The one thing worse than seeing monsters that weren't really there, Kaiba Seto had realized, was not seeing them anymore. In the last hour he had caught hardly a glimpse of a nonexistent being, nothing more than the glitter of armor or the flutter of wings out of the corner of his eye, gone by the time he raised his head. Just his imagination, nothing as extreme as full hallucinations.
He didn't feel any more sane for it. Even as his fingers hammered the laptop's keyboard, he felt detached, displaced. As if even while he worked in his office, he was at the same time outside the window, on the ledge and slipping, a two hundred fifty meter drop yawning before him. The fall which had killed Gozaburo, and no dragons perched on the ledge now to catch him--
"Kaiba-kun?"
Yugi's voice dispersed the vision, but not the vertigo when Kaiba opened his eyes (when had they closed?), the couch tilting and swooping under him even though he knew it was perfectly level. White text on black burned in afterimage on his retinas, obscuring Yugi's anxious expression. He blinked to force the spots away, snarled, "What time is it?"
"A little after two. It's okay, Kaiba-kun," Yugi hasted to reassure, "you hadn't actually dozed off yet, you were staring at the page and just blinked. Only a couple seconds."
His erstwhile rival sidled closer. "Here, Kaiba-kun," and he replaced the paper in Kaiba's hand--he was done with it anyway--with a candy bar, pushing it at him insistently. "You should eat something, it's been hours."
Kaiba was more nauseous than hungry, like his gut was still plummeting off that illusionary ledge. But that would be impossible to explain. He stripped the wrapper off the bar instead, bit off half and chewed mechanically, not tasting the chocolate. As he swallowed he stared past Yugi to his desk, where Jounouchi and Honda were hunched over the computer, muttering to one another.
No one behind them, though, neither magician nor elf nor dragon. If the cards were checking the new addresses to investigate, they were leaving the instant they had a destination. Or else they had stopped searching, because they had already found his brother--or had found it was too late--
And he was well on his way to a complete psychotic break, to be considering any of this. Kaiba forced down the rest of the candy bar, deliberately turned away, back to his laptop. "How many addresses have you found?" he asked Yugi.
"Nineteen in the Domino area so far, with the names and aliases you've given us," Yugi said.
"Twenty, now!" Jounouchi called over the correction.
Kaiba nodded, "Good work," slipping out before he could stop himself. Like he was approving of an employee's competency, but none of them here were on his payroll. And yet he was unthinkingly relying on them all the same.
Kaiba paid his employees better than his competitors, better than Gozaburo had, and competition for all levels of Kaiba Corporation positions was fierce. The one aspect of human nature that could always be relied on was self-interest; he could have faith that his employees would work to the best of their ability, because they were motivated to keep their jobs.
But these three working with him now were here for their own reasons. Here out of nothing more than friendship, nothing as substantial as ties of blood, just an ephemeral ideal.
An ideal that had been tested, hard and long; he had witnessed those trials, had instigated some himself, and it hadn't broken. But a hypothesis can never be proved, only disproved, and it was as great a madness to put his trust in an ideal as in hallucinated monsters--but he was glancing at his desk again, without meaning to, knowing hope was pointless and hoping anyway. If just one of the duel monsters would come back, long enough to tell him something, anything...
Meanwhile, he had no choice but to accept the help of Yugi and the others, to rely on their commitment to the principles they so often professed. Rely on their friendship with his brother, their greatest strength, which had never failed them before, even when tested against his own power. They liked Mokuba; they cared about what happened to him, and it was only logical to accept that bias, to use it, like he would any other asset.
Though even their friendship with Mokuba didn't explain the concerns he had overheard Jounouchi expressing, or the look Yugi was giving him now. Nor the bizarre impulse in him to answer that look, to tell them what he had seen, what impossible hope there might be, soaring over the city on silvery white wings.
He wondered if a schizophrenic would be conscious of his psychosis, whether he would know if his inevitable breakdown had already occurred.
He wondered if that mattered to him at all anymore.
At least he was reasonably sure Yugi and the others were real. That should probably count toward their favor. But it didn't give them the right to look at him with such inclusive familiarity. Like a peer, like he was the same level as them. Just another member of their silly little circle.
Like they cared--
The alarm sounding from his computers' speakers caught them all off-guard. Yugi jumped to his feet like he had been hit with an electric shock, and Jounouchi rocked back so hard he almost bowled his chair over. "What the hell's that?"
Kaiba wasted no time answering the bonkotsu, hurriedly calling up the duel disk uplink on his laptop, typing so quickly he nearly mis-entered his password.
The worldwide network of satellites and computers that comprised the Kaiba Corporation duel disk system was one of the most secure on the planet. Based as it was on military technology, the network's core operations were designed to be impenetrable, and after Battle City Kaiba had personally rebuilt the security protocols, with Mokuba's able assistance.
Two KaibaCorp support centers, one in Japan and the other in America, kept a twenty-four-hour watch on the system, checking all unusual activity in the case of a crash or a cyber-attack. They dealt daily with a host of problems, amateur hackers and the thousands of fake cards that players tried to use every day, as well as monitoring legitimate duels, especially during big tournaments. They had several thousand categorized alert codes, and handled most incidents autonomously.
From time to time the center directors would contact their CEO to report potentially serious problems. Additionally, a couple dozen of the highest level emergency codes were set to trigger automatic alerts in Kaiba's own system as well as the centers. Most of those he could trust the centers to resolve, and would merely keep an eye on their resolution; occasionally he would advise their course of action.
Of all the codes indicating unusual activity on the system, there were only two that the system was programmed to bypass the support centers and alert him directly, situations that he wanted to personally handle before they became known to anyone else, even inside his own company.
One of these alerts hadn't been triggered for some time. It signaled that somewhere in the worldwide duel disc system, a God Card had been played.
The other alert had never sounded before, but Kaiba still recognized it instantly. Even before he logged into the system, he knew what it was. Who it was. Who it had to be, and the blood pounding in his ear roared like dragons, something inside his heart so powerful it might tear itself free from his chest.
"Kaiba," the bonkotsu asked--they were all hanging over him, Yugi and his two friends, leaning over the couch almost touching his shoulders, but he was too absorbed to shove them away, "why the hell are the computers flipping out? You find something? What'd that noise mean?"
There were only four of those cards in the world, and only three undamaged, three that could be played in the duel disk system, and all three were in his deck, safe in his pocket. None had initiated this fourth, impossible signal, beamed from disk to satellite and setting off the alarms, sure as a beacon spelling out his name. No fake card could fool the system's protocols; no random hacker could be that lucky. There could be no doubt at all.
Just hope.
"Someone just played a Blue Eyes White Dragon," Kaiba said.
o o o
The dragon was magnificent, rearing up to its full height, white wings spread wide and jaws gaping in its thunderous roar. Its blue eyes flashed, vicious and victorious, and it seemed to Mokuba that the monster was looking at him, though the holograms weren't programmed to detect anyone not wearing an active duel disk.
It was there only for an instant, and then vanished in a burst of disintegrating static, as the Ghoul ripped the fake dragon card from his duel disk's slot and flung it aside. "What the hell was that? That was no Red Eyes!"
"It looked like a Blue Eyes White Dragon," one of the other Ghouls said.
"I know what it looked like!" shrieked his boss. "But it sure as hell wasn't supposed to be--we don't have any damn Blue Eyes cards, what good would it be to make a copy everyone would know is fake?" He deactivated his duel disk, swung around to advance on Mokuba. "You! You did this!"
Mokuba's back was against the computer desk; he couldn't retreat any further, and the other two Ghouls were between him and the door. "I--I'm sorry," he stammered, putting as much fear and confusion into his voice as he could manage, with the dragon's triumphant roar still echoing in his ears. "I must've made a mistake with the codes--"
"I'll say you made a mistake," snarled the Ghoul. "Did you think we'd be too stupid to notice?"
"I'm sorry," Mokuba cried again. His heart was pounding in his chest--if they did notice, if they realized the ramifications of what he had done... "I thought that was the code for Red Eyes Black Dragon for sure--"
"That's what you told us," the Ghoul said. "You claimed you had it programmed correctly, that all we had to do was test it, make sure our card would really play."
"It did play, though," said the same Ghoul who had spoken before, the tallest of the three of them. "The hologram was perfect, the system accepted it as a genuine card. So he got that part right."
"The system accepted it as the wrong card! What good does that do us?" The scraggly Ghoul took hold of Mokuba's collar, dragged him up off the floor to scream in his face, "Like we'd mistake a Blue Eyes for anything else! What'd you think, that we'd wait to test it until after we let you go? I know what you're trying to get away with here. You don't know a damn code except for that dragon--that one's probably never been changed, right, since we've never bothered with fake Blue Eyes cards. You don't know the access codes for any other cards!"
"No!" Mokuba protested, forcing his voice high enough to crack. "No, I know more cards, really I do--just let me try again, please, I'm sorry!"
"Why are you so eager to try? You think it'll buy you some time? Your time is up, kid. No one's coming for you!"
"Please, I can help you! Don't hurt me again!"
He was braced for the backhand, but the Ghoul's blow was hard enough to knock him to the floor. Mokuba lay there for a moment, letting the tears he had been holding back for days freely well up, fill his throat. "Please, don't, I'm sorry, I really tried," he whimpered, knowing it would encourage the man's violence, that show of weakness like blood in the water to human sharks such as these.
The kick to his stomach forced the breath from his lungs in a gasp. "I'll do anything, I'll tell you whatever I know, please," he choked out, curling around his bruised body. Somewhere above him he heard the dragon's outraged howl.
None of them heard it, of course, but one of the other Ghouls stopped their boss before he could land another blow. "If he knows something, we shouldn't get rid of him yet," the man pointed out, while Mokuba lay there, not moving. Faintly, light as a moth's wings, he felt white scales brush his cheek. He didn't open his eyes. The taste of blood tainted his mouth, and still he had to fight not to smile.
Let them have this victory over him; let them think they had won. Let them think about how pathetic a kid he was, about how easily they could hurt him, about how he was helpless and subject utterly to them. Let them think about anything, except the duel disk system, and the uniqueness of the Blue Eyes, and the signal he had sent, bright as shooting off a flare over his location.
All he had to do was wait; let them do anything, just as long as they didn't take him elsewhere. As long as they didn't go anywhere, until the dragon brought his brother here.
to be continued...
And I'm back! Hopefully with more on the way shortly. Big thanks as always for the reviews - you all make me eager to post, knowing it's being read. Which is good, because I suspect if I left Mokuba in this situation much longer, his Nii-sama would come hunt me down. Personally. ...Yes, I know Kaiba's a fictional character. But do you want to be the one to tell him that?
