“You turned yourself in.” There is a note of fascination in his voice. “And did you know what you would be sacrificing in doing that?”
I shrug. “Didn’t have time to dwell on it. Just seemed like the right thing to do.”
Hideo is quiet. His attention is now completely locked on me.
“I suppose chivalry isn’t dead,” he finally says.
I don’t quite know how to respond. All I can do is return his look, feel another wall around him fall away, see the glint in his eyes change. Whatever he thought of what I said, it’s made him let down his guard.
Then the moment’s over. He straightens in his chair and breaks his eye contact with me. “Until next time, Emika,” he says.
I murmur my own farewell and end the call. His virtual self disappears from my room, leaving me alone again. Slowly, I exhale and let my shoulders sag. Hideo hadn’t mentioned anything about the other bounty hunters, which means I’m probably ahead of them on this job. So far, so good.
It takes me a moment to realize that I’d forgotten to turn off my hack when I was having my conversation with Hideo. That meant that I was crawling his profile for data, too. Hideo has his own protective shields up on his info, but even so, I’d managed to grab one unencrypted file from his account, one newly created earlier today. Now sitting in my downloads, blinking at me. I peer at it long enough that it opens, thinking that I want to look inside.
My room fades away. I find myself standing in some sort of gym, equipped with large punching bags, racks of weights, mats, and long mirrors. This is one of Hideo’s Memory files. I shouldn’t be poking around in his data. Right away, I start exiting, but the Memory plays before I can.
Hideo is punching a bag in a furious rhythm, each impact shuddering in my view. Kickboxing? I pan around the Memory’s world—then stop when I see the reflection in the mirrors.
He’s shirtless, and his chest and back are slick with sweat, his muscles wound tight. His damp hair shudders with each hit he makes. His hands are wrapped in white bandages, and as he continues his ferocious assault on the punching bag, I can see glimpses of blood staining the bandages over his knuckles. The scars I always see. How hard has he been hitting that bag? But what shocks me is his expression. His eyes are black and fierce, a look so full of focused anger that I physically pull away.
I think back to the intensity I’d seen on his face during our first meeting, when he was talking about his newest creation, about his passions. I can see a similar light in his eyes here in the way he throws his punches—but this is a darker intensity. One of deep fury.
Hideo’s bodyguards wait patiently at the edges of the room, and standing right next to him is someone who must be his trainer, decked out head to toe in padded gear. “Enough,” he says now, and in response, Hideo pauses to turn on him. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the look the trainer gives me—to Hideo—is wary, even a little afraid.
The trainer starts to circle, and Hideo does the same. His movements are fluid and precise, deadly. His hair falls across his face, obscuring his eyes momentarily from view. The trainer twirls a long wooden stick in one hand, drags it along the ground, and then hoists it. He comes at Hideo, swinging the stick at him with blinding speed. My view blurs. Hideo dodges the blow easily. He sidesteps again, then a third time—on the fourth strike, Hideo lunges. He brings one arm up, fist clenched, as the stick comes down on it. The stick snaps with a loud crack against his forearm. Hideo darts forward. His fist strikes the trainer’s arm pads so powerfully that the trainer winces at the impact. Hideo doesn’t let up. He rains blows on the man’s arm pads in a blur of motion—the final punch lands so hard that the trainer stumbles backward and falls.
Hideo stands there for a moment, breathing heavily, his expression hard. As if he were seeing someone else lying there. Then, the fury in his eyes fades, and for a moment, he looks like himself again. He offers the trainer his hand and pulls him back up to his feet. The session ends.
I watch in stunned silence as Hideo bids farewell to his trainer, then heads out of the room’s double doors with his bodyguards flanking him, his hands still wrapped in bloodied bandages. Then the Memory ends, and I find myself in my own room again, jolted back into a peaceful scene. I finally exhale, realizing I’d been holding my breath.
So that’s how Hideo gets his bruised knuckles. Why does he train like a demon possessed? Why does he strike as if he wants to kill? I shiver at the memory of his expression, of those vicious, dark eyes, absent of any hint of the playful, polite, charismatic version of himself that I thought I knew. I shake my head. Best if I didn’t mention watching this Memory to anyone. Aside from his own bodyguards, Hideo probably didn’t intend for anyone to see that.
The shifting light in my bedroom starts to reflect from the pool outside my balcony, and the glow startles me back into reality. I’m here for a job, not to spy on Hideo’s private training sessions.
I exit from my account and remind myself to focus my thoughts on Ren instead. In the back of my mind, though, Hideo’s conversation with me plays on repeat. And when I finally leave my bedroom to join my teammates in our training for the day, it’s the memory of his dark eyes that lingers, the mystery behind his bloodied knuckles and furious gaze.
15
Three days pass in a blur of training activity. The Phoenix Riders run drills of every possible combination. I’m paired with Hammie, then with Ren, then with Asher and Roshan. I’m paired with two of them. I’m paired against them. Our environments change from jungle to city to towering cliffs. We practice in levels from past championships and everything in between.
Asher trains us with an intensity I haven’t seen before. I struggle to keep up. Every new world I play is a world everyone else has already played, every new maneuver a familiar one to the rest of my team. Just when I think I’m getting the hang of something, Asher will halve the time required of us to do certain missions or perform certain moves. Just when I start getting used to a world, Asher moves us on to the next one.
I end my days exhausted, slumped against the couches with my teammates, my mind crowded with new information as Asher reviews with us what the next day will be. My dreams are filled with our drills.
While Hideo had made sure I would end up on a team, he can’t help the Phoenix Riders win. If we lose, my teammates will disband for the season, and it’ll be that much harder to follow Ren around. Hideo is counting on me to fulfill this end of the bargain. If I don’t, I might end up forfeiting the bounty to some other hunter who can stay in the Championships.