Wildcard (Warcross #2)(92)

A voice drifts toward me. I open my eyes and look in its direction.

A small pagoda is at one end of the garden, and waiting beside its pillars are Roshan, Hammie, and Asher, sharing bottles of soda. They wave at me. My smile breaks into a grin, and I head over to them. My footsteps quicken until I reach them, when I stop with a jolting halt.

“Hey,” I say to Roshan.

He grins back at me. “Hey.”

And then my teammates crush me into a hug.

I lean heavily against them, not saying a word. After everything’s that’s happened since my life turned upside down, this is the best part of it all.

Minutes later, the four of us sit in a row along the stone ledge of the pagoda that overlooks the koi pond, our legs dangling above the water. The sun has set completely now, washing the sky’s orange and gold into softer shades of purple and pink.

“That’s it, then,” Asher speaks first, breaking the silence. He glances to where he has parked his chair several feet away. “No more Warcross tournaments. No more NeuroLink.”

He tries to say it in a liberating way, but then he falters and goes quiet. The rest of us do, too.

“What are you going to do now?” I ask him.

He shrugs. “I figure we’re all about to be flooded in movie deals and interviews and documentary requests.” He doesn’t sound all that excited about it.

Roshan leans back and runs a hand through his dark curls. “It’s back to London for me,” he says, his voice similarly dejected. “It’ll be good to see my fam again, get some quiet time with them, and then try to figure out what I want to do now.”

“But Tremaine’s joining you, I hear,” Hammie adds, nudging him hard enough to throw him off balance.

A small smile grows at the edges of Roshan’s lips. He tries to hide it by looking out at the pond. “Nothing’s final yet,” he says, but all Hammie does is grin harder and poke him in the ribs. He grunts once. We laugh.

Hammie leans over to study the koi swimming by beneath us. “Houston for me,” she says. “And back to life before Warcross.”

Asher nudges her once. “And?” he adds.

She shoots him a bashful wink. “And frequent visits to LA. No reason.”

He smiles at that.

Life before Warcross. I picture the little apartment I’d lived in with Kiera in New York, the daily struggle. Most bounty hunters will be out of a job now, too—no need to hunt down people gambling illegally on Warcross or entering the Dark World. There will always be criminals, but they’ll return to operating in the regular Internet. And in real life.

What am I going to do now? Go back to New York? How will I settle back into a normal life? I picture myself applying to college now, filling out an application for a job, working in an office. It’s a strange, surreal thing to imagine.

“Warcross wasn’t who any of us are,” I say, mostly to myself.

“No,” Roshan agrees. There’s a long pause. “It’s just something we made.”

And he’s right, of course. It would’ve been nothing without them—us—making it matter. Without us, it really was just a game.

“It won’t change this,” Roshan replies, gesturing at the three of us. “You all know that, right? We’re linked forever now.”

He lifts up his glass bottle in a toast. Hammie joins him, and then Asher. I lift mine, too.

“To good friends.”

“To pulling each other up.”

“To sticking together, no matter the apocalypse.”

“To our team.”

We clink. The sound rings out across the garden, then fades into the sky.



* * *





* * *



WHEN I GET back to my hotel at night, there’s a written message waiting for me on my nightstand. I stare at it for a second before picking it up and holding it up to the light. It’s a phone number left by the hotel concierge, plus a message asking me to call.

I check my phone again. In the quiet of the garden and the company of my teammates, I hadn’t been looking at it at all. Now I realize that I’ve missed a few calls from the same number. I dial it, then walk over to my window and hold it up to my ear.

A woman’s voice comes on the other end. “Miss Chen?” she says.

“Who’s asking?” I reply.

“I’m Divya Kapoor, the new CEO of Henka Games.”

I stand up a little straighter. It’s the woman I’d seen at the Supreme Court. “Yes?”

There’s a brief, embarrassed pause on the other end. “Miss Chen, on behalf of Henka Games, I would like to apologize to you for everything that has happened. As you know, Hideo’s actions were not revealed to everyone in the studio, and I am as shocked as the rest of the world over the allegations. It is because of your help that we have avoided sheer catastrophe. We owe you a great deal.”

I listen to her quietly. It wasn’t so long ago that I’d walked into Henka Games feeling like a complete outcast. “You called me just to say that Henka Games is sorry?” I say, then immediately wince. I hadn’t meant my words to come out so accusatory. Some things never change, I guess.

“There is something else,” Divya adds. She hesitates again before going on. “We are in the process of dismantling all that’s wrong with the NeuroLink. But we also want to find a way to rebuild it.”