Elusion(66)

“Listen, Patrick, we need to talk.”

He laughs. “Do you have any idea how much talking I’ve done in the past twelve hours? My voice is almost gone.”

“I don’t care; this is important.”

“What about when I wanted to talk earlier? If I remember correctly, you’ve been ignoring me,” he counters.

“I went to Orexis to meet you, but the press had the place surrounded. Ask your mom. She saw me there. You’re the one who’s playing games.”

He stands up and rubs the back of his neck. “I can’t do this now. Let’s just talk tomorrow, okay?”


“Pat, I’m not leaving here until you tell me why you keep lying to me.”

“I’m not lying to you.”

I roll my eyes. “Really? That’s the best you can do?”

Patrick lets out a disgusted huff and tries to leave the room, but I block his path.

“When I was in Elusion tonight, my Escape practically disintegrated. Is that what sent Anthony Caldwell and those other kids into a coma?” I say, my voice practically shaking.

“Your Escape disintegrated?” His breath catches hard on each word as he steps away from me, seemingly stunned.

“First it decomposed and then everything around me started to vanish. My emotions were raging, too. Indescribable fear mixed with uncontrollable anger. And I saw my dad again. How can you explain all that?”

“Did you go back in using your old tab?” His face contorts into a tight grimace. “You did, didn’t you?”

“This isn’t a downloading issue with my tab and you know it,” I snap. “There are hundreds of reporters downstairs right now, here to ask you if these kids that are being found are getting hurt because of Elusion—and none of them were using my tab.”

A flash of pain crosses his eyes as he drops back down on the edge of his bed.

“You owe me an explanation. If my father were here, he’d demand one, too. Or . . .”

“Or what?” he asks, twisting his head toward me.

“I’ll talk to the media. I’ll tell them that I’ve been to the warehouse. That I see visions of my dead father while I’m in Elusion. I’ll tell them everything.”

“So you’d betray me? Like Josh did with those photos?” Patrick narrows his eyes at me. “I thought you and I . . . After everything we’ve been through together, I thought we were family.”

I recognize his tone of disbelief. I can’t believe this is happening to us either. Last week, we meant everything in the world to each other, and now it’s like we’re becoming enemies.

“I don’t want to. I really don’t,” I murmur. “But I will if I have to.”

When he doesn’t respond, my lower lip begins to tremble. I can’t cave now, but I can’t quite let go of our history together. This is so much harder than I thought it would be.

“Please, Pat. Talk to me.”

He sniffles and wipes at his nose. “Okay. There are some problems. With Elusion.”

The second he makes this admission, the air in the room feels a lot cooler, like someone just broke the thermostat. It’s actually kind of soothing.

“Hackers are hijacking the signal between the Equip and the visors so that they can dismantle some of the safety settings and adapt the programming,” he continues.

“Just like Josh said.”

Patrick grips the mattress hard with his fingers. “Those morons don’t comply with the product directions. They do whatever the hell they want, regardless of how dangerous it might be. And then who gets blamed? The manufacturers, the programmers, and everyone else in between! We’re the ones who get sued and—”

I throw up a hand to put a stop to his oncoming tirade. “How were they able to do it?”

Patrick swallows hard. “I’m not sure, but there’s a chance that the new company that hosts the main server connected to the app cloud isn’t carrying out the security protocols correctly, which would make it easier to hack.”

I think back to the day I went to Patrick’s office with the QuTap. He and Bryce were in the middle of a conversation that I was only half listening to at the time, but now it’s all materializing in my head.

“I just found out that the board of directors outsourced it instead of keeping the server here, where it can be controlled and protected with the highest levels of security.”

“Why would they want to do that?” I ask.

“Well, safety measures cost a lot of money. I guess when the CIT approval was just pending, they saw this as a way to trim some fat off the budget and—”

“Are you kidding me? Orexis is already making a killing, and Elusion hasn’t even hit the national market yet!”

Patrick lets out a frustrated growl. “I just need a little more time, Ree. I can fix this!”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I can try to get the board to void the new contract somehow. I’ll put together a full report of all of the incidents this month, something really convincing.”

“Wait a sec, this month? What are you talking about? The only incidents on record have been from the past week.”

“Something else happened. A week or two before I heard about Nora,” he says, his shoulders hunching forward. “We got this anonymous tip on our customer service site. Someone wrote in to say that the Equip safety function, the one that cuts off the sensors in the visor and the wristband if the levels of serotonin and dopamine are too high, wasn’t working. Because the signal between the app and the device had been disrupted.”