Elusion(76)

“No, this has to be some kind of misunderstanding,” I say, hazarding a glance across the water, because I can’t look either Josh or Avery in the eyes.

“What’s to misunderstand? It’s all here in black and white,” Avery says, snatching her tab back from me.

“Hold on, let’s think about this for a minute,” Josh suggests. “So everyone who has shown addiction symptoms, or had hallucinations, are young people, like us, right?”


“Yes, they’re all under the age of twenty-one. It totally backs up the information in this report,” says Avery.

“Nora and her friends. They’ve been obsessed with getting behind the firewall. That’s why they started hijacking the signal in the first place. To stay in Elusion until they could find a way to do it,” Josh says.

I glance back and see Avery nodding her head in agreement.

She says, “And since symptoms of nanopsychosis vary, you and Regan—”

“Experienced something totally different,” I murmur, trying to ignore the pain in my chest. “Still, if my dad knew about nanopsychosis . . . he would have pulled the plug on Elusion. Or he would have at least put an age limit or something on it.”

“Are you so sure about that?” Avery shoves her tab back in her bag with the force of a pile driver. “Teenagers are a huge part of Orexis’s consumer market. If we couldn’t use their product, then sales would be cut in half.”

“Or kids would have just bought it on the black market,” Josh adds.

“Which is why they wanted to add that chemical,” Avery says. “Probably as a short-term solution to the problem.”

“If they did, it looks like it backfired somehow,” Josh counters. “Or it wasn’t enough to fix things.”

“But maybe it did fix it, for a little while at least,” I reply.

“What do you mean?” Josh asks.

“Sometimes people build up immunity to medication if they’re given it over long periods of time,” I say, somehow channeling my mom’s knowledge of all things nursing related. “Drug resistance. Maybe the sodium pentothal worked for a while, but then for some kids, the effectiveness—”

“Began to wear off,” Avery concludes. “But Orexis was willing to gamble with people’s lives. That’s unforgivable.”

Scary thing is, she’s right.

I don’t know what comes over me, but I grab her arm so hard I practically dislodge it from the socket. “Were you able to find a response to this memo? Anything that shows what my dad told Bryce to do?”

“No.” She yanks her arm away, her eyes piercing right through me. “The encryption algorithms on each of these documents were ridiculous; I was up all night running them through advanced decoding software. I nearly freaked when I extracted this one.”

“What if he never read it? What if it just got lost in the data banks?” I’m grasping at anything that will help my case, but Avery is here, waiting to slap me back to reality.

“Yeah, the odds of that happening are about zero.”

I take a seat on one of the benches near the carousel, resting my elbows on my thighs and covering my eyes with my hands so I won’t burst into tears.

“I just . . . can’t believe any of this,” I say.

“The facts don’t lie,” Avery snaps. “Your father knew Elusion was dangerous, and there are thousands of people at risk because of him. Now I have the smoking gun I need to take everyone at Orexis down.”

My hands fall to my sides, my face sizzling with frustration and anger—at her accusations, at the memo, even at myself. Just as I’m about to lash out, Josh sits down next to me, puts his arm around my shoulders, and fires away at Avery.

“If it weren’t for Regan, you wouldn’t have jack shit, so just shut up, okay?”

“Why are you protecting her?” she growls. “Her dad and her bastard boyfriend are responsible for making Nora sick. Shouldn’t you be, I don’t know, telling her to go to hell?”

“I know you’re scared,” Josh says, calmly. “And when you’re scared, you like to bitch. But yelling at Regan isn’t going to help us find her. You know that, right?”

“We need to make this public right away,” Avery says, steamrolling right over him. “Patrick is probably already at work on a counterattack, now that he knows about the QuTap.”

When I hear Patrick’s name, my heart begins to pound. The voice inside my head that’s been convincing me this is all some kind of grand hoax is now asking questions, like, What if Patrick discovered the memo and has been trying to protect your dad all along? What if he’s going to fix everything that’s gone wrong, if you just give him a chance?

Honestly, I don’t know what to believe. I look around me and it’s as though this world is breaking into fragments and disappearing, like the Mount Arvon Escape. My eyes are playing tricks on me—I’m almost certain that I see metal rungs peeling away from the base of the carousel and floating up into the night sky, as though the moon were a high-powered magnet.

“Regan?” Josh says, shaking me a little. “Are you okay?”

“Just give me a minute; I’ll be fine.”

I don’t think that’s true, but I want it to be.