Wildcard (Warcross #2)(44)

Half an hour later, I emerge into the darker, quieter residential streets beyond the outskirts of Tokyo. Here, the virtual overlays diminish into little more than building names in subtle white letters—Curry House, Bakery, Laundry—and the block number I’m currently on, then rows and rows of nondescript house labels. Apartments 14-5-3. Apartments 16-6-2.

My board streaks silently through the roads until the homes come to an abrupt end. A solid stone wall wraps around the next block, ending in a security window and a lowered barrier gate. I pull to a stop in front of it. There, looming past an expanse of lawn and fountains, is a large office complex, its main atrium made entirely of glass.

My gaze stops on the words engraved into the slab of stone just beyond the barrier gate, the same one that Tremaine had shown me in his photo.

JAPAN INNOVATION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

The parking lot isn’t empty. I see a few black cars here, parked in one corner.

My hackles rise at the sight. It’s entirely possible that some people are just working late—but something about the cars reminds me of the one I’d ridden in with Jax when she’d first taken me to the Blackcoats. Maybe Tremaine is here, too. At the thought of him, I do another quick scan of my messages. He’s still online, but he hasn’t answered me yet.

I hesitate for another second before I finally pull my hood on tighter, switch my randomized facial features to a new set, and squeeze past the car barrier.

The main entrance is locked, of course. From the outside, it’s hard to make out exactly what’s past the all-glass front atrium—but it soars at least three to four floors high, and some kind of dim gradient of colored light is sweeping around inside, from top to bottom. The entire building looks shut down for the night. I glance back at the cars, considering, and then wander away from the main entrance to follow the building’s wall.

I make my way around the entire complex, looking for a good way in, but everything seems locked down, with no security faults anywhere. I huddle down near a clump of bushes on the side of the main building and bring up Tremaine’s maps again, hoping to see some security vulnerability I might have missed. Then I run a search on whether the complex has any online system that I can worm into. Once, I’d broken into a closed Manhattan boutique by getting past its security cameras’ simplistic passwords. But here, I find no weaknesses.

What good was coming here if I can’t even get inside? I sigh, then poke around the perimeter of the building a second time, looking for what clues I can gather. There are several different buildings connected here: a physics wing, a neuroinformatics wing, a research resources tech center, and several cafés. None of this is new info—I’d seen all of this in my online research on the institute.

I’m about to call it a night when I suddenly hear the faint sound of footsteps.

Ahead of me, one of the side entrance’s glass doors slides open—and Jax steps out. She glances over her shoulder for an instant, and her gaze sweeps over the campus.

I duck below the bushes surrounding the building. My mind stumbles frantically from one possibility to another, each thought as rapid as my heartbeat. What the hell is she doing in here? Who is she with?

Jax probably didn’t travel here alone. She’s a bodyguard and an assassin, which means she’s either here guarding Zero or Taylor, or she’s here on a mission to cop someone. I count to three under my breath, then dare to peek around the side of the bushes.

Several guards have emerged from the building to join her. They’re dressed in black, too, and I wonder for a moment if any of them are the same people who’d watched me duel Zero in the Dark World. Maybe they’re the type of low-level goons you’d hire out of the Kabukichō area in Shinjuku.

Jax exchanges a few terse words with them, then heads off toward the far side of the complex at a brisk pace. A couple of the guards follow her, while two others start heading back into the door.

I move before I can think everything through. Shoulders hunched; eyes forward. I sneak along the bushes like a shadow, as quickly and silently as I can toward the open door. As the last guard disappears inside the door and it starts to close, I dart forward. I slide into the building’s dark interior without a sound, right as the door slides closed.

Immediately, I slip into the closest hidden crevice I can find—a row of tall recycle bins. But the guards have already disappeared down the hall. I squeeze my eyes shut for a moment and lean my head back against the wall, then pull down my mask so I can take in some deep gasps of air. A sheen of cold sweat covers my entire body.

In my next life, I’m going to be an accountant.

Farther down the hall, the guards’ footsteps grow steadily fainter. I wait until it’s completely silent before I pick myself up and move forward.

The building is dark, and no one seems to be on duty. I go until the ceiling starts to get higher and the sound of my footsteps changes. Then I emerge into the main atrium, and I freeze, my mouth open.

The institute’s main lobby could be a museum in itself. The ceiling soars many stories above me, and in the vast space is suspended what I can only call an enormous art sculpture that resembles the electric pulses of a brain—except on a massive scale, extending all the way from the ceiling down to a few feet above the floor. Hundreds of lines of light connect colorful orbs, and as I watch, the lines flash and fade, glow and darken. It’s hypnotizing.

Other displays are encased behind glass boxes—human-like machines with metal limbs and legs, structures made of thousands of cylinders and circles all moving in a rhythmic pattern, curtains of light that look like a neon waterfall.