find me.”

  We head up to the house. As we draw near, I can hear the sound of muffled voices in the house, the recognizable hum of Hideo’s mother and the lower rumble of his father. Hideo approaches the home, opens the door, and leads us in.

  It’s a warm, comforting space, as neat and tidy as I remember it—except without the sculptures that Hideo’s father would later make in remembrance of Sasuke. In fact, there are still photos of Sasuke on all the walls, portraits of him with Hideo and with his parents. This must be a memory from when he was still back home.

  “Hideo-kun!”

  We turn in unison at the sound of Hideo’s mother bustling into the room. She looks startlingly different from how I’d seen her in person—here, she looks like the original sun instead of the shadow, with a straight back and a sharp gleam in her eyes, her smile cheerful and energetic. There’s something painful in seeing her this way, before Sasuke disappeared.

  Beside me, Hideo makes an instinctive move toward her before he forces himself to stop. His hands bundle into fists at his side. He knows this isn’t real.

  The floor beneath us shudders for a moment. Roshan braces himself against the wall before exchanging a wary look with Hideo. Already, Hideo’s motioning for us to back up.

  Hideo’s mother pauses with a frown at the sight of her son hesitating. “What’s the matter?” she says as I read the translation. She glances back in the kitchen and motions for someone to come out. “Come help your brother.”

  I blink. When I do, Hideo’s mother is gone, as if she’d never been there in the first place. Hideo stares back as the person who emerges from the kitchen isn’t Sasuke—but Zero. His black armor glints in the low light as he tilts his head slightly at us. Beneath us, the ground trembles harder.

  He looks straight at Roshan, then Hideo, then me. “There you all are,” he says, his voice deep and cold.

  He shouldn’t be able to see us behind our encryption unless he touches us—we’re supposed to be invisible to him. But there he is, or some shell of him, or a proxy. Whatever he is, he knows we’re here.

  “The house,” Hideo suddenly murmurs at the same time I realize it. This time, the trap had been the entire house, and all three of us had been exposed the instant we stepped inside.

  Zero turns his attention to his brother. Then, he lunges.

  Roshan moves even before I can. He brings his forearms up in a cross, and a glowing blue shield arcs protectively before him and Hideo. Zero clashes against it—the force of it splits the shield cleanly in half. Zero seizes Roshan by the neck and slams him against the wall.

  Roshan lets out a gasp as he struggles. I lunge toward them to pull Zero off, but Hideo grabs my wrist. “Sasuke,” he says in a hoarse, furious shout. “Stop this.”

  Zero glances back at Hideo. “I know why you’re in here. I know what you’re looking for.” He drops Roshan, who crumples to the ground as he holds his throat.

  I rush to his side, but Roshan’s hand flies up, warning me to stay away. Already, he’s slowing down, his eyes turning blank and emotionless. His hand slowly drops back to his side. As it happens, the world around me flickers briefly with a memory.

  It’s of Roshan waiting inside a hospital room where Tremaine is resting, hooked up to a bunch of wires. Roshan is leaning his head into his hands, his elbows sinking into the bed. Looped around one of his hands are his prayer beads, and now he’s running his thumb across each turquoise sphere unconsciously. His dark curls are a wild mess, the evidence of his fingers raking anxiously through them.

  My gaze goes to Tremaine. His wound is as I remember it, his head still wrapped in thick layers of gauze. Nearby in the adjoining waiting room, the other Riders and Demons are finally calling it a night and heading out into the stairwell exit.

  This memory is from the evening after I left the hospital, when I went to see Hideo.

  The room’s quiet, except for the regular beeping pulse from a monitor. When I look closer at Roshan, I notice he’s clutching a crumpled piece of paper in one fist. It’s a list of hastily scribbled dates, all set for a couple of days from now, one after another—follow-up appointments and an additional surgery and physical therapy. Maybe they’re treatment benchmarks for Tremaine to hit, dates when Roshan plans on being here in the room.

  At first, I think Tremaine is still unconscious—but then his mouth shifts a little, his lips peeling open in their cracked state. Roshan looks up from his hands to meet Tremaine’s gaze from under his heavy bandages. The two stare at each other, then exchange a wry smile. Now I can see how puffy and swollen Roshan’s eyes are, and the dark circles underneath them.

  “You’re still here,” Tremaine croaks out.

  “Leaving any minute,” Roshan replies, even though I can tell he doesn’t mean it. “These chairs are the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever sat on.”

  “You and your sensitive ass.” In spite of everything, Tremaine still has the ability to roll his eyes. “You used to complain about my bed back in the Riders’ dorms, too.”

  “Yeah, it sucked. If there was ever a reason for you to leave the Riders, it was because of that damn bed.”

  There’s a pause. “Where’s Kento?” Tremaine finally asks.

  At that, Roshan sits back, his prayer beads sliding back down onto his wrist. “Flying to Seoul with two of his teammates,” he replies. “He needs to be back in time for a parade in their honor. He sends his best.”

  Tremaine doesn’t follow that statement up with anything other than a cough, which makes him squeeze his eyelids together in pain. After another long silence, Roshan leans his elbows back on the bed. “Emi told you to stay away from that institute’s files,” he says.

  “It wasn’t my hacking that exposed me,” Tremaine replies. “I stumbled against a stupid plant in that hall, and the vase tipped over and broke. Shit happens.”

  “Yeah, well, you can only handle a hole in your head so many times before you don’t make it through.” Roshan furrows his brow and looks down again. He doesn’t speak, but I can feel the burn of his anger in his clenched jaw, his hands clasped tightly together.

  “What are you thinking?” Tremaine says in a quiet voice.

  Roshan shakes his head
. “I’m thinking that I’m sorry,” he replies.

  “Why the hell are you sorry?”

  “For asking you to help Emi out in the first place. I was worried she’d go off on her own again, keep everything to herself. I shouldn’t have put the idea in your head.”

  Tremaine lets out his breath in a huff. “If you didn’t say it, I would’ve done it anyway. You think a hunter’s going to stay away from the chase of a lifetime? Come on, now. Don’t give yourself so much credit.”

  Roshan’s eyes are moist again, and he hurriedly rubs a hand once across his face. “You really want to know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking about how everyone else has already left and here I am, still at your bedside like some kind of idiot. The doctors said you’ve already stabilized; they told me to go home. What am I waiting around for? I don’t know.”

  Tremaine just looks back at him. I can’t tell what’s flitting through his pale eyes, but when he speaks, he can’t meet Roshan’s gaze. “Know what I’m really thinking?” he mutters. “I’m thinking about how, if you were the one lying in this bed instead of me, your entire family would be in here. Your brother and his duchess of a wife and their baby. Your sister. Your mother and your father. All your cousins and nephews and nieces, every single last one of them. There wouldn’t be any space left. They would have flown in together on a private plane and they would be packed in here, waiting and worrying until you could walk out the door.”

  He hesitates, as if afraid to go on. “I know you’re with Kento now. I know he’s better than me in every way. But I’m thinking that, even though there’s no one in my family willing to wait around for me, even though you’re the only one in here, I couldn’t care less, because you might as well be the entire damn world.”

  He grimaces in the silence afterward, his expression embarrassed. “See, here’s the moment after my speech when I’d like to either go right up to you or leave the room in a grand finale, except I’m kind of tied down to this stupid bed, so now it’s just awkward. You know what? Forget what I said. It was only—”

  Roshan reaches out, takes Tremaine’s hand in his, and squeezes it tight. He doesn’t say a word for a long moment, but somehow, this contented silence seems like just the right thing to hear.

  “You know, I’m not over you,” Roshan finally murmurs.

  “I’m not either,” Tremaine replies. He turns his head slightly, all he can manage, and closes his eyes as Roshan leans down to kiss him.

  The memory vanishes, as if everything I’d just seen had happened in the space of a second. Roshan stays seated against the wall with his eyes staring vacantly forward.

  Zero already knows what we’re doing and where we’re trying to go. He’d even planted this false endpoint here, had used this game against us in order to hunt us down. He knew Hideo would come here, back to their old home.

  My head jerks back up to Zero, my eyes narrowed in anger. He just looks at me through his opaque helmet, studying me quietly before turning his attention back to Hideo. To my surprise, though, he doesn’t touch Hideo.

  Instead, he turns toward me and lunges.

  Hideo darts for me. He reaches me before Zero can, clenches his jaw, and crouches before me, ready to attack his brother. Zero halts before Hideo can reach him. Again, he seems to shy away from Hideo, as if making contact with him might have the same poisonous effect as Zero’s mind controlling any one of us.

  “Touch her, and I’ll kill you,” Hideo growls.

  “You won’t kill Sasuke,” Zero replies in a cool voice.

  “You’re not Sasuke.”

  The ground beneath us cracks more. I lose my balance and fall to my knees. Before my eyes, a huge line divides the entire floor. I try to scramble to my feet and throw myself at Zero, one last-ditch attempt to get to him.

  But it’s too late. The floor gives way, and all of us fall into darkness.

  31

  I have no idea where we are. The darkness is all-consuming, and the only thing I can hear is the sound of Hideo’s breathing coming from somewhere near me. His breaths are hoarse now, and when he speaks, he sounds weaker.

  “Hideo?” I whisper, then say his name louder. “Hideo?”

  He doesn’t respond right away. For a frightening moment, I think that Zero has somehow gotten to him, too, and that my new theory is completely wrong. Hideo’s going to stop speaking. He might already be staring emotionless into space within this darkness.

  Or maybe, in real life, he’s dying. Bleeding out. We’re both trapped inside this panic room with Zero’s guards outside our door. At any moment, they could break in and seize us, and I’d feel rough hands grabbing my arms and dragging me to my feet. I’d feel the cold barrel of a real gun pressed to my head.

  Then Hideo whispers something. “Emika.”

  All I can do is whisper back. “I’m here.”

  He lets out a breath that sounds like relief. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I should have known he’d set a trap for us in the one place where he knew I’d take us.”

  Gradually, the overwhelming darkness around us lightens. At first, I can see only the ground right beneath my own feet. It looks like cracked cement. Then, faint silhouettes around us transform from simple shapes into skeleton trees, and dark walls materialize into soaring buildings. My gaze travels higher and higher as the world comes into view.

  It looks like a half-finished city.

  Skyscrapers with empty interiors, devoid of light. Streets full of broken pavement. The streets are a ghost version of Tokyo, without the crowds of people I’d seen in the earlier illusion of Shibuya. Neon signs hang unlit from the sides of malls and shops. The buildings have windows, but through the glass, I see only empty rooms with peeling walls. Paintings on the walls are unfinished. When I look more closely at them, I can see that they depict pieces of scenes from Zero’s old life. There’s a frame that seems like part of their old home, except it looks like a rough sketch with a few daubs of paint on it. There’s a portrait of a family, but no faces are filled in.

  This is the very center of Zero’s mind—a hollowed-out version of Sasuke’s memories, a million fragments of pieces with their hearts ripped out.

  Zero materializes before us now, his dark figure nearly invisible against the backdrop, his face hidden and impenetrable. As he appears, so do dozens—hundreds—of his security bots, all standing on the ledges of buildings and rooftops and street corners, silently watching us.

  “You’re wasting your time,” Zero says with a sigh. His voice echoes in the space.

  “If you’re so sure of that, then why are you here to stop us?” I reply.

  His head cocks slightly to one side in a mocking gesture, then he ignores me, and turns his attention to Hideo. “Is it ironic,” he asks, “to see your creation in the hands of someone else? Did you really think it would always be under your control?”

  I can practically see his words hit Hideo clean in the chest. Hideo winces, his eyes still fixed on the armored figure that bears the voice of his brother. “Sasuke, please,” he says.

  Zero takes a step toward us. The world trembles at his movement. “You’re looking for someone who no longer exists.”

  Hideo stares at him, searching desperately. “You may not be who you once were, but you’re still molded from my brother. You know my name, and you know who did this to you. I have to believe that a part of you remembers.” His voice turns hoarse. “The park where we used to play. The games you used to make up. Do you still remember the blue scarf I gave you, the one I used to wrap around your neck?”

  Zero’s posture stiffens, but when he speaks again, his voice doesn’t change. “Is that a challenge?”

  As he says this, the world trembles again—and then scarlet and sapphire gems appear everywhere, hovering in the air like marbled power-ups, their surfaces reflecting the landscape around them. His bots surrounding us tense, their faces t
urned in our direction as if ready to attack.

  A chill runs through me. Sasuke’s hand can be seen here, too—there’s no other reason for Zero to bother playing this game with us. But his hold seems to be weakening as Zero’s bots continue to grow in number.

  A deafening sound roars around us. I look over to Hideo, who has moved into a crouch, too, his hands balled into fists. Under our feet, the floor has transformed into a living thing, a moving block of concrete parts that open and close like jaws, and every time they move, they expose shafts of red light from somewhere within.

  It’s not real. I remind myself, the way I do every time I step into a Warcross world—but this time, it’s not wholly true. We’re not just in some random virtual place. We’re standing inside the most powerful mind in the world.

  There’s a second of unbearable silence.

  Then, all the bots rush at us with impossible speed.

  Every instinct in me rears up. I reach for my last stick of dynamite and hurl it right in front of us. It explodes, throwing back our attackers in a huge arc. But behind them are hundreds more. Thousands. They race toward us.

  We don’t have a chance. But I still loop a quick noose into the rope of my cable launcher and throw it to Hideo—he catches it without so much as glancing at me. He tosses it high up in the air, where the hooked end of the cable launcher lassos around a streetlight, then yanks himself up right as the bots close in on him.

  I’m sprinting in the opposite direction. As the first bot nears and makes a lunge for me, I twist out of his coming grasp and sprint for the closest building. I reach it, wedge my boot against the windowsill, and clamber up it until I get to the second-story ledge. There, I manage to pull myself up onto the awning.

  Zero’s there, waiting for me. He slams his fist into one of the two poles holding the awning up. The pole explodes into tiny pieces. I’m thrown off balance and back to the ground, right as Zero grabs down for my neck.

  Hideo’s here before I can register him. He lunges out as Zero lands, throwing his own fist at Zero, but Zero dodges easily. He unleashes a scarlet gem against Hideo—light bursts from his hand. Hideo goes flying, hitting his back hard against a wall.