Wildcard (Warcross #2)(72)

His words, mockingly soothing, bear an echo of Taylor’s thought process. Even though she’s dead, her influence over him must have been so complete and so extreme that it still lingers underneath those smooth plates of steel.

“But first,” Zero continues, finally turning away from Hideo and heading back toward me. Every muscle in me tenses as he approaches. “Let’s fix you.”

I glare at him, wishing I could see some sign of Sasuke trapped inside, but the only thing staring back at me through his opaque mask is my own reflection.

By the sink, Jax has ripped open the box with the lenses and pulled out a set. I glance at her again. She still has that blankness on her face, going about her motions like she’s not entirely here.

Then . . . her eyes flicker to me. I realize that Zero doesn’t know I’ve Linked with her before. Her flint-gray irises gleam under the fluorescent light. In that instant, I see her familiar wit, her mind alert behind a carefully controlled expression. She’s not under Zero’s influence, no—but merely pretending to be.

She shakes her head once at me, then her eyes look toward the door. A red light illuminates it from above, suggesting that it’s locked—but beside the door is the emergency box I remember from the first night I’d been in the institute. I look back at Jax, who goes back to preparing my new lenses at a counter closer to the door.

Hope cuts through my dread. Maybe Jax is still my ally, after all. If I can stall for more time, maybe she can help us get out of here before Zero forces the new lenses on me.

“You can’t be real,” I manage to choke out as I stare up at him. “I don’t believe you. You’re nothing but a simulation.”

“Then see for yourself.” Zero reaches over and presses a flat button near the top of my gurney. The metal cuff restraining my left wrist snaps open with a clang, freeing my hand.

I pull it immediately out of the binding, flexing my wrist in relief. My eyes return to him. Hesitantly, I reach out toward him. He doesn’t move.

My hand touches his upper arm. I almost flinch. Cold, hard metal. There’s nothing human about the steel plate my fingers brush against, nothing that suggests a soul might exist inside. And yet . . . here he is, moving and functional, alive in every technical sense.

“Can you . . . feel that?” I find myself asking.

“I’m aware that you’re touching me,” he replies. “I can feel it, logically, if you can call it that.”

“Can you sense pain?”

“No. I don’t understand my limbs in the same way you do.”

“Do you remember what that was like?”

“Yes. I remember everything.”

“Except what matters.”

“Except what doesn’t matter,” he corrects me.

I withdraw my hand and let my arm drop back to my side. Zero closes his fingers around my wrist. He pushes it into place against the metal cuff, ignoring my pleading eyes as he snaps it shut again.

“I don’t understand,” I whisper. “Why do you want this?”

He smiles in amusement, as if someone like him could still understand such a human emotion. “You already know. It’s the same answer that Taylor would have given you, that Hideo himself probably once gave you.”

“But they had goals because they’re human, flesh and blood. Taylor wanted control because she’s afraid without it. Hideo did it out of love for you.” I lean forward, straining against my bonds, and grit my teeth at him. “What do you get out of controlling others, besides the satisfaction of doing so?”

“Freedom, of course,” he replies. “Now I can do anything. Enter anyone’s mind.” He nods out toward the dark hall at the world beyond these walls. “I can be everywhere at once and nowhere at all.”

And just like that, I understand. It’s the exact opposite of what Sasuke had endured at Taylor’s hands. When he’d been human, he had been her prisoner, trapped within the confines of this institute for years and subjected to unspeakable horrors, until he’d finally died and had his mind tethered to hers. He’d been fully at her beck and call.

In seizing control of everything, Zero is taking back his freedom and more. It’s his revenge against Taylor for all that she had stolen from him.

Taylor’s death.

“But there’s more to it than that,” I go on. “You set Hideo up to kill Taylor, didn’t you? You made sure she was with us because you knew how Hideo would react to seeing her. You wanted to bring his creation crashing down around him, and you wanted to see Taylor realize the moment she’d lost in her own game.” My voice turns more desperate now, angrier, as I make the connections. “You wanted her dead, and you wanted Hideo to do it.”

Zero is silent. Something about my words has plucked a string in him. I barrel on before he can continue.

“You wanted to show him how flawed his plan was from the start.” My heart trembles as I talk. “You wanted Hideo to realize how he had corrupted the NeuroLink with his algorithm, and the only way you could show him that—the only way to get through to the brother you love—was to force him to demonstrate it in front of the entire world.” I take a deep breath. “And that’s because Sasuke wanted you to do it. Because he’s still there, somewhere inside you.”

I don’t know how much of my words reach Zero. Maybe he doesn’t care at all. He’s nothing more than a web of algorithms controlling a machine, after all, and whatever is still human about him has simply been translated into code.