The smile I get in return from the creator of Warcross is, of all things, bashful. “Well,” he says, “I wanted to do something for you, for a change.” He looks expectantly at me. “Do you like it?”
Suede gift boxes holding fifteen-thousand-dollar electric skateboards. Flights on private jets. Closets full of expensive clothes. Dinners at restaurants he owns. And yet, none of that has made my heart skip like this earnest, hopeful look on his face as he waits to hear if I enjoyed the food he made for me.
I lean my shoulder into him as I hold my bowl. “Decent,” I reply. He blinks in surprise, then seems to remember what he’d once said to me during our first meeting. A laugh escapes him.
“I’ll take it,” he says, leaning back.
Still. Even as he talks easily with both his mother and father, I can’t help thinking about his words from earlier, that Sasuke is a topic never discussed with them, that their grief and shame run so deep that they can’t even bear to have their second son’s portrait in the house. No wonder I never heard about this in all the documentaries I watched about Hideo. No wonder he has such a strict company policy of not talking about his family.
“They don’t want to move,” Hideo tells me on our ride back into Tokyo. “I’ve tried convincing them a thousand times, but they don’t want to leave our old home. So I do my best to keep them safe here.”
“Safe?” I ask.
“There are bodyguards watching their home at all times.”
Of course there would be. I hadn’t even noticed them, but now I think about the random passerby on the sidewalk, the gardener working on the hedge.
By the time his car pulls up in the back of the Phoenix Riders’ dorm, it’s nearly midnight. I stare at the overlays on the tinted windows, currently showing an empty car interior so that no one will be able to see us both inside.
“I’ll see you soon,” I whisper to him, reluctant to leave.
He draws closer, touches my chin with one hand, and guides me into a kiss. I close my eyes and lean into it.
Finally, too soon, he pulls away. “Good night,” he murmurs.
I have to force myself not to look back as I get out of the car and head toward the dorm. But even long after his car has pulled away and left me alone, his presence lingers. There was a new expression in his eyes tonight, the kind open only to a few . . . but there are still secrets behind it. I wonder what it will take to uncover another of them.
? ? ? ? ?
THE REST OF the week flies by. On Friday morning, the familiar sound of Asher ramming his wheelchair into my door stirs me out of my restless sleep in my dorm room. “Game three!” he shouts, the excitement obvious in his voice as it fades down the hall. “Let’s go! We’re gonna knock out the Cloud Knights in record time!”
I rub a hand across my face. I feel groggy today, my mind stifled and my heart still pounding from another round of nightmares, and my limbs are weighed down as I drag myself out of bed. While I dress, a message pops into my view from Hideo.
Good luck today. I’ll be watching from the balconies.
I shake my head. Now he’s just thumbing his nose at his attackers.
I thought you were going to stay away from the upper decks.
We’ve redone the security cams, rewired the stadium, and security detail has been doubled. They’d be fools to attack in the same place again. I’ll be fine.
I already know there’s nothing I can do to talk him out of it.
Well, be careful, ok?
Keep your eyes peeled.
My eyes will be on you, I’m afraid.
A nagging worry lingers in my mind, but his words still pull a smile out of me. I head downstairs.
The other Phoenix Riders chat animatedly on our way to the stadium this morning. I feel strangely disconnected from it all. Ren doesn’t seem to act any differently toward me, but his nonchalance bothers me even more. Maybe I should have told Hideo about him after all. Maybe he would have been disqualified from today’s game. I narrow my eyes as I watch Ren crack a joke with Asher. No. Hell if he’s going to force me out of my element. I’m going to keep using him to get to the bottom of this.
The stadium feels like a blur today, and as we enter the arena and go to our individual terminals, I feel like I’m walking in a fog. The announcer sounds far away, and the cheers from the audience turn into a mess of background noise. I keep my head turned up to the balcony seats. Sure enough, Hideo is there, surrounded by bodyguards.
Then the world goes dark, and I find myself transported into another realm.
“Welcome to the Lost City Level!”
The echo of the announcer’s voice fades away as the virtual world materializes around us. Dim light filters down from the ocean’s surface far above. I find myself floating above a spectacular, ruined city surrounded on all sides by walls of colorful coral. Stone pillars tower up toward the surface. Piles of rock are everywhere, looking like once-grand theaters and bathhouses. Turquoise light shines from within some of their crevices, forming glowing lines that seem to point out pathways to take. The ruins stretch as far as I can see, dappled sunlight dancing against their surfaces, and drifting over them are a field of shining, jewel-like power-ups. The only thing keeping us from feeling completely immersed is the sound of the crowd’s cheers all around us.
I look to either side. My teammates are all here, dressed in outfits of bright white with flippers on our feet and fins on our arms. I look down at my hands. They are equipped with buttons in my palms. When I experiment with pressing them, my avatar jerks forward a bit. This will be how we get around.
Far on the other side of the ruins appear our rivals. The Cloud Knights. They are dressed in outfits of bright yellow, standing out against the blue tint of this place. All of our eyes are turned toward them—all except Ren’s. I glance at him to see him staring down at the ruins already, as if searching for something. My jaw tightens. Follow him.
“Game! Set! Fight!”
The game starts. Asher barks orders at us through our comms, and we split immediately. On the other side of the ruins, the Cloud Knights dive down for the ruins, no doubt ready to lose themselves inside the maze of crumbled structures. We dive, too. I clench my fists down on the buttons on my palms, and I jerk forward through the water in a blur of motion, slicing a trail behind me. A bar appears in the center of my view, showing how much oxygen I have left.
As we get to the point where we start splitting up, my teammates reappear as tiny dots on a small map in my view. But the only person I’m paying attention to is Ren. He swims away from the others and toward a series of collapsed columns that form a cave. Considering what had happened after our first round, I change course from where Asher tells me to go and instead trail after Ren.
“Emi,” Asher calls through our comms. He sighs. “Can you follow my lead for once? I said go center, toward that collapsed amphitheater.”
“I see a better route,” I lie, continuing in my direction. “Don’t worry.”