Wildcard (Warcross) Read online

  You’re wasting time. Turn right at the next intersection. Head into the mall and go down to the basement floor. There’s a car waiting for you on the opposite street.

  A car? Maybe I wasn’t just being paranoid, after all. He had been watching me, maybe had calculated what routes I’d take once I left the Riders.

  I look around frantically. Maybe Zero’s lying to me, playing one of his games. I pull up my directory and start to place a call to Asher. If the others are still somewhere close by, they can come get me. They—

  I never finish my thought. A shot rings out behind me, whizzing narrowly past my neck to chip the wall at an angle.

  A bullet. A gunshot. A sudden wave of terror sweeps over me.

  I throw myself to the ground. Down the street, a random passerby screams and runs, leaving me the only person that I can see. I glance over my shoulder—searching for my followers—and this time, I see a shadow moving against a building, rippling in the night. Another movement on the other side of the street catches my eye. I start scrambling to my feet.

  A second gunshot rings out.

  Panic hovers at the edges of my senses, threatening to crowd out everything. The sounds come to me like I’m underwater. As a bounty hunter, I’ve heard gunshots before, the ping of police bullets against walls and glass—but the sheer intensity of this moment is new. I was never the target.

  Did Zero send them? But he’d warned me to run. He’d told me that I was in danger. Why would he do that, if he’s the one attacking me?

  You have to think.

  I flatten myself against the wall, throw my board to the ground, and jump on it. My heel slams down and the board surges forward with a high-pitched whoosh. Zero had said a car was waiting for me around the next turn. I crouch low on my board so that my hands can grip either side of it, then aim for the end of the street.

  But another gunshot streaks past my leg—too close—and hits the board. Another knocks a wheel loose.

  I jump off as the board veers sharply into the wall, roll, and push myself back to my feet—but my sneaker catches against a crack in the pavement. I stumble. Behind me come footsteps. My eyes squeeze shut, even as I struggle back up to my feet again. This is it; any second now, I will feel the searing pain of a bullet ripping through me.

  “Around the corner. Go.”

  I jerk my head to one side at the voice.

  Crouched beside me in the darkness is a girl with a black cap pulled low on her head. Her lipstick is black, her eyes gray and hard as steel and fixated on the shadowed silhouettes on the street. A gun’s in her hand, and clipped around her wrist is a black cuff. I think the cuff is real for a moment before a virtual ripple of blue shines across it. She’s balanced so lightly on her feet that she looks ready to fly away, and her expression is completely still, without even the tiniest ripple of unease.

  No one was beside me a second ago. It’s like she materialized out of thin air.

  Her eyes flicker to me. “Move.” The word cracks like a whip.

  This time, I don’t hesitate. I bolt down the street.

  As I do, she rises from her crouch and moves toward one of my hooded assassins. The girl walks with a sense of calm that borders on eerie—even as the attacker shifts his arm to shoot at her, she is shifting, too. By the time the attacker fires at the girl, she has twisted her body to one side, dodging the bullet as she raises her gun. She shoots at the attacker in a blur of fluid motion. I reach the bend in the street and look back at the same time her bullet hits my assassin hard in the shoulder. It knocks him backward, clear off his feet.

  Who the hell is this girl?

  Zero hadn’t said anything about someone else working with him—maybe she’s not connected to him at all. She could even be one of my attackers and is trying to throw me off track by pretending to be my rescuer.

  I’ve already reached the mall complex. I’m rushing past crowds of startled people as I make my way down the first flight of stairs. Basement level, the words repeat in my mind. In the distance, I hear police sirens wailing down the last street I was on. How’d they know to come here so quickly?

  Then I remember the passerby who’d screamed and fled at the first gunshot. If she was using the new, algorithm-affected lenses, then her reaction could have triggered the NeuroLink to contact the police. Could that be possible? It seems like a feature Hideo would have added.

  It isn’t until I reach the bottom of the stairs and burst through an emergency exit that I realize the gray-eyed girl is already here, somehow, rushing alongside me. She shakes her head when she sees me opening my mouth to ask her a question.

  “No time. Hurry up,” she orders in a terse voice. I numbly do as she says.

  As we go, I quietly analyze what information I can about her. There’s precious little. Like me, she seems to be operating behind a false identity, the various profile accounts hovering around her empty and misleading. She moves with single-minded focus, so intense and so sure in her gestures that I know she’s done things like this before.

  Like what? Like helping a hunted target get to safety? Or tricking one into following her to their demise?

  I wince at the thought. That’s not a gamble I can afford to lose. If she’s trying to isolate me from her other rival hunters or something, then I need to find a good chance to bolt away.

  This basement floor of the shopping center is laid out like cosmetics counters in a New York mall, except all of the kiosks here display an array of decadently decorated desserts. Cakes, mousses, chocolates—all so delicately packaged that they look less like food and more like jewelry. The lights are dimmed, the floor long closed for the night.

  I race along the darkened aisles behind the girl. She edges close to one of the cake displays and brings an elbow down hard on the glass. It shatters.

  An alarm starts to wail overhead.

  Satisfied, the girl reaches into the broken display counter to grab a miniature mochi cake adorned with gold flakes. She shakes off bits of glass before popping it in her mouth.

  “What are you doing?” I shout at her above the noise.

  “Clearing our path,” she replies through her mouthful of dessert. She waves her arm impatiently at the ceiling. “Alarm should scare some of them away.” She tightens her grip on her gun and raises her other hand to make a subtle series of gestures in midair. An invite pops up in my view.

  Connect with [null]?

  I waver for a heartbeat before accepting. Neon-gold lines appear in my view, directing us along a path that she has set for us. “Follow it if you lose me,” she says over her shoulder.

  “What do I call you?” I ask.

  “Is that really important right now?”

  “If someone attacks me and we’re separated, I’ll know what name to scream for help.”

  At that, she turns around to face me and gifts me with a smile. “Jax,” she replies.

  A scarlet shape appears in our view, hiding behind a pillar at the other end of the floor.

  Jax turns her head in its direction without slowing down. She lifts her gun. “Duck,” she warns. Then she fires.

  I jerk down to the floor as Jax’s gun sparks. The other person returns fire immediately, the bullets lighting up against the pillars and shattering another glass counter. My ears ring. Jax continues moving with the same exacting motions as before, stepping out of the line of fire each time, cocking her gun, bracing her shoulder, and firing back. I race near her with my head hunched down.

  As a bullet zings past her, forcing her to shift sideways, she tosses her gun effortlessly from one hand into the other. She fires back.

  Her bullet makes contact this time. We hear a yelp of agony—when I glance up past the counters, I see the shape outlined in red collapse. The gold line dictating our path turns right, but before we take it, Jax strides over to the figure on the floor.

  She
points her gun straight down at the person and fires one efficient shot.

  The assassin convulses once, violently, before going limp.

  It’s over in an instant, but the sound of the shot echoes in my mind like ripples disturbing a pond, the memory overlapping repeatedly over itself. I can see blood sprayed against the wall and the scarlet pool spreading under the body. The gaping wound in his head.

  My stomach gives a violent lurch. It’s too late to stop it, so I just fall to my knees and spill the contents of dinner on the floor.

  Jax yanks me hard to my feet. “Calm down. Follow me.” She tilts her head and signals for me to keep moving.

  The blood on the wall splatters over and over again in my mind. She killed him far too easily. She’s used to this. I think about bolting away—but Jax had defended me and hadn’t tried to kill me herself. Is there a higher ransom on my head if I’m taken alive?

  A thousand questions crowd the tip of my tongue, but I force myself to stumble dizzily after her. There is no sound now except for the echo of our boots against the ground. Police sirens and ambulances must still be at the scene of the shooting upstairs, and maybe someone has already discovered the dead body Jax has left behind.

  The seconds drag on like hours before we finally reach our destination—where the gold line ends in front of a narrow utility closet.

  Jax types in a code on the door’s security lock. It glows green, lets out a single beep, and opens for us. She ushers me inside.

  The room looks like a standard utility closet, filled with wooden crates and cardboard boxes stacked up to the ceiling. Jax leans against a counter and starts to reload her gun.

  “Can’t take you through the regular exit,” she mutters as she goes. “There’s a police barricade up there blocking the car. We’ll go this way.”

  The car. Maybe she really is with Zero.

  I huddle in a corner and squeeze my eyes shut. My throat still feels coated with acid. The killing shot echoes in my mind. I let out a long, shaky breath and attempt to compose myself, fixing my eyes on the girl’s gun, but my hands keep quivering, no matter how hard I clench my fists. I can’t seem to gather my thoughts properly. Every time I try, they scatter apart.

  Jax sees me struggling to steady myself. She pauses, takes a step toward me, and holds my chin with one gloved hand. Blood stains the leather. I hold still for a moment, wondering how she can be this firm and calm after she just shot someone in the head. Wondering if this is when she’ll snap my neck like a twig.

  “Hey.” She locks her stare on me. “You’re okay.”

  I pull away from her grip. “I know that.” A quaver lingers in my voice.

  “Good.” At my reply, she reaches behind her back and pulls another gun from her belt. She throws it at me without warning.

  I fumble the weapon. “For chrissakes,” I blurt out, holding the gun in front of me with two fingers. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Fire when needed?” she suggests.

  My blank stare continues until she rolls her eyes at me and snatches the weapon back. She replaces it on her belt before picking up her own gun and clicking the old cartridge out of its magazine. “What, you’ve never shot a gun before?”

  “Not a real one.”

  “Seen someone die?”

  I shake my head numbly.

  “I thought you were a bounty hunter.”

  “I am.”

  “Don’t you do that kind of stuff?”

  “What, kill people?”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “My job’s to catch my marks alive, not to put holes in their heads.” I watch her snap a new cartridge into her gun. “Is this my cue to ask you what’s going on? Did Zero send you?”

  Jax tucks the freshly loaded gun back into her holster. The look she gives me is almost pitying. “Listen. Emika Chen, isn’t it? You clearly have no idea what you’re getting yourself into.” Without missing a beat, she pulls a knife out from the inside of one of her boots and continues. “You were having dinner with the Phoenix Riders tonight, weren’t you?”

  “You’ve been spying on me?”

  “I was observing you.” Jax walks over to the other side of the closet, where she pushes one of the stacks of crates aside. Behind it is an inconspicuous door, visible only as a thin rectangle against the wall. She takes her knife and jams it carefully into the subtle cracks. “Tell me I don’t have to explain everything.”

  “Look, let’s start with you telling me what the hell just happened, and we’ll go from there.” I cross my arms. It’s an easier way to disguise my trembling, and the feeling of my arms crossed protectively over my chest gives me a small hint of comfort. Showing this girl weakness seems like a dangerous thing.

  “I just saved you from your would-be assassins,” Jax says, pointing her knife at me. “Zero warned you about them.”

  Hearing this confirmation from her sends another wave of dizzying fear through me. I steady myself against the wall. “So he sent you to fetch me?”

  She nods. “I’m willing to bet that some of those hunters were working together, from the way they placed themselves on either side of the street and covered the basement floor of this place. They won’t be the last, either. Plenty will be targeting you as long as that fat jackpot stays up in the Pirate’s Den.”

  She walks over to me and drops a metal fragment into my hand. “Hold this.” Then she heads back to the door and continues working on wedging her knife into the outline.

  I look on, frozen in shock. “Why do people want me dead?”

  “Is your connection to Hideo Tanaka not enough?” She grunts once as her knife’s blade becomes stuck. “People think everything that’s gone wrong in the games this year is because of your hack of the opening ceremony game and your fling with Hideo. Rumor’s that you’re also the one responsible for installing the cheat in the Final, as a rebellion against being kicked off your team.” She shrugs. “I mean, they’re not wrong.”

  Anger slices through my surprise. “People want me dead for that?”

  “There are a lot of gamblers out there who probably lost big money on that Final. Doesn’t matter. You’re going to have assassins on your trail for a while, so I suggest you stick close to me.” She yanks the knife out and presses it into a different spot in the crack, then pushes her weight against it.

  Zero. This is the first time I’ve heard someone other than Hideo acknowledge his existence. “Why’d he send you?”

  She pulls off her black cap, revealing short silver hair, and looks up at me. “Why else? To save you from being pumped full of bullets. And you’re welcome.”

  A tingle runs through my limbs. Zero had been genuine about warning me, after all. Hadn’t he? “No—I mean, what do you do?”

  She pauses to glance at me. “Takes an assassin to stop one, doesn’t it?”

  An assassin. It shouldn’t shock me, not after what I just witnessed her do, but suddenly I think back to the Pirate’s Den in the Dark World, where I’d seen potential assassins watching the lottery rankings, their figures as patient and quiet as death. Maybe Jax was one of them.

  I swallow hard. “You work for Zero, then? Are you part of his crew that was trying to sabotage Warcross?”

  She considers this question thoughtfully before answering. “You could say that. We’re both Blackcoats.”

  Blackcoats.

  I frown, thinking through all the shadow groups I’ve come across in the Dark World. There are the bigger names, of course—the Wrecking Crew hackers; Anonymous—that the public knows, and smaller gangs who aspire to be notorious.

  But the Blackcoats aren’t a name I’m familiar with at all. I have no concept of how big or small they are, what they do, or what their purpose is. In my world, that’s even more dangerous. They’re not here to pull publicity stunts. They’re here to do serious
damage.

  “I’ve never heard of them,” I reply.

  She shrugs again. “Didn’t expect you to. If you had, I’d be more suspicious.”

  “And what if I don’t want to?”

  “Don’t want to what?”

  “What if I don’t want to know more? What if I don’t want to go with you?”

  This time, a small smile creeps onto Jax’s lips that changes her entire expression into something sinister. It suddenly occurs to me that I’m trapped in the same room as a professional killer.

  “Then leave,” she says, cocking her head once toward the door.

  She’s taunting me now, testing the resolve of my words. Out of sheer stubbornness, I lunge toward the door and seize the handle, ready to throw it open and rush out the way I came. I half expect to feel the searing pain of a bullet in my back, ripping through me to drop me on the spot.

  “If you’re fine with dying tonight,” she adds casually behind me.

  As much as I hate myself for it, her words stop me cold.

  “Zero’s going to be disappointed to lose you,” she goes on, “but he’s also never forced anyone to work with us against their will. Step out that door, and you’ll be both free and dead. Your choice.”

  There are hunters on the other side of this door, waiting for me to come fleeing out into the dim basement level . . . and there’s an assassin in here, one who claims to want to help me escape.

  My hand tightens against the door handle. Jax is right. I’ll last two seconds out there by myself, facing off against who knows how many unknown hunters all eager to claim my jackpot. Or, I can take my chances in here, with a so-called Blackcoat who nevertheless saved me and—so far—seems interested in keeping me alive.

  I clench my jaw and force my hand to release the handle. Then I turn to glare at her. “This isn’t a choice,” I say. “And you know it.”

  She shrugs and goes back to her work. “Just doing my job. Zero’s expecting you, and he’d prefer you in one piece.” A subtle click finally sounds from the door, and she waves one hand at me. “Give me that thing.”