“Can you see him through the window?”

Roshan nods. “His bandages are bloody. The doctors say they’re waiting for the swelling to go down, but they don’t know when that’ll be. They said he’s incredibly lucky the bullet hit the way it did. A tiny bit to the left or right, and he would’ve arrived dead on the scene.”

I think of Jax’s promise that she’d shot Tremaine with a glancing blow. She’d kept her word, after all.

“What happened?” Asher asks as he wheels over to us, followed by Hammie.

Other players—the Demon Brigade, a smattering of other teams—have shown up, too, filling the waiting area with an awkward gaggle of rivals. So I keep my voice down and tell my teammates as much as I can. That Tremaine and I had gone to the institute, and that everything went completely wrong.

But I don’t tell them about Sasuke. I can’t handle the thought of bringing them any closer to real danger.

“You have to stop,” Hammie says to me as I finish. “That could be you in there too—it could be so much worse.”

I want to listen to her, but tonight I’m seeing Hideo. The closing ceremony happens in two days. We’re out of options. There’s simply no time to stop anymore. All I can do is nod weakly at her. She can see the lie in my eyes, but she doesn’t press me.

As we settle into our chairs in the waiting room, I find myself staring at the date in my view. When the closing ceremony game starts, everything will either end or become a living nightmare.

* * *

* * *

HIDEO ISN’T AT his home tonight—at least, not the one I remember. Instead, the car he sends for me takes me across the bridge spanning Tokyo Bay, where the ocean meets the city and the reflections of skyscrapers trembles against the water. Tonight, the bridge is entirely lit with the colors of the Phoenix Riders, and through my lenses, cruise ships and tourist ferries dotting the harbor have a smattering of hearts and stars hovering over them.

The scarlet Phoenix Rider lights reflected against the ocean look like blood spreading across the water, and the cityscape like millions of shards of glass. I focus down at my lap instead, where I’m pressing my hands tightly against each other.

We travel along the waterfront until we leave most of the boats behind and enter a quiet stretch of luxury high-rises. Here, a team of security guards waves the car through a gate, and when it finally stops at the end of a dock, more bodyguards in suits come to open the door for me.

I step out of the car and stand facing the water, breathing in the salty air, my lips parted at the sight.

Floating serenely before me is the largest yacht I’ve ever seen. The entire ship is matte black, blending in with the night, save for the lines of soft silver lights running along each deck and the trails of fairy bulbs strung across the top.

“Mister Tanaka has been waiting for you,” one of the bodyguards says to me. He holds a gloved hand out, gesturing for me to step onto the ramp leading up to the yacht. I nod wordlessly, suddenly queasy with anticipation and dread, then head up to the ship’s lower deck and into its interior.

The space opens up into a two-floor-high ceiling, where a chandelier dripping with crystals hangs. Floor-to-ceiling glass walls, tinted for privacy, line the chamber, and at the far end is a set of double doors already open, inviting me in. I walk to them, stopping hesitantly at the entryway to peer into the vast suite beyond.

The lighting is dim, the walls made of more tinted glass that reveals the outline of the city against the water. Thick white rugs and plush divans dot the space. Sheer, pearlescent curtains glide idly in a sea breeze from an ajar window, under which lies a low, luxurious bed.

The space is as immaculate as I remember Hideo’s main home being—at least, until I see the broken porcelain on the floor.

“Watch your step.”

Hideo’s familiar voice drifts from across the room, where he’s heading in from the balcony with a dark jacket slung over his shoulder. He tosses it unceremoniously onto a nearby chair. In the low light, all I can see of him is his tall silhouette and the silver of his hair, but I can still tell that his shirt is uncharacteristically rumpled, his sleeves rolled up haphazardly, and his collar pushed up. The shadows cover his expression entirely.

“What happened?” I ask.

He straightens and walks toward the long couches, coming slightly into the light as he goes. “I’ll sweep it up in a bit,” he replies, his classic habit of answering without answering.

My eyes dart straight to his hands. His knuckles are an angry red, cut up, and crusted over with blood. Dark circles rim his eyes.

Has he been here since that night at the art museum, agonizing over all I’d told him? I’ve never seen him so weary, like his whole heart is struggling underneath a great weight.

I take a seat across from him, then wait until he leans forward and regards me with a piercing stare.

“You brought us here,” he says quietly. “So, tell me. What do you know about my brother?”

No need for small talk tonight. In his voice is an anger I remember only from the night Jax had attempted to assassinate him, when he’d leaned over his injured bodyguard and ordered the rest of his men to find the culprit. Even that night is nothing compared to now. I feel like I’m staring into a void that has opened up inside him, threatening to swallow him whole.

I don’t answer right away. There are no words I can say to ease us into this conversation. Instead, I Link with him and bring up a screen to show him a Memory I’d saved of my first encounter with Zero, of him in my hotel room.

Hideo just stares at his brother’s face. There is a whirlwind of emotion in his eyes. First disbelief, that this person could possibly be him. Then recognition, because there is no question that this young man is the same little boy who disappeared so many years ago.

“How did you find out?” he finally asks.

“I figured it out after the final game, after I left your suite,” I go on, wanting to fill the heavy silence. “The hack I pulled at the end to stop him also exposed his identity, and that was when I saw his name.”

“It’s not him.”

I bring up a second video of Zero, this time of us walking side by side as he escorts me to my room. “It’s him,” I insist in a quiet voice.

Hideo stares at him for a long time. He stares until it seems he may have frozen solid.

“What—” His voice breaks for a moment, and I feel my own heart crack at the sound. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him falter like this. “What happened to him?”

I sigh, running a hand through my hair. “I shouldn’t be the one to tell you this,” I reply. “But your brother . . . when he disappeared, he was very ill. Your mother had, in desperation, entered him into an experimental trial that had a chance of curing him.”

Hideo shakes his head at me. “No,” he replies. “My parents would have told me. Sasuke was playing in the park with me on the day he vanished.”

“I’m only telling you what I know.” As Hideo looks on, I show him each recording I’d duplicated, in chronological succession. The testing room in the Innovation Institute, with a child at every desk. The hopeful, worried faces of Hideo’s parents peering in from the window. The private meeting between Dana Taylor and Mina Tanaka. The small silhouette of Sasuke, cowering in the corner of a room, of him begging to go home to his family. The bright blue scarf wrapped around his neck. His friendship with Jax, and all the moments they spent huddled together. The way he tried to negotiate with Taylor for his freedom, paid the price of his scarf, and then failed to escape. The slow, gradual, crippling disappearance of his identity with each new procedure done to him, of Sasuke becoming less of a person and more a series of data.

The truth behind Project Zero.

I expect Hideo to tear his eyes away at some point, but he doesn’t. He watches all of it in silence, his stare never shifting away from his brother as Sasuke ages a little in each video and loses more of himself. As Taylor takes away Sasuke’s scarf. As Sasuke watches his brother’s first public announcement. Each scene rips a gash in Hideo’s heart.

When the recordings finish, Hideo doesn’t say a word. I fixate on the dried blood on his knuckles. The silence roars in our ears like a living thing.

“Sasuke died years ago,” Hideo finally whispers into the dark, echoing the words Jax had said to me. “He’s gone from this world, then.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper back.

The heavy weight that has been crushing his heart—the polite, stiff distance, all the careful shields he’d always put up one by one—gives way. His shoulders sag. He lowers his head into his hands, and suddenly, he starts to weep.

That weight was the burden of not knowing, of years and years of anguish, of imagining the thousands of things that could have happened, of wondering whether his brother might ever walk back through the door. Of all those countless iterations he’d made of his Memory, trying to figure out how Sasuke could have disappeared. It was the silver strand of an unfinished story.

There’s nothing I can say to comfort him. All I can do is listen to his heart break over and over again.

When there are no more tears left, Hideo sits in silence and stares out the windows. He looks lost in a fog, and for the very first time, I see uncertainty in his eyes.

I lean forward and find my voice. “Even though Sasuke is gone from this world,” I murmur softly, “he’s still alive in another.”

Hideo doesn’t answer, but his lashes lower as his gaze turns toward me.

“Zero is Taylor’s creation,” I go on. My voice sounds deafening. “He’s tethered to her in every sense of the word. Just as your algorithm controls those who wear the new NeuroLink lenses, Taylor controls Zero’s data. His mind. But Sasuke isn’t gone. I think he reached out to me through Zero because he’s trapped somewhere in that darkness, crying for help.”