The Rule of Thoughts Read Online Free Page B

any background files he could find on his friends. Personal information was sacred in the virtual world. Sacred.
    He could sense Kaine’s efforts to crash his system. It was almost like a tangible pressure, pushing down on him. Ignoring it as best he could, Michael swam in a sea of data, searching, searching.
    There. A gamer’s file with all of its experience points laid out like folded laundry on a bed. Everything looked familiar, matched the criteria Michael had entered. He recognized somuch of what he saw before him, spelled out in code—he’d been by that gamer’s side.
    It was Sarah.
    The pressure intensified. The characters on the screen jumped and twitched, pulsed like a drumbeat—something he’d never seen before. The upper-right-hand corner of the screen glowed, a bulge of light forming like a giant blister. Michael found the location-file, seared it into his memory. Sarah. He’d found Sarah. She was real. Relief and something close to happiness swelled within his chest.
    And then everything came crashing down.
    Slashes of bright light flashed across the screen. Acting on instinct, Michael reached up and squeezed his EarCuff, but he knew it would do no good. The NetScreen stayed where it was, though it had lost its crisp shape, its edges blurry. Numbers and letters swirled, barely identifiable behind the barrage of blinking lights. There was a loud buzzing sound. Michael tried to lean back, tried to escape the pulsing screen, but he hit his head on the wall behind him. This was a massive, all-out cyberattack.
    Something popped, followed by one last explosion of blinding light. Michael closed his eyes and turned away, saw spots swimming in the darkness. Sweat drenched every inch of his body. Then the buzzing stopped, replaced by the distant honking of horns, the skittering of debris as wind pushed it across the alley.
    Michael opened his eyes. Of course turning his head had done no good—the NetScreen hovered before him, seeming to lean against the wall of the building. The screen was black, with white-lettered words filling the space:
YOU SHOULD’VE FOLLOWED MY ORDERS, MICHAEL. WE NEED EACH OTHER .
    He was reading the message for a third time when the words dissipated into the dark background; then the entire screen winked out. Michael didn’t have to squeeze his EarCuff to know that it would never work again.

Michael’s brain was tired.
    Even though his stomach ached with hunger, the sheer exhaustion of mental effort overwhelmed everything else. He didn’t even care that the pavement on which he sat was rough and dirty. He slumped over and rested his head on his arms, curled his legs up, and closed his eyes.
    Right there, in the corner of the alley, not caring who saw him, somehow soothed by the hypnotizing sounds of the city, he slept.

    When he woke up, it was dark.
    He hadn’t changed position the entire time he’d slept, and he opened his eyes to see the pavement an inch from his face.He slowly turned his head and stretched, his muscles groaning, joints popping, as he straightened out. Slowly, he got to his feet. He felt like an eighty-year-old man. He stretched out his limbs again and the memory of Kaine’s cyberattack hit him, making his stomach turn. Then came the hunger—cramps that felt like claws raking his innards.
    He needed food. The man at the coffee shop around the corner was a little shocked when Michael ordered three different sandwiches and two bags of chips, but everything in the place looked good. He found a booth and wolfed down the food, staring blankly out the window at the city lights, thinking of the data he’d found on Sarah. She wasn’t close at all. She was hundreds of miles away, and for some reason, it saddened Michael to think of leaving for such a long journey, which made no sense, considering he had no actual ties to the home of Jackson Porter.
    He had no ties at all. To anywhere. It didn’t matter where he went.
    The second sandwich did him in. As his dad—his