“Oh, I know better than that. It’s Ren.”
Hideo’s stare darts from the screenshot over to me. “Renoir Thomas?”
I nod. “DJ Ren. A marker in the screenshot’s code pointed to him. Since then, I’ve hooked up all of the official players to my Warcross profile.” I pull up everyone’s accounts. “I may need to go through some of their Memories, see who else might be involved.”
Hideo’s gaze goes to the digital map I’ve created that shows where each of the Warcross players currently are. Most are in their dorms. A group of Andromedans are out in the city, while Asher has left the Riders’ dorm. Ren is still sitting in his room.
“You’re more dangerous than I thought,” Hideo muses, admiring my handiwork.
I offer him a smile. “I promise I’ll be nice to you.”
This time, I manage to coax a laugh from him. “Should I be even more concerned?” he says to me.
I let his question linger, and bring up Ren’s email. “I’ve been running a hack on Ren’s info,” I reply, pulling the email forward to hover between us as a dark, encrypted cube of data. “Found this yesterday, although I can’t seem to unlock it.”
Hideo scans the file once. Like me, his eyes go immediately to the red marker on the edge of the cube. “This was sent from the Dark World,” he says.
I nod. “And wrapped in a shield I don’t recognize.”
Hideo brings his hands slightly apart, then rotates the cube once. “I do,” he mutters. He expands his hands again. The cube grows larger, and as it does, he pulls one side of it so that I can see its surface in detail. I narrow my eyes at it. The surface is coated with an elaborate, winding series of endlessly repeating patterns.
“It’s called a fractal shield,” he explains. “A new variation on onion shields we’ve seen lately, except that the fractal shield’s layers loop endlessly, multiplying each time you burrow through a top layer. The more you try to break it open, the more secure it becomes. Your hacks will run in place forever without getting anywhere.”
No wonder I couldn’t break my way through it. “I’ve never seen this before.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to. This is mutated from security we developed inside Henka Games.”
I lean forward, my gaze running over the surface of the cube. “Can you break it?”
Hideo puts his hands against two surfaces of the cube. When he removes his hands, a copy of the top of the fractal shield floats above the cube. “An infinite shield requires an infinite key,” he says. “Something that multiplies at the same rate and type as the shield itself.”
“Every locked door has a key,” I murmur.
At my words, Hideo meets my gaze. He smiles.
He types several commands that are invisible to me, then runs it through a Henka Games program. A key forms in his hands, blacked out and ever-shifting, its own surface coated with the same endless patterns. I look on as he takes the key and presses it back against the cube.
The surface of the cube suddenly stills. The infinitely repeating fractals that cover it vanish. Then, in a flash, the cube disappears—replaced by a message.
It only says one thing.
1300PD
My gaze hitches on it at the same time Hideo’s does.
“Pirate’s Den,” we say in unison.
To a normal person, 1300PD would be meaningless. But to me, it’s a scheduled event. The 1300 is 1:00 p.m., written according to a twenty-four-hour clock—and PD stands for “Pirate’s Den,” an abbreviation I know well. It’s a notorious gathering place in the Dark World.
The event is tagged for March twentieth.
“Well,” I say. “Guess I know where I’m going this week.”
Hideo considers the message for a moment longer before giving me a questioning look. “You’re headed in alone?”
“You crack the fractal shields.” I lean back on my bed and cross my arms. “It’s my job to walk with the criminals, Mr. Tanaka.”
At that, he smiles a little. “Hideo, please.”
I tilt my head at him. “You insist on calling me Miss Chen in public. It’s only fair.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “I try not to give the tabloids more gossip than they can handle. They’re particularly aggressive at this time of year.”
“Oh? And what gossip is that? That we’re on a first-name basis? Scandalous. It seems like the tabloids are already making up their own gossip about me, anyway.”
“Would you prefer I call you Emika?”
“I would,” I reply.
“Well.” He nods. “Emika, then.”
Emika. Hearing him say my first name sends a pleasant shiver down my spine. “I’ll keep you updated,” I decide to say, shifting to signal an end to our call. “Should be enlightening.”
“Wait. Before you go.”
I pause. “Yes?”
“Tell me about your arrest from a couple of years ago.”
He’s been doing research on my record. I clear my throat, suddenly angry that he’s brought it up. I haven’t talked about my arrest in years. “It’s old news,” I mutter as I begin to launch into a summary of what had happened to Annie, how I’d hacked into the school’s directory.
Hideo shakes his head, stopping me. “I already know what you did. Tell me about how the police knew it was you.”
I hesitate.
“You’re far too skilled for them,” Hideo continues. He studies me intently, his expression the same as it had been when he’d tested me during our first meeting. “They didn’t actually catch you, did they?”
I meet his gaze. “I confessed.”
Hideo stays silent.
“They thought Annie did it,” I go on. The memory of sirens, of me walking into the principal’s office where the cops were gathered, of Annie’s cuffed wrists, her tear-streaked face looking up at me in shock, comes back to me now. “They were going to arrest her. So I turned myself in.”
“You turned yourself in.” There is a note of fascination in his voice. “And did you know what you would be sacrificing in doing that?”
I shrug. “Didn’t have time to dwell on it. Just seemed like the right thing to do.”
Hideo is quiet. His attention is now completely locked on me.
“I suppose chivalry isn’t dead,” he finally says.
I don’t quite know how to respond. All I can do is return his look, feel another wall around him fall away, see the glint in his eyes change. Whatever he thought of what I said, it’s made him let down his guard.
Then the moment’s over. He straightens in his chair and breaks his eye contact with me. “Until next time, Emika,” he says.
I murmur my own farewell and end the call. His virtual self disappears from my room, leaving me alone again. Slowly, I exhale and let my shoulders sag. Hideo hadn’t mentioned anything about the other bounty hunters, which means I’m probably ahead of them on this job. So far, so good.
It takes me a moment to realize that I’d forgotten to turn off my hack when I was having my conversation with Hideo. That meant that I was crawling his profile for data, too. Hideo has his own protective shields up on his info, but even so, I’d managed to grab one unencrypted file from his account, one newly created earlier today. Now sitting in my downloads, blinking at me. I peer at it long enough that it opens, thinking that I want to look inside.
My room fades away. I find myself standing in some sort of gym, equipped with large punching bags, racks of weights, mats, and long mirrors. This is one of Hideo’s Memory files. I shouldn’t be poking around in his data. Right away, I start exiting, but the Memory plays before I can.
Hideo is punching a bag in a furious rhythm, each impact shuddering in my view. Kickboxing? I pan around the Memory’s world—then stop when I see the reflection in the mirrors.
He’s shirtless, and his chest and back are slick with sweat, his muscles wound tight. His damp hair shudders with each hit he makes. His hands are wrapped in white bandages, and as he continues his ferocious assault on the punching bag, I can see glimpses of blood staining the bandages over his knuckles. The scars I always see. How hard has he been hitting that bag? But what shocks me is his expression. His eyes are black and fierce, a look so full of focused anger that I physically pull away.
I think back to the intensity I’d seen on his face during our first meeting, when he was talking about his newest creation, about his passions. I can see a similar light in his eyes here in the way he throws his punches—but this is a darker intensity. One of deep fury.
Hideo’s bodyguards wait patiently at the edges of the room, and standing right next to him is someone who must be his trainer, decked out head to toe in padded gear. “Enough,” he says now, and in response, Hideo pauses to turn on him. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the look the trainer gives me—to Hideo—is wary, even a little afraid.
The trainer starts to circle, and Hideo does the same. His movements are fluid and precise, deadly. His hair falls across his face, obscuring his eyes momentarily from view. The trainer twirls a long wooden stick in one hand, drags it along the ground, and then hoists it. He comes at Hideo, swinging the stick at him with blinding speed. My view blurs. Hideo dodges the blow easily. He sidesteps again, then a third time—on the fourth strike, Hideo lunges. He brings one arm up, fist clenched, as the stick comes down on it. The stick snaps with a loud crack against his forearm. Hideo darts forward. His fist strikes the trainer’s arm pads so powerfully that the trainer winces at the impact. Hideo doesn’t let up. He rains blows on the man’s arm pads in a blur of motion—the final punch lands so hard that the trainer stumbles backward and falls.