Okay, I won’t leave you hanging. The answers were, respectively: We had; it was; who knew; and, blessedly, no.

Where there should have been a bone-shattering impact, there was just the world freezing, and that same booming voice from earlier proclaiming: “Congratulations! You’ve won the Victory Bell Royale! Come back soon!”

And then me, Sammi, Laddu, and a bewildered man with (not to harp on this, but) some seriously greasy hair were all staring at one another, stunned, sitting on our butts on a trio of platforms floating just above the very bottom of the entire Honeycomb. It was as quiet in the massive chamber as it had been when I’d left it, and it was hard to know who would break the silence first.

Just kidding. Obviously, it was Sammi.

“I can’t believe that worked,” she said.

“I can’t believe you helped me,” said Ender_Of_Games. “You totally had the drop on me. You could have just taken me out. Why didn’t you?”

“That was sort of the whole point,” I said. “We didn’t want to do that.”

“I mean, we might have—”

“We wouldn’t,” I said over Sammi. “Keep that in mind if you have to go into another game, okay? Not everything is win-lose. There may be a way out you haven’t thought of yet.”

“Wow.” As Ender stood up, he unconsciously scratched at the spot on his chest where the pie bandolier had vanished. “I don’t know about all that, but thanks. And they say there are no cheat codes in HIVE—maybe there are. I didn’t have you pegged for such an experienced gamer.”

I heard a snort, looked around, and realized it was Jason. I shrugged.

“I’m really more of a casual player,” I said.

Ender just shook his head. “I dunno,” he said as his platform began to float up and away from us. “I think we’re in here for a while. There’s no such thing as a casual player anymore. You girls stay safe.”

And then Ender_Of_Games was gone.

Which was our cue to get going, too. The last time I’d emerged into the Honeycomb, I’d been ambushed six ways from Sunday; I didn’t intend for it to happen again. I hopped onto Sammi’s platform faster than she could say something about it—so, very fast—and said: “Take us to the top of the Honeycomb, to—”

“Terms and Conditions,” Jason reminded me.

“Terms and Conditions,” I finished. And as the platform began its ascent, Sammi leaped up, grabbed my face with both armored gloves, and tilted it sharply this way and that.

“Ah!” I winced as she squinted into each of my ears. “What are you—”

“Where’s the earpiece?” Sammi grunted, her teeth between her tongue as she got up close and personal with my earwax (did I have earwax in HIVE? Ugh, next question). “I knew you were talking to someone, it’s so obvious. How did you get messaging to work? Is it Gus? If you and Gus are holding out on me, I swear—”

“It’s not Gus!” I said, finally smacking her hands away. “It’s—it’s a long story.”

Sammi gestured around at the sea of silence and steel through which we rose. “It’s a long way to the top of the Honeycomb,” she said. “Try me.”

I hesitated.

“I’m not sure you should tell her,” Jason said, which settled it.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you. So this morning …”

And so the long, eerie ride up through the Drone-infested void was spent telling Sammi exactly how I’d ended up here. To her credit, Sammi was as good a listener as she was a talker, and she nodded and exclaimed appropriately as I told her everything, or almost everything: That I’d been in the real world when the Update happened. That I’d met someone who’d escaped the Update, and that they knew a way they could guide me in, and then maybe help me guide people (e.g., Sammi and my father) back out. Also, I’d saved that person from Markus Fawkes just yesterday, and now Markus was on some kind of bloodthirsty revenge quest. Also also, that person I’d saved was—

“Jason?”

“I bet she doesn’t even remember me,” Jason muttered.

“Jason Alcorn?” Sammi said, earning a begrudging grunt from Jason. “I remember him. Only kid who did better than me in our ninth-grade coding unit. He sure wasn’t humble about it, either.”

“Sammi, you’re not humble about anything.”

“I didn’t say it was a bad thing, did I?” Sammi shrugged. “But Jason? Wow. That’s so random. Or, like, the opposite of random—I mean, the biggest Hivehead in town? What are the odds?”

“Fascinating,” Jason said. “The AI allows her to tiptoe right up to the precipice of realizing this must be a simulation, but it doesn’t let her break through.”

“Shut up,” I hissed.

“What?”

“Hmm?”

“I thought you said—oh. Jason. I see.” Sammi tilted her head at us—I mean, at me. “So, uh … how is that going for you, then?”

Acutely aware that Jason could hear us, and not wanting to open the whole can of worms that was He’s had a total break from reality and thinks you don’t exist, I searched carefully for the right words to avoid suspicion.

“He’s got … a perspective on HIVE that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” Sammi said instantly.

“What? No, there’s not.”

“No, this is good.” Sammi peered at me intently. “Don’t tell me. I’ll totally guess what it is.”

“Believe me,” I muttered wearily, “you will never guess.”

“So there is something!” Sammi pumped her fist triumphantly.

“Dang,” I said, and Jason whistled.

“She’s good,” he admitted. “You know. For an NPC.”

I would have pushed back on that, but I had neither the energy nor the time. We were nearing the top of the Honeycomb, as evidenced by the slowly sloping curve of the walls above us—and the weirdness of the games now lining those walls. As mentioned earlier, the games at the top of the Honeycomb were intense and odd, meant for HIVE’s true believers and novelty seekers. If I let my gaze settle on any one game long enough, holographic titles would appear, offering tantalizing or unsettling hints of what lay behind each hexagon: Nightmarathon. Undead Undemption 2. And one that just said Frisbee, but Bad. Gone were the comforting pink glows and cute catwalks of the world below; here there were only the barest of steel beams connecting one game to the next, and the occasional abandoned platform. This far up, there weren’t even any Drones hanging around—just Sammi, Laddu, and me. Yesterday, that would have been normal; today, it just felt like one more thing to be creeped out by.

At this point it occurred to me: This was where I’d sent Dad. And that had been at least an hour ago.

“Jason?” I said, causing Sammi to perk up with interest. “Have you heard anything from my dad? Or my brother?”

“No, sorry,” Jason said. “If your dad’s been trying to get in touch with me, he hasn’t found me. And if your brother got out, I assume I’d know.”

I frowned. “How would you know if Kyle got out?”

“Well, your dad said he was at the Apiary, right? So if he went through the back door, I’d notice him doing the same thing I did when I made it out.”

“Which was?”

“Falling gasping out of a pod and then pulling myself across the carpet with my shaking, useless limbs,” Jason said flatly.

“Oh.” I winced. “Right.”

Sammi read the look on my face and said, “Didn’t your dad say he was going to get Kyle? Maybe they just haven’t made it here yet.”

She was trying to be comforting, but when I imagined my dad stepping into Brawl of Duty, totally unaware of the new stakes of entering a HIVE game, my breaths got short and tight.

“You’re here,” Jason cut in. “Time to get moving.”

Of all the moments for Jason to be an impatient jerk, why did he have to choose now? I drew myself up, ready to reprimand him.

“Trust me,” Jason added, more quietly this time. “Doing something is easier than worrying about where they are.”

Oh.

“Oh,” Sammi said as the platform came to a smooth halt. “We’re here.”

Looking around, I couldn’t see what either of them was talking about. None of the games around us were titled Terms and Conditions. When I turned to ask Sammi where it was, I found the answer by following her gaze—straight up.

We were hovering a couple feet under the very tip-top of the Honeycomb, which was exactly one hexagon wide. The hexagon wasn’t gold, pink, blue, or any other color—it was an aggressively unremarkable pale gray. And if you looked at it long enough, three words appeared in an ever so slightly whiter shade of pale:

TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

“Huh,” Sammi said. “Funny how I never thought to see what was up here.”

“You still haven’t,” Jason said, and there was his impatient voice. “Let’s go!”

“Oh. Right.” I began to stand up, with Sammi following my lead. “Come on, let’s”—I straightened up, and the Honeycomb vanished—“go.”

The lights in Terms and Conditions were dim, a series of long, low strips on the walls, like the kind you’d find running off the backup generator of a bunker somewhere. But this place wasn’t a bunker—or not just a bunker, anyway. We stood at the entrance of a massive library, strip lights stretching away into unending aisles of shelves. The first few aisles were marked like they would be in a real library (A–J, K–S, and so on), but they quickly devolved into numbers and characters from a coding language I’d never seen. Under those signs were glowing touchscreens, each one hexagonal and displaying equally incomprehensible prompts like BACK-END ARCHIVES—ACCESS? or HIVE SIMULATOR—ENTER? And instead of books, each shelf was lined with—

“Scrolls?” Sammi said, stepping forward to pick one up. Jason had just enough time to say “Don’t touch the—” in my ear before Sammi reached out and touched a scroll. With a sound like a printer tray exploding, the scroll shot out into the aisle, an endless sheet of paper whizzing past a startled Sammi, colliding with the shelf across the way, and then continuing to unwind until it was piling up on the ground around her feet. It was like watching a frog’s tongue leap out, if frog tongues were made out of parchment and also half a mile long. After a full minute of frenzied rustling, the scroll finally slowed to a creep, then a crawl, and then stopped altogether in a mountain of coils that came up to our shins.

Sammi reached into the pile of paper and picked up a random section. “ ‘BrainSTIM Card removal must always be supervised by a licensed biotechnician,’ ” she read aloud. “ ‘Unlicensed BrainSTIM Card removal is illegal, an improper use of trademarked technology, and constitutes an act of copyright theft. It may also be detrimental to the Player’s continued life. For guidance on how to acquire a removal license, see Shelf …’ ” She paused for a moment, confused. “Okay, I don’t know how to pronounce that, and I’m me.”

“It’s the rules,” I said, looking around. “It’s a whole library of how HIVE works.”

“Not just the rules,” Jason said in my ear, while Sammi continued to read. “You know every time you’ve ever downloaded something new and been asked to agree to a set of regulations, and stipulations, and privacy violations? Have you ever once read any of them?”

“No,” I admitted. “And I love to read.”

“Exactly,” Jason said. “You just scroll past all those words and click yes. Everyone does. Pages and pages of words, and more for every new Update, and longer every time. They add up. And they’re all here. It’s the perfect hiding spot for everything someone doesn’t want you to know—because nobody wants to know anything in Terms and Conditions. Nobody wants to care.”

Credit where it was due: Jason was making new strides in creeping me out.

“Thanks for the color commentary,” I said, signaling to Sammi that it was time to get moving. “Speaking of hiding spots: Which way are we going?”

“Straight ahead,” Jason said. “I’ll tell you when to turn.”

I stepped carefully over the pile, and Sammi dropped her reading material and followed me as we moved forward into the dim light of the library. I’d walked through a lot of library aisles in my life, and normally I liked to drag my fingers along the spines of the books as I passed through, feeling the accumulated ridges of all those words waiting to be read. Now, though, I took care not to touch any of the scrolls, fearing I’d set off another paperslide. Sammi had either had the same thought, or she was just as creeped out by this place as I was because she held Laddu close to her chest as we walked.

“Okay, turn left here,” Jason said. “And then in two aisles, turn right.”

This guided library tour went on for a while—certainly for much longer than I’d expected. As the twists and turns piled up, Jason’s little speech really began to sink in: This library was huge. You could hide anything in here, easily. And even more easily than that, you could get lost.

“Maybe my dad did make it here,” I whispered. (Just because we were seemingly the only people in a spooky magical virtual shelf maze didn’t mean I was going to be loud in a library.) “Maybe he just got turned around.”

“Maybe,” Jason said. “But speaking from experience, if he made his way to the back like you told him, he’d find the door eventually. I’m just showing you a shortcut. You know, like how you can get to the kids’ reading room faster if you go through the Romance aisle.”

Sammi raised her eyebrows at my sudden smile, but I couldn’t help it. Jason’s acknowledgment of our shared childhood was as unexpected as it was dead-on. I couldn’t count the number of times one or both of us had run our latest pile of books back to the Bullworth Library reading room, giggling as we passed by scandalously illustrated paperbacks with names like In Love with a Hologram or Kidnapped by a Bitcoin Billionaire. Somehow I’d forgotten all about it; how had Jason, of all people, remembered?

Jason must have realized I was about to follow up on this because he quickly sputtered, “Okay, uh, you’re almost there. Take two more lefts and a right and then wait for my instructions.”

This attempt at regaining his tough-kid clout was both unsuccessful and hilarious, but I let it go as I led Sammi and Laddu around one more corner and then another. My heart started to beat faster as we approached the final corner. I’d spent so much time rushing from one crisis to another that I’d barely given myself a second to imagine what this mysterious back door was, or how it would work when we found it. Who’d put it in Terms and Conditions, and why? Would Sammi really be able to pass through it? Would Dad be waiting for us there? Was it even, like, an actual door?

But as I turned the final corner, I froze in place, and as Sammi came up behind me and started to say “What,” I clapped my hand over her mouth.

None of our questions were getting answered anytime soon. However the back door worked, whatever it looked like, our view of it was blocked. Because we weren’t the first people here.

Between us and where I assumed the door would be, there was a swarm of Drones. And when I say a swarm, I mean it—not just the neat, still rows of watchers we’d seen out in the Honeycomb, but a cluster of Drones, a mess, crammed in from floor to ceiling, sliding over one another like insects, a living wall of nonliving guardians. And they were doing something I’d never known Drones to do before: They were all producing a wordless, agitated buzz.

And between us and the Drones were still more figures: not more NPCs, but real, genuine, flesh-and-blood, not-actually-flesh-and-blood digital actual people. Sammi and I whipped back around into the aisle before any of them could notice us, but they were all too concerned with the Drones and one another to see us, anyway. Not just concerned, come to think of it—they were upset. From the brief glimpse I’d gotten, they were all people who weren’t used to wanting for anything; they were men and women in expensive, important-looking outfits, interspersed among giant men in dark suits with earpieces and weapons.

And standing between two of the biggest men, looking away from the Drone wall just long enough to frown at something, was a face I had never expected to see in person—even, or especially, in HIVE. And as Sammi and I stared at each other and held our breaths, that person spoke.

“Did any of you hear something?” asked the president of the United States.