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In an eternal white void, I sat, and I cried, and I waited for the loading screen to go away.

And waited.

And waited, and waited.

Loading screens. You know how it is.

Eventually, I cried myself out, and my sadness turned to numbness, then to boredom, then to outright irritation. I wrapped my arms around my legs and hunched up in a sulky ball. How long was this going to take? Why even put me through this at all? What heretofore undiscovered part of HIVE could be so impressive that it took this long to load?

On some level, I knew that these cranky questions were just a way to mask the deep grief and loneliness I felt. I missed my family. I missed my friends. Heck, I even missed—

“Kara?”

I shot straight upright.

“Jason?” I asked. “You—you can hear me? You’re still with me?”

“Uh, yeah,” he said. “And apparently I’m the only one. What happened while I was asleep? Where’d everybody go? Where’d … everything go?”

I filled him in on all the details: that we’d found the last Bug, and that Markus Fawkes had come back one last time. That it seemed like my mom had been leaving the messages the whole time—but that by following them, I’d lost everyone I cared about.

“Whoa,” Jason said when I was done. “That sounds … intense. Sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said tentatively, but I remained on guard. With Jason, there was always a catch.

“But if it makes you feel any better,” he went on, “they’re not really—”

“I knew it!” I exploded. “I knew you were going to say something ridiculous and delusional about how everything I care about is pointless because none of it’s real! Well, news flash, you jerk—my feelings are real! The pain I’m going through is real! And if you can’t understand that, then you’re less real than anyone I know!”

There was silence in the void.

Then:

“I was going to say,” Jason began slowly, “that they’re not really gone for certain. You didn’t see them dissolve like Markus did, right? And we don’t really know what’s been happening to anyone since the Update dropped. If we fix it, they might be okay.”

“Oh.”

I tugged abashedly at the edge of my dress.

“So are you saying—”

“Look, can I tell you why … how I got here?”

I gestured broadly at the loading screen. “I’m not going anywhere. Knock yourself out.”

“Okay.” Jason took a deep breath.

“My parents were always neglectful. They left me alone a lot—at the library, yes, which you knew, but elsewhere, too. The park. The playground. Heck, even the power plant. Places much less safe than the Bullworth Library Reading Room. They were addicts.”

From the way he said it, the irony did not seem to be lost on Jason, the biggest HIVE addict I knew. Or maybe it was lost on him. Things that were obvious to me were not always obvious to Jason, and vice versa.

“That’s how I wound up at the mall by myself the first day they were offering the free HIVE demo,” Jason said. “I was fourteen—okay, I was thirteen—but when I offered to start working at the arcade in exchange for free access to HIVE, Mr. Wamengatch said yes.

“I hadn’t moved in yet, but it was like I’d gained a new home. Or actually, given my parents, it was like I’d gained a home, period. And the more time I spent in HIVE, the higher up the Honeycomb I went. Part of it was just that I loved the games: They kept getting weirder and harder the farther up I climbed, and learning how to play them made me proud. But mostly, I just liked how few people were up there. HIVE was really taking off at that time—this is around when they turned the arcade into an Apiary—which meant there were a lot more Normals filling up the bottom of the Honeycomb. Then the middle. Then, more and more often, the top. So I kept going up. And up, and up. And then one day, someone was in my last safe game, the one I thought no one else would play.”

“Was it Frisbee, but Bad ?” I asked, unable to stop myself.

“What—how did you know that?”

“Saw it earlier.” I shrugged. “Continue.”

“Well—yes. Anyway. I wanted one place that was just mine. One place no one else would think to go. And when I went as far up into HIVE as it was possible to go, I found it.”

“Terms and Conditions.”

“Exactly,” Jason said. “And in all the years I spent there—all the years until today—no one ever went in there. They all assumed it was boring. Not me, though. To me, it was fascinating. I read everything I could, and went through all the doors to all the little mini-libraries like the one you saw—though I never thought to open the beehives, credit where it’s due.”

“Thank y—”

“So anyway, slowly but surely I worked my way to the back of the library. Which is where I found it—the weirdest door of them all.”

“The back door?”

“Yep,” Jason said. “Except that’s not what it was called. You couldn’t see it today because it was covered by all the … well, you couldn’t see it today. But when I first approached it, there was a little label on the door. Boredom Simulator. And I stepped through it.”

“And?” If I’d had a seat to sit on, I’d have been on the edge of it.

“I woke up in the Apiary,” Jason said. “It popped me right back out into Bullworth. Our world. The Boredom Simulator.”

“I …” I honestly didn’t know where to begin. “Jason, it’s a joke. A gag. Like when someone tells you to hit F4 and your window closes. Or an egress.”

“What’s an egress?”

I shifted backward onto my palms. “Carnival workers used to say, ‘This way to the egress,’ or ‘Step here to see the amazing egress.’ And then you go through this whole tent and you get to the back and you find out egress is just a fancy word for exit.”

There was a long silence in which I could practically feel Jason staring at me.

“What?” I huffed. “I read. You pick stuff up.”

“Well,” Jason said at last. “I thought it was just an egress, too. Then I got home.”

Something in the way he said it made me shiver, even though it was perfectly room temperature in the void. Void temperature?

“What was at home?” I asked.

“Nothing. My parents had disappeared.” Jason relayed this info the same way he’d relayed everything else—flatly, like he was reading an old news article that had worn out with age. But I thought I detected the slightest pause before he continued.

“And not just like they’d done before,” he said. “I waited, but they never came back. They were gone for good.”

“Jason,” I said quietly. “That’s … that’s terrible. I’m so sorry. I know that when my mom left, I felt—”

“No, it’s okay,” Jason said. “Because I figured it out. They’d gone home. Their real home, the one in the real world. All those times growing up when they’d disappear—I thought it was because they were addicts, but those times were the only times they were getting sober. Because those were the times they left HIVE.”

“By HIVE,” I said slowly, “you mean …”

“The world where you and I grew up, yes. The day my parents left was the day they got back to the real world and got clean. I don’t know if it was their choice or not. My guess is, something about me getting close to the truth scared someone way up top, and they found my parents and brought them home. But they forgot to find me. So I decided then and there that I would keep reading everything in Terms and Conditions, and I would do what it takes to find the one true door to the real world, and find them. Until this Update today, when everything went out of whack, and I went through the Boredom Simulator door just one more time to see if it would still work. It did. But now I can’t get back in again. I was even trying to drive back to my old home, to see if maybe this all meant they’d come back … until I ran into you. And now here we are.”

And then he was done, and we both sat there in silence.

“Jason …” I said at last.

“Yeah?” he said, and I could tell already he was feeling defensive, and I wished I didn’t have to be the one to make him feel that way. But I couldn’t not say it. It wouldn’t have been honest to keep quiet, and it wouldn’t have been doing my duty to him as a fellow human being, or as a friend.

Curse my need to help everyone.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “How would your using the Boredom Simulator trigger your parents leaving? It’s a terrible coincidence, I admit, but that’s the only thing it can be. And surely if you’d read that much of Terms and Conditions, you’d have found something by now revealing that our world wasn’t real. Or you’d have some memories of the ‘real world’ where you’d been born, or … or …”

“Stop it!” Jason said. “Stop trying to confuse me! I’m just telling you what happened to me!”

And there it was—that voice crack I knew so well. For the first time since he’d started telling this story, Jason’s emotions were seeping through. But I didn’t think that was a bad thing—far from it. I was pretty sure it meant I was starting to get through to him.

“Jason, I get why it’s easier to think that none of it’s real, or that everyone’s against you,” I said. “I felt that way a few times myself after my mom left. But other people aren’t against you. They’re real, and they’re going through as much pain as you are, and you can help them, which means they can help you.”

“Who’s gone through half the pain I have?” Jason spat.

“I mean,” I said, trying not to sound too flippant. “I think I … literally have?”

“You don’t count!” Jason said. “You’re real!”

“That’s it, though, Jason,” I said. “I’m real. My friends were—are—real, too. And I think on some level you know that, or you wouldn’t have helped us as much as you did today. Deep down, you care about other people. That’s not bad. That’s good.”

“I’m so sick of this,” Jason said. “I’m sick of you. I should never have helped you get here—and where even is here, anyway? I went to sleep for two minutes and you clearly messed everything up without me. I bet this isn’t even a loading screen. You’re just going to be stuck here forever, and that’s your problem because I’m done helping you. I’m done talking to you. Enjoy forever, I’m—”

“Loading completed,” said a voice, ringing out across the nothing.

And then the nothing went away.

I’d expected somewhere astounding, an insanely elaborate lair full of opulence and eye-popping detail to justify just how long it had taken to get here.

Instead, I sat in what appeared to be a corporate meeting room—like my dad’s office, but with a slightly more minimalist decorator. There was a whiteboard on the wall and a little plastic water bottle next to me. My chair was wheely.

My Mind Your Manors evening gown was gone, replaced by a default Honeycomb suit, though the smoker was still clipped to my belt, under the table.

It was a very boring table.

But the person who sat across it was not very boring at all.

“Kara—” Jason gasped, suddenly much less combative. “That thing I said about not talking to you …”

“I know,” I said. “No worries. Please stick around.”

“Okay. I, uh. I will.”

Across the table, my new companion stood up.

“Hello, Kara,” said Eric Alanick.