Wildcard (Warcross #2)(23)

My shoe connects hard with Chloe’s face. She lets out a yelp and releases me. “Little bitch!” she spits as she grabs for me again.

I manage to slip out of her grasp, scramble to my feet, and burst through the door out into a stormy night.

The grass is so slick that I nearly slip, but I regain my footing in time. The chain-link gate is right in front of me. I slam into it, just as I realize that it’s held shut with a heavy padlock. Panic ripples through me. My hands hook on to the wiring of the chain-link fence and I haul myself up, not caring when a sharp edge on the metal slashes a red line across one of my fingers.

I crumple in a heap on the other side of the fence, off the property of the foster home. Get up. You can’t be here—they’ll catch you. Behind me, someone emerges from inside the house. They sweep a flashlight beam across the porch. Faint shouts drift to me in the wet air.

I drag myself up to my feet again and dash down the street. I’m not sure if I’m crying in real life or if this is another figment of the memory. All I know is that eventually I huddle in a doorway, almost able to feel the texture of wet wood grain against my hands as I push against either side of the door in an attempt to steady myself. My fingers curl—my nails dig into the chipping paint on the wood.

Zero appears on the sidewalk in front of me. Before I can even start thinking about what to do next, he rushes at me with impossible speed.

Every single instinct I have as a hunter kicks into high gear. I spin out of the way, my arms up in self-defense to protect my face as he lunges at me. He seizes me by my collar before I can run, then yanks me up onto my feet. He brings his face close to me.

“Calm down and think,” he says angrily.

The vividness of the Memory shudders, and his words cut through my panic. This isn’t real; you’re not really back here. You’re playing in the Dark World, inside a ghost from your past.

How dare you. A surge of anger hits me, forcing me to focus only on Zero. He has broken into my mind, has violated my privacy yet again. The cube. His hack. I stare up at his figure towering over me and bring up the code again. This time, I look inside my Memory.

There. I can even see what he’s done—there is an extra file in my account that shouldn’t be there, an access file that the cube had somehow planted.

I open the access file he’s downloaded into me to see a hidden Link between us, the gateway he’d opened up that led me right back to him. Then I open the cube of data and run it on him.

A ring of files appears around Zero, each one a gaping, door-like void with a view of another world on the other side. Windows into Zero’s mind. I’m in.

I don’t wait for him to react. I just pick the closest door to me—and suck my breath in as his mind suddenly envelops everything around us.

The stormy night vanishes; so do the familiar midnight street and the foster home behind chain-link fencing on the other side of the road. New York disappears.

Instead, I’m now on a carpeted floor, in a strange place. When I look up, I see what appears to be a bedroom. A figure is crouched in one corner, huddled tightly against the wall. I’m in Zero’s memories.

The figure crouching in the corner of the bedroom now stirs.

It’s a young boy, with his arms wrapped around his knees. His wrists are bony, protruding from a baggy white sweater, and when I look closer, I notice a symbol embroidered on his upper left sleeve. It’s not a mark I’ve yet seen associated with Zero or the Blackcoats, nor is it anything else I recognize. I can’t make out his face in the darkness—but my eyes hitch on a thick scarf wrapped around his neck. A blue scarf.

The same scarf Hideo had given Sasuke the day he disappeared.

The sight startles me so much that I stop short, frozen in place. I pause long enough that, when I blink again, the figure in the corner is gone, and Zero is standing before me again. He reaches out to seize my arm before I can turn away. His hand closes around my wrist, and suddenly I feel like I’m falling, paralyzed. I try to pull my virtual self back up onto my feet, but it’s like I’ve completely stopped responding. All I can see is Zero standing over my figure, dark armor reflecting the dim light in the boy’s bedroom, before it all disappears into darkness.

The Pirate’s Den comes back into view. The onlookers around us are riotous, shouting over one another as payouts fly, the transparent numbers over their heads changing wildly. I blink, confused and lost. On a hovering screen, I see a playback of the last moments of the Duel. I see the moment when Zero struck me with a Lightning power-up, causing me to collapse on top of the glass arch. Zero walks up to me. I run from him along the arch and I recognize my frantic gestures from when I was running down the hallway in the memory of my foster home. I see myself fight back against Zero—the moments when I’d actually hacked into his Memory—only to have Zero paralyze me with a grip of my wrist, another power-up.

He takes my Artifact.

No one in the audience saw my Memory or Zero’s. No one has any idea what happened, that Zero had hacked into my mind or that I had hacked into his. All they witnessed were the same actions playing out in the Duel world. They heard none of the things Zero said to me. It had only been through our Link, as were my words to him.

Some of the onlookers snicker at me, but others seem impressed with the way I played. I nod back at them as if still in a trance. Zero stands beside me. When he looks at me, the black brace around my wrist reappears.