The Rule of Thoughts

But there was one thing even more important than that.

Finding Bryson and Sarah. At least one of them. At least the general area where they lived. With Jackson’s account compromised, it might be a while before Michael dared access the Net again.

A line of bright light slashed across his NetScreen again, wider this time, and it remained longer. Random numbers and letters flashed, then vanished. Kaine—it had to be Kaine—was now throwing his full force, trying to sabotage instead of hack. Michael knew the signs from his own work over the years. He pushed back with a flurry of codes, not sure if he could do it again.

Instinct took over. He searched and searched, digging through the archives of Lifeblood, the game that had once meant so much to him. Data on players, high scores, dates, event logs. The image of the girl, Tanya, jumping to her death off the Golden Gate Bridge flashed in his mind. Michael had only been a Tangent, Lifting up from what had actually been Lifeblood Deep to play the game. But Bryson and Sarah were real—Agent Weber had said so, anyway—and there had to be one snippet of real-world information he could dig up from all the Lifeblood data before Kaine destroyed the digital existence of poor Jackson Porter.

Three slashes of searing white light burned across the NetScreen, wiping out the path Michael had been digging through the code. Once again, numbers and letters flashed, one after the other, blurring the screen in a rush of movement that drowned out the background. Michael swept it away with a last-gasp code that was absolutely illegal. The screen cleared once more and he jumped full-bore back into the Lifeblood data archives, his eyes stinging with tears from concentrating so hard.

Sweat beaded his forehead, ran down his temples, slicked his skin as he worked. Lifeblood’s code was complicated and heavily protected. But Michael was good—he’d been part of the code itself. He dug and searched, looking for any background files he could find on his friends. Personal information was sacred in the virtual world. Sacred.

He could sense Kaine’s efforts to crash his system. It was almost like a tangible pressure, pushing down on him. Ignoring it as best he could, Michael swam in a sea of data, searching, searching.

There. A gamer’s file with all of its experience points laid out like folded laundry on a bed. Everything looked familiar, matched the criteria Michael had entered. He recognized so much of what he saw before him, spelled out in code—he’d been by that gamer’s side.

It was Sarah.

The pressure intensified. The characters on the screen jumped and twitched, pulsed like a drumbeat—something he’d never seen before. The upper-right-hand corner of the screen glowed, a bulge of light forming like a giant blister. Michael found the location-file, seared it into his memory. Sarah. He’d found Sarah. She was real. Relief and something close to happiness swelled within his chest.

And then everything came crashing down.

Slashes of bright light flashed across the screen. Acting on instinct, Michael reached up and squeezed his EarCuff, but he knew it would do no good. The NetScreen stayed where it was, though it had lost its crisp shape, its edges blurry. Numbers and letters swirled, barely identifiable behind the barrage of blinking lights. There was a loud buzzing sound. Michael tried to lean back, tried to escape the pulsing screen, but he hit his head on the wall behind him. This was a massive, all-out cyberattack.

Something popped, followed by one last explosion of blinding light. Michael closed his eyes and turned away, saw spots swimming in the darkness. Sweat drenched every inch of his body. Then the buzzing stopped, replaced by the distant honking of horns, the skittering of debris as wind pushed it across the alley.

Michael opened his eyes. Of course turning his head had done no good—the NetScreen hovered before him, seeming to lean against the wall of the building. The screen was black, with white-lettered words filling the space:

YOU SHOULD’VE FOLLOWED MY ORDERS, MICHAEL. WE NEED EACH OTHER.

He was reading the message for a third time when the words dissipated into the dark background; then the entire screen winked out. Michael didn’t have to squeeze his EarCuff to know that it would never work again.

Chapter 4: A Blur of Color

Michael’s brain was tired.

Even though his stomach ached with hunger, the sheer exhaustion of mental effort overwhelmed everything else. He didn’t even care that the pavement on which he sat was rough and dirty. He slumped over and rested his head on his arms, curled his legs up, and closed his eyes.

Right there, in the corner of the alley, not caring who saw him, somehow soothed by the hypnotizing sounds of the city, he slept.

When he woke up, it was dark.

He hadn’t changed position the entire time he’d slept, and he opened his eyes to see the pavement an inch from his face. He slowly turned his head and stretched, his muscles groaning, joints popping, as he straightened out. Slowly, he got to his feet. He felt like an eighty-year-old man. He stretched out his limbs again and the memory of Kaine’s cyberattack hit him, making his stomach turn. Then came the hunger—cramps that felt like claws raking his innards.

He needed food. The man at the coffee shop around the corner was a little shocked when Michael ordered three different sandwiches and two bags of chips, but everything in the place looked good. He found a booth and wolfed down the food, staring blankly out the window at the city lights, thinking of the data he’d found on Sarah. She wasn’t close at all. She was hundreds of miles away, and for some reason, it saddened Michael to think of leaving for such a long journey, which made no sense, considering he had no actual ties to the home of Jackson Porter.

He had no ties at all. To anywhere. It didn’t matter where he went.

The second sandwich did him in. As his dad—his fake dad—used to say, his eyes had been bigger than his stomach. Still achy from the long sleep on the concrete bed, he got up and headed out of the restaurant, handing the spare sandwich and a bag of chips to a homeless woman he’d seen nearby. For some reason, he envied her. At least she had a world. His had been destroyed.

There was a lot to do before he could leave town. He’d just started making a mental list of tasks when he heard someone shout behind him.

“Jax!”

It was a girl’s voice, and Michael only turned around out of curiosity, at first making no connection to himself. But it clicked when he saw dark eyes focused on him, a pretty teenage girl running down the sidewalk. It was her. Gabriela. Even from a blurry pic sent with a short note, he could tell.