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.

A chill runs through me. Sasuke’s hand can be seen here, too—there’s no other reason for Zero to bother playing this game with us. But his hold seems to be weakening as Zero’s bots continue to grow in number.

A deafening sound roars around us. I look over to Hideo, who has moved into a crouch, too, his hands balled into fists. Under our feet, the floor has transformed into a living thing, a moving block of concrete parts that open and close like jaws, and every time they move, they expose shafts of red light from somewhere within.

It’s not real. I remind myself, the way I do every time I step into a Warcross world—but this time, it’s not wholly true. We’re not just in some random virtual place. We’re standing inside the most powerful mind in the world.

There’s a second of unbearable silence.

Then, all the bots rush at us with impossible speed.

Every instinct in me rears up. I reach for my last stick of dynamite and hurl it right in front of us. It explodes, throwing back our attackers in a huge arc. But behind them are hundreds more. Thousands. They race toward us.

We don’t have a chance. But I still loop a quick noose into the rope of my cable launcher and throw it to Hideo—he catches it without so much as glancing at me. He tosses it high up in the air, where the hooked end of the cable launcher lassos around a streetlight, then yanks himself up right as the bots close in on him.

I’m sprinting in the opposite direction. As the first bot nears and makes a lunge for me, I twist out of his coming grasp and sprint for the closest building. I reach it, wedge my boot against the windowsill, and clamber up it until I get to the second-story ledge. There, I manage to pull myself up onto the awning.

Zero’s there, waiting for me. He slams his fist into one of the two poles holding the awning up. The pole explodes into tiny pieces. I’m thrown off balance and back to the ground, right as Zero grabs down for my neck.

Hideo’s here before I can register him. He lunges out as Zero lands, throwing his own fist at Zero, but Zero dodges easily. He unleashes a scarlet gem against Hideo—light bursts from his hand. Hideo goes flying, hitting his back hard against a wall.

Hideo leaps up, kicking out against his brother’s shoulders. It forces Zero to release Hideo’s collar. Hideo lands lightly on his feet and rushes again at Zero. There’s a rage in his eyes that I remember from his boxing sessions, from the moment he first looked into Taylor’s eyes.

I lunge at the closest power-up I can find. It’s a neon-yellow sphere. “Hideo!” I shout. He glances over to me for a brief moment. Then I unleash it.

A blinding light swallows the entire space. Even through my closed lids and my outstretched hands, I want to squint against the brightness of it. It washes out everything around us into white.

Zero pauses for a moment. He can’t be blinded by something like this, I don’t think, but he must be reacting to the overwhelming data wipe—as if everything in his view went temporarily blank.

Then the light vanishes as quickly as it’d appeared. Hideo doesn’t waste the chance. He’s already dashing at Zero. Zero whips out an arm, seizing his brother, but Hideo takes advantage of the move and instead uses Zero’s weight against him—he kneels down and flips Zero over.

Zero’s on his feet again in a split second, rolling off his back and leaping up in one fluid motion. He rushes toward Hideo, grabs him by the neck, and pins him against the wall.

“You’re a fool for trying,” Zero says to him, his deep voice echoing around us and in my mind. He sounds amused, but beneath it all, there’s a churning rage—no, something else, something that sounds desperate. “Why don’t you go back home? You have all the money in the world now, don’t you? Leave this alone and take care of your parents.”

Hideo grapples at the metallic hand locked around his neck and says nothing. He just stares hard into the opaque black helmet.

I point one of my knives at him and throw as hard as I can.

The knife slams into his helmet, shattering it.

But Zero just vanishes, reappearing a few feet away from us. He looks completely undisturbed.

“It’ll be easier for you this way, you know,” he says. “You don’t want to hurt your parents, do you? Your poor mother, slow and forgetful? Your father, sickly and frail? You don’t want any harm to come to them, do you?”

And I realize that these aren’t Zero’s words at all. They’re Taylor’s—I can recognize them solely by the taunting questions. These are things she must have once said to Sasuke, threatening his family to keep him from running away.

Hideo stares back at Zero with a clenched jaw. “You’re not going to hurt anyone,” he snarls. “Because you’re not real.”

Somehow, Hideo’s not going blank like everyone else had—he’s still here, alert and conscious. He slams Zero down against the floor, striking him in the face.

Zero vanishes, reappears again. I sprint for him, only to realize that he can just disappear again and again. How can I reach him and break through his armor to install Sasuke’s data into him? It’s impossible. I glance desperately over at Hideo as several of Zero’s bots reach him. A scream bubbles in my throat.

To my surprise, though, they go around him. They don’t touch him at all. It’s as if they’re leaving Hideo for Zero to deal with himself.

But in my confusion I let one bot get too close to me. I don’t react fast enough. His hand shoots out and seizes my wrist.

I gasp. His grip feels so cold, like he’s made out of ice. Behind me comes Hideo’s shout. “Emika!”

I twist around, my teeth clenched, and kick out at his black helmet. My boot smashes straight through the glass. He immediately vaporizes.

I hold my wrist tightly. The ice of his touch lingers, burning straight through me and into my mind, and the edges of my vision blur a bit. I shake my head. The world around me shifts again as I run.

I blink. Where am I? The city had looked like emptied Tokyo, but suddenly I see a layout of intersecting streets that I recognize as New York. I’m passing through Times Square now, except it’s not Times Square at all—none of its lights are lit, and no pedestrians crowd its streets. Right beside it is a glimpse of Central Park.

That doesn’t make sense at all, I think to myself, as I race toward Zero. Sasuke has probably never been to New York before. The layout of it makes no sense either, as Central Park isn’t anywhere near Times Square.

This is my home—my memories.

I realize with a sickening lurch that Zero’s security bots have infiltrated my mind, as surely as he’d done with each of my teammates—that ice-cold grip on my wrist had been him seeping into my mind.

I look wildly around for Hideo, ready to call out for him, but the entire world around me has now transformed into New York City. In Central Park, I see a figure walking. Hideo. Zero. I start running toward it.