While the counter blared in his ears, he pulled the hood over his head. The sun was sweltering, encouraging the sweat on his nape. He looked up at the sky, cursing the weather under his breath and pumping his legs to go faster.

The comms in his left ear fizzed, and Flint's voice speared through his thoughts. "I'm outside Section H's building," he said. "Permission to engage?"

Thirteen checked his watch. Still a few more minutes before the counter finishes. His portable screen showed him what was happening on both fronts. Converging to a point he fixed up beforehand, Karrel had apparently left the rest of her team to deal with the stealth unit to go off the fighting unit on her own. If her records were accurate, she'd be able to take on any of them. Maybe she'd go after Eight for the girl's destructive ability, using it to flay the others. Or maybe she still had scores to settle with One for injuring most of her team for numerous counters. Either way, as long as Five was there, Thirteen would be able to keep her in check.

His boots scratched against the grass in hurried steps, his stride widening. Never mind the heat nor the waterfall down his back. If he couldn't pull this off perfectly, he'd lose Five before he could even say her name.

"Granted," Thirteen said to Flint. "Have Slate ready to meet me at the rails."

Section H's headquarters stood in the middle of a clearing. A ring of thick forest surrounding it, making field attacks virtually impossible. Only Eight, Fifteen, and Sixteen would survive a frontal assault. One, if she decided to burn the entire woods with her hands. Maybe Seventeen, if he developed a way to think about using his ability more effectively overnight.

Seven would be completely useless with the undergrowth exposing every sound he made. Fourteen would have enough trouble to last her a lifetime. Just as Caden's ability relied on him having visual stimulation, Fourteen's accurate aim involves having something to shoot at that wouldn't defy natural laws. An annoying limitation, considering most of the abilities here defied foundational laws and messed up with his calculations so much he just gave up. Now, he just played by ear, and so far no one died because he was wrong.

But that statistic could change today if he didn't hurry the hell up.

His steps lengthened into brisk walking before quickening to a full-fledged run. By the time he punched through the dense foliage, his chest felt like exploding and his breath lagged a full thirty cycles behind. He had to brace his knees and throw his hood off just to get some air circulating in his system. A shadow fell over him. He looked up to see Slate towering over him.

"Well, aren't you pathetic," the girl had the gall to say. He considered whipping his gun and shooting her point blank. That wasn't a productive move. "You can't even last that far?"

"Section H is across the city," Thirteen responded, straightening even though his side truly wanted to twist his body into julienned strips. "I am not the best at sports."

Slate's answer was a choked hum.

Thirteen ran a hand on his hairline and wiped his wet fingers on his trousers. He pulled the portable screen from his travel bag and checked the live feeds. Great. Now, Karrel has killed One and was now battling Five. On average, the fight could last at least six to seven minutes provided Karrel played it fair. If not, less.

He sank to the ground, sitting on a gnarly root. His fingers flew across the screen, tapping away at the digitized keys resembling his board back at the command room. With the screen so small, he had to shift environments every few seconds or in between waiting times of his algorithm loading to check on the live feeds. The stealth unit was doing well against Verez and his goons. With Caden out of the way, they would have a fighting chance.

He shifted back to the screen where the decryption process went on. Come on. Come on. His gaze flicked back to Slate who stared at him as if she saw her dead comrades come back to life. "Can you mimic a voice?" he asked.

Slate blinked. "Y-yeah," she said. "If I hear it once."

Thirteen nodded, typing a quick code into his screen before flicking his comms to Flint open. "Invert the line to gather noise," he instructed. "Make sure to get as much info on Kalyani. She's the only girl there now."

If the active chips proved to be true, then there were only two people left in headquarters—a girl named Kalyani who could talk to plants and a boy called Jason who could bend light. They decided to not be in the battlefield and Karrel agreed. Now, it was Thirteen's chance to push their leader's buttons, find out how far she'd bend for her comrades. Had she thought of them as friends? As bonds that went deeper than a mere pawn to her leadership?

"Copy," came Flint's reply. A few seconds passed, then a crisp, feminine voice laughed in the background. Thirteen passed his comm to Slate, letting her listen. She returned it to him soon after.

"What are we going to do with it?" Slate asked.

Thirteen looked up at her just as his algorithm cracked the access to the counter's alarm system. "How are your acting skills?" he asked, a grin pulling at the corners of his lips.

That night, long after everyone had gone to bed, Thirteen sat in front of the only screen alive at this hour. The keys, once again, clacked in soothing trills under his fingers. His eyes flitted across the blue landscape of letters and numbers as he wrote layers upon layers of decryption algorithms. His chip was back into the reader, taking him along the thrill of beating the programmers who aimed to hide things from him.

He wasn't solely after information, though. Just how he bypassed the counter alarms earlier, he'd be able to twist the chips' codes to give him the abilities they were programmed with. But...with them being founding chips, would they just grant him abilities based on what his body was capable of? Hence, he needed access to their existing data so he could configure them to grant him what they have granted another host.

The possibilities were endless. Thirteen wasn't aiming to discover all of them. His goal was to twist what was already deemed possible into something he wanted.

A knock resounded on the door. In a flash, he snatched the reader off its connection and threw it into the yawning drawer nearest him. By the time the door opened and Five stepped through, the drawer had slid shut and clicked with finality.

"Hey, can we talk?" Five said. Her hair was back to her chin. With how styled it was, Eighteen had probably done the cutting. That girl had some skills. Maybe Thirteen should drop by. His hair got more unruly by the day.

Thirteen watched her from his periphery as she stalked towards his desk. Leaning her weight against it like Nine would, she glanced at him. With a quick tap on a key on his keyboard, the screen went blank, showing them a blinking picture of a pixelated cat. "Do I have a choice?"

"If you don't, what would you do?" Five challenged.

"I'd avoid whatever this conversation entailed," he answered.

Five scoffed, crossing her arms. "You don't even know what I'm going to say."

Sometimes, he forgot how self-assured people were in their stupidity. Thirteen resisted the urge to roll his eyes, so he tapped a finger on the table's rim instead. "Does it have something to do with the counter earlier?" he said. "Before you ask how I knew—you rarely speak to me unless it concerns your and others' security."

A vexed glint passed across Five's gaze, illuminated by the faint glow of his blank screen. "Well, I assume you already know what you're going to say to me," she tilted her head to one side. "The excuses you're going to make?"

"I do." Thirteen bobbed his head. "I do."

"And what are your excuses?" Five prodded.

He heaved a sigh and pushed his hair off his face. His curls fell back down and stung his eyes. Eighteen's haircut visit should be moved higher in his priorities. "Think of it as philosophy. Ethics," he said. "What you are accusing me of is disregarding the sanctity of human life, correct?"

"To put it simply," she said.

He nodded. "To put it simply," he rolled a hand in the air. "You think we must protect one another as we belong to the same section, and I should, as your de facto leader, not be constantly throwing you into trouble with Karrel and her section."

"My excuse—rather, my ethics—revolves around the same thing, believe it or not," he continued when Five didn't see the need to interrupt. One of the things he liked about her, really. She had learned how to keep him talking. "I protect your lives the only way I know how."

Five cocked an eyebrow. "By getting us killed?"

"A consequence of my choices," he said. "Apologizing won't bring back the dead; we both know that, but I offer you my condolences. I did save you in the end, didn't I?"

"By hijacking the counter's system and staging the biggest fraud since the Game started?" she said. "Don't you realize we have to survive together? That's why we agreed to follow you in the first place. Or was that a fraud too?"

"I save who I can." Thirteen snapped his gaze away from the screen to meet Five's eyes. Let her think he was annoyed. He hated explaining himself. "Between us, I suppose I understand my temporality more."

Five's jaw clenched. Oh, she didn't agree with what she was hearing. It wasn't even what she came here for. She came here to be comforted, to be told of Thirteen's grand plan on bringing down Section H and avenging their fallen comrades. He wasn't going to do that. He wasn't a fool. Avenging the dead was an imbecile's errand.

"You can't save everyone, you mean," Five said after a beat. "But shouldn't you at least try a little harder?"

Thirteen dropped his gaze back to the screen. "I do what I can. I save what can be saved," he said. "Those I cannot, I let go of. Those who need to perform a role for me to get an outcome, perform it to be worthy of salvation. Whether they fail and perish, or succeed and survive—it's entirely up to them."

"So, a means to an end?" Five quipped. "Lives are hardly that."

Thirteen sighed. "If you want to win, that perspective needs to go," he said. "Winning takes selfishness. Getting to the peak means stepping on a mountain of pebbles. The Game doesn't let us have that choice."

Five matched his gesture and removed her weight from the table. The wood creaked with her movement. "I don't fully agree with your ethics, but I understand," she said, ducking her head at him.

"What are you going to do after this?" he ventured. "Mount an opposition against me?"

A snort tore off her nostrils. "You knew about that, huh?"

He crossed his arms and leaned back on his seat. "I know everything that happens in this building," he said. "I appreciate you sticking up for yourself at that moment."

"And I'm doing it again now," Five said. "While I understand your point, I will keep doing what I believe in. Everyone in this section deserves to be free. They deserve to win the Game and get out of here. I will keep fighting for them even when you won't."

Thirteen didn't reply. He watched Five retreat towards the door through the edge of his vision. "Be careful, then," he said just as she was about to close the door behind her. The hinges paused their whining along with her freezing in place. "The Game isn't a place to be chivalrous. I hope you understand that before it's too late."

When he swiveled his seat to see her expression, a playful smirk pulled on her lips. Her hand still rested on the door's handle. The other braced the door frame. "Even if I wasn't," she said. "You'd still come and save me, right?"

That made him chuckle the tiniest bit. It was an amused laugh, something he hasn't done once since he woke up in this cursed place. "Always," he said.

The door shut, and Five's footsteps receded up the stairs. Thirteen stared at the bare panel of wood before him, wondering if what he just said was the absolute truth or something he convinced himself to be the truth. There was a difference, and in the dim blue light of the screen and the next-to-cold air of the command room, it scared him a little to find out he didn't know it.