Maneuvering an incapacitated teenage boy into the passenger seat of a smashed-up car should probably not have been as easy as it was just then, but two things worked in my favor. Thing one: years of helping Dad get upstairs after he’d spent a long weekend shift in HIVE. Thing two: Jason didn’t weigh half as much as Dad, even soaking wet.

Which, to be clear, he was. His teeth were chattering as I buckled his seat belt for him. A combination of exhaustion, digitally induced wooziness, and gushing hydrant water had left him a shivering wreck.

“Do you have, like, a blanket back there?” I asked, peering over his shoulder. “We gotta get you warm. Or a— Oh, wow.”

He had more than a blanket. There appeared to be a whole bedspread stretched across the back seat, and that wasn’t all: Toothpaste. Wrinkled shirts. Multiple generations of HIVE headsets. And a bottle of dry shampoo, with the plastic seal still across the top.

“Jason …” Even after all the crazy things that had happened today, this sight robbed me of words. “Have you been …”

“I d-don’t need you j-judging me,” Jason shiver-snapped. I recoiled instinctively, like he was a dog who’d tried to bite me, but when I saw the look on his face, watching me, I felt instant guilt. Probably no one wants to be thought of like a rabid dog.

“Oh my God. I’m not judging you,” I said truthfully. “I mean, my own car is a total— Well, that’s not the point. The point is I’m trying to help you. Again.” Before Jason could protest further, I reached past him and pulled a rumpled cotton blanket from the back seat, wiping at his hair a bit and then draping the rest around his shivering torso. He didn’t say thank you or anything, but he didn’t try to stop me, either, so I counted this as progress. Shutting the passenger door, I circled the car and got into the driver’s seat.

“First things first,” I said, turning the keys he had left in the ignition. “We’re taking you to the hospital.”

“Wrong,” Jason said. Well, progress was fun while it lasted.

“Oh, pardon me,” I said as the engine kicked and whined and eventually groaned to life. “I didn’t realize there was already a game plan. Any chance you can show me a copy, or is Step One: Dying of Hypothermia secret advanced-level knowledge?”

“That’s n-not the game plan.” Jason looked pointedly out the window, away from me. “But the hospital is the wrong move. They can’t help us anymore. Plus, I’m not dying, just buzzed. Plus, I can’t afford it.”

He spat this last part, like he was daring me to laugh about it. But it was his first point—they can’t help us anymore—that really jumped out at me. Again I thought of the phones ringing endlessly at the call center, and again I shuddered.

“Okay,” I said, pulling onto the road carefully; Jason’s left-side mirror had been snapped clean off during his dramatic entrance. “Fair. But where are we going? And, Jason, what’s happening right now?”

Finally, Jason turned to look at me again, and even with my eyes on the road I could feel him scanning me up and down, like he was sizing me up, deciding which difficulty level he thought I could play at.

“The Apiary,” he said finally. “There’s nowhere else to go.”

I nodded. My knuckles whitened on the wheel as I realized: Before he’d even mentioned the Apiary, I’d already decided we were going there, too.

For a moment, there was just the ticking of the turn signal. Then, as if his personal server was processing at a delay, Jason finally seemed to hear my second question.

“Okay,” he said. “You know I spend a lot of time in HIVE, right?”

“Duh,” I said. “That’s like your whole thing. Apparently. Though why I had to find that out from Markus Fawkes, when you and I used to—”

“Focus,” Jason said. “So I’m in there today. I mean, I’m in there every day, but today I have an extra reason to be there, and so does everyone else. The Honeycomb is packed—you know, the main loading area with all the platforms?”

“I know what the Honeycomb is,” I said, bristling. My mom helped code it, I almost added, but Jason definitely hadn’t unlocked that secret advanced-level knowledge.

“All right, whatever, I don’t know what terms Normals do and don’t know,” Jason said, and for the second day in a row he made the word sound like a slur. “Anyway, everyone’s there. The Normals, the Casuals, the Moddies, the Trolls—I’ve never seen it this crowded. Everyone wanted to be there when the big Update dropped.”

That was another thing Jason said differently—to him, the word Update had a pop to it, the way Digicast preachers said the word Rapture in their iSermons.

“Okay,” I said. “So then what happened— Augh!”

I swerved suddenly to avoid a man’s body. He was just lying in the road, staring into nothingness, much the same way Sheila had. And he wasn’t alone; the farther we got into town, the more the creep vibe rose from abandoned ghost town to apocalyptic wreck. People were strewn across the sidewalks; we passed a car parked on the side of the road with two children in the back seat, each strapped into their headsets, neither moving.

“That happened. That was the Update,” Jason said. He said it with astounding calm, and I realized then that he’d been driving from this direction, meaning he’d witnessed this entire spook show already.

“At first I noticed a few people in the Honeycomb getting kind of weird. I thought they were just annoyed because it was so crowded, but when I came down into the crowd, I realized it was different. Worse.”

I frowned. “Came down from where?” I asked. The higher you went in the Honeycomb, the harder the games got—and frankly, weirder, littered with the cultish, intense games that appealed mostly to the true HIVE diehards. “What do you do in HIVE, anyway?”

Jason ignored me and pressed on. “There was this woman who was yelling, saying she’d tried to log off just for a second to let out her dog or something—but she couldn’t. Log off. Like, at all. And other people were saying the same thing. Which was a little weird, but, y’know, whatever, I figured it just meant the Update was about to drop and things were buffering. I thought people were being totally Normal for freaking out, and I tried telling them to calm down, but there were too many of them, and a lot of them didn’t speak English.

“So then this guy appears on a loading platform next to me looking totally stunned. He says he was just standing in his kitchen, trying to boot up to message his wife, because she wasn’t responding—and now he’s logged all the way in and can’t log back out. That’s when the numbers really start climbing—dozens, hundreds, thousands of new people, all doing the same thing, all having the same problem. They were all getting stuck in HIVE while trying to see why their friends were stuck in HIVE. That’s when people really started to panic.”

A memory came unbidden to me: how fast and hard Sheila’s heart had been beating, even though she had seemed to be unconscious. No wonder; HIVE must have been an absolute madhouse right now. I thought of everyone who might have been in there this morning, just waiting for the Update: My brother. Sammi and Aaron. Gus, who— Oh no, Gus, whose last conversation with me had been a dumb fight about HIVE.

And Dad, who was working today.

And what had Jason just said? Not all of them spoke English? This wasn’t just happening in Bullworth. This was the whole world.

I swallowed back the bile of fear. Worrying wouldn’t help anyone.

“So the Update is glitching,” I deduced. “Or it needs a repatch. That happens sometimes, right? For a few minutes?” I remembered Gus telling me once about a buggy Update that had, for a memorable moment, turned everyone bright blue until some genius coder had whipped up a quick fix.

I also remembered wondering if that genius had been Mom.

“It does happen,” Jason admitted. “But like you said—for minutes at the most. If I’m estimating right, the Update dropped around nine fifteen Eastern Virtual Time this morning. It’s been hours since then—and when I left, there hadn’t been any announcement from the staff. No ‘We apologize for the inconvenience’ from Eric Alanick. Nothing. That’s how I knew—”

“Wait a second.” Finally, I realized the million-dollar question, and wondered how I hadn’t gotten there earlier. “When you left? If everyone’s stuck in HIVE, how did you get out?”

Jason looked away again, out the windshield.

“I spend a lot of time in HIVE. There’s things I know about that not everyone knows.” He darted his eyes sideways toward me. “Like a back door.”

He fell silent after this. He seemed to think that he had given me a satisfying answer, and now that I had learned this deep and meaningful secret, I would have no further questions.

He also seemed to be insane.

“What back door?!” I asked. “Like a cheat code? Didn’t you say there were no cheat codes in HIVE? Could other people use the door? Can we help them? Are you just screwing with me? Where the heck were you going when you were driving like a maniac? Where were you coming from? Where have you been lately? How—”

“We’re here.”

We were there. I’d gotten so caught up in Jason’s story that I’d hardly noticed as I drove us into the Apiary parking lot.

It was, predictably, crowded. The Apiary was always the most popular spot in its little strip mall, but today cars stretched from one side of the lot all the way to the other, and somehow, I didn’t think they were here for the deals at Ramy’s Mediterranean Grill.

“People were really pumped for this Update, huh?” My gaze swiveled back and forth as we looped through the aisles. Was Gus’s car here? Was my brother’s? “I don’t know how we’re going to find a spot.”

“I really, really don’t think it matters,” Jason said.

“Oh. Right.” I gave up and double-parked in front of someone’s truck. “I guess the apocalypse has perks. Now, about this back door— Hey!”

Jason’s seat belt was unbuckled before the car had even come to a full stop, and as I scrambled to turn off the engine, he was already forcing his way out the door. I hopped out to chase after him, but he was clearly still a little buzzed because he was more or less limping his way toward the Apiary. This put me in the novel position of chasing someone by wrapping an arm around their shoulders and helping them hobble across the sidewalk.

“You still haven’t answered any of my questions,” I said. “So people are stuck in HIVE, but you know a way out? If that’s true, shouldn’t we tell someone? That could help a lot, right? Should we tell, like, the government?”

“No!” Jason gasped the word, and I didn’t think it was just because he was winded. This line of questioning seemed to bring out a feral quality in him, something breathless and twitchy.

“No, it wouldn’t help?” I asked. “Or no, we shouldn’t tell the government?”

“Both,” he said, turning to face me. “The back door is … compromised. I went through it, yes, but it wasn’t like when I’ve used it before. It was like something popped. And now I can’t get back in.”

“You tried to go back in?” I couldn’t believe it.

“I need to go back in.” And with the way Jason looked at me as he said it, I found that this, I could believe.

“And as for the government,” he continued, “half of them are in HIVE at any given time. More, if you count the ones who … actually matter.”

“I wasn’t about to speed-dial the CIA,” I said, trying not to visibly roll my eyes, which was difficult, as Jason’s face was very close to mine. This was a crackpot conspiracy that just wouldn’t die—the idea of HIVE as a shadowy spy’s paradise, where you could conduct top-secret international meetings instantaneously, with no risk of getting poisoned or bugged, and no need to look like your real self.

Jason, for the record, had no qualms about rolling his eyes right in front of me.

“Those aren’t the people I was talking about,” he said. “But they wouldn’t help, either.”

But before I could ask who in the world he could be talking about, he turned forward again and said, “Help me push.”

Together, we opened the heavy double doors and stepped into the Bullworth Apiary.

Well, into the lobby, anyway. I’d been here just last night to pick up Gus and Co., and as far as I could tell, nothing was different; it was still a cross between a dentist’s waiting room and a laser tag holding pen (back from before HIVE had come along and made laser tag redundant). Leather banquette couches stretched around a small semicircular den, where patient parents or very cool, understanding significant others (like yours truly) could wait to pick up their beloved gamers. The lighting was dim, swathing us in darkness with flashes of yellow and black-cherry red. It was all meant to inspire a sense of excitement and anticipation, aided by screens that flashed little slogans like EVERYONE BELONGS IN HIVE or GAME ON, AND ON, AND ON, which someone who had a problem with HIVE (like not yours truly) might have found slightly creepy.

What was undeniably creepy, though, was that the screens were currently still flashing those slogans—as opposed to, for instance, something like SORRY FOR ACCIDENTALLY ABDUCTING EVERYONE YOU KNOW; WE’LL FIX THAT ASAP. On top of that, despite all the cars and bodies we had seen outside, these screens were flashing for a totally empty waiting room. I’d expected to see kids splayed over the couches, or even an employee slumped across the counter, like Hiro at the sushi place, but it seemed like absolutely everyone had been in the actual gaming chambers when the Update went down.

Well, no matter. We’d get them out soon, and then we’d—well, I wasn’t sure what we’d do next, but we’d do something. The only thing keeping me from going nuts right now was my determination to help.

“They must have them packed two to a chamber in there,” Jason mused, limping away from me toward the left side of the lobby. “There’s no way this place could normally fit everyone parked out there, even with all those extra units we shipped in.”

“Hey, the chambers are through this door over here,” I said. “You’re going the wrong— Wait, we?”

Jason fixed me with that same look from yesterday in Mr. Teigen’s classroom—that you poor fool, you are so far from understanding look—and then pushed his way through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

As I hurried after Jason, following him into a disheveled break room, everything finally began to fall into place. No wonder Jason knew so much about HIVE: He worked here.

“Jason, this is great!” I said. “I didn’t realize this was your job! Have you gotten in touch with anyone else in the company? Maybe they can tell us what’s going on, and we can—”

“They can’t help us.”

He said it offhandedly, not even looking at me as he made his way through the clutter of the break room toward some filing cabinets. But despite that—or maybe precisely because of that—I finally ran out of patience. I couldn’t just keep following Jason like some confused puppy; I planted my feet in the middle of the room and crossed my arms.

“Okay, Jason,” I said. “So according to you, the hospital can’t help us. The government can’t help us. And the people behind HIVE can’t help us fix—let me remind you—the thing that is wrong with HIVE. Why did we even come back here, then? Why don’t I just go home?”

This got Jason to turn around just long enough to look at me.

“I thought you wanted to help,” he said.

“Of course I do!” I threw my hands in the air. “But according to you, that’s not going to be possible!”

“Oh, it’s possible.” Jason turned back around and started fiddling with something between the filing cabinets. “It’s just that I’m the only person who can tell you how to do it.”

“And why should I believe you, Jason? I’ve saved your butt twice now. In two days! So you work at HIVE—big whoop. I know a lot more about HIVE than you think I do, not that you ever bothered to ask. What makes you think you’re so special? What plan could you possibly have that no other HIVE employee could come up with already themselves? And what … is that?”

I’d wound up following him after all—albeit only so I could harangue him from up close—and as I approached, I’d seen what was sandwiched between the two filing cabinets: another door, smaller and unmarked, which Jason had just now unlocked.

He swung it open and flipped a light switch on the other side of the door.

“Now do you believe me?” he asked. “That I’m your best shot?”

And in that moment, I couldn’t help it—my jaw dropped.

And I believed.