“For asking you to help Emi out in the first place. I was worried she’d go off on her own again, keep everything to herself. I shouldn’t have put the idea in your head.”
Tremaine lets out his breath in a huff. “If you didn’t say it, I would’ve done it anyway. You think a hunter’s going to stay away from the chase of a lifetime? Come on, now. Don’t give yourself so much credit.”
Roshan’s eyes are moist again, and he hurriedly rubs a hand once across his face. “You really want to know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking about how everyone else has already left and here I am, still at your bedside like some kind of idiot. The doctors said you’ve already stabilized; they told me to go home. What am I waiting around for? I don’t know.”
Tremaine just looks back at him. I can’t tell what’s flitting through his pale eyes, but when he speaks, he can’t meet Roshan’s gaze. “Know what I’m really thinking?” he mutters. “I’m thinking about how, if you were the one lying in this bed instead of me, your entire family would be in here. Your brother and his duchess of a wife and their baby. Your sister. Your mother and your father. All your cousins and nephews and nieces, every single last one of them. There wouldn’t be any space left. They would have flown in together on a private plane and they would be packed in here, waiting and worrying until you could walk out the door.”
He hesitates, as if afraid to go on. “I know you’re with Kento now. I know he’s better than me in every way. But I’m thinking that, even though there’s no one in my family willing to wait around for me, even though you’re the only one in here, I couldn’t care less, because you might as well be the entire damn world.”
He grimaces in the silence afterward, his expression embarrassed. “See, here’s the moment after my speech when I’d like to either go right up to you or leave the room in a grand finale, except I’m kind of tied down to this stupid bed, so now it’s just awkward. You know what? Forget what I said. It was only—”
Roshan reaches out, takes Tremaine’s hand in his, and squeezes it tight. He doesn’t say a word for a long moment, but somehow, this contented silence seems like just the right thing to hear.
“You know, I’m not over you,” Roshan finally murmurs.
“I’m not either,” Tremaine replies. He turns his head slightly, all he can manage, and closes his eyes as Roshan leans down to kiss him.
The memory vanishes, as if everything I’d just seen had happened in the space of a second. Roshan stays seated against the wall with his eyes staring vacantly forward.
Zero already knows what we’re doing and where we’re trying to go. He’d even planted this false endpoint here, had used this game against us in order to hunt us down. He knew Hideo would come here, back to their old home.
My head jerks back up to Zero, my eyes narrowed in anger. He just looks at me through his opaque helmet, studying me quietly before turning his attention back to Hideo. To my surprise, though, he doesn’t touch Hideo.
Instead, he turns toward me and lunges.
Hideo darts for me. He reaches me before Zero can, clenches his jaw, and crouches before me, ready to attack his brother. Zero halts before Hideo can reach him. Again, he seems to shy away from Hideo, as if making contact with him might have the same poisonous effect as Zero’s mind controlling any one of us.
“Touch her, and I’ll kill you,” Hideo growls.
“You won’t kill Sasuke,” Zero replies in a cool voice.
“You’re not Sasuke.”
The ground beneath us cracks more. I lose my balance and fall to my knees. Before my eyes, a huge line divides the entire floor. I try to scramble to my feet and throw myself at Zero, one last-ditch attempt to get to him.
But it’s too late. The floor gives way, and all of us fall into darkness.
31
I have no idea where we are. The darkness is all-consuming, and the only thing I can hear is the sound of Hideo’s breathing coming from somewhere near me. His breaths are hoarse now, and when he speaks, he sounds weaker.
“Hideo?” I whisper, then say his name louder. “Hideo?”
He doesn’t respond right away. For a frightening moment, I think that Zero has somehow gotten to him, too, and that my new theory is completely wrong. Hideo’s going to stop speaking. He might already be staring emotionless into space within this darkness.
Or maybe, in real life, he’s dying. Bleeding out. We’re both trapped inside this panic room with Zero’s guards outside our door. At any moment, they could break in and seize us, and I’d feel rough hands grabbing my arms and dragging me to my feet. I’d feel the cold barrel of a real gun pressed to my head.
Then Hideo whispers something. “Emika.”
All I can do is whisper back. “I’m here.”
He lets out a breath that sounds like relief. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I should have known he’d set a trap for us in the one place where he knew I’d take us.”
Gradually, the overwhelming darkness around us lightens. At first, I can see only the ground right beneath my own feet. It looks like cracked cement. Then, faint silhouettes around us transform from simple shapes into skeleton trees, and dark walls materialize into soaring buildings. My gaze travels higher and higher as the world comes into view.
It looks like a half-finished city.
Skyscrapers with empty interiors, devoid of light. Streets full of broken pavement. The streets are a ghost version of Tokyo, without the crowds of people I’d seen in the earlier illusion of Shibuya. Neon signs hang unlit from the sides of malls and shops. The buildings have windows, but through the glass, I see only empty rooms with peeling walls. Paintings on the walls are unfinished. When I look more closely at them, I can see that they depict pieces of scenes from Zero’s old life. There’s a frame that seems like part of their old home, except it looks like a rough sketch with a few daubs of paint on it. There’s a portrait of a family, but no faces are filled in.
This is the very center of Zero’s mind—a hollowed-out version of Sasuke’s memories, a million fragments of pieces with their hearts ripped out.
Zero materializes before us now, his dark figure nearly invisible against the backdrop, his face hidden and impenetrable. As he appears, so do dozens—hundreds—of his security bots, all standing on the ledges of buildings and rooftops and street corners, silently watching us.
“You’re wasting your time,” Zero says with a sigh. His voice echoes in the space.
“If you’re so sure of that, then why are you here to stop us?” I reply.
His head cocks slightly to one side in a mocking gesture, then he ignores me, and turns his attention to Hideo. “Is it ironic,” he asks, “to see your creation in the hands of someone else? Did you really think it would always be under your control?”
I can practically see his words hit Hideo clean in the chest. Hideo winces, his eyes still fixed on the armored figure that bears the voice of his brother. “Sasuke, please,” he says.
Zero takes a step toward us. The world trembles at his movement. “You’re looking for someone who no longer exists.”
Hideo stares at him, searching desperately. “You may not be who you once were, but you’re still molded from my brother. You know my name, and you know who did this to you. I have to believe that a part of you remembers.” His voice turns hoarse. “The park where we used to play. The games you used to make up. Do you still remember the blue scarf I gave you, the one I used to wrap around your neck?”
Zero’s posture stiffens, but when he speaks again, his voice doesn’t change. “Is that a challenge?”
As he says this, the world trembles again—and then scarlet and sapphire gems appear everywhere, hovering in the air like marbled power-ups, their surfaces reflecting the landscape around them. His bots surrounding us tense, their faces turned in our direction as if ready to attack.