Taylor stares at Hideo with a soft smile I’ve come to know all too well. When I look at her eyes, though, they are hard as stone. “I’ve been watching your career for a while,” she finally says to him. “You’re very impressive, as is this algorithm you’ve developed.”
Hideo has gone so still that for an instant I think he’s being controlled, too. He says nothing as he stares at the woman who kidnapped his brother and stole his life.
But his emotions—the dark, seething hatred churning across our Link—is a flood of barbs and thorns, a force so powerful that I can almost feel the edges of it clawing into my skin.
“Your creative director agreed to give us the way in,” she says. “Among other details.”
Kenn.
I gasp through the overwhelming wave of Hideo’s emotions. My eyes dart up to meet Taylor’s. Kenn had let them into the dome. What else has he given them?
Hideo’s eyes are hard and glittering. “How long?” he says quietly.
“Months.” Taylor takes a step forward and folds her arms. “It’s hard to find friends you can trust, isn’t it? I suppose everyone has their price.”
Everyone has their price. I realize they are the exact words Zero had once said to me, when he’d confronted me during the Warcross championships. Months. So Kenn has been working with her since before the championships began.
The argument I’d seen between Kenn and Hideo comes back to me in a flash. How eager he’d been to skip Mari’s study on the NeuroLink’s flaws.
But maybe his frustrations ran deeper than that. Deep enough for him to betray Hideo and let Taylor in.
And suddenly I understand how Zero always seemed to know so much. Every detail of the closing ceremony. Every piece of Hideo’s plan to patch the beta lenses at the opening of today’s game. The bug that allows a way into Hideo’s mind. The existence of the algorithm in the first place.
Kenn had been the one feeding them information. Maybe this is why he used to ask me to watch out for Hideo’s safety. It was never actually out of concern. It was to keep tabs on Hideo.
The truth of it hits me so hard I can barely breathe. My gaze flies from Taylor up to the glass box overlooking the arena, where Kenn now sits. His silhouette is angled down toward us.
Maybe he had even been the one who’d let Jax slip into Hideo’s secured box in the stadium during the failed assassination attempt.
My breaths are coming in short gasps now. Had Taylor offered him a stake in this mission in exchange for his help? She must have. And he, frustrated and ambitious, had agreed.
Fifty-nine seconds until the beta lenses patch.
Hideo’s attention is no longer on Taylor. He’s staring at Zero, whose eyes—unmistakably that of Hideo’s brother—stay cold and unfeeling.
Hideo’s studying Zero as if everything I’d told him couldn’t possibly be real.
“Sasuke,” Hideo says hoarsely. The wave of his anger shifts into grief.
All semblance of practicality has vanished from him. There’s a note of wild hope in his voice, like Zero might snap out of it if they could just talk to each other. And for a moment, even knowing that it’s impossible, I think it might work.
But Zero doesn’t react in any way. Watching him in front of his brother for the first time in years, I can’t tell if he registers any emotion at all. Beside him, Jax’s hand is wrapped tightly around the handle of her gun.
We are standing in the middle of a powder keg, and the fuse is about to blow.
Thirty seconds until the beta lenses patch.
“This is the deal, isn’t it, Hideo?” Zero finally says. His voice sounds like it always does, and there’s not even the slightest hint of recognition in it. “Or has Emika not told you what she should?”
Hideo looks at me. His eyes are black with anguish, filled with a deep feeling of loss, the realization that everything I told him was true, that Sasuke is looking at him, saying his name but not reacting to what it means. When he speaks again, his voice grates, harsh with desperation. “You’re not a work of code,” he says. “You’re my brother. I know you’re reluctant to hurt us. I can hear in your voice the memory of who you are. You know, don’t you?”
“Of course I know,” Zero replies, in that eerily calm way of his.
The words hit Hideo like bullets.
Taylor just smiles at him in that knowing, manipulative way. “Look at it this way, Hideo. You created your life’s work because of your brother’s disappearance,” she says. “Everything happens for a reason.”
“That’s the most bullshit saying in the world,” he snaps.
“Come on. Now your brother is here, when I could have just let him die of his illness. Is this not better?”
Hideo narrows his eyes at her. The pure hatred in his gaze—the rage that has surfaced at the sight of what Taylor did to his brother, that Taylor is now threatening my life—is boiling over now. The deep, soulless fury I’ve witnessed in him before, the scarred knuckles . . . it’s nothing compared to this.
Taylor glances at me. She’s expecting me to follow through on my promise now, that I will break into Hideo’s mind.
Zero seconds.
An electric current rushes through my head. Nearby, Hammie and Roshan also flinch. The beta lenses start to patch, steadily downloading the algorithm onto them.
I pull out the cube that Zero had given me. The hack. And in the space of that moment, I hesitate.
I don’t know what gives me away to Taylor. Something about the light in my eyes, the shift in my stance, the slight hesitation in my actions.
Does she know I have other plans?
She suddenly raises a gun and aims it directly at my head. She keeps her eyes on Hideo as her finger hovers over the trigger. “Open the algorithm, Hideo,” she says calmly.
Hideo’s lips curl into a snarl at her threat to me. His hatred pours over like oil across the ocean.
At the same time, Jax—who had been so still—suddenly draws her own gun and points it directly at Taylor. “Shoot her, and I shoot you.” Her hand is clenched tightly enough around her gun’s handle to wash her skin white.
Taylor looks sharply at her. This time, the woman is surprised. “What’s this?” she murmurs. “You’re in on this, too, Jackson?”
Jax winces at the use of her full name.
Taylor tightens her lips. Deep anger flashes across her face. I remember what Jax had said to me about Taylor’s greatest fear. Death. Now her daughter is threatening her with it.
Panic floods Jax’s eyes, that terror she’d had as a small girl cowering under the influence of someone supposed to be her mother. Her hand trembles. But this time, she doesn’t back down. Everything building up inside her since the death of Sasuke has erupted to the surface, and its strength keeps her arm lifted.
She tears her eyes away from Taylor long enough to glance at me. “Now,” she hisses.
Hideo, I gasp through our Link.
Taylor looks back at him and tightens her finger on her gun’s trigger.
Hideo moves.
He snaps his fingers once, pulling up his own small, rotating box to hover between us. Before I even have time to register that this is the key to opening his algorithm, he flicks his wrist and unlocks it.
A maze of colors bursts from the box, a million bright nodes connected to each other with lines of light, the way a brain’s circuits link to one another. It’s massive and intricate, extending far beyond our space on the floor to fill the entire arena. For one brief instant, I am looking into a web of commands that can control the minds of every single person in the world hooked up to the NeuroLink. If time could have stopped right now, I would stop to marvel at this frightening masterpiece.
Hideo homes in on Taylor’s account, seizes it, and links it to the algorithm. Her mind’s palette suddenly appears as a new node in the matrix, connected to Zero by a glowing thread.
Hideo flicks his wrist again. The thread snaps.
Taylor shudders violently as he rips away her control of Zero.