Wildcard

  Hideo leaps up, kicking out against his brother’s shoulders. It forces Zero to release Hideo’s collar. Hideo lands lightly on his feet and rushes again at Zero. There’s a rage in his eyes that I remember from his boxing sessions, from the moment he first looked into Taylor’s eyes.

  I lunge at the closest power-up I can find. It’s a neon-yellow sphere. “Hideo!” I shout. He glances over to me for a brief moment. Then I unleash it.

  A blinding light swallows the entire space. Even through my closed lids and my outstretched hands, I want to squint against the brightness of it. It washes out everything around us into white.

  Zero pauses for a moment. He can’t be blinded by something like this, I don’t think, but he must be reacting to the overwhelming data wipe—as if everything in his view went temporarily blank.

  Then the light vanishes as quickly as it’d appeared. Hideo doesn’t waste the chance. He’s already dashing at Zero. Zero whips out an arm, seizing his brother, but Hideo takes advantage of the move and instead uses Zero’s weight against him—he kneels down and flips Zero over.

  Zero’s on his feet again in a split second, rolling off his back and leaping up in one fluid motion. He rushes toward Hideo, grabs him by the neck, and pins him against the wall.

  “You’re a fool for trying,” Zero says to him, his deep voice echoing around us and in my mind. He sounds amused, but beneath it all, there’s a churning rage—no, something else, something that sounds desperate. “Why don’t you go back home? You have all the money in the world now, don’t you? Leave this alone and take care of your parents.”

  Hideo grapples at the metallic hand locked around his neck and says nothing. He just stares hard into the opaque black helmet.

  I point one of my knives at him and throw as hard as I can.

  The knife slams into his helmet, shattering it.

  But Zero just vanishes, reappearing a few feet away from us. He looks completely undisturbed.

  “It’ll be easier for you this way, you know,” he says. “You don’t want to hurt your parents, do you? Your poor mother, slow and forgetful? Your father, sickly and frail? You don’t want any harm to come to them, do you?”

  And I realize that these aren’t Zero’s words at all. They’re Taylor’s—I can recognize them solely by the taunting questions. These are things she must have once said to Sasuke, threatening his family to keep him from running away.

  Hideo stares back at Zero with a clenched jaw. “You’re not going to hurt anyone,” he snarls. “Because you’re not real.”

  Somehow, Hideo’s not going blank like everyone else had—he’s still here, alert and conscious. He slams Zero down against the floor, striking him in the face.

  Zero vanishes, reappears again. I sprint for him, only to realize that he can just disappear again and again. How can I reach him and break through his armor to install Sasuke’s data into him? It’s impossible. I glance desperately over at Hideo as several of Zero’s bots reach him. A scream bubbles in my throat.

  To my surprise, though, they go around him. They don’t touch him at all. It’s as if they’re leaving Hideo for Zero to deal with himself.

  But in my confusion I let one bot get too close to me. I don’t react fast enough. His hand shoots out and seizes my wrist.

  I gasp. His grip feels so cold, like he’s made out of ice. Behind me comes Hideo’s shout. “Emika!”

  I twist around, my teeth clenched, and kick out at his black helmet. My boot smashes straight through the glass. He immediately vaporizes.

  I hold my wrist tightly. The ice of his touch lingers, burning straight through me and into my mind, and the edges of my vision blur a bit. I shake my head. The world around me shifts again as I run.

  I blink. Where am I? The city had looked like emptied Tokyo, but suddenly I see a layout of intersecting streets that I recognize as New York. I’m passing through Times Square now, except it’s not Times Square at all—none of its lights are lit, and no pedestrians crowd its streets. Right beside it is a glimpse of Central Park.

  That doesn’t make sense at all, I think to myself, as I race toward Zero. Sasuke has probably never been to New York before. The layout of it makes no sense either, as Central Park isn’t anywhere near Times Square.

  This is my home—my memories.

  I realize with a sickening lurch that Zero’s security bots have infiltrated my mind, as surely as he’d done with each of my teammates—that ice-cold grip on my wrist had been him seeping into my mind.

  I look wildly around for Hideo, ready to call out for him, but the entire world around me has now transformed into New York City. In Central Park, I see a figure walking. Hideo. Zero. I start running toward it.

  When I get closer, I stumble to a halt. The figure walking through the park isn’t Hideo or Zero at all. It’s my father.

  “Dad,” I whisper. He’s here, and I’m home.

  I start running toward his figure. It’s him, everything about him screams it—his suit perfectly tailored and his hair sleek and elegant from an afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall. He’s walking with a young girl in a tulle dress, singing her a concert piece. Even from here, I can hear notes of his humming, off-key and full of life, followed by the accompanying singing of the girl. I can almost smell the bag of sweet roasted peanuts he hands to her, feel the breeze swirling the leaves around them.

  Where had I been earlier? Some unfinished illusion of a city. But this? This is obviously real, and here.

  There’s a warning going off somewhere in me, trying to tell me that this isn’t quite right. But I shrug it off as I make my way closer to my dad and myself. It’s fall, so of course the leaves are drifting down, and my dad is still alive, so of course he’s walking hand in hand with me through the park. The sound of his bright laughter is so familiar that I feel an intense burst of joy. My steps quicken.

  They never seem to get any closer, though, no matter how fast I go. I break into a run, but my limbs feel like they’re dragging through molasses. The little warning in my mind continues relentlessly. This happened a long time ago, I gradually realize—the walk through the park, the sound of Dad’s laugh, the smell of roasted peanuts.

  This isn’t now.

  Too late, I start to remember what had happened to the others, the memories that had surrounded them the instant they were touched by Zero’s security bots and had their minds infiltrated. This isn’t real, and I’d fallen for the same trap. My breaths come in panicked gasps. Already, I can feel myself stalling, my thoughts having trouble grasping on to something. Somewhere in the distance is Hideo’s voice, calling for me.

  To have come all this way and done all this—just to fail here at the end, when we were so close. To leave this puzzle unfinished, the door locked. My mind churns through other options, but a fog is starting to fill my head, and I can see myself slowing down. Along with it comes a strange sensation of . . . unfeeling.

  Was this what Sasuke felt on the final day of his experiment? When he gave up his last breath and his mind, and felt what was human of him scatter to become nothing more than data?

  Somewhere before me, a figure approaches. It’s Zero, hidden behind his armor, and he stops a foot away from me. He studies me for a moment.

  You made it so much harder for yourself, he says.

  So. Much. Harder. My mind struggles to process each word. Now I’ve become part of the algorithm, become one with Zero’s mind and the NeuroLink.

  Become one with Zero’s mind.

  Wait. A spark lights the fog creeping into me. I think of what he’s been doing to everyone in the world, and what he’d done to Asher, Hammie, and Roshan—he’d merged with the algorithm, with the NeuroLink, and that means that his mind has become one with all of that data. When he shuts down someone else’s mind, it’s because his mind has seeped in and taken control.

  But information in the NeuroLink,
Hideo had once told me, can go both ways.

  During our fight, Zero purposely avoided touching Hideo. Almost as if he were afraid to. Maybe he doesn’t want to see what’s there—echoes of himself as a child, of their relationship and their happy memories, or of their parents and what has happened to them since his disappearance. He’s afraid of absorbing that, just as much as someone might be afraid to click on an attachment for fear of downloading a virus.

  The puzzle clicks into place. Zero doesn’t know that I have the older iterations of Sasuke in my account. If his mind invades mine, then he’s also going to absorb those files into his data.

  I don’t have much time—I’m fading quickly, as if I were slowly falling asleep. I have the faint sensation that, in real life, I’ve slumped to the ground of the panic room, the same thing I’m now doing before Zero in the virtual world. The floor feels cold and metallic beneath me. With the last bit of strength that I can muster, I bring up the files I’d stored away of Sasuke.

  The files appear before me, this time not as a cube of data, but as a blue scarf.

  Zero stiffens. He can now see everything and anything running through my mind—which means he can see the scarf, too. I manage a small smile. Too late, he’s realized what I’ve downloaded into him.

  I take the scarf in my hands. My arms lift slowly before me, like I’m dancing through deep water, and as if in a dream, I reach out toward Zero. I drape the scarf around his neck. And as the last of me wanes, I can feel Sasuke’s data merging with Zero’s mind, becoming a part of it.

  His shielded face is the last thing I see. Even though he has no expression, I can feel his anger through the NeuroLink.

  Thief.

  No, I reply as my final thought. I’m a bounty hunter.

  32

  Zero freezes, as if he were nothing more than a metallic shell. A strange gasp comes from him, and I realize for the first time that I’ve never heard him utter a breath before. In that gasp, I don’t hear the deep, amused, soulless voice I’m used to hearing from Zero.

  I hear a child.

  “Ni-chan?”

  Brother? The translation appears in my view. Then Hideo’s beside me, kneeling down, and I struggle to turn my head so that I can look up at him. Hideo has his eyes locked on Zero.

  He heard the gasp, too. A hint of recognition flickers in his eyes.

  “Sasuke?” he says.

  “You don’t look like Hideo.”

  The voice is coming from a small boy, his dark eyes fixed on Hideo’s form crouched over the now lifeless robot. When had he appeared? Zero is nowhere to be seen now. A bright blue scarf is wrapped tightly around the boy’s neck, and as he takes a few steps forward, I see a colorful plastic egg clutched in his little hand.

  It’s young Sasuke, the first iteration of him, the real him.

  A shudder runs through Hideo at the sight. He doesn’t take his eyes off Sasuke as his brother moves hesitantly forward, his expression suspicious of this young man bent before him.

  “Sasuke,” Hideo says. A tremor has entered his voice. “Hey. It’s me.”

  Still, Sasuke tilts his head at him, doubtful. He doesn’t seem to realize he’s a figment of data, a ghost of a memory, and neither does Hideo. In this moment, he is here.

  “You don’t look like him,” Sasuke says again, although he keeps moving closer. “My brother is only a little taller than me, and he was wearing a white jacket.”

  I remember what Hideo had been wearing that day of the disappearance, and it was indeed a white jacket. Now Hideo wipes a hand across his eyes, a hollow laugh escaping from him. His cheeks are wet.

  “You remember what I was wearing?”

  “Of course. I remember everything.”

  “Yes.” Another shaking laugh from Hideo, full of heartbreak. “Of course you do.”

  “If you’re my brother, why are you so tall?”

  Hideo smiles as the boy finally stops right in front of him. “Because I’ve been searching for you for a long time, and somewhere in that time, I grew up.”

  Sasuke blinks at that, as if it triggered some sort of memory in him. Then he’s shifting again, and all of a sudden, he’s no longer the small boy who had disappeared in the park, but a lankier adolescent, maybe eleven or twelve, the way I’d seen him in some of the recordings. He’s still wearing the scarf, but the baby fat in his cheeks has disappeared. He searches Hideo’s gaze as he stands there, trying to figure it all out.

  “I thought you’d forgotten about me,” he says. His voice is at the in-between stage, high and low and cracking, trembling. “I waited for you, but you didn’t come get me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Sasuke-kun,” Hideo whispers, as if the words themselves were stabbing him.

  “I tried going to you, but they locked me away. And now I don’t know where I am.” His young brow furrows. “I don’t remember anymore, Hideo. It’s too hard.”

  My own heart feels like it’s crumbling as I watch him. He is a functioning mind, forever frozen in data, but he cannot remember things like a real person can, nor can he think exactly like one. He is a ghost, forever trapped in loops, doomed to exist in a permanent half state.

  “We looked everywhere for you,” Hideo says. He’s crying in earnest now and doesn’t bother to wipe his tears away. “I wish . . . I wish you could have known.”

  Sasuke tilts his head at Hideo in that way I’ve come to know so well. It’s a gesture that had carried over, even with the rest of his humanity stripped away. He reaches out to brush his fingers against his brother’s brow. “You have the same eyes,” he says. “You’re still worried.”

  Hideo bows his head, a laugh emerging between his tears. Then he’s reaching out, too, gathering his little brother in his arms and pulling him into a fierce embrace.

  “I’m so sorry I lost you,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry for what they did to you.” His words break again and again as he weeps. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.”

  Sasuke hugs his brother’s neck tight. He doesn’t say a word. Maybe he can’t, as data. He has reached the limits of what he can do.

  Time seems to stand still. Finally, when Sasuke pulls back, he transforms again, this time into his teenage iteration. Even taller, lankier. Dark circles under his eyes. He’s no longer wearing the scarf.

  But he does recognize his brother. “Ni-san,” he says as he stands up, looking on at the bowed figure before him. Hideo rises to meet his gaze. “You created the NeuroLink because of me.”

  “Everything I’ve ever done was for you,” Hideo replies.

  If it wasn’t for Sasuke’s disappearance, the NeuroLink might never have existed. And if it wasn’t for the NeuroLink, Sasuke wouldn’t be standing here like a ghost from the machine. It is a strange circle.

  The young Sasuke disappears again, and finally, in his place, stands the only version of him that I’ve ever known: Zero, clad in black armor from head to toe, silent and cold. He stands over the broken, soulless robot that Hideo had been fighting.

  I tremble at the sight of him. We may have been able to rejoin him with Sasuke, but his decisions are out of my hands and entirely with him. I have no idea what he’ll do at this point. Would Sasuke choose to continue what Zero had been relentlessly pursuing? Immortality and control? Maybe he still would, and then all of this would have been pointless.

  “What are you going to do?” Hideo says to him in a quiet voice.

  Zero doesn’t respond right away. He’s hesitant now, and in his hesitation, I can see the different versions of his past life merging inside him, filling up part of the well that had been hollowed out of him for so long. He doesn’t seem to know what he wants anymore.

  “If I don’t have a physical form,” he finally says, “am I still real?”

  As I look on, something strange happens. My father appears before me, with his familiar black outfit and h
is polished shoes and his sleeve of colorful tattoos. His hair glints in the light.

  It’s not him, of course. It’s the NeuroLink, somehow generating this hallucination before me, using the bits of memories I have left to piece together some semblance of him.

  But he looks at me now, stopping before me and giving me that quirky grin I remember. It’s as if he were truly here, like he’d never died at all.

  “Hi, Emi,” he says.

  Hi, Dad. My vision hazes with tears, real tears, ones I can feel sliding down my face.

  His smile softens. “I’m so proud of you.”

  They’re not his real words. They’re words simulated by the system, piecing together what it knows of my father to create his ghost. But I don’t care. I don’t dwell on it. All I focus on is the figure of him standing before me like he never went anywhere at all, his hands tucked casually in his pockets. Maybe, if I walk out of here, he’ll come with me, and it will be like he has always been here.

  “I promise I’ll miss you forever,” I whisper.

  “I promise I’ll miss you forever,” he echoes. Maybe it’s all the system can do.

  He stays a distance from me, and I a distance from him. And before I can say anything more, before I can ask him if he’ll stay, he vanishes. Gone in the blink of an eye.

  If you had asked me before whether virtual reality could ever cross over into reality, I would have shaken my head and disagreed. It’s obvious to me what’s real and what isn’t, what should and shouldn’t be.

  But there is a point where the lines start to blur, and I am standing in that place now, struggling to see through the gray. Maybe this is where Taylor had lost her way, too, where she had gone searching for something noble and ended up in the dark.

  Real. My father was real, and so was Sasuke, and so is Sasuke now, even though he has no physical form. He’s real because of the way Hideo is looking back at him, because he had been loved and grieved, had loved and grieved others.