I’d imagined this moment for years. How angry I’d be. The things I would say. I’d practiced my speeches in the shower, in the car, even while sitting in the Apiary lobby waiting to pick up Gus for a ride home. I’d dreamed of the hurt I’d unleash, the irrefutable points I’d make, the way I’d pick a fight.

The way I’d win.

Now the subject of all those imagined speeches stood before me. Under me, really—I was short, yes, but I got that from her, and the small staircase that descended from the doorway down into the Queen’s Cell meant that for once, I had not just the moral but the literal high ground. I towered over her. There would never be a better moment to make my mother pay.

I ran down the steps two at a time and threw my arms around her in the tightest hug I could possibly give.

“Kara!” Mom cried, wrapping her arms around me even tighter in return. “You did it; you found me!”

“Mom, Mom,” I was gasping over her, “I thought—I didn’t—”

“Shh. It’s okay.” Mom ran her thumbs across my cheeks, wonder in her brown eyes, eyes that looked just like mine—to say nothing of her hair, hair I recognized as precisely Dark Umber. “You’ve grown so much. You’re beautiful.”

I realized then that it hadn’t just been years for me—it had been years for her, too. There was so much I wanted to tell her.

“Mom,” I said. “Since you left …”

But she stopped me right there.

“I never left. Honey, I would never, never leave. I was taken.”

“But … the letter you left for the family—”

“You got a letter? In the mail ? Surely your dad recognized it wasn’t my handwriting.”

I hung my head, realizing how foolish I’d been to ever believe my mom could have done something so callous.

“It was … left in HIVE,” I said. “Saying that you didn’t have time for us anymore. Because of HIVE.”

“Oh, honey.” Mom hugged me again. “You must have been furious. Well, so was I. Eric told the board what he was planning to do all those years ago and I was the only one who objected. I threatened to go to the authorities right then and there, so the way they saw it, they had no choice—they locked me up, and I’ve been here ever since.”

She gestured around, and for the first time, I really took in our surroundings. As prison cells went, it wasn’t too bad. It was the kind of office you saw in startup brochures—a pinball machine in one corner; a set of jump ropes and yoga balls in another; and there, on the far side of the room …

“They gave you a computer?” I asked, incredulous.

“Eric knew I was his best coder,” Mom said, unable to keep the note of pride out of her voice. “He couldn’t afford to lose me. So he gave me this programming rig—with as many safeguards as he could think of. He did his absolute best to make sure I couldn’t leave any messages for anyone in the games.”

She smiled. “Good thing I’m absolutely better.”

“The messages in the Hive Simulator,” I said. “And the Bugs.”

“Exactly. Hidden away in places no one else would think to look. Waiting for the day someone would come find me. It’s a bit dramatic that it wound up happening today—and when Eric found out what I’d done, he was able to corrupt my labyrinth, making it far more difficult than it was ever supposed to be. But it looks like it all worked out, right?”

I felt a pang in my chest as I wondered whether or not I should tell her what had happened in the labyrinth. But I never got the chance because at that moment, she looked down.

“And—you got the boots!” she cried, ecstatic. “Oh, it was a long shot, but when Eric asked me to add some items to the HIVE store, I thought, What the heck. This could be my only chance, and he’ll never suspect it. He’s too arrogant.”

“You think that was a long shot?” I exclaimed. “How could you have known I would even get to Terms and Conditions in the first place?”

Mom looked at me, amused. “Honey, it’s a library. You were going to get there eventually.”

The tears threatened to return.

“No, don’t cry,” Mom said hurriedly. “This is amazing. I’m so proud of you, honey; you did incredible.”

“But,” I said. “Eric is going to start Phase Two, and then everyone will—”

“I know.” Mom sighed. “I would stop it if I could. But with this programming rig I can only reach the marginal things—the store, the mini-libraries, the leftover bits of dead code from years ago, scattered across HIVE. A pair of boots here, a Drone-proof smoker there, obscure little Bugs in some of the games I knew you played with your friends—I’ve been able to leave clues for you, but I’m just absolutely unable to shut down Eric’s code.”

“How is he going to do it?” I asked. “And when?”

“Oh, I know exactly how he’ll do it,” Mom said darkly. “He’ll activate this Update the same way he does every Update: with a quick visit to Terms and Conditions, so he can say that he’s read the new ones before the Update begins. The one thing buying us time is that he can’t just zap his way through the Honeycomb like he does through here. He has to ride that platform all the way up from the Business District.”

I nodded. I’d learned just this morning how long that trip took.

Then I realized:

“Wait. I spent an hour in that loading screen just to reach a regular office in the Business District?”

“You did what?” Mom rolled her eyes. “Ugh. He must have built a back door function into the labyrinth. He used to do that to our investors in real life all the time—make them wait an hour just to meet him. Some tip he read in a business self-help book about how to be the biggest man in the room.”

“Arrgh!” I roared so loud that Mom jumped.

“I can’t believe we’re stuck here because of that—that lunatic!” I said. “And you know what the worst part is? He’s not even unique!”

Mom stood back as I picked up pace and energy. You could tell she’d spent a few years without seeing a teenage tantrum up close and personal, but there was no stopping me now.

“I’m so sick of men like Eric Alanick!” I yelled. “Eric, and Markus, and everyone who thinks life is a game, and they must be the main characters, so everyone else is either a threat or just doesn’t exist! Because if you’re the winner, then everyone else has to be the loser. I’m sick of there being winners and losers at all! You know my favorite thing about books? Nobody flipping wins a book! You just enjoy it! And now we’re all going to be stuck here in this dumb world, and all there ever will be is winners, and losers, and HIVE, and—”

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“Wait,” I said.

“What is it?” Mom asked.

“What if …” I tested out the idea carefully. “What if Jason was right?”

“What?”

“What?” said Jason, still in my ear.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” my mom said.

“Jason Alcorn,” I said. I guess we were doing this one more time.

“The … boy I used to drive home from the library?”

“Told you,” I muttered. “She was there and you just never noticed.”

“Sorry,” Jason said, “I was busy not having parents.”

“What?” Mom said again.

“Sorry. Yes, Mom—the boy from the library. After you left he hit a, uh, really rough patch.” I just decided to go for it. “He got addicted to HIVE and began to think that NPCs were real people and real people were NPCs.”

“I sure did!” Jason said, with a fairly reasonable level of manic cheer for someone whose whole worldview had been shattered less than half an hour ago.

“Oh, no, that’s terrible,” Mom said. “Wait, and—and you think he’s right?”

“Well, no,” I said. “Not about everything—but what if he was right about one big thing in particular?”

As quickly as I could, I told Mom my plan. When I was done, she regarded me with a mixture of pride and sadness.

“Honestly, honey? I love that idea. It’s bizarre and outside the box and everything I wanted to encourage in you and other players when I put those Bugs in the crazy places I did. But it’s like I said—we can’t do anything without a way for me to bypass the security protocols on this rig. We’d need someone on the outside. As long as we’re in here, we’re sealed off.”

“What about Jason?” I suggested.

“What about him?”

“What about me?” he said.

“Oh, right, sorry.” I pointed at my head. “Jason’s in here. I mean, he’s not in here. He’s in my feed, but he’s sitting in the Bullworth Apiary, in the real world, with an old programming rig of his own, using some freaky hacker magic to keep himself hooked up into the pod that I’m in right now.”

Mom stared at me, processing this information. And then she sat down at her rig and began to tie her hair back into a messy topknot.

“Jason,” she said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” Jason said, and it was the most genuinely excited I’d heard him sound about anything all day.

“Oh—yes,” I repeated, after there was a pause in the Queen’s Cell.

“Okay.” Mom booted up her monitor. “Are you operating on an Anaconda system?”

“Actually,” Jason said as I repeated his every word, “it’s a Mocha language processor with a VDMI plug-in.”

Mom laughed. “Oh, that’s old-school. Respect.”

“Th-thank you,” Jason said, and I could hear him blushing.

“Don’t be weird,” I said.

“What?”

“Not you, Mom.”

“Jason, honey,” Mom said, already on to the next thought, “I need you to type in a request-access function for Kara’s pod. Can you do that?”

There was a pause during which I imagined Jason must have been typing at lightning speed, after which he said: “Done.”

“Great. You should be looking at a password menu. I’m going to give you some top-secret access info about HIVE that no one else has. Are you ready for that?”

“I have never been more ready for anything,” Jason said, his voice trembling, “in my entire life.”

“Fantastic,” she said. “Because if my math is correct, we have just under twenty minutes. Here’s what you’re going to do …”

Just under twenty minutes later, right as my brain began to hurt from relaying technobabble from one plane of reality to another, Mom yelled, “And … execute!”

“Done!” Jason said.

“Done!” I repeated.

For a moment, all three of us cheered.

But then the moment passed.

“So now what?” Jason asked. “Do we just wait?”

“Yes,” Mom said. “And hope we were fast enough.”

“Actually, if the plan worked,” I said, “then I think I have an idea of how to get us out of here.”

I pinched my nose briefly, finding a powerset that had been lying dormant all day in my Inventory, and then returned to the Queen’s Cell.

“Now we wait,” I said.

We waited.

If our plan had gone through, right now, things would be getting chaotic in the Honeycomb. The part of me that had grown up on books, that had come to expect a certain standard of narrative tension, wanted to hear the first rumblings of that chaos—the shouting, the confusion, the signs something was coming. But sealed off in this sterile office environment, the only way we would have heard anything like that was if someone came into our hexagon.

Someone came into our hexagon.

From outside the smoked-glass door of the Queen’s Cell, I heard yelling as people ran into the office, so desperate to find cover that they never suspected they were running into the headquarters of the very virtual reality they’d become trapped in.

Then a deafening roar signaled the arrival of the thing they were running from.

“It worked!” I said.

“It worked.” Mom beamed.

Sounds of commotion filled the open-plan offices of HIVE: the shattering of a snack bar being decimated, and the shrieking of hiding players as something huge and destructive lumbered ever closer to the Queen’s Cell.

And then the door was blown off its hinges in a burst of flame, and I saw a face I hadn’t seen since yesterday—a.k.a., a lifetime ago—in Family Feudalism.

A face with two big, smoking nostrils and a lot of scales.

“What is happening?” Jason cried.

“What’s happening is we just changed HIVE forever,” I said, grinning wildly. “And I have control over dragons.”