In one move, Zero has gotten rid of the person who took his life, has forced Hideo to show the folly of his algorithm, and has taken control. In one move, he has gained the most powerful instrument in the world.

My shock is reflected in the faces of Hideo and Jax. What have we done?

The cube. The virus I have. This is still the only moment when I have a chance to break into Zero’s mind. I could hack him. I lunge forward, aiming to sync the cube into his account. It flashes a blinding blue-white.

But I’m too late.

Zero turns to look at me. “Thank you, Emika,” he says.

I don’t know what happens next, because everything goes black.

27

Sounds and sensations around me flicker in and out: Jax shouting at me, a din of voices I don’t recognize, and then the feeling of floating in midair. Maybe the shock is too much. Maybe Zero had uttered a command that killed me, and I just don’t know that I’m dead.

My dreams—they must be dreams, because they make no sense—are sharp and strange, switching abruptly from one scene to the next. There’s a small boy wearing a blue scarf, and I’m chasing after him, trying in vain to tell him to turn around. I’m a child again, holding Dad’s hand as we walk together through Central Park. Today he looks sophisticated, his hair smoothed into a slick shine and his jeans and black shirt switched out for a well-tailored blazer and trousers. We’ve gotten out of an afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall, and he’s in a bright mood, singing an off-key rendition of the concert piece as I twirl in a tulle dress. I want to lean into the familiarity of it, the loudness and the sheer joy.

He points out something in the distance, and I rise up on my toes to look at what it might be. There’s a dark spot in front of us, right on the park’s path, like a paint streak. When I stare at it longer, it starts to grow, expanding until it soaks the path and covers everything around us.

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 turned to 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, and willed Taylor to die.

After all this time, no matter what the situation or his mood, I’ve only seen Hideo in control—in his office, in the arena, in his home. Even in despair, with his heart torn open, he never looked the way he does now. Helpless. His creation wrenched out of his control.

In spite of everything I’ve seen him do, I can’t help but feel afraid now that he’s no longer running the NeuroLink and the algorithm. It means that someone much, much worse is now in command.

Zero stands in front of the gurney. If he feels anything at the sight of his brother, he doesn’t show it as he lifts a steel hand and grips Hideo’s chin.

I suck in my breath sharply.

I’d thought Zero was walking around in here as a virtual simulation. But no, he’s in the armored suit that I’d seen him testing with Taylor on the night that Tremaine had been shot. The robot that had moved its arm in sync with Zero’s.

Zero’s mind is operating from within a real metal suit, an artificial being that seems alive in every technical sense.

He forces Hideo to turn his face up to meet his. One brother versus another. Zero studies him curiously, like a specimen, before he releases Hideo again. He folds his hands behind his back and flexes his steel fingers in a smooth wave, stalking a slow circle around his bound brother.

I clench my teeth, the white-hot heat of anger rising in me in a wave. “Leave him alone,” I growl.

Zero pauses to look at me. “You still care deeply for him,” he says quietly.

“You think?” I snap.

“Tell me, Emika, what that’s like?” Now he sounds fascinated. “He’s done terrible things. And yet I can still sense your connection to him.”

I realize with a start that it’s because Sasuke was never old enough to understand what love really means. Not even the early, innocent feelings he had for Jax could possibly compare to how complicated love actually is. He’d lost his humanity before he was ever able to experience that. My anger wavers as my heart breaks for him.

“Whatever it was that you did, Emika,” Zero says, addressing me as he turns back to Hideo, “it seems you affected the lenses of those you’ve Linked with before, too. And that means his.” He finishes a full circle around Hideo and leans close to him. “But don’t worry. We’ll fix that easily enough.”

His words, mockingly soothing, bear an echo of Taylor’s thought process. Even though she’s dead, her influence over him must have been so complete and so extreme that it still lingers underneath those smooth plates of steel.

“But first,” Zero continues, finally turning away from Hideo and heading back toward me. Every muscle in me tenses as he approaches. “Let’s fix you.”

I glare at him, wishing I could see some sign of Sasuke trapped inside, but the only thing staring back at me through his opaque mask is my own reflection.

By the sink, Jax has ripped open the box with the lenses and pulled out a set. I glance at her again. She still has that blankness on her face, going about her motions like she’s not entirely here.