Warcross

“How does this work?” I ask.

She walks over and nods at an On button hovering near the surface of the desk, but doesn’t try to touch it. “You’re the only one who can turn on your work area,” she says. “Press that.”

I touch it. The instant I do, the previously blank desk lights up soft stripes in our team colors, with a welcome message for me over it in white text. A second later, a holographic screen rises up from the desk. It’s a standard desktop display—except it’s floating in midair. These types of desktops have only recently started shipping in the States, and they’re, of course, way out of my price range.

Hammie smiles at my expression. “Swipe the screen toward your walls,” she says.

I touch the screen with two fingers, then make a swiping motion toward the wall we’re facing. The display on the screen follows my fingers, flying from the screen onto the wall, where it fills up the entire space, fully magnified.

“The downstairs living room has the best work area, of course,” Hammie adds. “But this is in all of our rooms. Good for any impromptu team meetings.”

If the same system is installed downstairs, then each room’s desktop isn’t nearly as secure as she thinks it is. I can work my way into the main system, and then I’ll be able to get into each of their individual systems, too, regardless of who the work area is tailored for. I smile at the gorgeous, wall-size display. “Thanks.”

“I was starting to think no American would ever be the number one pick.” Hammie tucks a curl behind her ear. “Nice to have you on the team. Maybe I’ll stop teasing Ash and target you for a change.” She winks and turns away before I can respond.

I stay where I am until she steps out of my room and the door slides shut behind her. Then I put my hands on my hips and admire the room. My space. In the Phoenix Riders’ official house. I walk over to where my few belongings have been delivered and placed by my bed, then take out my Christmas ornament and Dad’s painting. I prop them carefully up on the shelf. They look small there, too simple for this luxurious room. I imagine Dad standing beside me.

Well, Emi, he’d say, pushing his glasses up. Well, well.

At the thought of my father, my attention goes to my closet. With a tap of my finger against the door, it slides open, revealing a space as large as the studio where Keira and I lived.

Holy hell.

The closet is already filled with an assortment of clothes, every single one of them a high-end brand. I stare in disbelief before I walk inside, running my hands along the hangers. Each item is easily worth thousands—shirts, jeans, dresses, coats, shoes, purses and clutches, belts and jewelry. My hand stops at the shoe rack, where I pick up an exquisite pair of white, red, and green kicks that smell like new leather, the heels decorated with gold studs. Like everything else in the closet, the shoes still have a tag hanging on them, accompanied by a small greeting card.

GUCCI

Official Sponsor of

Warcross Championships VIII

Sponsored gifts. No wonder every professional player always looks like they just stepped off a runway. I slip off my well-worn boots, tuck them carefully in one corner, and then try on the new shoes. They fit like a glove.

An hour flies by while I feverishly try on everything in my closet. There’s even a shelf dedicated to face masks in all colors and patterns, an accessory I’ve seen worn all over Tokyo. I try a few of them on, pulling their straps over each of my ears so that the mask covers my mouth and nose. Might be a good thing to have if I need to go around the city unrecognized.

When I’m done, I stand there, still decked out in lavish items, breathless and uneasy. Each thing in here costs more than my entire debt before Hideo erased it.

Hideo.

I shake my head, put everything back, and step out of my closet. There’ll be plenty of time later to admire all of this—for now, back to work. Hideo had made sure that I would be drafted onto a team, but now it would be up to me to make sure my team won each round. The longer the Phoenix Riders stay in the championship tournaments, the more time I have to investigate the players.

At this very moment, other hunters are probably hot on Zero's trail, reporting their findings to Hideo while I gape at my new wardrobe. They would have been at the Wardraft, too. What if they also saw the dark silhouette perched in the ceiling’s scaffolding? Right now, somebody else might be earning ten million dollars; I might already be doomed to return to New York. And here I am, playing around in my new closet.

I jerk into motion.

First, I bring up my shields and switch to the anonymous, invisible version of my account. Then I sit down on the edge of my bed and pull up the screenshot I’d taken earlier of the dome’s scaffolding. The image is a 3-D capture, one that I can rotate from its point of origin. In addition, it’s caught all of the data and code running in the dome at the moment of capture.

I squint at the static silhouette in my 3-D screenshot. Zooming in on it only makes it blurrier. I can see the code running the virtual simulations around the dome—but I can’t see any code or data on this shape. I type in a few commands and strip away the visuals of the screenshot, so that I’m now immersed inside reams of code. Where his silhouette is, I can only see a patch of static.

I sit back, pondering. He is hidden from me, in every single way—except that I could see him. He probably didn’t expect that. If this is Zero, then he’s not disguising himself as well as he should be. But the Tokyo Dome is on its own network of connections for the Wardraft. The easiest way for this person to have hacked his way up there is if he was already approved to enter the arena, and had already physically cleared security. Someone in the audience, then. Or a player, like Hideo suspects. Or a wild card.

I lean forward again and switch back to the visuals, then zoom in to break down the code that generated the image of him. A stripped-down view of the code pops up. I read through it as I chew absently on the inside of my cheek.

Then I see something that makes me pause. It’s just a line. Not even a line—a pair of letters and a zero, lost in the code. A clue.

WC0

In most of the Warcross code, players are referred to by their Warcross IDs, written as WPN. WP stands for Warcross Player. N is a randomized, scrambled number. So, if I’m looking at code about my own avatar, I’d probably see myself referred to as WP39302824 or something like that.

The only time a different ID is used for Warcross players is at the Wardraft. During the draft, players aren’t referred to in the code by their regular IDs. They don’t use WP. Instead, they are WC—Wild Cards. My ID in the Wardraft was WC40, because I was the last entry added into the draft.

WC0. Whoever the silhouette was, it was someone physically cleared to be there in the Tokyo Dome. A wild card in the Wardraft. Hideo’s suspicions were pretty close.

I chew idly on my nail, my eyes narrowed in thought. I need another moment where every wild card is in the same space at once, and I’ll get to be physically close enough to them in order to study their info.

Tonight’s party. Asher’s last words to me echo in my mind. The players will be out in force. That will be my chance.

I bring up a virtual menu and tap on the call button for Wikki.

A minute later, the little drone comes rolling into my room, his half-moon eyes turned expectantly toward me. I wave him over, then turn him around so that I can study the panel on the back of his head. At the same time, I bring up his settings.

“Aren’t you just the cutest thing,” I murmur to him as I carefully remove the covering for the panel. Inside is a maze of circuits. “Wikki, turn off all recording.”

The robot obeys, switching off its data gathering. As I fiddle, I realize that it’s not made by Henka Games—it’s by some other company, with weaker security. Everyone had thought to install protections on everything else, but no one had thought much about the security needed on this little drone that just serves us food and drink, quietly storing information about all our habits as it goes.

An hour later, I’ve cracked through its shields. It records a lot more data than I thought it did. Not only does it store information about the Phoenix Riders, but it also seems preset to serve the other teams, which means it has optional connections to everyone else’s NeuroLink accounts. I smile. Everyone in the world is connected in some way to everyone else.

I run a script to overwhelm Wikki’s security. While it’s working, I worm my way into each of my teammates’ accounts. I crack into their emails, their messages, their Memories. From there, I set up my hack to penetrate each of the accounts of the other teams.

It’s going to take a while to download everything, but it’s running now.

I replace Wikki’s panel, double-check to make sure I leave no trace of my presence behind, and then reboot the robot. It turns back on, its eyes blinking, its data gathering set back to normal. I pat it once on the head, then accept another strawberry soda.

“Thanks, Wikki,” I say, winking at it. It records my preference, then rolls out of my room again.

I pop open the soda and take a sip. By tomorrow, I should be in.

11

By the time the sun sets and we arrive in the heart of Shibuya, the neon lights of Tokyo have already lit up, casting the city in a glittering rainbow of color. Security guards swarm around our limo as we pull up to the nightclub’s entrance. The streets are fenced off, so that no cars other than ours can come through, and a red carpet lines the sidewalk.