Roshan steps beside me as we stare at the people looking back at us with their sightless faces. Their heads tilt toward us as they draw near. “Security bots,” he whispers.

Just like the ones we’d faced earlier—except these are disguised as regular shoppers.

Hideo starts carefully moving us forward. “Don’t let any of them touch you.”

“Do you know where we’re supposed to go?” I ask.

“Yes.” He nods toward a department store right next to the coffee shop, where a store worker is handing out coupons to entice potential customers. As we move carefully through the crowd, I see a couple walking hand in hand with two small boys, both of whom have their necks craned up at the movie trailer playing on the screen above them.

My heart twists as I recognize them. It’s Hideo and Sasuke.

We pass them, but I can’t see their faces. When I look forward again, they’re back to walking ahead of us, as if everything had just reset. It’s a perpetual, repeating memory.

Hammie bumps into me from behind. I glance back to see her casting suspicious looks at the people walking around her. “Someone just lunged at me,” she whispers, quickening her stride. “Zero’s on the hunt.”

After what happened to Asher, Zero must know the rest of us are in here somewhere. I hold a hand out at Hammie and look her straight in the eye. “Did they touch you?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she mutters back, even though she’s rubbing at her elbow. “She just brushed my sleeve a little, that’s all.”

My heart seizes. “She brushed your sleeve?” I say—but Hammie looks away from me and focuses on something in the crowd ahead of us. Her eyes widen.

“Hey. Hey!” Hammie calls out into the crowd, startling us all, and then suddenly starts pushing her way through the throngs.

“Hammie!” Roshan calls out. But she’s already off, heading away from the department store at a slant.

“That’s my mom,” she says breathlessly, looking over her shoulder at us with a shocked expression. “That’s my mom! Right there!” She turns back to point at a woman wearing an air force uniform, with dark skin and dark curls like her own. “What is she doing in here? How does Zero know what she looks like?”

I burst into a run. Hideo does, too—even though we both know it’s too late. It’s impossible to move as fast as Hammie without accidentally bumping into anyone. More passing people look at us—another person leans sharply in toward Roshan, forcing him to barely duck out of the way in time.

Hammie! I want to shout, but I’m too afraid of drawing more attention.

We finally catch up to her. But she’s just standing in the middle of the street now, her stare vacant and unseeing, her posture ramrod straight, her expression completely blank. Above us, the enormous advertisement vanishes, replaced by something that can only be one of Hammie’s memories.

It’s of two girls, their curly hair hidden behind silk caps. The younger of the two is in bed, laughing uproariously as their father tries in vain to adjust her cap. The older one—Hammie, it looks like—is quieter, sitting at a small, square table across from someone who must be their mother. They’re both concentrating on a chess game. I watch as the mom moves her pieces each within the span of seconds, while Hammie scowls and shifts in frustration as she struggles with her own moves.

“Why do you have to go again tomorrow?” Hammie finally mutters as she loses her rook to her mom’s bishop.

“Yeah,” her younger sister shouts in a singsong voice from the bed as she purposely pulls her cap askew again, making her dad give an affectionate sigh. “Why d’you have to go?”

“Stop repeating me, Brooke, I swear,” Hammie snaps at her sister, who just giggles in return.

“I’m not gone for long.” Their mother leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. Her air force uniform is decorated with several medals. When Hammie finally decides on a good spot to put her queen, her mother nods in approval. “It’s just for a few weeks. You girls can even come to the base and see me off, if you want to.”

Brooke bursts into protest as their father tugs her silk cap straight again. Hammie looks away from her mom. “You just came back yesterday,” she says.

Their father raises a stern eyebrow. “Hammie. Stop making your mamá feel bad. I assigned you plenty of algebra homework to keep you busy for the next week. I can always give you more. Now, that’s your last complaint. You understand me?”

Hammie opens her mouth, then shuts it sullenly. “Yes, sir,” she mutters.

Their mother smiles at Hammie’s face. “It’s a good thing,” she teases. “Without me around, you can finally win a few chess games. Maybe you’ll even put up a fight when we play next time.”

Hammie straightens, a little smirk sneaking onto the corners of her mouth, and suddenly she looks exactly like the teammate I know. The spark in her mother’s eyes seems to feed her. “Yeah, you’ll be sorry. Next game, your king is mine.”

“Oh, big talk now.” Her mother laughs once, the sound full of warmth. “Listen—each time you play against anyone, pretend you’re playing me. All right? That should give you the fire to do your best.”

The young Hammie nods at that. “Hell yeah, I will.”

“Hammie,” her dad scolds from the bed. “Language. How many times?” Brooke starts cracking up.

Hammie might be too young to understand it, but I know what her mother’s really doing—reminding her that the game connects them, that her mother’s presence is there even when she’s not.

The scene shifts again to the middle of the night, where Hammie sits by flashlight at the little chess table and plays quietly on her own, her brow furrowed in determination.

Finally, the memory disappears, replaced once again with the endlessly repeating movie trailer.

Hammie stays frozen where she is.

It takes everything in me not to reach out and pull her back with us. I tear my eyes away from her, feeling my heart rip a little as I go. “Come on,” I say through gritted teeth, my hand on Roshan’s arm. He stumbles a little as we walk by, like he wants to grab her, too, but instead he forces his face forward again.

Hideo marches beside us, twisting and turning his body as he weaves through the crowd. When I glance at him, his expression is stone-cold.

I shouldn’t have brought them here. I didn’t understand how dangerous navigating Zero’s mind would be.

But it’s too late to dwell on it.

We finally reach the department store’s entrance. The model smiles at us with her blank expression. She holds out a coupon for us to take, but unlike everyone else walking into the store, I hold back and don’t dare touch it. Neither does Hideo nor Roshan.

Her smile disappears. Then, suddenly, she raises her voice. It’s a warning call.

And everyone near us starts rushing toward us at a frightening pace.

“He’s found us,” Hideo calls over his shoulder. “Hurry!” He seizes my wrist and pulls me forward. Roshan dashes ahead.

A door at the end of the floor glints, and we make a run for it. People behind us continue to rush forward, still expressionless and wordless.

Hideo reaches the door and shoves it open. We hurry inside. The last thing I see when I look back are the countless determined faces heading toward us. Then I slam the door shut, sealing them out.

I’m trembling all over. Hammie’s gone. Asher’s gone. And if we don’t get to the end of this soon, if we don’t restore Zero’s mind to Sasuke’s, they may never come back.

After the strange, wordless bustle of the Shibuya illusion, this street looks calm and quiet and dim, lit only with streetlights and the occasional stripe of golden yellow light streaming out from homes.

It’s the street where Hideo’s parents live, but everything looks different at night, and a subtle mist floats around us.

Hideo’s breath fogs in the air as he stares at the house. “This is before Dad planted the spruce in the front yard,” he says in a soft voice. “The door’s a different color, too.”

I remember that. When I’d visited his home, the door had been painted a deep red, but in the Memory Hideo had once shown me of his younger self sprinting back home, the door had been blue. That’s the color it is here.

Hideo hesitates, as if he were afraid to walk closer. This is a nightmare that he’s trapped in, just like how Zero had once used my worst memory against me.

Roshan starts walking toward the house. “Emi,” he says quietly, “you and Hideo stay back. I have my shields; it’ll be safer for you both that way. No doubt there are security bots here, too.”

Hideo shakes his head once and steps in front. “Watch Emi,” he replies, then sweeps a hand across the scene. A menu grid appears. “I’m such an integral part of this scene that I’ll blend in easily. Zero’s not going to find me.”

We head up to the house. As we draw near, I can hear the sound of muffled voices in the house, the recognizable hum of Hideo’s mother and the lower rumble of his father. Hideo approaches the home, opens the door, and leads us in.

It’s a warm, comforting space, as neat and tidy as I remember it—except without the sculptures that Hideo’s father would later make in remembrance of Sasuke. In fact, there are still photos of Sasuke on all the walls, portraits of him with Hideo and with his parents. This must be a memory from when he was still back home.

“Hideo-kun!”

We turn in unison at the sound of Hideo’s mother bustling into the room. She looks startlingly different from how I’d seen her in person—here, she looks like the original sun instead of the shadow, with a straight back and a sharp gleam in her eyes, her smile cheerful and energetic. There’s something painful in seeing her this way, before Sasuke disappeared.

Beside me, Hideo makes an instinctive move toward her before he forces himself to stop. His hands bundle into fists at his side. He knows this isn’t real.