Elusion(47)

I just have to be patient and wait for it to become real.

So I steel myself and say to Josh, “Keep trying. Please.”

He doesn’t answer, but I can hear him clicking away on his laptop, each stroke of his fingers hopefully bringing us closer to some kind of breakthrough. This goes on for about five to ten minutes, and my eyes never leave the tower. But with each heavy and frustrated sigh of his, my hopes begin to wither away. When thoughts of my run-in with Patrick begin to flood my head, I distract myself by tracing the concrete-and steel-infused horizon on my finger, the squeaking sound of my skin against the glass echoing inside the capsule.

And then it happens.

“I think I got something!” I hear him exclaim.

I spin around, my hair almost whipping me in the face. I stumble over to Josh and squat down next to him, my hand on his arm. “What’d you find?”

Josh redirects his eyes so they meet mine, and grins. “I only had a few files left when this one ruptured.”

I tilt the laptop so I can get a better look at the screen and watch as he scrolls through pages and pages of spreadsheets filled with hundreds of diagrams that look oddly like genealogical charts. There are lots of rectangular boxes filled with sequences of letters and symbols. Connecting them together are solid and dotted lines with arrows pointing in multiple directions.

I’m not sure what to make of it.

“These are parse trees,” Josh explains, pulling away from me to point at one of them. “They basically break down the source code of computer programming languages.”

“It’s a map?”

“Yes. The only problem is we have no idea what program it’s for.”

I reach over Josh and slide two of my fingers across the screen so I can zoom in on one of the trees, but enlarging the visual unfortunately doesn’t give me any deeper understanding of its meaning. “This could be source code for something my dad might have been working on before Elusion.”

Josh narrows his eyes, studying the figures carefully. “There are at least twelve levels of syntax being deconstructed here. What other program would have code this complex?”

“We need to know for sure, though,” I counter.

“But we can’t figure that out until we make sense of these trees,” he says. “And this is way more complicated than what I’m used to.”

“God, I wish my dad had taught me . . . then maybe I’d be able to help.” I stand up, and Josh instinctively moves over on the bench, giving me room to sit down. When I do, I bring my knees up to my chest and rest the heels of my sneakers against the metal. “He spent all his time training Patrick, who was a natural at it, of course. Like everything else.”

I used to admire that trait in Patrick, but the pinched sound of resentment in my voice paints a different picture altogether.

“Well, he’s the last person we can go to for advice,” Josh says, smirking.

I smile back.

“Listen, I might be able to get somewhere if I take the QuTap back to the person who gave it to me,” he suggests, ejecting the magnetic device in question out of the laptop’s side port.

I shake my head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. We can’t risk someone finding out what we did to get the information that’s on there.”

“I think I can get that point across.” He pushes up his sleeves, and I take a nice, long look at his toned forearms and large hands. I see what he’s getting at, but again, it’s hard to picture Josh as a threat, even after what he’s told me about his past.

Maybe that’s because we’re getting to know each other while we’re most vulnerable.

“So you take the QuTap back and then what?” I ask.

“Haven’t thought that far ahead.”

Just as he’s about to shut his laptop down, a chirping noise comes out of the speakers. I take a peek as he pulls up his personal message system, but glance away when he catches me in the act. Thankfully, he doesn’t tease me about it. Just one look at my flushed neck and he’ll notice I’m embarrassed enough as it is.

“You need to see this,” I hear him say.

When I shift my eyes back to Josh, his fair complexion has gone a little pale and his mouth is hanging open in shock.

“What’s wrong?”

He turns his laptop toward me, and a video clip is pulled up on the screen. It’s posted on the New Associated Press site, with the headline “Do You Know This Child?” Josh clicks on the Play button and the news story begins to roll. A young woman with a brunette bob and a microphone headset is standing outside a hospital’s emergency-room ambulance bay. She begins:

“This afternoon, police found a comatose boy on the streets of Miami. He was rushed to the hospital, where he is being treated for severe malnourishment and possible head-related trauma.”

“Turn it up,” I say, dropping my legs to the ground with a thud.

Josh immediately increases the volume.

“The young man had no picture ID or passcard, so he has been admitted as a John Doe. He appears to be fifteen years old, six feet tall, and about one hundred sixty-five pounds.”

The image of the reporter dims and a photo suddenly appears in her place. It’s a snapshot of the boy in question. His eyes are closed and he’s in a hospital gown, so the picture must have been taken after the doctors stabilized him. His cheekbones are sharp and raised, and he has a narrow chin. His coppery hair is greasy at the roots, and he has a bit of acne in a thin line across his brow.