The floor beneath us shudders for a moment. Roshan braces himself against the wall before exchanging a wary look with Hideo. Already, Hideo’s motioning for us to back up.

Hideo’s mother pauses with a frown at the sight of her son hesitating. “What’s the matter?” she says as I read the translation. She glances back in the kitchen and motions for someone to come out. “Come help your brother.”

I blink. When I do, Hideo’s mother is gone, as if she’d never been there in the first place. Hideo stares back as the person who emerges from the kitchen isn’t Sasuke—but Zero. His black armor glints in the low light as he tilts his head slightly at us. Beneath us, the ground trembles harder.

He looks straight at Roshan, then Hideo, then me. “There you all are,” he says, his voice deep and cold.

He shouldn’t be able to see us behind our encryption unless he touches us—we’re supposed to be invisible to him. But there he is, or some shell of him, or a proxy. Whatever he is, he knows we’re here.

“The house,” Hideo suddenly murmurs at the same time I realize it. This time, the trap had been the entire house, and all three of us had been exposed the instant we stepped inside.

Zero turns his attention to his brother. Then, he lunges.

Roshan moves even before I can. He brings his forearms up in a cross, and a glowing blue shield arcs protectively before him and Hideo. Zero clashes against it—the force of it splits the shield cleanly in half. Zero seizes Roshan by the neck and slams him against the wall.

Roshan lets out a gasp as he struggles. I lunge toward them to pull Zero off, but Hideo grabs my wrist. “Sasuke,” he says in a hoarse, furious shout. “Stop this.”

Zero glances back at Hideo. “I know why you’re in here. I know what you’re looking for.” He drops Roshan, who crumples to the ground as he holds his throat.

I rush to his side, but Roshan’s hand flies up, warning me to stay away. Already, he’s slowing down, his eyes turning blank and emotionless. His hand slowly drops back to his side. As it happens, the world around me flickers briefly with a memory.

It’s of Roshan waiting inside a hospital room where Tremaine is resting, hooked up to a bunch of wires. Roshan is leaning his head into his hands, his elbows sinking into the bed. Looped around one of his hands are his prayer beads, and now he’s running his thumb across each turquoise sphere unconsciously. His dark curls are a wild mess, the evidence of his fingers raking anxiously through them.

My gaze goes to Tremaine. His wound is as I remember it, his head still wrapped in thick layers of gauze. Nearby in the adjoining waiting room, the other Riders and Demons are finally calling it a night and heading out into the stairwell exit.

This memory is from the evening after I left the hospital, when I went to see Hideo.

The room’s quiet, except for the regular beeping pulse from a monitor. When I look closer at Roshan, I notice he’s clutching a crumpled piece of paper in one fist. It’s a list of hastily scribbled dates, all set for a couple of days from now, one after another—follow-up appointments and an additional surgery and physical therapy. Maybe they’re treatment benchmarks for Tremaine to hit, dates when Roshan plans on being here in the room.

At first, I think Tremaine is still unconscious—but then his mouth shifts a little, his lips peeling open in their cracked state. Roshan looks up from his hands to meet Tremaine’s gaze from under his heavy bandages. The two stare at each other, then exchange a wry smile. Now I can see how puffy and swollen Roshan’s eyes are, and the dark circles underneath them.

“You’re still here,” Tremaine croaks out.

“Leaving any minute,” Roshan replies, even though I can tell he doesn’t mean it. “These chairs are the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever sat on.”

“You and your sensitive ass.” In spite of everything, Tremaine still has the ability to roll his eyes. “You used to complain about my bed back in the Riders’ dorms, too.”

“Yeah, it sucked. If there was ever a reason for you to leave the Riders, it was because of that damn bed.”

There’s a pause. “Where’s Kento?” Tremaine finally asks.

At that, Roshan sits back, his prayer beads sliding back down onto his wrist. “Flying to Seoul with two of his teammates,” he replies. “He needs to be back in time for a parade in their honor. He sends his best.”

Tremaine doesn’t follow that statement up with anything other than a cough, which makes him squeeze his eyelids together in pain. After another long silence, Roshan leans his elbows back on the bed. “Emi told you to stay away from that institute’s files,” he says.

“It wasn’t my hacking that exposed me,” Tremaine replies. “I stumbled against a stupid plant in that hall, and the vase tipped over and broke. Shit happens.”

“Yeah, well, you can only handle a hole in your head so many times before you don’t make it through.” Roshan furrows his brow and looks down again. He doesn’t speak, but I can feel the burn of his anger in his clenched jaw, his hands clasped tightly together.

“What are you thinking?” Tremaine says in a quiet voice.

Roshan shakes his head. “I’m thinking that I’m sorry,” he replies.

“Why the hell are you sorry?”

“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.”