“Got one,” she calls up to us.
Every single one of the sweeping red lights suddenly shoots toward us, flooding all of us in a scarlet glow. A deafening horn echoes across the landscape.
This was a trap. The marbles are needed in order to get through the door, but making contact with those same marbles has also alerted Zero to exactly where we are.
“Climb!” Asher shouts down at Hammie, right as we see a whirlwind of security bots cluster at the base of the tower.
Hammie doesn’t waste another breath. She starts pulling herself up the rope as quickly as she can. Roshan darts down the steps two at a time toward her, but the bots are moving so fast that I know they’ll catch up to them before Hammie can get back to us.
I glance at Hideo and toss him one end of my rope. He catches it. Then I swing down toward Hammie and Roshan. But the bots are swarming up too fast—they’ll catch up to them before I can make it. Below me, Roshan has reached Hammie and positioned himself in front of her as she pulls herself up onto the lone island of a step she’s on. He narrows his eyes at the approaching bots and crosses his forearms. His shield appears.
The bots clash against it. Roshan winces as he’s pushed back, his boots digging hard against the stone steps, trying in vain to keep them from pushing him right off the edge. Hammie hops to her feet and lunges back up the stairs toward us.
Roshan’s shield can’t sustain the hits anymore. The glowing blue circle shudders as the bots throw themselves once more at it, and then it flickers out. I scream something. They charge forward at him.
“Hey!”
My head jerks up at the sound of Asher’s voice. He’s leaped off the stairs to grab on to another marble. Half of the security bots shift direction toward him now, while the others slow for an instant, giving Roshan just enough time to turn and race up the steps after Hammie.
I dart past them both as they rejoin Hideo at the top. Roshan glances at me. “Where are you going?” he shouts.
I don’t answer right away. Instead, I stop beside Asher and crouch down, then pull a stick of dynamite from my utility belt. I fit it against the steps, right before the bots. “Move!” I shout at Asher.
He already sees what I’m doing. As I turn tail, so does he, and we sprint up right as the dynamite goes off behind us.
The explosion knocks us to our knees. Behind us is a gaping hole in the steps, so wide that it stops the bots from following us. They gather at the edge in a crowd—it won’t be long before they start leaping across the gap.
“Put them in!” I hear Asher shout. Hammie and Roshan take the two marbles and shove them into the slots on either side of the door.
The bots are climbing and clawing, making their way across the chasm in the stairs. They’re racing up toward us.
The door swings open. Hideo grabs my arm. The bots are almost on top of us.
Hammie leaps through the door, followed by Roshan. Hideo shoves me through the entrance. Beside us, one of the first bots to reach us latches on to Asher’s arm, its metal fingers closing around him in a tight grip. He kicks out at the bot’s chest—it loosens its hold, and he throws himself inside the door. I turn around just as Hideo barely makes it in, slamming the door shut right as the bots lunge at it.
We collapse against the ground. My heart’s racing so fast that I find myself clutching at my chest, as if that would help me breathe.
“Well,” Asher gasps out as he meets our eyes. “That was different.”
Hideo winces, bracing himself against the door. His face is ghostly pale now, mirroring what he must look like in real life, and I know he’s growing weaker from blood loss. The image of his body glitches slightly—flickering in and out before solidifying again.
I hurry to him and touch his arm. We are running out of time, and his wound is our ticking clock. He gives me a slight smile that’s closer to a grimace. Then he nods at the new place we’ve arrived in.
Hammie collapses against Roshan, letting out a long breath. I can feel my hands shaking in my lap. When I look around, I realize that we’re all sitting inside a glowing white space, with no walls or ceiling. Where’s this?
My thoughts are interrupted by a sharp intake of breath from Asher. I turn to see him clutching his arm, right where the bot had touched him. His eyes are squeezed shut.
“Ash,” Hammie says. “You all right?”
Asher doesn’t respond. His arm trembles; all the color drains from his face. All of a sudden, he opens his eyes wide—and his irises aren’t their usual blue, but an unsettling silver.
The blank, white world around us flickers, replaced for a moment by a new surrounding. We are suddenly within the interior of a house—banisters of curled iron, potted poinsettias, and broken glass all over the hardwood floor.
I shrink away instinctively. Hammie starts to reach for Asher, but I yank her back.
“Don’t touch him,” I warn.
“What happened to him?” Roshan says.
Hideo already understands it. “When that security bot touched Asher, Zero found his way in.”
Zero had broken past Asher’s encryption and gotten into his mind. This must be a world constructed out of his memories.
We look on in horror as the world around us continues to play one of Asher’s memories. The boy hurrying down the stairs isn’t Asher, but his brother Daniel, unmistakable with his shock of light brown-blond hair and piercing blue eyes. When he reaches the bottom, he shoves Asher in his wheelchair hard enough to send it bumping against the back wall.
“Where the hell are you going now?” Asher says to him. He looks younger, like maybe this happened at least eight or nine years ago.
Daniel doesn’t answer him. Instead, he turns to head off into the kitchen. At the sight, Asher’s voice shifts into anger. “You know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know everything about your life when you obviously don’t give a shit about mine.”
At that, Daniel turns back around. He looks so much like Asher, his eyes alight with the same fire. “You don’t need me to care,” he snaps. “Don’t you get enough attention?”
“Just because you’re ignoring the divorce doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”
“And what are you doing? Playing Warcross in your room?”
Asher narrows his eyes, and his expression suddenly turns cold and hard. “What do you do that’s so much better? Maybe you’ve got some fans, but my local wins are what put food on the table.”
This seems to hit Daniel so precisely that Asher hesitates, tightening his lips as if he knew he went too far.
Daniel walks over to Asher, puts one hand on either of the wheelchair’s armrests, and leans down to his brother’s face. “You’re never going to make it,” he says. “You’re never going to amount to anything in it. You keep throwing yourself into this useless game, like you honestly think they’ll choose you as a wild card.”
Asher doesn’t respond. He just pulls his chair away, forcing Daniel to step away again, and turns his back on his brother.
I want to get out of this place right now—I want to take out these lenses and see the panic room around me instead of this warped mindscape. I don’t want to know that, somewhere out there, Asher is just sitting straight in his chair, completely unaware anymore of anything going on around him.
My hand’s still on Hammie’s shoulder. She looks so tense that she might break.
Hideo gets up. “If you want him back, we need to keep going.”
I tear my gaze from Asher’s blank one, turn my back, and along with the others, head off again.
30
Before long, we come across another door floating in the empty whiteness of this space. I reach it first, put my hand on the knob, and carefully turn it. Then I enter, followed by the others.
We step out into a bustling, crowded, rain-washed street in Tokyo. I recognize the spot immediately—Shibuya Station, right next to the huge intersection that I’d once overlooked from my hotel window. Beside us is the statue of the dog Hachikō, where people huddle as they wait for friends. All around us swarms a moving crowd.
I blink, thrown off by the change. There are people everywhere—huddled under colorful umbrellas, wearing face masks and hats, draped in coats and boots, shadows over their eyes. Cars splash into puddles as they drive by, and above it all tower bright advertisements showcasing smiling people holding up lotions and creams.
Beside me, Hammie almost seems to relax at the sight. I feel it, too—it’s like we’re here, instead of inside Zero’s mind, walking in an illusion. But Hideo’s eyes are narrowed, and he exchanges a quick glance of warning with me.
Roshan frowns at the scene. “This isn’t right,” he says.
Only after he says it do I realize what’s bothering me, too. The scene isn’t quite accurate—some of the storefronts aren’t supposed to be here, while others are in the wrong order along the street. It’s as if Zero—or Sasuke—couldn’t remember it correctly.
But what stands out the most is that no one walking around is saying anything at all. All we hear is the shuffling of feet, the rush of cars, and the blare of advertisements. There must be thousands of people here, and no one is saying a word.
I swallow hard. Hideo holds out his arm, telling us to stay close. “We must be nearly there. I remember this,” he says, his gaze fixed on the advertisements. “Our mother and father took Sasuke and me here tonight so that we could shop for new boots. That trailer.” He nods at a giant screen curving around a two-story coffee shop that now shows a promotion for a new movie. “I was eight when that film came out. Sasuke was six.”
Hideo’s right. These aren’t just the inner workings of Zero’s artificial mind anymore. We’re inside a distorted memory in Zero’s mind, I realize, a twisted fragment of what had once been Sasuke’s.