“How did you find out?” he finally asks.
“I figured it out after the final game, after I left your suite,” I go on, wanting to fill the heavy silence. “The hack I pulled at the end to stop him also exposed his identity, and that was when I saw his name.”
“It’s not him.”
I bring up a second video of Zero, this time of us walking side by side as he escorts me to my room. “It’s him,” I insist in a quiet voice.
Hideo stares at him for a long time. He stares until it seems he may have frozen solid.
“What—” His voice breaks for a moment, and I feel my own heart crack at the sound. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him falter like this. “What happened to him?”
I sigh, running a hand through my hair. “I shouldn’t be the one to tell you this,” I reply. “But your brother . . . when he disappeared, he was very ill. Your mother had, in desperation, entered him into an experimental trial that had a chance of curing him.”
Hideo shakes his head at me. “No,” he replies. “My parents would have told me. Sasuke was playing in the park with me on the day he vanished.”
“I’m only telling you what I know.” As Hideo looks on, I show him each recording I’d duplicated, in chronological succession. The testing room in the Innovation Institute, with a child at every desk. The hopeful, worried faces of Hideo’s parents peering in from the window. The private meeting between Dana Taylor and Mina Tanaka. The small silhouette of Sasuke, cowering in the corner of a room, of him begging to go home to his family. The bright blue scarf wrapped around his neck. His friendship with Jax, and all the moments they spent huddled together. The way he tried to negotiate with Taylor for his freedom, paid the price of his scarf, and then failed to escape. The slow, gradual, crippling disappearance of his identity with each new procedure done to him, of Sasuke becoming less of a person and more a series of data.
The truth behind Project Zero.
I expect Hideo to tear his eyes away at some point, but he doesn’t. He watches all of it in silence, his stare never shifting away from his brother as Sasuke ages a little in each video and loses more of himself. As Taylor takes away Sasuke’s scarf. As Sasuke watches his brother’s first public announcement. Each scene rips a gash in Hideo’s heart.
When the recordings finish, Hideo doesn’t say a word. I fixate on the dried blood on his knuckles. The silence roars in our ears like a living thing.
“Sasuke died years ago,” Hideo finally whispers into the dark, echoing the words Jax had said to me. “He’s gone from this world, then.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper back.
The heavy weight that has been crushing his heart—the polite, stiff distance, all the careful shields he’d always put up one by one—gives way. His shoulders sag. He lowers his head into his hands, and suddenly, he starts to weep.
That weight was the burden of not knowing, of years and years of anguish, of imagining the thousands of things that could have happened, of wondering whether his brother might ever walk back through the door. Of all those countless iterations he’d made of his Memory, trying to figure out how Sasuke could have disappeared. It was the silver strand of an unfinished story.
There’s nothing I can say to comfort him. All I can do is listen to his heart break over and over again.
When there are no more tears left, Hideo sits in silence and stares out the windows. He looks lost in a fog, and for the very first time, I see uncertainty in his eyes.
I lean forward and find my voice. “Even though Sasuke is gone from this world,” I murmur softly, “he’s still alive in another.”
Hideo doesn’t answer, but his lashes lower as his gaze turns toward me.
“Zero is Taylor’s creation,” I go on. My voice sounds deafening. “He’s tethered to her in every sense of the word. Just as your algorithm controls those who wear the new NeuroLink lenses, Taylor controls Zero’s data. His mind. But Sasuke isn’t gone. I think he reached out to me through Zero because he’s trapped somewhere in that darkness, crying for help.”
Hideo winces visibly. He still says nothing.
I put a hand on his arm hesitantly. “Hideo, Taylor’s after your NeuroLink. Her people are behind every recent attack against it.”
“Let them come.” Hideo’s words are a quiet and clear threat. He rises from the couch, turns away from me, and walks toward the window. There, he puts his hands in his pockets and stares out at the city on the water.
My words fade away. After a while, I push myself off the couch and go to stand beside him at the windows.
When I glance at him, I can see the tears on his cheeks, his red eyes.
Finally, after a long moment, he turns his head slightly toward me, his gaze still directed outward at the city. “Does he remember anything?” he asks in a low voice.
I can hear the real question he’s asking. Does he remember me? Does he remember our parents? “He knows who you are,” I reply softly. “But only in the way that a stranger might know you. I’m sorry, Hideo. I wish I could tell you something better than that.”
Hideo continues to stare blankly out at the city. I find myself wondering what he’s thinking, if maybe he wishes he could use the NeuroLink to will away what happened in the past.
“Jax told me that the only way to help Sasuke is if we use your algorithm to turn Zero against Taylor.”
This breaks through his trance. Hideo looks sidelong at me. “You want me to link the algorithm to her.”
“Exactly. If you open the algorithm and connect Taylor to it, you’ll be able to control Taylor and free Zero from her.”
“What about Sasuke?” Hideo’s jaw tightens at his brother’s name.
“Taylor has archives of Sasuke’s past mind. All the iterations of him. If we can combine those versions with who he is now, we can make his mind whole again.” I pause. “I know he can never be real . . . but you’ll be able to have him back in some sense.”
“You’re asking me to give you access to my algorithm.”
I hesitate. “Yes.”
He’s still struggling to trust me, but with his guard down, I can once again see his beating heart behind the armor. All the thousands of possibilities of what could have happened to Sasuke are wiped from his gaze and replaced by clarity—a path forward. He has a chance to talk to his brother again, bring him back in some small way.
For this, I know he’s willing to tear the world’s order to shreds. He’s willing to risk anything.
Hideo looks back out at the water. A long beat passes before he finally says, “I’ll do it.”
Without thinking, I take a step closer to him until we’re nearly touching. My hand comes up to rest on his arm. I don’t say anything. He stirs anyway, sensing my own mix of emotions—the wavering trust I’m putting in him, the pull I always feel when I’m near him. My fear of letting him in again. Beneath his shirt, his skin is warm. I can’t bring myself to move away.
He turns to face me. “You’re risking your life, telling me this,” he says. “You could have returned to New York and left all of this behind. But you’re still here, Emika.”
For a moment, I imagine myself back at the little bar with Hammie and the other Riders. I see Hammie leaning forward and fixing me with her steady gaze. Why are you doing this?
Then I do something I never thought I would. I think back on the morning I’d crouched, thin and hollow and hopeless, in my foster-home bed and heard his story on the radio. I let the Memory form, crystallizing into a clear image, and then I send it to him, every last thing I saw and felt and heard that day. I let him see the broken side of me that had stirred at the knowledge of him, the pieces that somehow found each other again.