Wildcard

by Marie Lu

  Hideo flicks his wrist again. The thread snaps.

  Taylor shudders violently as he rips away her control of Zero.

  Now, Hideo, I cry out silently. The cube in my hand flickers in and out as I tremble. Destroy the algorithm.

  But Hideo’s eyes are still black with hate. And I realize, abruptly, that he isn’t done yet—he’s not satisfied with this part of our plan, to merely hook Taylor into the algorithm and force her to free Zero from her control. He’s snapped loose from his measured self and allowed his rage to run free. He’s going to unleash the full, unthinking force of his power on her.

  “No—” I start to say. But it’s too late.

  In that same instant, Taylor’s lips part in terror as she realizes what he’s about to do. She holds out a hand instinctively in front of her.

  Hideo narrows his eyes. Through our Link, I hear him send a quiet, unspoken command to Taylor.

  Die.

  26

  I see it happen in slow motion.

  Taylor doesn’t even have time to utter a sound. She only gets a fraction of a second—and all she can do is turn her disbelieving expression to Hideo, her eyes dilated like a deer’s at the end of the hunt, right after the predator’s teeth sink in. Her lips part, but she never gets a chance to say a final word. Maybe she’d wanted to scream.

  Then her face goes milk white. Her eyes roll back. Her legs give way like their bones have been crushed within her flesh.

  She collapses hard on the floor, her head cracking with a horrifying sound. She lies there in a sickening, wrong way, and I’m reminded of the way I’d seen Tremaine fall to the ground, the spray of blood against the wall.

  At the same time, the node that was her mind’s palette flashes a brilliant, blinding white—then vanishes, deleted from the rest of the algorithm. The links to it snap back into place with other nodes, as if Taylor’s mind were never there. The command had instantly forced her brain to shut itself down.

  She’s dead.

  My mind is a blank slate, with only a single thought coming in through my shock.

  Hideo killed her with a single command.

  This is supposed to be the one thing that the algorithm was designed to protect against—it was supposed to cure humanity of impulsive violence, of inflicting pain and suffering on anyone else.

  Yet in this single moment, in his rage, for everything she had done to his brother, everything she threatened to do to me . . . Hideo disproved everything he worked for.

  Jax looks stunned. But Zero . . .

  Zero turns to face Hideo. There is nothing on his face except for an icy smile. He isn’t shocked at all. He nods his head, like everything just went according to his plans.

  He lifts a hand, waves it once, and brings up a bit of code I’ve never seen before. This is not the virus he had shown me. Before Hideo can react, Zero installs it into the algorithm.

  The web of nodes around us shakes—and then, right before my eyes, the colors change, the millions of nodes of blues and reds and greens shifting, one by one, into black. It sweeps across them in a tidal wave. It reaches Hideo and, in an instant, severs his control of the algorithm.

  Zero’s helmet folds back up, shielding his face from view once again. Then the algorithm shifts into place with him.

  I realize what has happened before anyone can say it.

  Zero had no plans to destroy the algorithm. He has instead merged with it. I watch in horror as the new algorithm solidifies with Zero at the center of it.

  His artificial mind had managed to evolve, to circumvent Taylor’s control, and he had been developing it independently all along behind her back.

  Hideo tries to wrestle his control back—but it’s too late. He has been cut entirely from his creation.

  One look at Jax’s face tells me that Zero’s plan had never been the same as Taylor’s. He had never intended for her to take control of the algorithm or even to potentially destroy it, and his goal had never been to stop only Hideo from using the NeuroLink to control people.

  He had done this solely to take control of the NeuroLink and the algorithm. He knew. He’d guessed that if Hideo saw Taylor, he would kill her himself. It’s the whole reason why he let me reconnect with Hideo in the first place, why he concocted this plan for me to cozy up to Hideo and persuade him to show me his algorithm. It’s probably why no one ever caught me doing what I was doing, because Zero knew and wanted me to go through with all my plans.

  And that means, I realize, that Zero had always wanted Taylor dead. She had tortured his mind so severely that she had molded him into the same monster she became.

  In one move, Zero has gotten rid of the person who took his life, has forced Hideo to show the folly of his algorithm, and has taken control. In one move, he has gained the most powerful instrument in the world.

  My shock is reflected in the faces of Hideo and Jax. What have we done?

  The cube. The virus I have. This is still the only moment when I have a chance to break into Zero’s mind. I could hack him. I lunge forward, aiming to sync the cube into his account. It flashes a blinding blue-white.

  But I’m too late.

  Zero turns to look at me. “Thank you, Emika,” he says.

  I don’t know what happens next, because everything goes black.

  27

  Sounds and sensations around me flicker in and out: Jax shouting at me, a din of voices I don’t recognize, and then the feeling of floating in midair. Maybe the shock is too much. Maybe Zero had uttered a command that killed me, and I just don’t know that I’m dead.

  My dreams—they must be dreams, because they make no sense—are sharp and strange, switching abruptly from one scene to the next. There’s a small boy wearing a blue scarf, and I’m chasing after him, trying in vain to tell him to turn around. I’m a child again, holding Dad’s hand as we walk together through Central Park. Today he looks sophisticated, his hair smoothed into a slick shine and his jeans and black shirt switched out for a well-tailored blazer and trousers. We’ve gotten out of an afternoon concert at Carnegie Hall, and he’s in a bright mood, singing an off-key rendition of the concert piece as I twirl in a tulle dress. I want to lean into the familiarity of it, the loudness and the sheer joy.

  He points out something in the distance, and I rise up on my toes to look at what it might be. There’s a dark spot in front of us, right on the park’s path, like a paint streak. When I stare at it longer, it starts to grow, expanding until it soaks the path and covers everything around us.

  Dad pauses, afraid, his hand gripping mine tighter. When I look around me, the park is gone, and in its place is the Dark World, the towering nonsense skyscrapers reaching up into a black sky, the crooked dark streets and the neon red lights of exposed names hovering over us.

  Wake up, Emika Chen.

  An amused voice tugs me gradually out of the darkness.

  When everything comes back into view, I’m in a dimly lit room with a white ceiling and floor. Tall glass windowpanes line every wall.

  This is the room where I saw Jax shoot Tremaine.

  We’re back at the Innovation Institute, only now I’m on the other side of the glass. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m strapped down tightly to a chair, and another moment to notice the figure standing several feet away from me.

  Of course the voice had belonged to Zero. He’s shielded behind his armor, and when he glances casually over his shoulder at me, I see that his face is masked behind virtual steel and glass. His hands are tucked easily behind his back, his chin tilted in thoughtful curiosity. It’s such a Hideo-like gesture.

  A note of fear cuts through my foggy mind. Hideo. Where is he? Is he here? Is he okay?

  “What happened?” I say. My words still sound a little out of place, slower than my thoughts are coming to me.

  “Stay still,” Zero says, his voice echo
ing in the space.

  Nearby, a girl with short, silver-white hair has her back turned to me as she pulls containers of lenses off a shelf and places them on a counter.

  Jax. The name floats up to the surface of my groggy mind. Jax, who had been working with me. I watch her, wanting to scream. What if she has been in on it all along? Has played me for a fool? Hadn’t she shot Tremaine without a second thought? What made me think that she could possibly be trustworthy?

  She turns around now, so that I can see her face, and takes a box of lenses to the sink. There’s something off about the way she glides from one activity to the next, as if she were on autopilot rather than conscious.

  Zero must be controlling her, using the palette of his mind to move Jax—the girl he’d once loved, the one he’d given up his freedom to protect—around like a puppeteer would his marionette.

  An icy claw grips my heart.

  That means Zero must now be in control of everyone in the world who’d been using Hideo’s lenses, anyone who Hideo had originally connected to his algorithm.

  Jax, I try to say, but my voice chokes, dry from hoarseness. Had I been screaming?

  “I wiped your NeuroLink account clean and rebooted your connection,” Zero calls back to me as he walks toward the other side of the room. “It’s updating, and it will go more smoothly for you if you let yourself relax. This isn’t something you’d want to glitch, Emika.”

  Central Park. My father. The boy with the blue scarf. What I thought were dreams were probably just a mash-up of all of my Memories and saved recordings, jumbled into a fray as they were deleted from my account.

  And what I thought was me passing out—the darkness that had engulfed me—was actually Zero powering off my NeuroLink, so that all I could see in my view was a black field. Everything I had—my level, my Warcross account, everything in it—is all gone, downloaded into some external place I can’t access.

  This isn’t something you’d want to glitch, Emika.

  “What do you mean?” I finally croak out through my disorientation. “What kind of glitch? What are you doing to me?”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he replies. “Your lenses—and your connection to me—are just not as stable as I’d expect, given how much control I have over everyone else. I think you may have broken something when you launched the hack against me.”

  The cube I’d used. A vague recollection of the moment comes back to me now, splintered and blurry, the brilliant blue-white flash followed by suffocating darkness. It hadn’t worked . . . I don’t have a pathway into Zero’s mind. Not that I can see.

  But if I’m supposed to be completely under Zero’s control . . . then I don’t quite feel that, either. Something about the hack colliding with Zero’s mind must have altered my lenses, preventing me from being properly connected to him.

  That’s what Jax must be doing right now—preparing new lenses to give me, replacing mine and finally, properly, connecting me to Zero and the algorithm so that he can have full control.

  I struggle against my bonds, but they’re strapped so tightly that I can’t do anything more than wriggle my arms and legs by a fraction. I have to get out of here.

  Zero pauses on the other side of the room beside a second raised gurney, to which someone else is tied tightly. I pause in my struggles at the sight of him.

  It’s Hideo.

  He looks drugged and barely conscious, his head leaning against his headrest, and a light sheen of sweat gleams on his face. It’s a sharp contrast to the last moment when we’d stood together. When he’d lifted his hand, his eyes black with fury, and willed Taylor to die.

  After all this time, no matter what the situation or his mood, I’ve only seen Hideo in control—in his office, in the arena, in his home. Even in despair, with his heart torn open, he never looked the way he does now. Helpless. His creation wrenched out of his control.

  In spite of everything I’ve seen him do, I can’t help but feel afraid now that he’s no longer running the NeuroLink and the algorithm. It means that someone much, much worse is now in command.

  Zero stands in front of the gurney. If he feels anything at the sight of his brother, he doesn’t show it as he lifts a steel hand and grips Hideo’s chin.

  I suck in my breath sharply.

  I’d thought Zero was walking around in here as a virtual simulation. But no, he’s in the armored suit that I’d seen him testing with Taylor on the night that Tremaine had been shot. The robot that had moved its arm in sync with Zero’s.

  Zero’s mind is operating from within a real metal suit, an artificial being that seems alive in every technical sense.

  He forces Hideo to turn his face up to meet his. One brother versus another. Zero studies him curiously, like a specimen, before he releases Hideo again. He folds his hands behind his back and flexes his steel fingers in a smooth wave, stalking a slow circle around his bound brother.

  I clench my teeth, the white-hot heat of anger rising in me in a wave. “Leave him alone,” I growl.

  Zero pauses to look at me. “You still care deeply for him,” he says quietly.

  “You think?” I snap.

  “Tell me, Emika, what that’s like?” Now he sounds fascinated. “He’s done terrible things. And yet I can still sense your connection to him.”

  I realize with a start that it’s because Sasuke was never old enough to understand what love really means. Not even the early, innocent feelings he had for Jax could possibly compare to how complicated love actually is. He’d lost his humanity before he was ever able to experience that. My anger wavers as my heart breaks for him.

  “Whatever it was that you did, Emika,” Zero says, addressing me as he turns back to Hideo, “it seems you affected the lenses of those you’ve Linked with before, too. And that means his.” He finishes a full circle around Hideo and leans close to him. “But don’t worry. We’ll fix that easily enough.”

  His words, mockingly soothing, bear an echo of Taylor’s thought process. Even though she’s dead, her influence over him must have been so complete and so extreme that it still lingers underneath those smooth plates of steel.

  “But first,” Zero continues, finally turning away from Hideo and heading back toward me. Every muscle in me tenses as he approaches. “Let’s fix you.”

  I glare at him, wishing I could see some sign of Sasuke trapped inside, but the only thing staring back at me through his opaque mask is my own reflection.

  By the sink, Jax has ripped open the box with the lenses and pulled out a set. I glance at her again. She still has that blankness on her face, going about her motions like she’s not entirely here.

  Then . . . her eyes flicker to me. I realize that Zero doesn’t know I’ve Linked with her before. Her flint-gray irises gleam under the fluorescent light. In that instant, I see her familiar wit, her mind alert behind a carefully controlled expression. She’s not under Zero’s influence, no—but merely pretending to be.

  She shakes her head once at me, then her eyes look toward the door. A red light illuminates it from above, suggesting that it’s locked—but beside the door is the emergency box I remember from the first night I’d been in the institute. I look back at Jax, who goes back to preparing my new lenses at a counter closer to the door.

  Hope cuts through my dread. Maybe Jax is still my ally, after all. If I can stall for more time, maybe she can help us get out of here before Zero forces the new lenses on me.

  “You can’t be real,” I manage to choke out as I stare up at him. “I don’t believe you. You’re nothing but a simulation.”

  “Then see for yourself.” Zero reaches over and presses a flat button near the top of my gurney. The metal cuff restraining my left wrist snaps open with a clang, freeing my hand.

  I pull it immediately out of the binding, flexing my wrist in relief. My eyes return to him. Hesitantly, I reach out towar
d him. He doesn’t move.

  My hand touches his upper arm. I almost flinch. Cold, hard metal. There’s nothing human about the steel plate my fingers brush against, nothing that suggests a soul might exist inside. And yet . . . here he is, moving and functional, alive in every technical sense.

  “Can you . . . feel that?” I find myself asking.

  “I’m aware that you’re touching me,” he replies. “I can feel it, logically, if you can call it that.”

  “Can you sense pain?”

  “No. I don’t understand my limbs in the same way you do.”

  “Do you remember what that was like?”

  “Yes. I remember everything.”

  “Except what matters.”

  “Except what doesn’t matter,” he corrects me.

  I withdraw my hand and let my arm drop back to my side. Zero closes his fingers around my wrist. He pushes it into place against the metal cuff, ignoring my pleading eyes as he snaps it shut again.

  “I don’t understand,” I whisper. “Why do you want this?”

  He smiles in amusement, as if someone like him could still understand such a human emotion. “You already know. It’s the same answer that Taylor would have given you, that Hideo himself probably once gave you.”

  “But they had goals because they’re human, flesh and blood. Taylor wanted control because she’s afraid without it. Hideo did it out of love for you.” I lean forward, straining against my bonds, and grit my teeth at him. “What do you get out of controlling others, besides the satisfaction of doing so?”

  “Freedom, of course,” he replies. “Now I can do anything. Enter anyone’s mind.” He nods out toward the dark hall at the world beyond these walls. “I can be everywhere at once and nowhere at all.”

  And just like that, I understand. It’s the exact opposite of what Sasuke had endured at Taylor’s hands. When he’d been human, he had been her prisoner, trapped within the confines of this institute for years and subjected to unspeakable horrors, until he’d finally died and had his mind tethered to hers. He’d been fully at her beck and call.