Fifty-nine seconds until the beta lenses patch.

Hideo’s attention is no longer on Taylor. He’s staring at Zero, whose eyes—unmistakably that of Hideo’s brother—stay cold and unfeeling.

Hideo’s studying Zero as if everything I’d told him couldn’t possibly be real.

“Sasuke,” Hideo says hoarsely. The wave of his anger shifts into grief.

All semblance of practicality has vanished from him. There’s a note of wild hope in his voice, like Zero might snap out of it if they could just talk to each other. And for a moment, even knowing that it’s impossible, I think it might work.

But Zero doesn’t react in any way. Watching him in front of his brother for the first time in years, I can’t tell if he registers any emotion at all. Beside him, Jax’s hand is wrapped tightly around the handle of her gun.

We are standing in the middle of a powder keg, and the fuse is about to blow.

Thirty seconds until the beta lenses patch.

“This is the deal, isn’t it, Hideo?” Zero finally says. His voice sounds like it always does, and there’s not even the slightest hint of recognition in it. “Or has Emika not told you what she should?”

Hideo looks at me. His eyes are black with anguish, filled with a deep feeling of loss, the realization that everything I told him was true, that Sasuke is looking at him, saying his name but not reacting to what it means. When he speaks again, his voice grates, harsh with desperation. “You’re not a work of code,” he says. “You’re my brother. I know you’re reluctant to hurt us. I can hear in your voice the memory of who you are. You know, don’t you?”

“Of course I know,” Zero replies, in that eerily calm way of his.

The words hit Hideo like bullets.

Taylor just smiles at him in that knowing, manipulative way. “Look at it this way, Hideo. You created your life’s work because of your brother’s disappearance,” she says. “Everything happens for a reason.”

“That’s the most bullshit saying in the world,” he snaps.

“Come on. Now your brother is here, when I could have just let him die of his illness. Is this not better?”

Hideo narrows his eyes at her. The pure hatred in his gaze—the rage that has surfaced at the sight of what Taylor did to his brother, that Taylor is now threatening my life—is boiling over now. The deep, soulless fury I’ve witnessed in him before, the scarred knuckles . . . it’s nothing compared to this.

Taylor glances at me. She’s expecting me to follow through on my promise now, that I will break into Hideo’s mind.

Zero seconds.

An electric current rushes through my head. Nearby, Hammie and Roshan also flinch. The beta lenses start to patch, steadily downloading the algorithm onto them.

I pull out the cube that Zero had given me. The hack. And in the space of that moment, I hesitate.

I don’t know what gives me away to Taylor. Something about the light in my eyes, the shift in my stance, the slight hesitation in my actions.

Does she know I have other plans?

She suddenly raises a gun and aims it directly at my head. She keeps her eyes on Hideo as her finger hovers over the trigger. “Open the algorithm, Hideo,” she says calmly.

Hideo’s lips curl into a snarl at her threat to me. His hatred pours over like oil across the ocean.

At the same time, Jax—who had been so still—suddenly draws her own gun and points it directly at Taylor. “Shoot her, and I shoot you.” Her hand is clenched tightly enough around her gun’s handle to wash her skin white.

Taylor looks sharply at her. This time, the woman is surprised. “What’s this?” she murmurs. “You’re in on this, too, Jackson?”

Jax winces at the use of her full name.

Taylor tightens her lips. Deep anger flashes across her face. I remember what Jax had said to me about Taylor’s greatest fear. Death. Now her daughter is threatening her with it.

Panic floods Jax’s eyes, that terror she’d had as a small girl cowering under the influence of someone supposed to be her mother. Her hand trembles. But this time, she doesn’t back down. Everything building up inside her since the death of Sasuke has erupted to the surface, and its strength keeps her arm lifted.

She tears her eyes away from Taylor long enough to glance at me. “Now,” she hisses.

Hideo, I gasp through our Link.

Taylor looks back at him and tightens her finger on her gun’s trigger.

Hideo moves.

He snaps his fingers once, pulling up his own small, rotating box to hover between us. Before I even have time to register that this is the key to opening his algorithm, he flicks his wrist and unlocks it.

A maze of colors bursts from the box, a million bright nodes connected to each other with lines of light, the way a brain’s circuits link to one another. It’s massive and intricate, extending far beyond our space on the floor to fill the entire arena. For one brief instant, I am looking into a web of commands that can control the minds of every single person in the world hooked up to the NeuroLink. If time could have stopped right now, I would stop to marvel at this frightening masterpiece.

Hideo homes in on Taylor’s account, seizes it, and links it to the algorithm. Her mind’s palette suddenly appears as a new node in the matrix, connected to Zero by a glowing thread.

Hideo flicks his wrist again. The thread snaps.

Taylor shudders violently as he rips away her control of Zero.

Now, Hideo, I cry out silently. The cube in my hand flickers in and out as I tremble. Destroy the algorithm.

But Hideo’s eyes are still black with hate. And I realize, abruptly, that he isn’t done yet—he’s not satisfied with this part of our plan, to merely hook Taylor into the algorithm and force her to free Zero from her control. He’s snapped loose from his measured self and allowed his rage to run free. He’s going to unleash the full, unthinking force of his power on her.

“No—” I start to say. But it’s too late.

In that same instant, Taylor’s lips part in terror as she realizes what he’s about to do. She holds out a hand instinctively in front of her.

Hideo narrows his eyes. Through our Link, I hear him send a quiet, unspoken command to Taylor.

Die.

26

I see it happen in slow motion.

Taylor doesn’t even have time to utter a sound. She only gets a fraction of a second—and all she can do is turn her disbelieving expression to Hideo, her eyes dilated like a deer’s at the end of the hunt, right after the predator’s teeth sink in. Her lips part, but she never gets a chance to say a final word. Maybe she’d wanted to scream.

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 rest of 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 place with him.

I realize what has happened before anyone can say it.

Zero had no plans to destroy the algorithm. He has instead merged with 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 always wanted Taylor dead. She had tortured his mind so severely that she had molded him into the same monster she became.