What about Zero himself? Surely Sasuke is a better option to use than me?

A million questions threaten to spill out of my mouth. In the light, Zero’s eyes are a very dark brown, and if I look closely, I can see thread-thin slashes of gold in them. The vision of him as a small boy, his high-pitched laugh as he ran through the park with his brother, flashes through my mind. I think of him grinning as Hideo looped the blue scarf around his neck, and him calling over his shoulder as he went to retrieve the plastic egg that Hideo had thrown too far.

Sasuke should be the only connection to Hideo that the Blackcoats would ever need. If Sasuke were to approach Hideo, he would give up the world for his lost brother, would move heaven and earth if Sasuke asked him to.

Would Sasuke do the same in return? Why is there no hint of emotion for his brother in his eyes?

I push down the rising tide of questions in my mind. There’s too little that they’re revealing about the Blackcoats, and something about the tension in the air tells me that I shouldn’t be openly asking about Zero’s connection to Hideo yet. I need to wait for a moment alone with him.

“So, you’re trying to stop Hideo out of the goodness of your hearts?” I ask.

“Why else would we be doing it?”

I throw my hands up. “I don’t know. You haven’t told me much of anything about your shadow group. Why’d you try to kill me when you blew up the Riders’ dorms? Was that out of your goodwill, too?”

Zero seems completely unsurprised by my remark. “Sometimes, doing the right thing means making hard decisions along the way.”

“And how do I know you won’t make another hard decision with me?”

“You don’t believe me.”

“No, I don’t believe that you’re telling me everything I need to know.”

Taylor suddenly straightens. “You went to prison for a while, didn’t you?” she says. “Earned a red mark on your record because you saw an injustice done to some girl you barely knew?”

My jaw tightens at her words. “You’ve been snooping around in my files.”

She ignores my tone, her eyes bright. “Why did you do it, Emika? What did you get out of it, aside from years of hardship? What took you down that path? You used your talents to break into the private files of all your fellow students. You released that data onto the Internet. That was a crime, wasn’t it? And yet, you did it anyway—because you were standing up for a girl who had been wronged.”

The memory rushes back—my arrest, my trial, the sentencing.

“You’re still so young,” she goes on. “Is it so hard for you to believe that someone else might want to do the same? Try to remember how you felt at that time, then take that and expand it into something bigger than yourself, a group of people, all of whom might believe in a higher cause?”

I don’t say anything.

Taylor leans toward me. “I know you’re hesitant,” she says gently. “I can see it on your face, your distrust of everything I’m telling you, and I understand why. We didn’t get off on the best foot.” She glances at Zero with a lifted eyebrow. “But you’re now aware of what Hideo’s true plans are. And no matter how little you know about us or we know about you, we’re both on the same side. We have no intention of harming an ally. No one’s going to force your hand.” Her voice hardens now, a tone that doesn’t seem to match her face. “Nothing I’ve ever seen has frightened me quite as much as what Hideo Tanaka is doing with the NeuroLink’s algorithm. Isn’t that why you cut ties with him, in spite of everything he could give you?”

She says this in a way that hints at my brief relationship with Hideo, and to my annoyance, my cheeks warm. I wonder exactly how much she knows about me. My eyes flicker again to Zero.

A sudden surge of rage grips me. All I can remember in this moment is the way Zero had stood there in the dark hall, hidden behind his virtual armor, mocking me as I discovered all my files had been emptied. All I can feel is the same skin-crawling sensation of Zero being inside my mind, his theft of my most precious Memories.

This is someone who has betrayed me before. And now here he is, asking me to help him.

“Why should I trust you?” I ask. “After everything you’ve done?”

Zero regards me with a penetrating look. “It doesn’t matter if you trust me or not. Hideo’s moving forward, regardless, and we’re running out of time. We’re going to stop him from abusing his NeuroLink, and we can do it faster with your help. That’s all I can tell you.”

I think of the colorful maps of minds that Hideo had shown me, then the ability he had to stop someone dead in his tracks by doing nothing more than shifting that map. I think of the eerie blankness on people’s faces.

“So.” Zero laces his fingers together. “Are you in?”

I’m ready to refuse him. He had taken my soul out of my chest and done something obscene with it; even now, he is messing with my emotions. I want to turn my back on Zero and step out of this room, do what Roshan said and return to New York and never think about any of this again.

Instead, I scowl at Zero. “What do you have in mind?”

6

Zero smiles. He exchanges a stare with Taylor, then with Jax, and as he does, Taylor rises from her seat. She gives me an encouraging nod before she turns away.

“Glad to have you on board,” she says over her shoulder, and then heads out of the room.

Jax lingers a second longer, locked in a silent exchange with Zero that feels like something shared between familiar partners. She doesn’t bother looking my way before she leaves, too. “I’ll be next door,” she calls out as she goes. I can’t tell if it’s meant to reassure or threaten me that she’ll be on guard so close by.

The door closes behind her without a sound, leaving me completely alone with Zero.

He moves closer to me, looking amused at my fascination and unease. “You’ve always worked on your own, haven’t you?” he says. “It’s uncomfortable for you, being marked with a group.”

Somehow, his physical appearance seems even more intimidating than his virtual one. I realize I’m clenching my fists and force myself to relax my hands. “I was doing fine with the Phoenix Riders,” I reply.

He nods. “And that’s why you’ve already told them everything you’re doing, right? That you’re here now?”

I narrow my eyes at his mocking tone. “And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“How long have you been with the Blackcoats? Were you the one who formed them? Or have you never been a loner?”

He puts his hands in his pockets in a gesture so reminiscent of Hideo that, for an instant, I feel like he’s the one here instead. “As long as I can remember,” he answers.

Now’s my chance. All the questions swirling in my mind sit on the edge of my tongue. My breath is suddenly short as the words pour out. “You’re Sasuke Tanaka. Aren’t you?”

My statement is greeted only by silence.

“You’re Hideo’s younger brother,” I urge him, as if he didn’t hear me the first time.

His eyes are absolutely devoid of any emotion. “I know,” he says.

I blink, thinking I’d misheard him. “You know?”

There’s something unusual about his eyes again, that empty stare. It’s as if what I’ve said means nothing. It seems irrelevant to him, like I’d revealed he was related to some faraway stranger he knows absolutely nothing about . . . and not the brother he’d grown up with, the brother who had destroyed his own life and mind out of grief for him. The brother he is now trying to stop.

“You—” My words falter, my voice turning incredulous as I look at him. “You’re Hideo’s brother. How can you know that and still talk like this?”

Again, no response. He looks completely unaffected by my words. Instead, he steps closer to me until we’re separated by a mere foot. “A blood relation is meaningless,” he finally replies. “Hideo’s my brother, but more importantly, he’s my mark.”

My mark. The words are harsh and cutting. I think back to the grin on young Sasuke’s face in Hideo’s Memory, when they were both at the park. I puzzle over the deep wounds that Sasuke left behind in Hideo and his family when he disappeared. This is a boy who had been loved deeply. Now he doesn’t seem to care at all.

“But—” I say, faltering, “what happened to you? You vanished when you were a little boy. Where did you go? Why are you called Zero?”

“Jax didn’t warn me about how curious you are,” he replies. “I guess this is what makes you a good bounty hunter.”

The way he’s responding reminds me of code stuck in an infinite loop, going round and round in useless circles, or politicians who know exactly how to evade a question they don’t want to answer. People who can turn a question on you to take the heat off themselves.

Maybe Zero doesn’t want to answer me. Maybe he doesn’t even know. Whatever the reason, I won’t be getting anything out of him voluntarily—nothing more than these piecemeal replies. I shove down the urge to keep pressing him. If he won’t tell me himself, then I’ll have to gather info on my own.

So I try a different kind of question. “What are you planning?” I force myself to say.

“We’re going to insert a virus into Hideo’s algorithm,” Zero says. He holds his hand out, and a glowing data packet appears over his palm. “The instant it’s in, it will trigger a chain reaction that deletes the algorithm entirely and cripples the NeuroLink itself. But to do this successfully, we have to launch it from inside Hideo’s own account, his actual mind. And we have to do this on the day of the closing ceremony, at the very moment when the beta lenses finally connect to the algorithm.”

I guess the rumor about when the beta lenses would convert to algorithm lenses is true, after all. It makes sense—theoretically, there’ll be a split-second delay when the beta lenses are hooked into the algorithm but not yet influenced by it. When it’s setting itself up. That’s the only chance they’ll get to insert a virus.

“And when, exactly, are the beta lenses connecting to the algorithm?” I ask.