Five groaned, turning her head against the pillow. She followed the normal routine of people waking up—stretching her arms like a lanky cat, curling her legs underneath the covers, and checking the room to see if something was odd. Her gaze landed on Thirteen where he sat for the last five hours. A scream tore off her throat. She bolted upright, scrambled back, and pointed an accusatory finger at him.

"W-what are you doing here?" she demanded, her eyes wide. Her fingers bunched the blankets up and drew it over her chest, even though she was still dressed in her black jacket and Thirteen was three meters away.

Thirteen frowned, setting his screen aside. He uncrossed his legs and strode towards her bedside. Her body tensed, hands searching for something to smack him with under the covers. "Relax, would you?" he snapped, sinking into the foot of the bed. The silver rails creaked when he rested his hand on them. "I'm beyond touching people. Sorry to disappoint."

That seemed to jar her into dropping her guard. She blinked, pushing her matted hair off her face. "What happened?" she asked. Her eyes traveled from his face down to his arms. They stayed where his hands clasped each other with his elbow propped against the rails. "Why are we here?"

"I'll take it as our reason for visiting the infirmary," Thirteen answered. "You don't want to hear a philosophy lecture, do you?"

Five rolled her eyes, snorting. "As if you know anything about that," she muttered under her breath.

"I am proficient," Thirteen defended, his ego flying out of his lips faster than he could stop it. He shook his head. "But the infirmary visit is because of something rather...unnerving."

She dropped her eyes to the ground. "It's about the overtaking, isn't it?"

Thirteen inclined his head to one side. "Overtaking?"

"I remember everything," Five said, picking at her lips. For someone who could grow anything with her hair, she could use a stick of balm now. "Since we first talked in the Northern region, and you freezing my ass off."

"Not your ass," Thirteen corrected.

Five snorted. "Figurative. You don't need to be accurate all the time, you know." She waved a hand in the air to dismiss the topic. She must have known he wouldn't let it go until they had lost the thread of the conversation. From the sag in her shoulders, she didn't want to go around in circles with him either.

Her legs folded closer to her chest, her arms hugging them. "But after I got out of the ice, my aim has always been to get to Seven and Slate," she continued. "Then, it happened."

Thirteen faced her fully, tucking a leg beneath him. His boots sat somewhere outside the infirmary. Slate expressed her concern about lugging dirty shoes inside a sacred and sterilized room, but really, it was to avoid making a noise. The cold seeping into his joints and bones was uncomfortable. He wouldn't die from it, though.

"What does it feel like?" he asked.

Five looked to the ceiling. "At first, it was a light thumping at the base of my neck. Then, it would travel up. The speed varies, but when it gets here,"—she pointed to her forehead—"it takes over my thoughts and floods my senses with nothing but an irrepressible urge to snap someone's neck."

"Did that urge focus on only one person in particular?" he prodded.

She pursed her lips, a hand coming up and rubbing her chin in thought. "Sometimes, yes," she said. "The urges would intensify whenever..."

Her eyes snapped up to him, and the realization clicked for both of them. "What the hell did you do?" She threw off the blanket and leaned closer to him. She didn't know what her unconscious actions meant. But he did. And he wasn't sure what he'd do with it. "What are you doing now?"

As an answer, he pulled out Karrel's chip and slotted it into the reader on his arm. He had gotten used to the sharp stab in his arm whenever the sharp needles piercing his skin were jostled. Five watched this all with a flat expression. Either she wasn't impressed by his ability switching or she was working out whether to be disgusted or horrified by the mere notion.

Either way, as Karrel's ability loaded into his system, he studied Five's ability, his mouth carrying over the conversation as usual. "Part of what you've seen," he answered. With Five's ability off most of the time, he couldn't see where the external command would come from. They were together now, weren't they? The stimuli should come soon. "I've been experimenting with the chips and have gotten close to accessing the mainframe."

Five knitted her eyebrows. "Mainframe?" she asked. "Care to talk in sentences I can understand?"

"Sure," Thirteen said. "The chips, as I surmised, are hard drives where information is stored. Ability records, patent backgrounds, battle logs—you name it. I've mined to the deepest level, but I've yet to reach the mainframe. This is the level where the chip's core code should be."

She hummed, picking at her lips again. "And this is important because...?"

Thirteen edged off the bed, noting the tension easing off her shoulders for a bit. He trudged to the bedside table where a recycled heater and a scavenged mound of paper cups stood. Seven had been kind enough to find those for Five when Thirteen first discovered the infirmary.

"The chips are what gives rise to an ability. Any ability," Thirteen answered. He plucked one cup from the mound and poured water from the heater. "They only need to connect to a biological system of its host, and it would configure the best route to enhance the individual, giving them a separate biosystem that can manifest itself into what we call abilities."

He offered Five the cup, never looking at her as she took it and he trudged back to the foot of the bed. The thin mattress crumbled under his weight for the second time. The ring lights slotted in odd points in the ceiling flickered. The one closest to the door would probably give out first—a prediction he made after running a quick calculation in his head assuming the average rated life. What were those anyway? CLFs? LEDs?

"The Corrector doesn't like how I'm getting closer to reaching them and the information they are desperate to hide," he said. His curls poked his eyes whenever he blinked the wrong way. Perhaps Five's ability was the one Karrel's chip copied. What a pain. "There can only be one supreme being in the Game, and as you know, information is the currency towards power."

"So, are they sending me and Eight to kill you?" Five said, taking a sip from her drink. She smacked her lips when it wasn't even that good. It was barely potable. "Why not send you into overdrive? If they can influence each one of us, they can do the same to you."

Thirteen stuck a lip out. "Which leads me to assume something hinders them from doing so," he said. "We can run our heads around it. Over and over, if you like, but we'll eventually get nowhere. Without knowing everything about what's up there or what's beyond, it's impossible to plan your next move."

"Is the Corrector simply trying to get rid of me to get the Game to continue, or are they planning towards something far grander—something that we won't understand until we've seen the Game for what it truly is?" he continued, his voice evening out to that lecture timbre again. From his periphery, he saw Five's eyes glaze over. Props to her for still trying to listen at this point, but she asked the question. He was only inclined to give an answer. Despite how long-winded it was. "What I mean is that we won't really know what the Corrector is going to do next, what they are steering the Game towards, and what our place in it is. Hell, we don't even know who they are."

"And the commands? Did the Corrector really send them?" Five ventured, taking a huge gulp from her cup. Did it even have any left after her first swig?

Thirteen retrieved the screen and pulled up the recent copy of the records he pulled from her chip on his brief way back to her. "Here's the proof," he said, passing her the portable hunk of glass and wires. "I hope you don't mind me taking a look."

Her eyes landed on the bandage rolled around her wrist. Instead of saying something, she gave the cup back to him and ran a finger across the screen. She must have observed him use the gadget, knowing how to scroll up and get around the interface. Dark violet eyes skimmed the walls of text, the screen's eerie blue glow turning her pale skin more ethereal.

"The Corrector gives the green light, as the closing remark implied," Thirteen interjected, setting the cup down on the bedside table. She flashed him a slight glare, but didn't tell him to stop. What right did she have after treating him like a nanny? "But I doubt they are here personally to execute the command."

"You're saying someone else was inside, following us around?" Five asked.

Thirteen shrugged. "They don't need to be here to do that," he said. "Perhaps another person was stationed somewhere. Someone who has the expertise to facilitate the Project and can do it without direct contact with anyone in the grounds. If we locate where the commands are coming from, maybe we can storm that place and put an end to this madness once and for all."

"Is that why you loaded a chip into that..." Five jerked her chin towards his arm.

He hefted it into the bland light. "I repurposed the reader you made me," he said. "It now connects to my bloodstream to facilitate easier activation and switching."

"That can't be harmless," she said.

Thirteen locked eyes with her then. Perhaps, it was accidental. "You get used to it," he replied. "I can sense Two lingering in the same floor like I told him two. That boy can never switch off his ability, and Karrel's chip has a wide scope in sensing and duplicating abilities."

He raised both arms as if he was conducting an orchestra, stopping inches away from Five's temples. "Two's ability lets him connect into a person's mental synapses, enabling him to view parts of the brain in images. He can also decode the information and imprint them into his brain. Karrel's ability lets me do the same thing. May I?"

Five scowled. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to look into your brain," he replied. "There is something I need to confirm."

She glanced at the chip pulsing in his arm then back at him. "Will it hurt?"

Pain was the most trivial worry in this life. Instead of answering, Thirteen inched closer and beckoned her to do the same, to bridge the distance between them. She could take it any way she ought to, but he merely needed to get his hands on her temples, activate Two's ability, delve into her mind, and fish out what he needed. "Close your eyes, and don't move," he instructed. "I'll be done in a jiffy."

Five blew a breath and surrendered her head into Thirteen's fingers. They pressed on both her temples. As two abilities surged from him to her body, he relaxed his muscles and focused on scouring her mind. The process was the same with how he did it to Two. The ebbing sparks of color the deeper he went and the entire period of nothingness were the same. When the last flicker of light showed up, he expected to see a girl lying on the hospital bed much like one in the infirmary. Someone would be crying—a woman who looked eerily the same as the one in his head—and she would choke to death. The memory would always end there, and he would always wake up soaked in sweat.

Instead, the image that flashed into his mind was different. Far from expected.

In Five's head, he watched an entire film. He followed her as a younger child, seeing the world through wide eyes and idealistic wonder. Thoughts were absent from her memory, but she guided him through a landscape of white-hot corridors, hulking glass windows, and people in white coats and rubber gloves bustling around strange equipment and colorful substances. Most of the faces were blurs and blobs, either obscured by surgical masks and blue bouffant caps or adorned with goggles and small pin lights shining down her eyes that got in the way of the view of the ceiling.

It was a long while of alternating black and sheets of color, as if she slipped in and out of consciousness between each instance. Thirteen then watched blobs of thick blood spray across walls, floors, and down her arms and legs. A thin, white hospital gown covered most of her body, and her memories showed him nothing but that. No sign of a different life outside the grounds. Not one clue she knew someone outside the Game and whatever this monster facility was.

But this was new information—one Thirteen could use to piece another conclusion in his head. He withdrew from Five's head and popped Karrel's chip out. She opened her mouth, no doubt to ask what he found. He didn't hear if she did ask, his mind latching onto his current thought train.

The pieces clicked together. Something gave them their abilities, and they weren't the chips. A host couldn't accept the chip if its biological functions weren't primed for its introduction. That was what the laboratory was for. Five's new memories were the deepest level of the truth, and he had just unlocked it when he slammed her head against the wall. It should be the cause, since the first time he started dreaming, it was after she knocked him flat against a pillar, causing a concussion.

Which meant all the other memories he overheard people talk about during the first counter were false. No one retained memories of the outside world either because they didn't exist or they were deleted. On purpose. The brain needed to anchor itself and not realize their faulty memory, so the Corrector did the next best thing.

They implanted fake memories.

That was why he saw the same thing in Two's mind, just tailored to the boy's mind. Which raised another important question—was the woman in Thirteen's version of the fake memories even real? Was she part of the illusion, or was she someone his brain made to complete the picture? Finally, did the Project's multiple interjections in the workings of her brain unravel the safety locks they placed on it? Was that why Five unlocked a different set of memories?

What would happen if even this new information was false too?

Fingers snapped in the air, shattering his thoughts into a million shards. He turned to find Seven, Slate, and Five all staring at him as if he had sprouted wings and started flying. "What?" he snapped.

Five scoffed. "You thought of something, didn't you?" she asked. "You never space out unless you're thinking."

"Are you able to remember the image I unearthed?" Thirteen asked. She bobbed her head, causing the two newcomers to turn from her to Thirteen then back again. "Tell me if you remember something more. We might be able to get to the bottom of this faster."

"What the hell is going on?" Seven demanded. "You've been talking here for hours."

Thirteen rose and swiped the screen Five's side. "Gather the others," he said, tucking the screen under his arm and stalking towards the infirmary's door. The faded plastic curtains waved at him from behind Five. "We're getting out of here."