A tip for any emotional reunions you may plan on having in the future: Don’t hold them on blazingly dangerous highway medians.

Or do. It makes everything very efficient.

“Kara,” Gus began.

“Gus,” I said.

“Get in the car!” yelled Sammi and Aaron.

Sammi had already hopped into the back seat of the canary-yellow-colored convertible Rolls-Royce, and she now pushed the back door open as an eighteen-wheeler roared by, its side-view mirror narrowly missing an opportunity to take off my head. I leaped into the back seat next to Sammi and was still pulling the door shut behind me when Aaron floored it. With a grinding thump, the Rolls-Royce careened over the median and into the opposite lane from which Aaron and Gus had arrived, completing the world’s most daring—and dumb—U-turn.

“Hold on tight!” Aaron shouted over the wind as he accelerated down the highway. We were racing down the edge of Neversleep City, the open-world metropolis that sprawled across an entire seaboard and gave Ain’t Auto Theft Grand its setting. On our right, skyscrapers flickered past like so much background data; to our left was the kind of warehouse-festooned waterfront found in a thousand old gangster movies. Aaron’s showy driving was only made showier by the fact that he was steering one-handed, using the other hand to keep a fedora from flying off his head. Gus was similarly dressed in the nattiest three-piece suit this side of 1929. It looked, I had to say, very good on him—albeit slightly rumpled by high-velocity winds. A sequin smacked me in the face as Aaron changed lanes, and that was how I realized I was wearing a vintage flapper dress. Not the most practical outfit for adventuring, but classic AATG couture. At least a quick glance downward confirmed I still had my trusty boots.

“How did you find us?” Sammi asked. Her turban and gloves remained unchanged, but the rest of her armor had been converted to brown leather and furs—the outfit of a daring aviatrix.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Aaron asked, weaving across three lanes without so much as glancing at his turn signal.

“The simulation!” Jason said.

“The save function,” Aaron said. “The last time any of us played this game, the four of us were doing a mission as a crew. The game always reunites crews with each other.”

“Oh, duh,” Sammi said.

“Ugh,” Jason said.

Gus turned around in his seat, hugging the headrest with one arm to stay balanced while he reached out for my hand.

“What are you doing in HIVE?!” he asked. “I mean, not that I’m not happy to see you! I just never thought you’d voluntarily get trapped in here!”

“I’m here to save you!” I said, yelling over the blaring horn of the Studebaker Aaron had just cut off.

I’d thought it was a nice line, but Gus just squeezed my hand, tilted his head, and asked:

“What?!”

“And me,” Sammi said. “And her dad and brother, and—and everyone, really.”

“What?!” said Gus and Aaron.

“Long story,” I said, and then gasped as we swerved onto an on-ramp at the last second, nearly smashing head-on into a concrete divider.

“C-c-c-combo! Ten trick driving points!”

“Also,” I yelled over the in-game announcement, “why are we driving like this?”

“Because Aaron always drives like this,” Sammi pointed out correctly, rolling her eyes as she pulled the middle seat belt as tight as it would go across Laddu’s body.

“Well, pardon me for being awesome!” Aaron protested. “And for enjoying the one time in life when my hands definitely won’t shake!” But as his eyes flickered to his rearview mirror, he added, “Real talk, though, it’s because we’re being chased.”

Now it was our turn to say, “What?!”

“By who?” Sammi added, just in time for a sleek black roadster to speed onto the on-ramp behind us as—oh boy—a mobster holding a tommy gun leaned out from the passenger side.

“By them,” Aaron said. “Hold on!”

He switched lanes so fast that Gus fell forward and I slammed into the left side of the car, which I might have toppled out of if I hadn’t dug my fingers into Gus’s wrist. From the clanking sounds behind me, something heavy in the trunk had just taken the same hit. Now we were heading off the highway we’d been on—and up onto a bridge that curved high over a wide, dark river. I heard the distinct sound of bullets firing, but our pursuers must not have made the exit in time because the gunfire quickly dopplered out of earshot. Nevertheless, Aaron only sped up as we rose over the river, leaving behind the island hub at the center of Neversleep City. The bridge was dizzyingly high and impossibly long, and there were several miles at least between us and the desolate plain of smokestacks on the river’s far shore. Below us, the drop from the bridge to the water became greater and more fatal with every second.

And I couldn’t be sure, but here and there on the face of the river, I thought I saw a scatter of gray—a dotting of doomed and wandering Drones, from players who had fallen before us.

“We’re still playing that mission from last time,” Gus explained. “Remember? We had to steal the hooch from that speakeasy and deliver it to the drop-off spot under the bridge without getting caught by the speakeasy’s, uh, employees.”

Well, that explained the gunshots, and the heavy clanking that was still coming from the trunk.

“We didn’t finish it at the time because Sammi had to go to her tutoring job,” Gus continued, “and also you all agreed that it was … well, it was …”

Sheepishly, Gus dropped my hand and adjusted his tie.

“Too hard,” Sammi filled in for him. “We said you’d picked a game that was too hard. Like you always do.”

“Well, that’s not quite how I remember it,” Gus said, in a tone that suggested it was exactly how he remembered it. “But yes, something like that. And that’s bad news. I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but if you lose a game right now—”

“We know,” Sammi and I chorused.

Gus looked like he wanted to follow up on that, but at that moment, Aaron cut in—both to the conversation, and to the carpool lane.

“Good, then you’re all caught up,” he said. “I’ve managed to lose them a few times today—like when we found you and switched directions on the highway back there—but they keep catching up to us. We’ve been driving around the city all day, but we can’t do this forever. I mean …”

He abruptly pulled us ahead of the ambulance he’d been tailgating.

“I could do this forever. This is like the one thing I could do forever. But sooner or later we’ll run out of gas. But now that we have you guys, maybe we can win this!”

“We can’t win this,” I said.

“What?!”

This time, everyone said it. Except for me, of course, and for Laddu, who said, “Laddu!”

Because a hail of bullets had just passed over our heads.

The black roadster was back. Sammi, Gus, and I all threw ourselves down out of sight; Aaron, unable to do so, dropped his seat back as low as it would go, bashing the back of my head but saving him at the last second from a follow-up round of gunfire.

“Why are we in a convertible?!” I cried. “This is a car chase game!”

“You chose this!” Aaron said. “Remember? You said it was like the car from that book you loved!”

“Oh yeah,” I said, blushing and remembering how I’d mainly agreed to play this game because I was going through a Great Gatsby phase at the time.

“Don’t listen to Aaron,” Gus said. “But, Kara—why don’t you think we can win? If it’s because you think it’s too hard, I swear, together, we can do it! And by the way, all day I’ve been wishing I could talk to you—I need to apologize for the way that I—”

As enticing as that line of thought sounded, the growing roar of the roadster behind us told me that we didn’t have time for any of it.

“We can’t win because we need to stay in the game,” I yelled, even as the staccato pinging of bullets ricocheting off bridge supports made it feel like we very much did not. “Because of what we found on this.”

I held up the honey-covered frame so Gus could see it. Of course, Gus’s mystified expression reminded me that this would mean nothing to him, so I continued:

“A bug. There’s a bug somewhere in Ain’t Auto Theft Grand—”

“Probably,” Sammi said.

“And finding it could be the key to finding out what’s been done to HIVE—and putting a stop to it.”

“What kind of bug?” Aaron asked.

“We don’t know.”

“ ‘Done to’?” Gus frowned. “This was on purpose? By who? Why? How?”

“We don’t know that, either,” I admitted. “Right now we just need to solve the problem in front of us.”

“I’ll say,” said Aaron. “Hang on to something!”

For all Aaron’s fast and fancy driving, the roadster was gaining on us with the single-minded focus that was so often the delightful hallmark of NPC personalities. Just as it was about to pull abreast of us, Aaron broke two lanes to the right and dropped his speed, managing to put a white stretch limousine between the mobsters and us.

“C-c-c-combo!”

“Guys,” Aaron crowed, “I rock in HIVE.”

“You rock all the time, buddy,” Gus said.

“Well, duh,” Aaron said. “But that part goes without saying.”

“How do you find a bug in a video game?” Sammi asked, not wasting a moment of our temporary reprieve.

“Some people—debuggers—that’s all they do,” Gus said. “It’s their job. I read about it.”

“What did you learn?” I asked. “How do they find the bugs?”

“They just … play the game. I remember because it sounded like a dream job.”

“Great,” Aaron said as a bullet pierced one of the windows of the limo, missing our car but bringing with it the scream of someone in the limo and what sounded like the faint tinkling of a shattered champagne glass. “Very helpful!”

“Okay, right, okay,” Gus said, pulling at his tie nervously again, “but to speed it up, they … they play the game … wrong. They do things you wouldn’t expect. They go to weird places on the map. Which exposes weird glitches and, and edge cases, things that programmers couldn’t have anticipated their players would find.”

“We can’t afford to play the game wrong!” Sammi said, and then gasped as the Rolls-Royce shuddered and jerked. Whoever was driving the limousine had had enough of being caught between us, and was now trying to push us out of our lane; unfortunately, the only thing to the right of our lane was a deadly drop to the banks of the Neversleep River.

“Why don’t you pick on the guys shooting at you with a gun!” Aaron roared at the limo driver, begrudgingly dropping the car back and surrendering our cover.

“Probably because of the gun,” Sammi pointed out.

Aaron looked for another car to hide behind, but everyone else on the road had noticed something bad was going down and had begun to give us a wide berth—or as wide a berth as they could within the confines of the bridge. Slowly but surely, the black roadster was revealed to us, two lanes over but just a few yards behind—and closing in by the second.

“Wait,” Aaron said. “So you’re saying that to find the bug, we should play the game wrong?”

“I—sure,” I said, watching as the roadster drew level with us once more. “It’s the best plan we have.”

“Which means doing things you wouldn’t expect?”

“Sure!” I said, increasingly frantic. The mobster, a man in a dark suit and glasses, was rising from his seat.

“Okay.” Aaron looked into the rearview mirror. “Just checking. Unbuckle your bird, Sammi.”

“Okay,” Sammi said, hurrying to free Laddu, “but why—”

The man in the roadster took aim.

And then—in the middle of a busy bridge, hundreds of feet above a vast and inky river, surrounded by high-speed traffic and right in the crosshairs of a gun-toting gangster—Aaron hit the brakes.