Elusion

by kindle@abovethetreeline. com

  No howling wind, no booming thunder—nothing. It’s as if the earth has gone to sleep, leaving just the two of us, utterly and completely alone.

  Yet I still hope.

  I gaze up at the sky. Even though it’s barely visible through the haze, we’ve been using the A in the lockout message as a sort of North Star to guide us, assuming the words in the sky are stationary. But if they’re not, we’re screwed. We could be walking in circles for God knows how long.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah, just checking our bearings. We’re still good.” I begin to walk, trying to ignore the pain shooting down my leg, but then I stumble a little and Josh reaches out to put his hand on my waist, his fingers dangling there when our eyes meet.

  “Maybe we should rest for a couple minutes,” he suggests.

  “No, I’m fine,” I say. “We should keep moving.”

  “I know, but I can tell you’re hurting. We won’t be long, promise.”

  I reluctantly nod in agreement, exhaling like I’ve been holding my breath for days. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Anything,” he replies, with a bit of a grin.

  “Do you think I have nanopsychosis?” I try to hide the worry in my voice but I don’t think it’s working. “After reading that memo, I can’t help but wonder . . .”

  “Is this because of what Patrick said before? About you sounding crazy?”

  “I guess so.” The words my father said on the beach are replaying in my mind, haunting me. “But the first time I saw my dad, he told me I wasn’t safe, Josh. He stared right at me when he said those words, and I swear, nothing about that felt like a hallucination.”

  “I believe you, Regan. And you’re not sick,” he says. “You know, in the mountain Escape, I saw your father too. And I’ve been thinking about it some more, how he ran away from us instead of toward us. It was kind of like he knew we would follow him. Like he wanted us to get as far away from the firewall as possible.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “If your dad is supposed to be some kind of false memory, or a vision or whatever, then why are his actions so logical? Why does what he said to you here, and what he’s done, make so much sense?”

  “You don’t have to do that, Josh.”

  “Do what?”

  “Humor me.”

  He pulls me into a warm hug and brushes his lips against my forehead. “Don’t you get it? I’m on your side about this.”

  “Really?” I say, gripping his arms and laying my cheek on his strong chest. “You think it could be possible that my dad is actually alive?”

  “I do. And the good thing is, if he is, he’s not addicted,” he adds, stroking my hair gently. “The memo said nanopsychosis only affects kids our age, so the theory that he staged his own death because he was a junkie is out the window, right?”

  When I glance up at him, he gives me a grin of encouragement, and it nearly melts me.

  But then the words “staged his own death” form some kind of seal in my mind, rinsing over every synapse and generating a focused burst of clear thinking. My eyes snap up toward the sky, and suddenly the words “ADMINISTRATOR LOCKOUT” have a whole new meaning for me.

  “What if my father got locked inside Elusion, like we are now?”

  A crease of thoughtfulness appears across his brow. “Maybe. We know Patrick is capable of it. But why?”

  I hesitate, trying to piece this hypothesis together.

  “I don’t know. What if Patrick wanted Elusion all to himself? With my dad out of the picture, he became the face of the entire project. And he was able to change the programming in whatever way he wanted, without my dad to step in and say no.”

  Josh nods. “Patrick has millions of dollars in his bank account. I’m sure he has the means to pay people off and make a plane accident look real.”

  I know my anger toward Patrick should be festering like a fast-moving infection, but instead of being mad, I almost feel giddy. We finally seem to be closing in on the right answers to all our questions.

  “If your dad has been in Elusion since the accident, then how could his body survive? Look at what happened to Anthony, and he wasn’t subjected to months of trypnosis,” Josh says.

  I know Josh is right, but I can’t help but hope that my dad has found a way to survive. “We need to get past that firewall,” I say.

  He hesitates and then gives me a quick nod. “Then we better get going; there’s no time to waste.” He bends down to examine his makeshift bandage. “How’s your leg?’

  I look at my calf and notice that the bleeding has intensified. His shirtsleeves have almost soaked all the way through. When he touches it, I flinch, sensing a sharp yet throbbing pain through the muscle.

  His eyes slide back up toward mine. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it?”

  “I’m okay,” I say.

  But that’s a lie, and Josh knows it. I may not be bleeding in the real world, but apparently my brain is still registering the pain.

  Who knows what that could mean?

  “I want you to promise me something,” I whisper to him. “If my leg gets worse and—”

  “I’ll carry you.”

  “No. I want you to promise me that you’ll leave me behind if you have to. That you’ll get to that firewall regardless of what happens.”

  He looks startled and also a little angry. He glares at me in a way I’ve never seen before. Then he shakes his head.

  “Don’t. You’re going to be fine.”

  “Promise me,” I insist. “Promise me that you will leave me behind if you have to!”

  He turns to me and brushes a strand of hair away from my eyes, the corners of his mouth turning up into an adoring smile. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

  A crash of thunder sounds, and noisy, harrowing wind thrashes around us, causing us to stumble. It only lasts a moment, but it’s enough to make my lungs seize up, like they’re out of air.

  “Looks like Elusion doesn’t like your answer,” I joke, clutching Josh’s hand and steadying myself.

  “You’re right,” he says, the loving gaze I just witnessed gradually disappearing from his face. Now, he looks determined. Focused.

  Like he’s plotting something.

  “You’re so beautiful, Ree,” he says suddenly, as he cups my chin in his hands, running his thumb over my lips.

  Next there’s an earsplitting sonic boom as a bolt of lightning cuts through the fog. Thunderclaps roar in the distance while my heart slams against my chest.

  Ree? Josh has never called me that before. It’s always been Patrick’s pet nickname for me.

  Another brutal gust of wind spirals all around us, covering our bodies in dust and clumps of thick mud. My hair is filthy, with bits of reed hanging from its strands. Josh grips me by my hips, holding me firmly in place so I don’t topple over.

  Then he leans into me, nuzzling my ear as he whispers, “Notice how the thunder and lightning happened the moment I called you Ree? I think Patrick’s watching us somehow.”

  I swallow hard, trying to move whatever has suddenly lodged itself in my throat. Can Patrick actually control what’s happening to us in this Escape? After all, he did design this one with me in mind, so perhaps this is all some kind of twisted game to him?

  Josh’s fingers are caressing my cheek now, his nose nestled by my neck, and as good as this feels, I realize that he’s not doing it because he’s overcome by lust.

  He’s trying to send me home.

  “Patrick loves you, Regan,” he murmurs. “If you give him even a hint that he has a chance, he’ll forgive you. He’ll let you go and bring you home.”

  “I’m not leav—”

  Josh puts a finger to my lips, quieting me. “I’m going to kiss you. I want you to break away, push me, slap me . . . make it good. Tell me you don’t feel the same way. That you love Patrick.”

  I’m barely able to refuse before he kisses me, but even though I know this is just fo
r effect—that this is not like before, when he really wanted to kiss me—I respond in spite of myself, wrapping my arms around his neck and letting my lips press against his. As if on cue, the sky explodes with light as buckets of lime greentinted letters and numbers melt into liquid and begin to pour down on us.

  Josh gives me a gentle shake, glaring at me, his face dripping with clover-colored water.

  “Regan,” he whispers into my ear. “This is your chance!”

  I shake my head. “I’m not going anywhere without you,” I say, repeating what he told Avery when we were about to leave the carousel.

  Josh exhales and his breath almost freezes in the air. The temperature is dropping by the second. Any colder and the emerald rain will turn into snow. I shiver as I look up at the lockout message, but it has totally disappeared.

  “We’ve lost our North Star!” I shout over the next deafening clap of thunder.

  “We don’t need it!” Josh yells, pointing.

  The rain has done something unexpected—it’s lifted the fog and allowed us to see the dark, towering wall in the distance.

  The stone fortress looms above us, looking like it has been standing in the same dismal patch of land for centuries. Soaked and muddy, we hold our ground in front of it, shielding our eyes from the rain as we scan upward toward the heavens, following the outline of the barrier against the sky, which is going berserk with lightning.

  The wind continues to howl in protest as Josh takes a step forward, pressing his hand against the dirty, stained exterior. The wall appears to be made from roughly hewed stone bricks, each about six inches in diameter and length.

  “Can we climb it?” I ask, my teeth chattering.

  Josh runs his fingers around the edge of the rock, but can’t get a grip. “Looks like there’s some sort of ledge up there.” He takes a running leap and throws his body up at an indentation in the bricks above us. He ricochets off the wall, falling backward into the mud.

  He flips himself upward, his hands resting on his hips as he surveys the firewall, thinking. There’s so much going on behind his deep-set eyes that even though almost nothing is changing on the surface of his face, I can see him going from angry to worried to despairing to thoughtful to determined to furious to resolved. “Ping tunnels,” he says, quickly turning toward me, his eyes blazing. “In the computer world, there’s this trick hackers use. One server sends an echo signal to a proxy server, and it acts kind of like a trip wire, allowing a user to tunnel through a security network to the side of the program that’s been blocked off.”

  “So it’s kind of like locking the door and keeping the front window open?” I ask, rubbing my arms to keep warm. “The entrance to the firewall is a ping tunnel?”

  Josh glances back toward the wall. “Maybe just a tunnel.”

  I scan at the brick wall looming in front of me. There’s no tunnel in sight. In fact, each brick looks wedged into place, as if it has been there a thousand years. “Why don’t we split up and look for it?” I offer. “I’ll take the left, you go right.”

  He wipes the rain away from his eyes with the back of his hand. “We’re not separating.”

  After I nod, he runs his hand around the mortar, trailing his fingers over a brick. His torn-up shirt is soaked, clinging to his arms like a second skin. “It’s probably not easy to find; otherwise more people would know about it. So look for something unusual. A hidden button. A removable brick. Anything.”

  Balancing my weight on my strong leg, I move slightly to the left, running my hands over the bricks. They’re cold and damp, the insides rough with deep grooves, as if someone chiseled them from blocks of stone by hand. I keep going, my fingers getting covered in soot as I move from brick to brick, trailing my fingers around the edges. If we keep at our current pace, this will take forever.

  I touch my fingers to another brick and notice a slight indentation that feels different from the others. More deliberate. I lean forward, peering at it closely. A letter is etched in the middle of the brick.

  “Josh!” I call out.

  He rushes over, his boots kicking up wet gunk from the ground.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I ask.

  “It’s an A,” he says hopefully, pressing his hand against it. “It feels loose.” He traces the A with his finger then yanks his hand away. The letter begins to glow, bright blue rays shining out from behind.

  “Did it burn you?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “No, just caught me off guard.”

  “What do you think it means?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says, his eyes searching the bricks around the A. “But maybe there are more like this.”

  We carefully scour the bricks, moving farther and farther away from each other, as we scramble to find another brick that has something unusual on it.

  “Regan,” Josh says, his voice hoarse from yelling above the rain. I limp over to him. He’s standing in front of a brick with a glowing E in the middle, like a window into the world beyond.

  “You have to trace the letter to get it to glow,” he says. I nod and continue searching, working faster and faster as the downpour continues

  I look over my shoulder and see that Josh is standing in front of a glowing T.

  A, E, T

  We look at each other. Even through the rain, I can see his eyes dance with excitement. We both know we’re on to something.

  Swiping the soggy hair away from my eyes, I focus back on the wall as I continue my search. I’m about forty feet away from Josh when I scrape a piece of particularly stubborn moss off a brick and see the familiar etching deep inside. Using my sleeve, I wipe away the soot. It’s the letter H. I trace it with my finger and it begins to glow.

  The wall groans, and loose pieces of concrete spill down from above. “Watch out!” I warn Josh as I jump back, instinctively covering my head. The wall shudders and heaves as if it’s about to bury us in an avalanche of bricks. But instead of collapsing, the bricks in the wall begin to shift, sliding around and changing position until each letter is neatly stacked on top of another, resting against the muddy ground and looking like they’ve been there for thousands of years. I inhale sharply as I read the word the vertical letters now spell: “HATE.”

  I think of the piece of paper that Josh found in the warehouse: Nora’s note with Hate Our New Land scrawled all over, the anagram that translated to Thoreau and Walden. Did she write it because she saw those words on the wall herself?

  “I think this might have something to do with Nora’s note,” I say, purposely being cryptic in case Patrick is watching us. “It would make sense, with the anagram and all.”

  Josh’s eyes light up, and he gives me a brief nod.

  We work in silence for a few more minutes, scrambling to find other bricks with letters. And soon we find an R and then an O.

  The rain pounds against us as the wind continues to howl. We work in tandem, each feeling our way. I scrape off more moss and find an U.

  Once again, the bricks begin to quiver. There’s a deep grinding sound as each brick breaks away and realigns itself like a puzzle, stopping when “OUR” is lined up horizontally, with the O on top of the E in “HATE.”

  It’s as if we have the top and side to a door. My breath catches in my throat. Is this a way into the firewall? Did my dad make some sort of key with the anagram for Thoreau and Walden? I think so. If I’m right, and we need to spell out the words “Hate Our New Land,” we’re almost there.

  We keep looking. Soon, we have the letters A, W, E and N.

  The wall begins to shake and Josh and I step back as we witness another reconfiguration. The A stays in place, but the W, E, and N begin to move, the wall realigning until N is situated next to the R from the word “OUR.” So far, we’ve spelled out “Hate Our New,” outlining the side and top of what I think will be the door. But how is this going to work? There’s only one word left to spell the last part of Nora’s sentence: “land.” And even if the word “land” dro
ps vertically from the W and forms the other side of the door, the bricks in the middle will still be solid.

  But I don’t let my confusion slow me down. We keep going, more and more frantic as the storm continues to rage around us, the green rain forming deep, cold puddles that drench our feet. Soon we have two more letters: L and N.

  I move farther and farther away from Josh, my arms beginning to ache from stretching and reaching and pushing against the stone bricks. The cold rain turns to sleet and lightning bolts cross the sky, every now and then slamming the ground behind us as if firing a warning shot. But I barely feel the cold or my once-throbbing leg. Adrenaline is heating my limbs and encouraging me on.

  I scan the wall, searching. There has to be a D hidden here somewhere.

  And then I see it. A brick located just below eye level, splattered with mud. I can only make out the top of a straightedged line, but still I run toward it, scraping off the soggy dirt and the layer of fur and fuzz underneath. I drop to my knees, brushing the bricks clean, or clean enough. There’s definitely a D under here. “I’ve got it!” I yell. And then I hear the roar of a train.

  “Regan!” Josh yells, as the funnel cloud moves toward me at full speed. “Lay flat on the ground and get as close to the firewall as you can!”

  Ignoring Josh’s warnings, I run my fingers around the rough-hewed edges of the letter. As the D begins to glow, the winds hits, plucking me off the ground and throwing me into a whirlwind of debris. Around and around I spin, my body feeling like it’s being ripped apart. And suddenly I’m tossed on the ground, spit out of the tornado. But I can’t move. The winds are still swirling around me, holding me down. With great effort, I manage to pick my head up and look back toward the wall. I’m relieved to see Josh, on his hands and knees, seemingly unharmed, as he fights to make his way toward me, slowly battling against the wind.

  Behind him I see that the word “Land” has aligned vertically, just like I thought.