Wildcard (Warcross #2)(88)

I remember what Hideo had been wearing that day of the disappearance, and it was indeed a white jacket. Now Hideo wipes a hand across his eyes, a hollow laugh escaping from him. His cheeks are wet.

“You remember what I was wearing?”

“Of course. I remember everything.”

“Yes.” Another shaking laugh from Hideo, full of heartbreak. “Of course you do.”

“If you’re my brother, why are you so tall?”

Hideo smiles as the boy finally stops right in front of him. “Because I’ve been searching for you for a long time, and somewhere in that time, I grew up.”

Sasuke blinks at that, as if it triggered some sort of memory in him. Then he’s shifting again, and all of a sudden, he’s no longer the small boy who had disappeared in the park, but a lankier adolescent, maybe eleven or twelve, the way I’d seen him in some of the recordings. He’s still wearing the scarf, but the baby fat in his cheeks has disappeared. He searches Hideo’s gaze as he stands there, trying to figure it all out.

“I thought you’d forgotten about me,” he says. His voice is at the in-between stage, high and low and cracking, trembling. “I waited for you, but you didn’t come get me.”

“I’m so sorry, Sasuke-kun,” Hideo whispers, as if the words themselves were stabbing him.

“I tried going to you, but they locked me away. And now I don’t know where I am.” His young brow furrows. “I don’t remember anymore, Hideo. It’s too hard.”

My own heart feels like it’s crumbling as I watch him. He is a functioning mind, forever frozen in data, but he cannot remember things like a real person can, nor can he think exactly like one. He is a ghost, forever trapped in loops, doomed to exist in a permanent half state.

“We looked everywhere for you,” Hideo says. He’s crying in earnest now and doesn’t bother to wipe his tears away. “I wish . . . I wish you could have known.”

Sasuke tilts his head at Hideo in that way I’ve come to know so well. It’s a gesture that had carried over, even with the rest of his humanity stripped away. He reaches out to brush his fingers against his brother’s brow. “You have the same eyes,” he says. “You’re still worried.”

Hideo bows his head, a laugh emerging between his tears. Then he’s reaching out, too, gathering his little brother in his arms and pulling him into a fierce embrace.

“I’m so sorry I lost you,” he whispers. “I’m so sorry for what they did to you.” His words break again and again as he weeps. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.”

Sasuke hugs his brother’s neck tight. He doesn’t say a word. Maybe he can’t, as data. He has reached the limits of what he can do.

Time seems to stand still. Finally, when Sasuke pulls back, he transforms again, this time into his teenage iteration. Even taller, lankier. Dark circles under his eyes. He’s no longer wearing the scarf.

But he does recognize his brother. “Ni-san,” he says as he stands up, looking on at the bowed figure before him. Hideo rises to meet his gaze. “You created the NeuroLink because of me.”

“Everything I’ve ever done was for you,” Hideo replies.

If it wasn’t for Sasuke’s disappearance, the NeuroLink might never have existed. And if it wasn’t for the NeuroLink, Sasuke wouldn’t be standing here like a ghost from the machine. It is a strange circle.

The young Sasuke disappears again, and finally, in his place, stands the only version of him that I’ve ever known: Zero, clad in black armor from head to toe, silent and cold. He stands over the broken, soulless robot that Hideo had been fighting.

I tremble at the sight of him. We may have been able to rejoin him with Sasuke, but his decisions are out of my hands and entirely with him. I have no idea what he’ll do at this point. Would Sasuke choose to continue what Zero had been relentlessly pursuing? Immortality and control? Maybe he still would, and then all of this would have been pointless.

“What are you going to do?” Hideo says to him in a quiet voice.

Zero doesn’t respond right away. He’s hesitant now, and in his hesitation, I can see the different versions of his past life merging inside him, filling up part of the well that had been hollowed out of him for so long. He doesn’t seem to know what he wants anymore.

“If I don’t have a physical form,” he finally says, “am I still real?”

As I look on, something strange happens. My father appears before me, with his familiar black outfit and his polished shoes and his sleeve of colorful tattoos. His hair glints in the light.

It’s not him, of course. It’s the NeuroLink, somehow generating this hallucination before me, using the bits of memories I have left to piece together some semblance of him.

But he looks at me now, stopping before me and giving me that quirky grin I remember. It’s as if he were truly here, like he’d never died at all.

“Hi, Emi,” he says.

Hi, Dad. My vision hazes with tears, real tears, ones I can feel sliding down my face.

His smile softens. “I’m so proud of you.”

They’re not his real words. They’re words simulated by the system, piecing together what it knows of my father to create his ghost. But I don’t care. I don’t dwell on it. All I focus on is the figure of him standing before me like he never went anywhere at all, his hands tucked casually in his pockets. Maybe, if I walk out of here, he’ll come with me, and it will be like he has always been here.