If the break room had been disheveled, this room looked like it had never even been heveled to begin with. Comic books and old HIVE instruction manuals were strewn across the floor in equal measure. Someone had pushed a cracked mirror up against the far corner of the room, which wasn’t actually that far—the walls were close and the ceiling was low, and from the middle of the ceiling dangled a single unguarded light bulb, which flickered on and off like a firefly having a fit. As I took a step into the room, I accidentally kicked an empty Big Slurp cup. It was like someone had taken the back of Jason’s car and turned it into an entire room.

When I saw the mattress on the floor, rising up out of lone socks and cheeseburger wrappers, the truth finally hit me. This room wasn’t a bigger version of Jason’s car; Jason’s car was a smaller version of this room. It was a satellite, something sent out to orbit the mother ship when Jason couldn’t be near his home.

Because this was his home.

“You don’t just work for HIVE,” I said slowly. “You live here. In the Apiary. How did I not know about this?”

Jason had been watching me carefully, and even in the flickering light I could see the mix of emotions in his eyes: the vulnerability; the fear of showing someone something he’d never showed before; and at the same time, the fierce, defensive pride.

“Mr. Wamengatch isn’t so hot on people knowing about the arrangement,” he said, bending down to pick up what looked to be a state-of-the-art headset. “He runs this franchise. Well, he owns this franchise—I run it, really.” And there was the pride, the swell of the painfully skinny chest. “I stay here overnight. I make sure the cooling vents are always running. And I know all the little tricks for each chamber that the seasonal employees never remember, and the secrets inside HIVE that they never even find out. And in return Mr. Wamengatch lets me live here, rent free, and I get to spend as much time in HIVE as I want.”

He paused, and one of his hands brushed, almost unconsciously, against the back of his neck—the spot where everyone’s BrainSTIM Card was buried.

“Until now,” he said.

He fell quiet. The only sound was the buzz of the light bulb. I realized he was waiting for me to say something. And not just something—the right thing. This was a very important moment. Once again, Jason was looking at me like a jittery animal, but now, seeing the depth of his relationship with HIVE, I finally believed he was the only person who might have some idea what to do in this situation. I couldn’t afford to scare him away.

“It’s a pretty good setup,” I said, looking around the room. “But, I mean … not perfect.”

Jason cocked his head at me. His grip on the headset tightened just a little.

“It needs one of those beanbag chairs,” I continued. “You know, from the library reading room? That would pull this place together.”

Success. Jason’s grip relaxed. He didn’t smile, but he didn’t do that condescending scowl thing, either.

“Well, thanks for not being totally Normal about it,” he said. “Now come on—let’s get started.”

“Right, okay, so about that,” I said, looking around the chaos of Jason’s room. “Get started doing what, exactly? How are we going to help get people out of HIVE?”

I turned back just in time to see Jason’s skinny arms jerk, and before I knew what was happening, I’d caught the headset he’d just thrown at me.

“By going into HIVE.” In an unexpected flurry of motion, he plucked certain items up from the piles of mess as easily as if they’d been waiting for him on a well-labeled bookshelf—some charging cords, a six-pack of energy drinks, a laptop of the kind I hadn’t seen used in half a decade—and then hurried past me back out into the break room.

So much for not following him like a puppy.

“We’re going into HIVE?” I asked, following Jason like a puppy (who could talk). “The place where no one can get out and everyone’s panicking?”

“You’re going in,” Jason corrected me, using a bony hip to open the door into the lobby. “But I’m going to help you. I still have messaging capabilities within the game. Whatever made it so I can’t go back in, it made it so I’m also the only person who can talk to players without getting sucked in myself.”

“Then why do you need me?” I asked. “Why not just talk to your friends in the game?”

For just a moment, Jason stopped. I could only see a sliver of his face, and the lighting in the lobby was as dim as ever, but somehow, I knew what he was going to say right before he said it:

“I don’t really … have any friends.”

We stood there. A cable slowly unwound from around Jason’s fingers until it was dragging on the carpet, as cables do.

“Jason, I—”

And then he started up again, as if he’d never stopped moving, continuing to talk to me even as he led us out of the lobby and into the gaming chambers … chamber.

“But you do,” he said. “Have friends. I’ve seen you with them. And you said your boyfriend played. Is he in there now? Are they all in there?”

I nodded, and then remembered that he was walking in front of me, and said, “Yes.”

“So I bet you want to see them again, right?” Jason was briefly scanning each chamber as we passed them by—big curved pods, packed together tighter than I’d ever seen them before, like an overabundant crop of some bizarre harvest stretching from floor to ceiling, each with a little red indicator on the side: IN SERVICE. IN SERVICE. IN SERVICE. We kept moving.

“Here’s my deal,” Jason continued as I tried not to trip over his dragging cable. “You go back into HIVE. You find whoever it is you care about. I’ll guide you all where I need you to go, and then I’ll get you where you need to go.”

“You mean the back door?” I watched Jason’s shoulder blades shrug begrudgingly through the back of his T-shirt. “You do. So you think you can help me fix this?”

Jason stopped abruptly, and at first I thought I’d struck a nerve again, but then I realized he’d found what he was looking for. Here, amid a sea of occupied chambers, he’d found a single pod with a little green legend: AVAILABLE FOR USE.

Suddenly, the reality of what I was about to do hit me—the image, the locked-up-tight feeling of me crawling into that chamber and sealing myself off from the outside world—and I staggered under a wave of second thoughts. Which, since the plan had seemed crazy from the moment I’d heard it, were really more like first thoughts, back with a vengeance. Jason, to his credit, seemed to sense this and turned to face me for the first time in several minutes.

“I think we have a darn sight better chance of making something happen in there”—Jason gestured with his neck at the chamber—“than we do out here. What are we going to do, fix it in the real world? Everyone and their mother was in HIVE when it went down, Kara. That includes the HIVE programmers themselves.”

I couldn’t help but stiffen at those words, thinking of my own mother, but Jason either didn’t notice or—possibly, since this was Jason—didn’t care.

“Everyone in the world who I trust to fix things is standing in this room,” he went on. “For example, I’m the only person in the world who knows HIVE inside and out who isn’t missing, or hiding, or trapped in HIVE.”

“And me?”

For the first time all day, Jason smiled.

“You’re the only person in the world who has the good fortune of being in the same room as me.”

I scoffed and began to turn around, but Jason quickly backtracked or, at the very least, zigzagged.

“And I know you’ve got a reason to care about what’s going on,” he added. “And I know you, and how you act when you see a problem you care about. And I … I trust you.”

He paused.

“More than I trust most Normals.”

Seemingly out of words, he turned his face from mine, pretending to inspect the conditions of the gaming chamber. Or maybe he actually was inspecting them, who knew. Certainly not me.

I only knew one thing.

“Beats any plan I’ve got,” I said, sighing and beginning to unwind the straps of the headset. “And I never really trust anyone but myself to solve a problem anyway, so, like, I get it.”

As I snugged the headset around my forehead and stepped toward the chamber, Jason smiled again—but it was a different smile this time, broader, the kind that came from letting your guard down rather than from having it up. Maybe having him guide you through HIVE isn’t the craziest idea in the world, I thought as he pushed a button and the chamber door slowly hissed open.

Obviously, this thought should have set off major alarm bells, but for the past few hours absolutely everything had been setting off major alarm bells, so in my defense, all the bells were sort of starting to sound the same.

The chamber door slid open like a slab being pulled from a tomb (again: bells), gradually revealing a plush, Kara-sized seat and an array of tubes. Meanwhile, Jason had plopped down onto the floor, where he’d opened up his old-fashioned laptop—and the first of his energy drinks—and was hooking the laptop up to the chamber, plugging a cable into a port that I would never even have known was there.

“What’s that for?” I asked, trying to distract myself as I clambered into the chamber.

“Little bug in this specific generation of headset I found.” Jason took a swig of something bright blue in between furious bouts of typing. “Gives me videofeed on my—our—your headset. I’ll be able to see what you’re seeing and guide you where I need you to go.”

“Right, speaking of, where do you need me to go?” I turned and twisted, trying to find a comfortable sitting position. Nothing was worse than emerging from a multi-hour HIVE session where you’d been sitting funny. Well, I mean, clearly several things were worse than that, but at least this was a problem I could be proactive about.

“Obviously, you’ll be dropped into the Honeycomb,” Jason said while I began hooking myself into the chamber. “The first thing I’ll want you to do is to go up.”

“The first thing I’ll be doing is finding my people,” I reminded him.

“Oh. Right. Yeah. Suit yourself. But once you’ve done that, or while you’re doing that, or whatever, I’m gonna need you to go all the way up to—could you hook that cord into the left side of your headset, I need to load into your neural grid—all the way up to the top of the Honeycomb. There’s some stuff up there I think might solve my problem—and yours. Then you’ll have the people you care about back in your world again, and I’ll—your other left—be back on my way to the real world.”

“Great,” I said, finally hooking the cord into my headset. “Perfect. Wait. What?”

“Okay!” Jason clapped his hands and leaned back from the laptop. “I’m loading into your neural grid! No going back now—now, we just wait.”

“No. Jason. Hold on.” I leaned as far forward out of the chamber as I could without snapping any cords or tubes. “What do you mean, the real world?”

“Oh. Huh. Did I say that?” Jason gave me that sizing-up look again, and then sighed and threw his hands up. “I suppose if you’re going to really be helpful to me, you were going to have to find out at some time.”

He gestured around at … the air? The Apiary? All of it, as it turned out.

“None of this is real,” he said matter-of-factly. “This building, Bullworth, our Earth—I mean, it is, but only in the sense that it’s as real as any other game in HIVE. It’s real code, but it’s virtual reality. What’s really real is the Honeycomb, and the people who made it, and wherever they’re from.”

I stared at him, looking for the slightest hint he was joking. Terrifyingly, I found none.

“Okay, that’s enough,” I said, reaching up to yank the cord out of my headset. In a second, Jason was on his feet, hands shooting out in panic.

“No!” he yelled. “If you stop the upload now, you’ll fry your neural grid!”

“What?!” I froze.

Even in his panic, Jason found time to roll his eyes. “Look, can you pick one thing to be incredulous about and stick with it? We’ll be here all day.”

“No. Wait. Hold on.” My hands danced around my head, not daring to pull the cord, but suddenly unable to move forward with this boy as my guide. “So you think the real world is—is in HIVE? You think it’s … dragons, and race cars, and talking birds, and … and games?”

“Of course not.” Jason scoffed, like I was being impossibly thick. “Those are all simulations. Everything behind one of those HIVE hexagons is a simulation.”

“Yes,” I said, grateful for this shred of shared reality.

“Including us.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

I shouldn’t have had to struggle to answer, but I did. Where did you even start?

“This world is so … so …”

I looked around at the strip mall walls, the low-level fluorescent lighting, the carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in who knew how long.

“Boring,” I said. “Who would want to play this game?”

“Don’t you play The Skims?” Jason pointed out. “That’s just a reality simulator. You make fake people do real-people things.”

I saw his point and searched for a different counterattack.

“Okay, so we’re a really dull reality simulator,” I said. “But we can … go into the other games? How would that be possible? None of the other NPCs can do that.”

I realized as soon as I said it that it wasn’t true, and Jason dug in before I could backtrack. “Yeah, except for Sidekicks,” he said as I silently cursed myself. “They follow you everywhere if you want. And that’s why we’re different. That’s what makes our game unique from The Skims. What if there were a world full of NPCs who thought they could play with you? Wouldn’t that be adorable? We’re like Sidekicks you can kiss.”

This was the problem with people who lived in fantasy worlds: There was so much wrong with what he was saying, I couldn’t figure out the first thing to set right.

“So we’re the NPCs.” I tried, anyway. “Who are the PCs? Who’s coming to our world from HIVE?”

“Oh, there’s plenty of players from the real world, if you know how to spot them,” Jason said, and his voice shifted in a way I couldn’t nail down. “People you see sometimes who go away. Kids from elementary school you remember that no one else does. People who are here one day and gone the next.”

He looked into my eyes with no emotion.

“People like my parents.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

Ding!

“Oh, phew.” Jason returned to the laptop on the floor. “The upload’s done. Okay, time to really get this LAN party started.”

My thoughts were racing around in circles. I thought of Jason’s messy room in the back of the Apiary, of the way he’d practically vanished from school and the library, and of the way parents could be here one day and gone the next. Several things became clear all at once: Jason had been through more than I’d ever imagined. Jason was possibly just a little bit insane.

And Jason was the only person who had any idea how to get me and the people I loved out of this terrible day.

“You think you’re real,” I said carefully, trying to keep my voice neutral. “That you were born to real parents. And you think if you get back into HIVE, you can find your way to—to the ‘real world.’ And you think you’re helping me to …”

“To find the other NPCs you’ve been programmed to care about and return them to your game, yes,” Jason said. “I can’t promise you’ll make it through the back door okay, or that you’ll ever be able to reenter the rest of HIVE, but I promise I’ll bring you all back to your world.”

I noticed that it didn’t even occur to him to say our world.

“Why?” I asked.

Jason shrugged. “I’ve always been a sentimentalist.”

Before I could bark out a bitter laugh, he added quietly: “And you’ve always been nice to me.”

There was silence. My mind was still racing, but no longer in circles. I could feel, with a rising sense of dismay, that all my thoughts were headed in one direction.

Toward what I had to do.

“Kara?” Jason asked. “Did you short-circuit? Ha ha. I’m joking. But did you?”

I shook my head wearily and sighed, pulling the headset down over my eyes and shrouding my world in darkness.

“Seal the chamber,” I said. “Let’s play some HIVE.”

Jason didn’t say anything, but he must have pressed the button because there was a pneumatic hiss as the door slid closed. I hooked up my last tubes and felt a shadow slide over me, somehow turning my dark world even darker. The familiar buzzing feeling stole over my body, but ten times more intense than before because of the immersive tech of the chamber.

This was insane. I was trusting a boy I categorically could not trust to guide me through a world that had stopped working to find people whose whereabouts I did not know and return them to a world that was …

Real. Of course it was. My world was not a game.

But if it wasn’t a game, then why did I just think of it as my world, instead of the world?

And if it was a game … what would happen if I lost?

With that thought, the world flashed white, and the game began.