You have to promise me.
I try to focus my thoughts by glancing at the floor, and I notice that one of the IV bags is inches away from my foot. I trap it with the bottom of my shoe and drag it within reach. I slowly let go of Josh’s hand and pick it up, flipping it over to read the small type on the back.
TPN—Total Parenteral Nutrition.
The formula lists nutrients like glucose, amino acids, lipids, and dietary vitamins and minerals.
“They’re using this to keep themselves hydrated and fed,” I say.
You have to promise me.
What were the emotions behind my best friend’s words? Fear? Guilt? Shame?
My eyes dart around the room and connect with a blue prescription bottle that’s lying near the head of the mattress right next to us. I stretch backward and try to snatch it quickly, not caring that I can feel my skirt riding up my legs. When I have it in my grasp, I lean back up and read the label, but some of the information has worn off. All I can see is that the drug type begins with Zo, and the last name of the patient ends with an L.
“What do you think that’s for?” Josh asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, squinting hard so I can make out the faint traces of lettering. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.
“Maybe it relieves pain or something.”
“My mom’s a nurse-practitioner; I could ask her,” I offer.
Then again, that could lead to all sorts of questions—questions I’m not sure I can answer, or should.
Josh grins a little. “Thanks.”
We sit there silently for a moment, both of us registering these pieces of evidence. When tallied together, they seem to point to one conclusion: Elusion has been compromised, and we have to do something about it.
Before anyone else disappears. Or worse.
“Maybe we should call Patrick,” I say, half listening to an instinct that I never doubted until now.
“He knows.” Josh stands abruptly and crosses his arms over his chest. “Talked to him this morning, told him everything I saw.”
“What did he say?”
“He said I misinterpreted what was going on,” Josh says, rolling his eyes. “Then I asked him to meet me here after school. Guess he doesn’t plan on showing up.”
Don’t tell anyone what happened . . . You have to promise me.
“That’s why I came to you. I was hoping you could help convince Patrick to take me seriously,” Josh says, his voice cracking a little.
I’m simultaneously touched and terrified by what he just said.
He wants me to help him. Then my thoughts return to Patrick, the most helpful, concerned person I’ve ever known. How could he completely blow Josh off like this, especially when he knows firsthand that strange things are happening with Elusion? And while he and Josh haven’t really been friends over the past few years, the Patrick I know would go out of his way to be there for someone in need, even a stranger.
What has gotten into him?
“There’s also your dad. He taught you everything about Elusion, right?” Josh asks, almost willing that question into a yes. “I’m hoping you know something . . . anything that can give me a jump on Nora’s friends.”
I immediately cast my eyes away, because I can’t bring myself to tell him the truth—that while I understand the general mechanics behind Elusion, Patrick was Dad’s one and only protégé. What I know about programming or code could fill my great-grandmother’s antique sewing thimble.
A crashing sound suddenly echoes throughout the room, startling us both. We look to see what caused it and notice that a strong gust of wind has knocked a big shard of glass out of a nearby window frame. That’s when the black spray-paint numbers on the wall beneath it nearly stop my heart.
5020.
I gasp so loudly that Josh backs away from me, uncertain of what to do. I leap up from the mattress and run over to the wall, pressing my hands over the number just to make sure that it’s real. The dingy, crackling concrete under my fingernails confirms this isn’t make-believe or imagined.
Whatever is happening with Josh’s sister and her so-called friends is somehow connected to the vision of my father.
When Josh falls in on my right, Patrick’s voice is no longer ringing in my ears. Now I hear my dad calling out.
You need to find me.
I take a deep breath, letting it out slowly before speaking again. “I saw my father in Elusion last night. He was standing on the beach in the Thai Beach Escape, and he talked to me.”
Josh is silent for a moment, his cheeks flushing a deep shade of pink. Then he exhales and says, “Tell me everything.”
As the wind outside continues to howl, I tell him over the rattling windows about my dad, the crumbling Escape, and the number 5020 carved in the sand. When I’m done, it’s like the room has gone as black as the oil clouds outside.
“This can’t be just a coincidence,” I say to Josh. “There has to be a link between what happened to me in Elusion and what’s going on with Nora.”
“So what do we do now?” he asks me, but when I feel him take my hand again, it’s like he already knows what my answer will be.
“We find out the truth on our own.”
Inside my father’s study, everything is exactly as it was the morning we found out he died. His worn brown leather slippers are near the foot of his favorite polyvinyl nest chair. The laminate coating on his desk has a thin film of dust over it. The central air is still set at what my dad thought was the perfect temperature—sixty-eight degrees. But what stands out the most are the walls, which are covered with antique paintings and drawings in square gilded frames. Gorgeous landscape scenes filled with serene baby blue skies, rolling green hills, and picturesque lighthouses perched on towering stacks of rocks.
“When’s the last time you were in here?”
I feel Josh’s eyes on me, but I don’t turn around when I answer him. I guess I’m a little afraid that my composure might crack if I see his face.
“Six months ago, I think.” I walk over to Dad’s chair and graze my fingers along one of the padded armrests. “I woke up at three o’clock in the morning and wandered downstairs to the kitchen for glass of water. On my way upstairs, I saw a light peeking out through a slit at the bottom of the study door.”
I risk a glance at Josh, and I see his lips are turned up in a sweet yet concerned smile, like he regrets asking me this question. I look away before I can think too much about how Josh makes me feel. I need to focus, concentrate, and believe that what I’m about to do is right.
“Dad and I didn’t see each other much back then. He was always at the Orexis lab, working on Elusion, and when he was home, he was too tired for anything but small talk.” I sit down in my father’s chair. “I knew I shouldn’t disturb him. He treated this room like a private library. But I came in anyway and”—I cover my mouth after letting out a laugh—“he was just sitting here, doing these stupid word puzzles on his tab.”
Josh chuckles. “Sounds like top secret work to me.”
“We wound up solving a ton of them together. We didn’t even notice the sunrise through the window.”
Suddenly my eyes fill up with tears, and I quickly swivel around so that my back is to Josh.
“What do you think we’ll find in here?” Josh asks after a brief pause. I know he realizes I’m upset, and I appreciate him not forcing the subject.
I glance at the closet at the far left of the room. On a top shelf, there is a silver box with the Orexis logo emblazoned on the side. In it are Dad’s personal items, which Patrick brought over to the house a week after my father’s accident. My mother hid the box away because she couldn’t bring herself to go through it.
But I have to. I don’t have a choice. Something is wrong with Elusion, and this box is the only remaining unexamined piece of the life my dad left behind.
“I’m not sure,” I murmur. “But hopefully there’s something that will give us answers.”
I get
up from the chair and walk toward the closet, which opens the moment I step in front of the motion sensors. I stand up on my tiptoes and stretch, grabbing the box.
“Do you need help with that?” Josh asks, reaching up to assist me.
But when I pull it down, I’m surprised by its lightness.
“No, I’m okay. This thing is, like, less than a pound,” I say.
Josh takes the box out of my hands, holding it at different angles and inspecting it carefully. “Yeah, this looks like metal, but it’s probably made of something like carbon-fiber polymer. Where do you want me to put this?”
I point to my dad’s desk and Josh sets the box down. My heart in my throat, I take a laser pen out of his top desk drawer and shave through the thick strip of quick-seal across the top of the box. I take a deep breath and open it up, expecting to find something useful, like a portable hard drive or a small motherboard collection. But there are only a handful of items, and one of them I’ve already seen before.
Tucked underneath a mug with my picture printed on it is a paperback edition of Walden.
At first glance, it looks like the exact same copy Patrick and I found in the lockbox, but as soon as I open it, I notice a difference. On the upper left inside corner of the cover, my father has written in neat black script:
Please return to Regan Welch.
“I love that book,” I hear Josh say, and then I notice the warmth of his breath on the back of my neck. He must be reading over my shoulder.
“Are the transcendentalists big at the academy?” I reply, craning my head a little just in time to see him smile.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s not all fun and games there, you know.”
I grin and turn my attention back to the book, planning to skim through paragraph after paragraph in search of markings or notes. As I start to flip through the beginning, Josh says, “Wait,” and puts one of his hands on mine, sending a charge of crackling energy straight to my heart.
“There’s something on the copyright page,” he adds.
He’s right. The title of the book, Walden, is highlighted in a bold yellow strike, along with the last word in the author’s name, Thoreau.
“Why’d your dad highlight the title and the author?”
I shrug. “Beats me. Let’s flip through the rest of it and see if there’s more.”
I bend the spine of the book a bit so I can flip through the pages quickly and easily. There aren’t any other highlighted portions, but when I reach chapter 3, something falls out and lands on the floor. Josh squats down to pick the object up, his sweater creeping up a bit so I catch a flash of his fair skin above his belt. When he stands up, he hands me a passcard with my father’s social security number stamped on the lower right-hand corner.
“What is my dad’s passcard doing in here?”
“I don’t know. You think he would’ve had it on him when he—” Josh cuts himself off, realizing that he’s about to tread on hallowed ground. “Want me to empty the box?”
I manage a nod as I think back to the day Mom and I listened to the audio files from the HyperSoar Flight Commission, which investigated my dad’s accident. There was a sudden change in weather conditions. A wind sear formed in the stratosphere just as my dad was reentering from the mesosphere, causing an explosion in one of the HS-12’s engines, leading to IMD—instant matter disintegration.
Nothing was left. Not one trace.
But Josh is on to something—no one in Detroit goes anywhere without their passcard. People use them to start their cars, for Christ’s sake. Why would he have left it at Orexis? And how did he even get to the HyperSoar hangar without it?
After staring at it in my palm for a moment, I put it in my back pocket and place the book on the table, where Josh has lined up four digital photocubes. I pick up one and shake it as hundreds of pictures of me flash before my eyes. Dressed up as an old-fashioned rag doll for Halloween, Mom’s hand in mine. Smiling over a bowl of ice cream when I was five. Me and Dad watching a movie on the day he activated our first InstaComm. I hold it close to my chest and look at the other items that Josh unpacked—a small collection of ties my father kept in the office in case he was called into a meeting, a fine-toothed comb, and several multicolored earbuds.
I look over at Josh to ask him if this is everything, and that’s when I see him staring at something too.
A blue pill bottle that bears a strong resemblance to the one we found at the abandoned factory earlier.
“What is it, Josh?”
“Zolpidem,” he says, pointing at the white label. “Do you think this is what Nora and her friends are taking? Starts with the same letters.”
“I think Zolpidem is a sleeping pill,” I say, remembering all the talks my mom gave me about abusing prescription drugs when my always-in-trouble cousin got hooked a few years ago. “Let me see it.”
When I put down the photocube, he gives me the bottle, his brows knitting together in confusion. “That can’t be right. Why would they want something to make them sleep?”
“Maybe you could do a search for Zolpidem on your tab?” I suggest. “Double-check what it’s used for?”
“Sure.” Josh reaches into his pocket and pulls out the device. He types “Zolpidem” into the search engine on his touch screen, and a ton of links scroll in front of us. He clicks on the FDA site and reads the description of the medication. “It says here that . . . ‘the principal function of Zolpidem is to aid sleep, but in very high doses the drug in powder form has been known to wake people up out of a coma-like state.’”
“Aftershock,” I mumble. “If someone is inside Elusion for days, then . . .”
“The side effects are probably much stronger,” Josh concludes, sighing deeply. “So the meds must counteract it somehow.”
My body temp is rising rapidly, so I pull my hair back and twist it so it lies over my right shoulder. I look at the label again, but this time I read everything on it. When I do, my legs almost buckle beneath me.
Patient: David Welch
Contents: Granulated Zolpidem 30mg
Instructions: Take as directed.
Authorized by: Meredith Welch, APRN
A gush of nausea overtakes me as a disturbing theory starts to form in my mind, but before I can say anything to Josh, a perturbed voice speaks up from behind us.
“What are you doing in here?”
I quickly shove the pill bottle into a side pocket of my skirt as I spin around. My mom is in the doorway, dressed in her scrubs and looking at us with shades of anger coloring her eyes. She never comes into my father’s study or goes through his things—it makes her too distraught. The fact that I’m doing both has got to be sacrilegious in her mind.
Unless the theory I’m toying with is right, and she’s not upset with me, but worried I’m going to find something in here that might shed some suspicion on her.
“I’m sorry, Mom, I thought you left for wor—”
“I forgot my dinner in the fridge, so I turned around,” she snips, not even letting me get a full sentence out. “And who is he?”
I’m about to explain, when Josh pipes up and responds for me.
“Josh Heywood, ma’am.” He approaches my mother with a kind, outstretched hand, and when they shake, I think I see her face soften a little. “I know Regan from school.”
My mom gives him a semipolite nod and says, “Josh, could you please give us a moment alone?”
“Sure,” he replies, glancing over at me so he and I can share a sympathetic look.
Once he leaves, my mom charges over to the desk and begins putting everything back into the silver box, her lips pursed.
“Why, Regan? Why would you do this?” Her voice doesn’t have an edge to it anymore. It’s just filled with disappointment.
“Do what?”
“Rifle through your father’s belongings. You know how much he hates that.”
And suddenly I’m noticing the way she just referred to him in the present tense. She does th
at a lot.
Just like she keeps his things in order, as if she believes he’s coming back.
I glance at the box, where we found the prescription for powdered Zolpidem, which wakes people up out of coma-like states.
My dad’s body was never found.
And I saw him in Elusion.
Is my dad still alive, his subconscious living in Elusion? Or is the mere thought of something this ridiculous a sign I’m losing my grip on reality? Either way, it hurts.
I have to get out of here now.
“It won’t happen again,” I say, backing up toward the door.
I hope Josh doesn’t mind going to his place, because I can’t stay. Not when I’m plagued by thoughts that make me feel like the last few months of my life might’ve been built on lies.
Just as I’m about to leave, I hear her call out for me.
“Regan?”
For a moment, I consider pretending I don’t hear her, but instead I turn around and give her the benefit of the doubt. She walks toward me, holding the copy of Walden that Josh and I just discovered in my dad’s things.
“Looks like he saved one for you, too,” she says, offering it to me like a gift.
After I take it and say thanks, she pulls me into a long yet awkward embrace. But this time, hanging on to her doesn’t make me feel stronger.
So I’m the first one to let go.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
NINE
“HOME SWEET HOME,” JOSH SAYS SARcastically, holding his helmet under his arm as he pushes open the front door to his house.
Josh’s uncle lives in a triple-wide FEMA trailer with pewter-color siding, right in the middle of at least five hundred others just like it. They are lined up in rows, like a huge box of mud-covered bullets. Above them is a tangled network of satellite dishes and power grids, a metallic weave of black electrodes stacking into the sky. The Quartz Sector wasn’t much before but the region was practically leveled by the string of tornadoes that struck it three years ago, and reconstruction has been slow, probably because most of its citizens are blue-collar workers or people on government assistance.
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