Wildcard (Warcross #2)

by Marie Lu

“Has he?” Jax interrupts me, her eyes distant and bleak. “Zero isn’t real. He’s an illusion. Sasuke Tanaka’s real body died years ago on a lab gurney. What you’ve seen standing before you is a virtual projection. Emika, Zero is Sasuke’s human mind successfully transmitted into data. He is an artificial intelligence program.”

“Hideo . . . I’m never going to agree with what you’re doing. I’ll never feel right about the deaths connected to your algorithm or your reasons justifying them. But that day, when you were just a boy being interviewed on the radio, hiding your broken heart, you reached a girl searching for something to hold on to. She found you, and you helped her pull herself up.”

“You are forever a piece of my story. I couldn’t turn my back on you without turning my back on myself. I had to try.” My quiet words hang in the air. “I had to hold out my hand to you.”

“You told me you never wanted to see me again,” I manage to say. His voice is low and raw. “Because every time I see you, it takes everything in me to turn away.”