Then . . . her eyes flicker to me. I realize that Zero doesn’t know I’ve Linked with her before. Her flint-gray irises gleam under the fluorescent light. In that instant, I see her familiar wit, her mind alert behind a carefully controlled expression. She’s not under Zero’s influence, no—but merely pretending to be.

She shakes her head once at me, then her eyes look toward the door. A red light illuminates it from above, suggesting that it’s locked—but beside the door is the emergency box I remember from the first night I’d been in the institute. I look back at Jax, who goes back to preparing my new lenses at a counter closer to the door.

Hope cuts through my dread. Maybe Jax is still my ally, after all. If I can stall for more time, maybe she can help us get out of here before Zero forces the new lenses on me.

“You can’t be real,” I manage to choke out as I stare up at him. “I don’t believe you. You’re nothing but a simulation.”

“Then see for yourself.” Zero reaches over and presses a flat button near the top of my gurney. The metal cuff restraining my left wrist snaps open with a clang, freeing my hand.

I pull it immediately out of the binding, flexing my wrist in relief. My eyes return to him. Hesitantly, I reach out toward him. He doesn’t move.

My hand touches his upper arm. I almost flinch. Cold, hard metal. There’s nothing human about the steel plate my fingers brush against, nothing that suggests a soul might exist inside. And yet . . . here he is, moving and functional, alive in every technical sense.

“Can you . . . feel that?” I find myself asking.

“I’m aware that you’re touching me,” he replies. “I can feel it, logically, if you can call it that.”

“Can you sense pain?”

“No. I don’t understand my limbs in the same way you do.”

“Do you remember what that was like?”

“Yes. I remember everything.”

“Except what matters.”

“Except what doesn’t matter,” he corrects me.

I withdraw my hand and let my arm drop back to my side. Zero closes his fingers around my wrist. He pushes it into place against the metal cuff, ignoring my pleading eyes as he snaps it shut again.

“I don’t understand,” I whisper. “Why do you want this?”

He smiles in amusement, as if someone like him could still understand such a human emotion. “You already know. It’s the same answer that Taylor would have given you, that Hideo himself probably once gave you.”

“But they had goals because they’re human, flesh and blood. Taylor wanted control because she’s afraid without it. Hideo did it out of love for you.” I lean forward, straining against my bonds, and grit my teeth at him. “What do you get out of controlling others, besides the satisfaction of doing so?”

“Freedom, of course,” he replies. “Now I can do anything. Enter anyone’s mind.” He nods out toward the dark hall at the world beyond these walls. “I can be everywhere at once and nowhere at all.”

And just like that, I understand. It’s the exact opposite of what Sasuke had endured at Taylor’s hands. When he’d been human, he had been her prisoner, trapped within the confines of this institute for years and subjected to unspeakable horrors, until he’d finally died and had his mind tethered to hers. He’d been fully at her beck and call.

In seizing control of everything, Zero is taking back his freedom and more. It’s his revenge against Taylor for all that she had stolen from him.

Taylor’s death.

“But there’s more to it than that,” I go on. “You set Hideo up to kill Taylor, didn’t you? You made sure she was with us because you knew how Hideo would react to seeing her. You wanted to bring his creation crashing down around him, and you wanted to see Taylor realize the moment she’d lost in her own game.” My voice turns more desperate now, angrier, as I make the connections. “You wanted her dead, and you wanted Hideo to do it.”

Zero is silent. Something about my words has plucked a string in him. I barrel on before he can continue.

“You wanted to show him how flawed his plan was from the start.” My heart trembles as I talk. “You wanted Hideo to realize how he had corrupted the NeuroLink with his algorithm, and the only way you could show him that—the only way to get through to the brother you love—was to force him to demonstrate it in front of the entire world.” I take a deep breath. “And that’s because Sasuke wanted you to do it. Because he’s still there, somewhere inside you.”

I don’t know how much of my words reach Zero. Maybe he doesn’t care at all. He’s nothing more than a web of algorithms controlling a machine, after all, and whatever is still human about him has simply been translated into code.

But Zero tenses at Sasuke’s name.

In that moment, I know. Everything Jax and I had assumed is true. Sasuke is still in there. He had, in his own way, tried to stop his brother from destroying himself.

“You’re not entirely gone,” I whisper.

“You like to solve things, don’t you?” Zero says.

“Every locked door has a key,” I reply.

Zero turns slightly, as if he’d studied the tattooed words running along my bared clavicle. Behind him, Jax has turned to face us, the new lenses in her hands and ready to be put on my eyes. I don’t dare look directly at her. When is she going to make her move?

Zero leans toward me, his presence overpowering. “We’re not so different, Emika. Your desire to control and solve is the same as mine. There’s nothing you’d like more than to be able to control your world. All the terrible things that have happened to you have been things you couldn’t do anything about. Your father’s death. Your time at the foster home. Hideo’s betrayal of your trust.”

Zero makes a casual gesture in the air, and suddenly he conjures a virtual image of my father standing in the room, his familiar smile on his gentle face, his silhouette against the door, outlined in light. He reaches over to pin a bit of cloth on a bustier. I can hear him humming.

The sight threads through me with the precise pain of a needle. Dad glances at me and grins, and all the air rushes from my lungs. Some illogical part of me reaches out, desperate to touch him. That’s him. He’s real.

No. He’s not. Zero is rendering him here right in front of me, showing me what life could be like if Dad were still here. He’s showing me the inside of the NeuroLink linked directly with his mind, how he will soon be able to control everything I see, everything in the virtual world for everyone.

“Wouldn’t you rather have saved your father into a pure data form, to make him live forever?” Zero presses. It’s a genuine question, without a hint of malice in it. “Wouldn’t you like to see him walking around in your life, just as I walk around in yours? Is this half-life so bad?”

I don’t dare admit out loud that he’s right. That his words tempt me more than I can say. Is it so bad? I imagine Zero as Sasuke, a little boy who could live out the ghost version of his life, grow up and go to school, play games with his brother and laugh with his friends. Fall in love. If Zero wanted, he could make this reality for himself now, creating a virtual version of this life for himself. He could live out a million different lives.

I tear my eyes away from the sight of my father. Tears blur my vision. Zero’s manipulating me. If he gets the new lenses on me, he can trap me in this false reality and make me believe anything.

“Go to hell,” I whisper with a snarl.

Zero finally, mercifully, leans away from me. He nods once at Jax, who has the new lenses ready for me. “Put her under,” he says. “I don’t have time to deal with her struggling.”

Jax meets my eyes. For a moment, I think she’ll do exactly as Zero says.

Then her hand darts to the gun at her belt. In one move, she whips it out, points it at the door, and shoots with barely a glance.

The bullet hits the emergency sensor.

Every light in the building shuts off in unison. The room plunges into blackness—then is washed in crimson red as emergency lights flare on.

The door clicks open at the same time an alarm begins to wail overhead.

Jax swings her gun toward the button on my gurney, right next to my head, and fires. Another perfect hit. My metal cuffs snap open. I almost collapse to the floor.

She points toward Hideo’s gurney, firing again. He’s freed, crumpling to his hands and knees.

In the scarlet glow, Zero’s silhouette is an ominous black hole. Even though he’s embedded in a machine, I can sense the surprise coming from him.

Adrenaline born from terror surges through me. I scramble to my feet and sprint toward Hideo.

Zero’s head snaps to Jax. “You’re with them,” he says, his voice low and deadly.

Jax doesn’t answer. She just faces him with her steady look and raises her gun again. “No,” she replies. “I’m with you.”

Then she shoots him.

28

Zero’s reflexes are inhumanly fast. His body snaps sideways—Jax’s shot misses his neck and instead hits him in the shoulder with the scream of metal tearing through metal.

Jax fires again, but Zero lunges for her at the same time. Her second shot strikes his leg, sending up another shower of sparks. His leg twists oddly, throwing off the grace of his movements.

I reach Hideo. He’s struggling to his feet, but his motions are slower as he fights against whatever drug is coursing through his system. I pull his arm over my shoulders and force him upright. We make a run for the door.

Zero turns to stop us, but Jax’s hits have broken parts of the suit, making him limp. Still, he’s terrifyingly fast. As we reach the door, Zero’s metal fingers close around a fistful of my shirt.

Jax is on him in an instant. Under the red lights, her eyes have the savage glint of a killer. She strikes his wrist as hard as she can.

She can’t break the metal, but it is enough to loosen his grip and for me to slide through. “This way,” she gasps out over the alarm as she shoves the door open and darts out into the hall.

Hideo and I rush after her. Behind us, Zero’s suit twists in our direction.