There is a familiar desperation in me, a rising panic that beats loudly in my chest, pounding out each thing I owe. The numbers in my head start over again. Rent, food, bills, debt.
Death has a terrible habit of cutting straight through every careful line you’ve drawn between your present and your future. The line that leads to your dad filling your dorm room with flowers on your graduation day. To him designing your wedding dress. To him coming over for dinner at your future house every Sunday, where his off-key singing would make you laugh so hard you’d cry. I had a hundred thousand of these lines, and in one day they were severed, leaving me with nothing but a stack of his medical bills and gambling debt. Death didn’t even give me somewhere to direct my anger.
Every locked door has a key.
Every problem has a solution.
Sometimes, people kick you to the ground at recess because they think the shape of your eyes is funny. They lunge at you because they see a vulnerable body. Or a different skin color. Or a difficult name. They think that you won’t hit back—that you’ll just lower your eyes and hide. And sometimes, to protect yourself, to make it go away, you do.
But sometimes, you find yourself standing in exactly the right position, wielding exactly the right weapon to hit back. So I hit. I hit fast and hard and furious. I hit with nothing but the language whispered between circuits and wire, the language that can bring people to their knees.
And in spite of everything, I’d do it all over again.
“Everything’s science fiction until someone makes it science fact,” Hideo says. There’s a specific intensity in his gaze now, a glow that brightens his entire expression.
He turns his eyes down, and his lashes catch the light. A smile lingers on his lips. I’d like to kiss you right now.
What if I didn’t let you? I tease.
You wound me, Emika.
I laugh. Maybe I want to kiss someone else.
Jealousy flashes across his face, and his eyes darken to cinder. Even through the physical distance between us, I can sense his emotions through our Link, that deliciously warm desire. Come over. Tonight.
My stomach flutters. But, my teammates . . .
I’ll make it worth your time."
I close my eyes, my lips parted, and soak in the warmth of his arms wrapped around me, his kisses trailing along my damp skin. The rough scars of his knuckles brush past my waist as his hands pull me close. There is a shyness in his eyes now that makes him look so young, an expression that tugs my heart closer to him. I can’t remember when we start kissing or when we stop, or when he leans against me, made weak, whispering my name. We seem to exist in a fog of heat and dusk, and I don’t know where the time goes, but it seems that night falls in the blink of an eye, and soon the evening has swallowed us.
“I don’t talk about him, Emika,” Hideo says after another silence. He looks away again. “I haven’t talked about him in years.”
This is Hideo stripped of his fortune and fame and genius. This is him as a boy, waiting every day for his brother to come back, falling asleep every night to the same nightmare, trapped forever wondering if he had only done one thing, anything, differently. It is hard to describe loss to someone who has never experienced it, impossible to explain all the ways it changes you. But for those who have, not a single word is needed."
“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.
When you refuse to ask for help, it tells others that they also shouldn’t ask for help from you. That you look down on them for needing your help. That you like feeling superior to them.
"You’re done!” I shout at him. “And so is your plan.”
Something about my words seems to surprise Zero. “You don’t know.”
Don’t know? Know what?
He straightens. “My plan,” he says, “was to stop Hideo.”
“How is your artificial intelligence capable of judging everyone in the world, or understanding why they do what they do? How do you know you won’t go too far? You aren’t going to bring about world peace all by yourself.”
“Everyone pays lip service to world peace,” Hideo says. “They use it as a pretty answer to pointless questions, to make themselves sound good.” His eyes sear me to the core. “I’m tired of the horror in the world. So I will force it to end.”