Elusion(35)

I shake my head.

“I’ll help you,” he offers.

“I’m not worried about that,” I say abruptly. “I can make it over—no problem.” I nod toward my skirt. “I’m just . . . not dressed for fence climbing.”

He moves toward the fence, closer to me. “Oh,” he says, smiling.

He takes his left hand and covers his eyes.

I scan the fence, smirking. Even though my gut is telling me that climbing a chain-link fence in a skirt and sneaking into an abandoned building with a guy I don’t know that well is not the greatest decision I’ve ever made, I cast my reservations aside.

After adjusting the tightness on my O2 shield, I walk over to the fence and place the toe of my shoe in a hole in the wiring. My hands latch on as high as I can reach, and I pull my body up, flexing every muscle, including ones I didn’t know I had.

“Good, now just lift your other leg and push up,” Josh instructs.

“I thought you weren’t looking!” I say, repeating my actions as I continue. It’s definitely not as easy as he made it seem a moment ago. I feel my face heating up, and my fingers are already sore from gripping the cold metal wire.

“Okay, all you have to do is throw one leg over and you’ve got it,” he says. The frosty wind prickles my legs, but I no longer care about modesty. I just want to make it to the other side.

I slip a bit, but then I manage to scale the rest of the fence, and I jump to the ground with an unsteady thud. I trip over my own feet and wobble into Josh, who catches me before I can fall. His hands grasp me firmly at the waist; the acrylic shield covering my nose and mouth is pressed against his neck. I can’t help but remember how he smelled at Patrick’s party—cedar with a hint of soap.

“You good?” he asks, concerned.

“Fine,” I say, looking up at him.

Josh lets me go and takes a couple of steps back. “Nice job.”

“Thanks.”

He gestures to a door with a few slabs of wood nailed to the outside of the frame. “This way.”

I follow him as he ducks underneath the planks, dodging jagged edges that threaten to rip through my jacket. Josh points to some clover-colored glass splattered across the floor and guides me around it. Then he leads me toward a stairwell marked EXIT.

“It’s up a couple of floors,” Josh explains.

“What is?”

Josh doesn’t reply—he just starts climbing. We stop on the third landing, and I trail behind him as he pads down a long, empty hall that has strands of electric cords dangling from the ceiling. At the end, he pushes his weight against a large metal door that squeals like a trapped mouse when its hinges move, and holds it open for me.

“Proof,” Josh finally answers.

The air seems clear in here, so I pull off my O2 shield and hook it to my skirt with a quick snap of a metal belt loop. Josh does the same. I look around the room, confused by the scene before me. There are tools scattered across the tops of makeshift worktables, and heaps of computer hardware fragments are practically everywhere. There are also several old, dirty mattresses, piles of MealFreeze containers, IV bags, and pill bottles littering the floor.

“Proof of what exactly?” I ask.

“That we’re being lied to about Elusion.”

I walk over to one of the worktables and pick up a plastic fragment that is sitting next to a broken compact drill. I hold it up to the faint light that’s streaming through one of the smudged windows and study it closely. It’s definitely a part of the Equip wristband—I can still see a small part of the Orexis company seal.

“Where are we?”

“An E-fiend hideout,” he says, and I wince at his use of that Avery-coined term. “People come here and Escape inside Elusion for days.”

“Impossible,” I say, taking a step away from him. “Equips automatically shut down when your time in Elusion is up.”

“What if there was a way to interfere with the communication between the Equip components and the cloud that hosts the app?”

“You mean hijack the wireless signals?”

Josh nods. “Once that happens, someone could instruct the operating system to do whatever they want.”

“Like disable the safety settings,” I say breathlessly. “But they’d have to know how to get past the Elusion server. Who would know how to do all that?”

“My sister,” he murmurs.

It feels like all the air has been sucked out of my lungs. “But . . . aren’t you the computer science master?”

“Nora fell in with this group—they’re ultra tech geeks like Patrick, much better than me. They spend all their time trying to break the signal down so they can stay inside their Escapes longer and stretch out the trypnosis high,” he continues, his voice hard as stone. “Thought they were harmless at first, but when I came back for a visit a few weeks ago, I saw Nora and she looked like hell. Malnourished, bloodshot eyes, shaking hands. I followed her here last night. A bunch of her friends were attached to their Equips, supposedly for over twenty-four hours. Some were strung out and hooked up to IVs, desperate to Escape again as soon as they could. They were like—”

“Addicts?” Just like Avery said.

“Yes,” Josh agrees.

“So what did you do?”