Wildcard (Warcross #2)(62)

“What happened?” I ask.

He straightens and walks toward the long couches, coming slightly into the light as he goes. “I’ll sweep it up in a bit,” he replies, his classic habit of answering without answering.

My eyes dart straight to his hands. His knuckles are an angry red, cut up, and crusted over with blood. Dark circles rim his eyes.

Has he been here since that night at the art museum, agonizing over all I’d told him? I’ve never seen him so weary, like his whole heart is struggling underneath a great weight.

I take a seat across from him, then wait until he leans forward and regards me with a piercing stare.

“You brought us here,” he says quietly. “So, tell me. What do you know about my brother?”

No need for small talk tonight. In his voice is an anger I remember only from the night Jax had attempted to assassinate him, when he’d leaned over his injured bodyguard and ordered the rest of his men to find the culprit. Even that night is nothing compared to now. I feel like I’m staring into a void that has opened up inside him, threatening to swallow him whole.

I don’t answer right away. There are no words I can say to ease us into this conversation. Instead, I Link with him and bring up a screen to show him a Memory I’d saved of my first encounter with Zero, of him in my hotel room.

Hideo just stares at his brother’s face. There is a whirlwind of emotion in his eyes. First disbelief, that this person could possibly be him. Then recognition, because there is no question that this young man is the same little boy who disappeared so many years ago.

“How did you find out?” he finally asks.

“I figured it out after the final game, after I left your suite,” I go on, wanting to fill the heavy silence. “The hack I pulled at the end to stop him also exposed his identity, and that was when I saw his name.”

“It’s not him.”

I bring up a second video of Zero, this time of us walking side by side as he escorts me to my room. “It’s him,” I insist in a quiet voice.

Hideo stares at him for a long time. He stares until it seems he may have frozen solid.

“What—” His voice breaks for a moment, and I feel my own heart crack at the sound. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him falter like this. “What happened to him?”

I sigh, running a hand through my hair. “I shouldn’t be the one to tell you this,” I reply. “But your brother . . . when he disappeared, he was very ill. Your mother had, in desperation, entered him into an experimental trial that had a chance of curing him.”

Hideo shakes his head at me. “No,” he replies. “My parents would have told me. Sasuke was playing in the park with me on the day he vanished.”

“I’m only telling you what I know.” As Hideo looks on, I show him each recording I’d duplicated, in chronological succession. The testing room in the Innovation Institute, with a child at every desk. The hopeful, worried faces of Hideo’s parents peering in from the window. The private meeting between Dana Taylor and Mina Tanaka. The small silhouette of Sasuke, cowering in the corner of a room, of him begging to go home to his family. The bright blue scarf wrapped around his neck. His friendship with Jax, and all the moments they spent huddled together. The way he tried to negotiate with Taylor for his freedom, paid the price of his scarf, and then failed to escape. The slow, gradual, crippling disappearance of his identity with each new procedure done to him, of Sasuke becoming less of a person and more a series of data.

The truth behind Project Zero.

I expect Hideo to tear his eyes away at some point, but he doesn’t. He watches all of it in silence, his stare never shifting away from his brother as Sasuke ages a little in each video and loses more of himself. As Taylor takes away Sasuke’s scarf. As Sasuke watches his brother’s first public announcement. Each scene rips a gash in Hideo’s heart.

When the recordings finish, Hideo doesn’t say a word. I fixate on the dried blood on his knuckles. The silence roars in our ears like a living thing.

“Sasuke died years ago,” Hideo finally whispers into the dark, echoing the words Jax had said to me. “He’s gone from this world, then.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper back.

The heavy weight that has been crushing his heart—the polite, stiff distance, all the careful shields he’d always put up one by one—gives way. His shoulders sag. He lowers his head into his hands, and suddenly, he starts to weep.

That weight was the burden of not knowing, of years and years of anguish, of imagining the thousands of things that could have happened, of wondering whether his brother might ever walk back through the door. Of all those countless iterations he’d made of his Memory, trying to figure out how Sasuke could have disappeared. It was the silver strand of an unfinished story.

There’s nothing I can say to comfort him. All I can do is listen to his heart break over and over again.

When there are no more tears left, Hideo sits in silence and stares out the windows. He looks lost in a fog, and for the very first time, I see uncertainty in his eyes.

I lean forward and find my voice. “Even though Sasuke is gone from this world,” I murmur softly, “he’s still alive in another.”

Hideo doesn’t answer, but his lashes lower as his gaze turns toward me.

“Zero is Taylor’s creation,” I go on. My voice sounds deafening. “He’s tethered to her in every sense of the word. Just as your algorithm controls those who wear the new NeuroLink lenses, Taylor controls Zero’s data. His mind. But Sasuke isn’t gone. I think he reached out to me through Zero because he’s trapped somewhere in that darkness, crying for help.”