“Aah!” I cried.

“Aaah!” yelled the beast, rearing away.

“Laddu!” cried Laddu, popping up from behind the beast’s shoulder.

“Kara?” asked the beast.

“Sammi?” I asked, and that was when I realized my hands, which I’d thrown up in fear, were currently the same shade of pale as the creature in front of me. Not only that—they were twice as big as they’d been a moment ago.

Because Sammi and I were both wearing beekeeping suits. The suits were white and baggy, and they obscured everything from our forms to our faces with mesh nets just thick enough that we could see out of them but not, apparently, see into them. Even Laddu, I now noticed, was covered in a fine netting, much to his clear displeasure.

As one, Sammi and I turned out from each other to gaze at the open-air greenhouse in which we now stood. Late-afternoon sunlight slid over boxes of white pine, stacked on top of one another in towers, each one emanating a familiar buzz.

“Oh,” I breathed, putting it together.

“Yeah,” Jason said. “Trippy, right?”

We hadn’t entered a HIVE Simulator.

We’d entered a hive simulator.

In HIVE.

“Who put this here?” I asked as Sammi and I moved forward to walk among the hives. A few bees danced around the outside of each tower, but the moment I got close to one, a dozen more emerged in a defensive cloud, and the soft humming from inside the hive became a buzz-saw whine as countless unseen bees sent up a would-be battle cry. I pulled my hand back and stood stock-still as the bees calmed down and darted back into their box. Suit or no suit, I did not intend to get on any of their bad sides.

“I think it’s a private joke for the HIVE architects,” Jason said. “I found it by accident during one of my reading sessions. It’s amazingly realistic—like, weirdly so. It’s just straight-up beehives. Not much of a game—but I figured it’d be a good place to hide.”

I’d been relaying his words to Sammi as he spoke, and she nodded.

“Good thinking,” she said. “Whoever those guys are out there, I don’t think they know to look for us here, or we’d have seen them by—wait.” She frowned. “One of your reading sessions?”

I’d noticed that, too, and it had reminded me of the things Jason had mentioned back in the real world. The secrets he knew that other HIVE employees knew nothing about; the time he spent hanging around the top of the Honeycomb; gradually, a portrait of Jason’s past few years was beginning to come together.

“Jason,” I said, “how much of Terms and Conditions have you read?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Jason said, “Most.”

“Most,” I began, “or all?”

Another hesitation, and then:

“There were some parts I didn’t understand,” Jason admitted, his voice soft, as if this was a shameful secret.

Crack! Sammi and I whirled around, and the hives sent up an indignant buzz as a sharp sound rang out from the front of the wheelhouse. But it was just Laddu, squawking in distress as his attempts to remove his protective netting led him to knock over a bizarre device that looked like a metal fan.

“Okay, look,” Sammi said, heading over to clean up Laddu’s mess. “I would love to know more about whatever PhD in weirdness Jason has slowly been earning. But we still have to find a way out of here—past those Drones and past those guys in the library. And by ‘those guys’ I of course mean—because I feel we really have not stressed this enough—the British prime minister and the president.”

“Oh, was that the prime minister?” I asked.

“Honestly, Kara,” Sammi said, picking up the fan and turning to fix me with a look I could feel through two layers of mesh. “I’ve seen you read Jane Eyre three times. How do you never read the news.”

Jason snorted, and I tried to get things back on track.

“Well, you’re right,” I said, looking around the greenhouse. “We need an escape plan. Let’s think. What do we know? Is there something here that can help us?”

“Something in a beehive simulator?” Sammi asked skeptically.

“Sure, why not? You’re the puzzle-game queen, Sammi—solve this puzzle.”

“Maybe,” Jason said, still enjoying himself, “you could try jumping off a beehive.”

I ignored him.

“I’ve never heard of portals from one game to another,” I said. “Let’s start there. That’s not normal, right? Is that new?”

“It’s not normal, no,” Jason said while Sammi mulled it over. “Game developers want to keep you in their games once you’re there, not send you away. That way you keep making in-game purchases and they keep making profits.”

“Why would developers need our money for their games if we’re not real?” I muttered, softly enough that Sammi couldn’t hear over the buzzing of the bees. “Your theory is flawed. Checkmate.”

“Oh, please,” Jason said. “Companies use bots to drive up revenue all the time. Your friends are just the bots. Next question.”

“What about mini-games?” Sammi spoke up, unknowingly interrupting a biting retort from me (that I had not actually thought of yet). “Some games have those, like the bocce ball courts in Super Plumber’s Backyard Barbecue Enjoyment. Maybe this is one of those.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Except Terms and Conditions isn’t really a game—it’s a library. So these breakout rooms must be like …”

“Mini-libraries.” Sammi snapped her fingers. “Those touchscreens—the Hive Simulator, the Back-End Archives—they’re not games, they’re holding cells for specific types of information. Like some sort of—”

“Reading room,” Jason and I said at the same time, and I was glad that my bulky beekeeping suit kept anyone from seeing the shiver that ran down my back.

“But I don’t see any books,” Jason said as I looked around.

“Well, there weren’t books in Terms and Conditions, either,” I said. “There were scrolls. Different information gets stored in different ways.”

“So the information in a hive simulator,” Sammi said excitedly, “would be stored in …”

Two pairs of eyes, and three people, turned to look at the greenhouse’s main attraction: stack after stack of pine boxes, each one literally overflowing with swarms of stinging insects, each insect ready to fight and die to protect their home.

“The hives,” I finished, and for a moment there was only buzzing in the greenhouse.

“You could always just go back and make a run for it,” Jason said at last.

“You’re just saying that because you want us to get caught.”

“Excuse me for thinking outside the box!”

“Look, this’ll be fine,” Sammi said, hoisting up the metal fan Laddu had knocked over. “I heard this story about beekeeping on that Digicast program Several Things Discussed. What I’m holding is a smoker. We’ll use it to blow smoke in the hives, and then the smoke puts all the bees to sleep, so we can open up the hive and look at whatever we want.”

“All the bees go to sleep?” I asked.

“Well, it was on the Digicast, so I couldn’t actually see how it happened,” Sammi admitted. “But the buzzing sounds definitely got softer. Look, do you have a better idea?”

I didn’t (Jason’s didn’t count). And Sammi was already creeping toward the first hive, arms outstretched to hold the smoker as far from herself as possible. When she was just out of arm’s reach, a handful of bees rose from the hive to dance inquisitively around the tip of the smoker. But Sammi was already pulling the handles of the fan apart—and then squeezing them tight together. With a creak and a wheeze, a plume of smoke enveloped the bees before rolling its way past them and into the hive. The effect was immediate: The bees we could see tumbled right out of the air, and the buzzing from inside the tower did, indeed, get notably softer.

“All right, Kara,” Sammi said. “Now’s your chance. Open the lid.”

Though I wasn’t exactly overjoyed to be leaving my safe position behind her, I couldn’t help but feel a small thrill of anticipation as I stepped forward and wrapped my gloved hands around the top of the hive.

And pulled.

The top of the structure came clean off in my hands, feeling remarkably light as I bent down to set it on the ground. When I straightened back up and looked into the hive, I saw what had been hiding underneath: row after row of thin wooden slats, lined up vertically next to one another, like those record collections you saw sometimes in old media museums. Except, you know, covered in bees. The bees clung to a sticky brown-and-yellow substance on the sides of each slat. A few of them rose up sluggishly, displeased by the intrusion, but after Sammi gave the smoker a second squeeze, even the biggest bees fell back down like someone had turned up their own personal gravity knobs.

“Those must be the frames,” Sammi said. “The sticky stuff is the honeycomb—like, actual honeycomb. That’s what bees make in hives, and what humans harvest.”

“Like I said,” Jason sighed. “It’s just regular beehives. No secret messages, just some weird inside joke.”

But something had caught my eye, even through the mesh and smoke and walls of sleeping bees. It was hard to get a good look at the honeycomb, but it almost seemed like …

“Give me more smoke,” I said, and Sammi obeyed. I reached out again and set to work loosening the first frame on the far left of the hive. This was much harder than just opening the hive; even half asleep, the bees clung and crawled grumpily across my gloves, and the honey was like glue, keeping the frame stuck to the box unless I pulled extra hard. But I wiggled the wood back and forth, and soon, with a sound somewhere between a squish and a smack, the frame finally came free, popping up into the air and shedding bees like fuzzy yellow glitter into the hive below.

Shedding so many bees, in fact, that for the first time, it was possible to fully see the patterns formed by the swirling brown and yellow of the honeycomb.

Not just the patterns—the words.

“No way,” Jason gasped.

“What?” Sammi breathed.

“Are you happy now?” I asked. And although Jason was too stunned to answer, I had to admit, I was sort of happy, even if I had no idea what came next. Sue me—I liked being right.

Because the first frame of the hive said, in huge letters spelled out of dried brown honey:

LET’S PLAY:

SAVE THE HEAD OF HIVE.

“This is why this is here,” I said. “This is how we find Eric Alanick.”