“Don’t move,” someone hissed in my ear, and upon hearing his voice—and the whispering of air that accompanied his every syllable—I realized it was Gills. I guess we hadn’t been as convincing as I’d thought.

“None of you move!” he spat, driving the muzzle of his pistol farther into the small of my back. Markus, who had just started to inch away, froze once more. Dad was barely breathing.

“Are you crazy?” yelled Jumpsuit from somewhere above me. “Don’t you know what’s going on?”

“Oh, I know exactly what’s going on,” Gills said, with relish. “These two are trying to use their family connections to escape to safety and leave the rest of us in the lurch. You big-tech types are all the same.”

“What is he talking about?” Jason said as my heart plunged through my boots. Dad didn’t say anything, his hands up and behind his head, staring hollowly at the middle of my stomach like he hoped he could remove Gills’s hand from behind it through sheer force of will.

“You know I’m on the hiring board, right, Tilden?” Gills continued. “I’ve kept quiet about this for years, but not anymore. I know you’re married to Kimi Swift. That puts you in the innermost circles of HIVE—and instead of using that power to help, you’re sneaking away. This is just like you elites—only looking out for yourselves, even while you make life so much harder for everyone else. Well, not anymore. You’re going to tell me what you know.”

There was a horrible silence, punctuated only by a low whistle from Jumpsuit above us.

I felt awful. Gills was wrong about where our intel was coming from, but not how I’d chosen to use it. By trying to keep the back door a secret, I’d been acting like this whole nightmare was some game only a select few could win—and in doing so, I’d made it an even more dangerous game than before.

But look how people respond the moment they find out, said an aggrieved voice in my head. That’s not your fault—you have to be playing this game to win.

Speaking of voices in my head:

“Your dad is married to who?!”

Obviously, I couldn’t respond, but I had to admit: Under different circumstances, it would have been gratifying beyond belief to hear Jason Alcorn so totally stunned. For several reasons, I hoped I’d get a chance to circle back to that later.

Meanwhile, outside my head:

“It’s not like that, Bret,” Dad was saying slowly, through clenched teeth, as if even one overly twitched jaw muscle might make the pistol go off. “If you’d let my daughter go, she can explain—”

“Oh, no,” said Gills (Bret? Nope, sorry, he was Gills to me forever). “I don’t need a Swift to defend a Swift. The power’s not in the hands of the few now. Now it’s in the hands of me.”

I wanted to tell him that I was more of a Tilden than a Swift. And that we had been just as hurt by the “few” he was talking about as everyone else—more, arguably. And that, mathematically speaking, one “him” was an even smaller population than one “few,” and so this was not, morally speaking, much of an improvement in power distribution. But, you know, laser pistol, back, et cetera.

And even as I was thinking all that, I was quickly becoming fixated on a new thought entirely: I had no idea what happened when you got wounded in the Honeycomb. If you died in a game, obviously, you popped out here, fine as could be. But that was only in the games, and only when HIVE was working normally. Now we were out in the open, and nothing in HIVE was working normally.

Well, almost nothing.

“Harassment is a violation of HIVE policies.”

“Oh, crud, here we go,” said Jumpsuit as a Drone hovered down from above us.

Based on Jumpsuit’s whole vibe, that wasn’t such a weird reaction. What was weird was the way Markus’s eyes had just gone wide with fear behind my dad.

“Please drop your weapon,” the Drone said, stopping above our heads.

“Yeah, yeah, what are you going to do to me?” Gills sneered at the Drone. “You can’t kick me out of the game—you can’t kick anyone out. That’s another thing about you startup goons: You always want to disrupt things, but if you keep disrupting yourself, sooner or later it’s just chaos. And—”

“Look away before the flash!” yelled Jumpsuit, interrupting wherever that monologue was going. “Close your eyes and look away!”

Again, I might not have put much stock in what Jumpsuit was saying, except Markus was doing exactly that, moving for the first time since the laser pistol had entered the scene to shield his eyes from whatever was coming. If he was doing it …

I made eye contact with Dad. He nodded. We each scrunched up our faces, closing our eyes as tight as we could, and I buried my face into my shoulder for good measure. Startled at this unexpected movement, Gills raised the laser pistol up from the small of my back, and even through my shut eyes and the sleeve of my shirt, I felt the flash.

There was the clattering of pistol against metal as the laser dropped from Gills’s hand and, luckily, did not accidentally shoot hot plasma through my ankles.

And then there was another sound, one that shot chills up my spine, not least of all because it was coming from two inches behind me.

Gills was screaming.

I knew I should have been moving, getting out of there, but I couldn’t help myself—I had to turn and look. And when I did, I understood the scream and bit down one of my own. Even Jason said “Whoa” in my ear, though this time, it was much less fun to hear him caught off guard.

Because Gills was transforming.

It started with his skin, and at first I just assumed the flash must have whammied my vision more than I thought, but no: Gills was turning—had already turned—a silvery gray. Gray like dull spray paint. Gray like a crawling mold. His arms were lifting up with no apparent input from his brain, and then—oh, please, no—shortening, and thickening, until they were more like fins than arms, smooth curves pushing out from his sides. His legs did something similar, sealing to each other and pulling up into his torso—which somehow stayed at the same elevation even as his feet disappeared.

Which meant Gills was now hovering.

This was when I realized what was happening, and I think it’s when he realized it, too, because his scream became something too hoarse to hear.

Somehow, Gills was becoming a Drone.

His neck swiveled as he tried to take in what was happening to him, but the swiveling slowed as his spine appeared to freeze up, until he could only look dead ahead—directly at me. There had been rage in his eyes when this started. Now there was just confusion and fear.

And then the color of his skin leached into his eyes, and there was just gray.

The second-to-last thing to vanish were his gills, smoothed over into stainless steel.

The last thing to vanish was his mouth.

And then there was a new Drone. With a dreadful, quiet calm, it floated up to join the Drone that had transformed it, and together they drifted off back into the void. As I backed up toward Dad, I looked around that void with a dawning horror.

This was why there were so many Drones all around us. This was where all those rioters from just half an hour ago had gone. This was the latest, most horrifying result of the Update, the glitch you got when you were programmed to remove players from a world they could no longer be removed from.

Or worse still: Maybe this wasn’t a glitch. Maybe Jason had been right, and HIVE had been hacked, and all this was happening on purpose.

“Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you guys,” Jumpsuit said in the jaded tone of someone who had already seen this happen dozens of times. “Now you know. Don’t do anything stupid. And don’t go into the games—that’ll just be worse.”

I wanted to ask her how that was possible, but she was already wheeling away, and I couldn’t blame her. She’d never wanted to stop in the first place, and now I understood why.

She wasn’t the only one who’d made a hasty exit. Markus had gone to ground again, vanishing while we were distracted. I doubted he’d gone far, though. I’d seen the look in his eyes when the Drone had first arrived. Markus had known what was about to happen, had seen it already, and somehow escaped having it happen to himself. That was why he’d been lying in wait for me just outside Dad’s office—he’d been planning to push me back through that door, banking on being able to take his revenge where the Drones couldn’t get him. Could they not get him in there? I wasn’t sure. I was willing to bet he wasn’t certain, either, but that he’d sure be prepared to try. Markus was only crafty up to a certain point; after that it was just instinct and want. Which was why …

“Dad,” I said, looking around. “We have to split up.”

“What? No.”

“There’s no time to argue. That boy who was coming for me? He’s not going to stop coming for me. But not for you. You don’t have that problem. Get on a platform.” I snapped my fingers to summon one and it appeared, pulling up to our feet. While looking down I noticed the laser pistol, still on the catwalk, and I bent to pick it up. The safety had been on the whole time, so that was nice, I guess.

“Go up,” I said, shoving the weapon into Dad’s hands. “Go to—”

“Terms and Conditions,” Jason leaped in helpfully.

“Terms and Conditions,” I repeated, and then, “Wait, what? What game is that?”

“Just go there! Go to the back!”

“Just go there!” I relayed, throwing my hands up. “Go to the back! And find Jason when you’re out.”

“No. I’m going to find your brother,” Dad said. “We’re going to—”

“Hey, nerd!” And there he was. Striding from behind a support beam, not running so as to avoid Drone concern, but bearing down on us purposefully nevertheless. Markus had decided to target me the exact way he had never targeted, say, graduating from high school.

I pushed Dad forward onto the platform. “I’ll find you at Terms and Conditions!” I hissed, so that no one could hear. And then I kicked the platform off the catwalk with my foot, and before he could protest, Dad was going up, up, and away, ascending heavenward and out of the reach of danger.

Well, this particular danger, anyway.

“Should have gotten a platform for yourself.” Markus grinned as I turned back to him. He was almost upon me now.

“You’re right,” I said. “I probably should have.” And as I said it, I realized I was no longer faking that devil-may-care tone in my voice. Markus was still bad news, sure, but after everything I’d been through this morning, he was more like a page-six paragraph than a front-page headline.

When I looked him in the eye, I was no longer just playing at the game of being brave.

But I was still winning.

“Guess I’ll have to improvise,” I said.

And then, just as Markus reached out to grab me yet again, I repeated a move of my own: I threw myself backward off the catwalk, plunging into the Honeycomb.

The dumbfounded look on Markus’s face as I fell away was almost worth it. It was an expression that stated very clearly he would not be following me into the abyss. But it didn’t stay in my vision very long.

Because, you know. Abyss.

This time around, there wasn’t an endless sea of platforms to catch my fall. There was just empty space, and a body dropping through it, and row after row of those chillingly still Drones, lining the walls of the Honeycomb, watching me fall. For a millisecond, a panicked thought blew through my head, rushing up with the wind in my ears, asking what I’d do if one of those Drones decided this was a violation of HIVE policies and came to me now, prepared to make me one of their own. But I guess a girl hurtling unimpeded toward terminal velocity wasn’t technically harassing anyone because nothing stopped me as I fell ever farther and ever faster. The only thing that was going to break my fall was a very, very hard landing—or falling right into a game.

Guess it was time to play a game.

My eyes watered as I accelerated downward, but even through my tears I could see the blue of the business district give way back into gold and yellow, narrowing in around me as the sphere of the Honeycomb bottomed out below. Was it a sphere? An egg? I was always better at language arts than geometry, and now I was about to become an object lesson in physics.

But then I saw what lined the bottom of the Honeycomb. Not yellow hexagons or hard steel, but a sea of warm, welcoming pink. Of course—the kids’ games, the ones that took up the lowest level of the HIVE world. Well, that didn’t sound so bad, no matter what Jumpsuit had said. And it certainly beat going splat against a catwalk.

Time to aim. I straightened my neck. I clasped my hands together over my head. I tilted my toes upward. I’d tried one terrible season of diving freshman year, and now I found myself thinking that if it had been anything like this, I might have been much better at it. For one thing, you had a lot more time to get the technique right.

“Kara!” Jason cried as I plummeted. “Kara, what are you doing?”

I tried to answer, but the wind just flapped at my gums.

“And why didn’t you tell me your mom is Kimi Swift?!”

And I couldn’t help it—whether out of the absurdity, or the exhilaration, or just out of sheer adrenaline-laced panic, I laughed.

And then, with a golden-pink sigh, I fell smack-dab through a hexagon and into the game.