Gus held my shoulder. Aaron held Gus’s hand. Sammi held on to the back of Aaron’s neck. I held the Bug.

And for a moment, balanced across four platforms in the middle of the Honeycomb, we all held perfectly still.

Then a flash of gray from far above us snapped us back into action. No Drone had noticed us yet, but they continued to circle lazily around the Honeycomb, like sharks in a tank.

“Kara,” Gus said. “The Bug. What if the Drones see …”

But the Bug solved that problem for me. For the first time since we’d found it, the Bug moved, fluttering its wings and jerking up out of my hand. I bit back a scream—I’d had my fill of bees by now, and especially mysterious reality-warping bees the size of my face—but instead of attacking any of us, the Bug just swiveled in midair, angled itself downward, and flew directly into—

“The frame!” Sammi gasped.

We watched in wonder as an object the size of a football flew into a surface no thicker than a flat-screen TV, and disappeared. Yellow ripples emanated out from where it had entered the frame, and the message that had previously been there was washed away.

“What in the …” Aaron began, but I held up a hand.

“Look,” I said. “It’s rewriting itself.”

I lifted it up so everyone could see:

A LESSON IN CODING: DEBUGGING 101.

And then after a moment, I flipped the frame around:

FIND THE RIGHT API.

“API?” I knew those letters rang a bell, but I couldn’t quite place why. I looked to Gus for help. “What is that again? Was that in the article you read?”

Gus shook his head mournfully.

“I mean, maybe,” he said. “I kind of mostly just paid attention to the part about playing video games forever.”

“Oh, come on, guys,” Jason said. “API stands for Application Programming—”

“Application Programming Interface!” I finished. “It’s the software you need for two programs to talk to each other without glitching! Yes, thank you, Jason, I knew I’d heard that bef—oh.”

Aaron was looking at me like I was crazy. Sammi and Laddu were looking innocently at the ceiling, or at least the vast and curving void where the ceiling would have been.

And Gus was looking at me like I had some explaining to do.

Okay, one last time, and then I never wanted to go through this again:

“Jason Alcorn has been helping me get through HIVE,” I said. “While we’re trapped here, he’s free in the real world.”

“Actually,” said Jason, “it’s the oppos—”

“And he’s plugged into my feed,” I said. “He’s the one who figured out Eric Alanick was kidnapped. He’s the one who helped us find the secret messages about the Bugs. And he’s the only reason I was able to find you.”

“Whoa, really?” Jason said excitedly.

“Well, he’s a reason I was able to find you,” I amended quickly. “So I don’t want to hear any grumbling about this situation, okay? It’s as weird for me as it is for you.”

There was a long pause, in which Sammi continued to study the sky, and Laddu—though I was in no way sure how this was possible—appeared to be trying to whistle idly.

Finally, Gus said, “Wait, Eric Alanick was kidnapped?!”

“Who’s Jason Elkhorn?” Aaron asked, scratching his head.

“We were getting so much done,” Sammi sighed.

“Okay,” Gus said, stepping from his platform to mine. “So Jason Alcorn is inside my girlfriend’s head? And he’s been watching this whole time without us knowing? And he’s the reason you’re stuck here in HIVE with the rest of us?”

“A reason,” I repeated, but it was unclear if he heard me.

“Jason …” Gus began. His eyes blazed as he grabbed each of my shoulders and stared me in the face.

And then he pulled me into a hug.

“Thank you,” he said.

Oh. Okay. Not what I expected. My hands wrapped tentatively around Gus’s shoulders. This may sound absurd, but I couldn’t tell if I was trying to hug him as me or as Jason. When Gus pulled back, though, there was nothing indecisive in his gaze.

“I always thought you were a weirdo,” Gus said.

“Hey!” I said.

“I meant Jason.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Hey,” said Jason.

“And I have, like, a thousand questions about you being in Kara’s head. But if you helped get her safely to me, then I owe you more than I can say.”

“I. Uh. You’re welcome?” Jason said.

“And you.” I realized Gus was addressing me now, even though he’d been looking at me the whole time. “I’ve been worried sick about you all day.”

“She can handle herself, you know,” Sammi said. “You should see her with a plunger gun.”

“Oh, sick, you guys played Animal Flossing?”

“Quiet, Aaron,” said Gus. “Of course Kara can handle herself. But what I hated most about being separated today was not getting a chance to apologize. You had every right to be mad at me last night. I’d gotten so wrapped up in HIVE, in endless adventure games, and—and in adrenaline rushes that I almost forgot about the greatest adventure of all. The time I spend with you.”

Mercifully, Jason stayed silent for once. But as I stared up at Gus, I found myself silent as well.

I’d set out for the Apiary this morning to apologize to Gus, not the other way around. I’d wanted to prove that I got it, that I got HIVE, that I got him. But now that I stood here, hearing Gus try to identify the cause of our fight yesterday, I felt like something was still off. There was maybe, potentially, I quite possibly might maybe have had to admit, something that bugged me about HIVE. And about—

“API! Of course!” Aaron blurted, and Gus and I finally broke each other’s gaze to look at him.

“A Pitfallen Idol!” Aaron continued. “You mentioned adventure games, and I realized—Find the Right API. API is, like, the classic adventure game. Maybe the Bug was telling us to go there!”

“Oh, wow,” Sammi said. “Yes.”

“Are you two done with your cutscene or whatever?” Aaron asked, gesturing between Gus and me. “Can we go find the next Bug?”

“Yeah,” Gus said, smiling. “Except—wait—if Jason’s in your feed, Kara … when I kissed you earlier, does that mean—”

“Let’s go find the next Bug,” Jason said.

“Let’s go find the next Bug,” I said.

We went.

And I’ll be honest: Now that we knew what we were looking for, debugging was, if not easier, then certainly quicker. A standard since the earliest days of HIVE, A Pitfallen Idol was a game of damp and dark jungles, forbidden Incan temples, and most important, the craggy, bottomless pits that gave the game its name, and which players did not want to fall into at any cost. So when Gus pointed out that you could strip the vines from the jungle trees and use them to rappel down into the pits on purpose, we figured that would be exactly the sort of thing a debugger might do. And there, hidden under a rocky promontory, glowing patiently in the darkness, we found it: another bee.

We already felt like old pros by the time we returned to the Honeycomb again, hiding under a catwalk so the Drones couldn’t spot us and feeding our newest Bug to the frame.

This one said:

DEBUGGING 102: A CODER’S NIGHTMARE:

And on the other side:

A CLIP IN SPACE.

“A clip?” Aaron frowned. “Like a video clip?”

“Like clipping, I think,” I said. “It’s when two objects in a video game pass through each other—like when your arm accidentally goes through a wall instead of bouncing off it.”

“Oh, that always freaks me out,” Sammi said. “So is there a game in HIVE that’s notorious for clipping?”

“What about Steampunk 1877?” Aaron suggested. “That game’s buggy as heck.”

“Good guess, but no,” Gus said, grinning like a player who’d just gotten the rainbow turtle shell in Super Plumber’s Backyard Barbecue Enjoyment. “Think: What’s the only game in HIVE where you begin by riding a clipper-class ship … in space?”

We all groaned in realization:

“Mass Defect.”

And so we were off again, to the worn-down, labyrinthine interior of a spaceship in the far-flung future of popular sci-fi RPG Mass Defect. Of course, the good ship SMS Overcharge was infested with mechanically enhanced space mutants, something that made searching for the next Bug even harder than before. It wasn’t in the vents; it wasn’t in the lowest bottom decks of the clipper ship; and it wasn’t in the steaming cyborg guts of the mechanically enhanced space mutant that ambushed us in the lowest bottom decks of the clipper ship. Then Jason, with an audible eye roll, suggested:

“If you’re going to play this badly, why don’t you guys just look for the Bug in an open airlock?”

My eyes widened.

“Guys,” I said, “I have an idea.”

“Wait, no, Kara, that was a joke, you’ll die. Wait!”

Once we’d found the Bug—which only appeared in the seventy seconds the human body could survive after throwing itself out of an airlock with no suit—the others congratulated me, but I just shrugged humbly.

“Being smart is just noticing things,” I said.

“Next clue,” Jason said grumpily.

The next clue:

DEBUGGING³:

STACK OVERFLOW.

“Geez, these are getting really cryptic,” Gus said.

“Okay, hold on.” I was desperately trying to access memories of my mom’s dinner table lectures, memories I’d gotten used to blocking out over the past few years. “So stack overflow is when, like—when a programming command recurs too many times and you run out of—uh …”

“Guys,” Sammi cut in. “Come on. Cubes. ‘Stack Overflow.’ It’s the popular cube-based game Stack Overflow.”

From the ensuing silence, it was clear none of us had heard of this game.

“It is, maybe, popular mostly with children,” Sammi amended begrudgingly. “But the problem-solving skills it sharpens are useful to all ages.”

“Hey,” Jason said a minute later as we descended back toward the kids’ section. “Have you noticed anything weird about the players in the Honeycomb right now? Like … that they’re in the Honeycomb right now?”

He was right. Whereas our last few visits had found us alone in a sea of Drones, now signs of life had begun to crop up above and below us. A Troll here, an Anon there—something was luring players back out of the games.

As we pulled up outside Stack Overflow’s yellow hexagon, I spotted a Moddie on a nearby catwalk, devil horns peeking out from under her beanie. They were honestly pretty sick devil horns, which made me like her, so I called out:

“Hey! Do you know what’s going on with the players right now?”

Devil Horns turned and fixed me with, in retrospect, the kind of look I might have expected from a girl in a beanie and devil horns.

“Well, we’d all been hiding in the games, obviously,” she said. “Because it was, like, safer to stay in a game you knew you wouldn’t lose than to come back out and take a gamble. But I heard from someone who heard from someone who’d just won a mission in AATG that there’s these, like, glowing bees that you can use to get out of a game without winning, so now some of us are, like, pretty into finding those.”

Whoa. The four of us looked at one another nervously.

Which we absolutely should not have done.

“Hey,” Devil Horns said, noticing our shifty expressions and stepping closer to look at the frame I held closely. “What is that? Is that … honey?”

“Nothing,” I said, trying to look very casual while still moving a large honeycomb frame behind my back. “I mean, no.”

For a moment I stared her down, trying to summon the same bluffing energy that I’d used so successfully before against Markus Fawkes.

Then Devil Horns cupped her hands to her mouth, and I remembered something crucial: Markus Fawkes was a moron.

“Hey, guys!” she yelled. “Down here! Check this out! I think I found—”

“All right, that’s enough of that,” Sammi said, and shoved us into Stack Overflow.

It was not much of a reprieve. Big colorful cubes fell around our heads, threatening to squash us into the surface of an immense checkered game board that stretched away to the horizon. Within moments, Devil Horns materialized a few squares away; shortly after that, more of her would-be debuggers appeared alongside her. The only bright side was that they all appeared to be as unfamiliar with the objective of Stack Overflow as Aaron, Gus, and me. One player in a porkpie hat reached out and attempted to touch a red cube as it fell, only to be sent flying fifty feet backward, hat and all.

Sammi, though, had no such problems. After taking only a moment to assess the selection of cubes available to her, she proceeded to—actually, I’m still not sure what it was she proceeded to do.

“Trust me,” she said as she tapped one green block repeatedly and waved vaguely at another. “This is exactly the way a Stack Overflow expert would never think to play the game.”

“Is … is that true?” I asked Jason softly.

“Beats me,” he said. “I’ve never heard of this game in my life.”

But after racking up two red-block combos and a blue-block blitz—or was it three combos and no blitz? Look, I don’t know—Sammi cheered in triumph as the pile she’d created flashed an ultraviolet hue, searing our eyelids before it disappeared entirely, leaving in its absence only …

“The Bug!” Gus cried.

“The bee!” yelled Devil Horns. She pointed from behind the wall of cubes she had been unable to prevent from piling up around her. Luckily, the cubes acted as an accidental prison, keeping the players from reaching us as we grabbed on to the Bug. But there was no stopping them from hearing “Override initiated for game-winning protocol! You may now return to the Honeycomb,” and as the golden glow overtook us, we all heard the player in the porkpie hat say, “I knew it! Wait till we tell—”

And then we were out.

“Yikes. We’ve got a head start, but not much of one,” Sammi said. “Stack Overflow’s not that hard to figure out once you get used to it. But I can’t imagine we’ll have to find too many more of these, right?”

As it turned out, Sammi was wrong—we would have to find several more of these—and Sammi was right—we did not have much of a head start. Even as we moved from game to game, getting better and better at finding Bugs, we found ourselves competing with more and more players. What was supposed to be an Old West ghost town was crawling with cowpokes, tearing up the floorboards of first banks and fusty saloons—but not, crucially, looking under the trapdoor of the hangman’s gallows. In an underwater palace, while we broke into the seahorse stables to steal a ride to the edge of the continental shelf, they scoured the throne room. And by the time we made our way to Ball 20XX, HIVE’s premier basketball emulator, the players were all taking turns calling time-outs so they could search in the stands.

“Wow,” Sammi said as we dug through the smelly detritus of the home team’s locker room (it was a very realistic basketball emulator). “I guess in HIVE, the buzz travels fast.”

“Sammi,” said Gus.

“Sorry,” said Sammi.

“Hey, guys, look!” Aaron said, pulling out a pair of Air Alanicks. “Do you know how high you can jump with these things on?”

“Aaron,” said Sammi.

“Not sorry,” Aaron said, slipping the shoes into his Inventory.

“Wait, guys, be quiet,” I said, holding up a finger.

“Kara’s right, Aaron,” Gus said. “I get that this is a fun time and all, but we’re trying to do something important here. Let’s focus up.”

“I—you’re having a fun time?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “Haven’t we already—that’s not—look, that’s not what I was talking about. Be quiet and listen.”

Aaron looked like he wanted to say something, but to his credit, he joined us all in falling silent.

Within moments, we heard footsteps closing in on the locker room, along with aggravated voices.

“The stalls,” I said. “Now.”

We rushed to hide in the bathroom at the back of the locker room. Laddu followed Sammi into a stall as she crawled up onto the tank of the toilet before pulling the door closed; Aaron took another; and Gus and I had just managed to balance ourselves on opposite sides of one toilet seat, our backs pressed against the walls, when a voice rounded the corner.

“I heard the bees were left by Eric Alanick,” said the voice. “And this whole thing is some big promotional stunt.”

“That’s insane,” said another voice. “ ‘This whole thing’ is a nightmare. What kind of promotional stunt would this be?”

“The kind Eric Alanick would do! He’s a cultural disruptor! It’s genius.”

“Hey,” Gus whispered. “Sorry for when I said this was fun. I know you must be pretty stressed. Sammi mentioned that your dad was—”

“Shh,” I said. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I was starting to get tired of hearing my boyfriend apologize. Plus: “Listen.”

“I heard,” someone was saying, “that there’s this crew that’s been collecting them. Four kids and a bird.”

“A bird ?”

Gus and I stared at each other. Looked like Devil Horns and her crew had made it out of Stack Overflow.

“Now I know you’re insane. Come on, there’s nothing here—let’s go.”

Once they were gone, we exhaled, stepping down carefully from our hiding spot.

“We can’t keep doing this,” I said. “Either we find out what’s going on with HIVE soon, or we might not get to at all.”

“I agree,” Gus said. “But how are we supposed to do that? We can’t even find the Bug in this dumb basketball game.”

“Uh, guys?” Aaron said from the stall to our right. “You’re not gonna believe what’s in this toilet bowl.”

Two minutes later, we all stood back in the Honeycomb for what I prayed would be the last time. Aaron shook his hands furiously like he was trying to get water off them, even though they’d become dry the moment we’d left the game.

“Let us never speak of that,” he said, but he didn’t have to worry—already, the Bug had done its work on the frame, giving us one more clue to crack.

“I honestly have no idea what this could be about,” Sammi said.

“Me too,” Jason admitted. “I’m stumped.”

“Kara?” Gus said. “Are you okay?”

Was I okay? I didn’t know. As I flipped the frame back and forth, the words swam in front of me. Together, the two sides read:

YOU’VE FOUND ALL MANNER OF BUGS.

JUST ONE MORE, IF YOU DON’T MIND.

“Oh, you’re kidding me,” I whispered.

“What?” Gus asked. “Kara, what’s going on?”

I looked up from the frame, hardly believing what I was saying as I said it:

“I know where the last Bug is,” I said. “And it’s in The Skims: Mind Your Manors.”

I told you we’d get to it.