Elusion(79)

“Leave her alone, Avery,” Josh warns.

But Avery doesn’t listen. Instead she puts her hand on the girl’s shoulder and shakes her. “Where’s Nora Heywood? Answer me!”

“Stop it! You’re going to hurt her!” I push Avery away with one strong, forceful hand.

“If you don’t get out of my way, you’re going to regret it,” she threatens.

Josh stalks over to the corner and yanks Avery back by the collar of her coat. “I said leave her alone!”

When Avery falls on her butt, she looks up at Josh, her jaw clenched. “I can’t believe it. Is she more important than your own sister now?”

“That’s enough!” he shouts.

Before I can squeak out a word to either of them, I hear something fall to the floor beneath me. I look down and see a tablet with a neon quilted protective casing, right near the girl’s limp hand. Once Avery sees it, she races over and grabs the tab greedily.

“This is Nora’s,” Avery said, her eyes filling with tears. “She got this from a street vendor in the Merch Sector. She had it engraved. Look!”

When Avery puts it in the palm of Josh’s hand, he smiles a little as he runs his fingers over the embossed initials. “You’re right—it’s Nora’s. Even if she was never here, this girl must have come in contact with her at some point.”

“Can you turn the tab on? Maybe we can see who else she texted,” I say.

Josh presses the power button several times, but no luck. “It’s not working.”

“That’s why we have to get information out of her, before it’s too late,” Avery says, pointing at the girl.

I look down at her and bite my lip. Her complexion is quickly losing color. “If we don’t get her to a doctor, she won’t be able to tell anyone anything.”

Josh starts pressing numbers on his own tab. “Regan’s right; we’ve got to call for help.”

“We’ll never get clearance to see her again, especially if the doctors think this is related to Elusion. I’m sure someone at Orexis will see to that,” Avery says, her eyes narrowing at me.

Josh ignores her, speaking into his tab. “Yes, we need medical assistance at Forty-Nine Flat Rock Road in the Quartz Sector.”

“I’m riding with her in the ambulance,” Avery says. “Just in case she comes to.”

Then she stalks up the stairs of the cellar, tears soaking her cheeks. I can’t blame her for being distraught.

“You . . . need . . . to find . . . me,” says a weak, hoarse voice, so faint I can barely hear it over Josh’s conversation with emergency dispatch.

“We found you,” I reassure her. “Everything’s going to be okay.” At least I hope she’s going to be okay. I feel the girl squirm in my arms a little, and I look down, our eyes meeting only for a brief moment because she can’t keep them open for longer than a couple of seconds.

The girl reaches up and takes hold of my hand, very lightly because she’s not strong enough to close her fingers.

“You’re not . . . safe. No one is safe . . . behind the firewall,” she murmurs before succumbing to another wave of all-consuming exhaustion, most likely brought on by nanopsychosis.

At first, I don’t even recognize the words she just said to me. But then when I take her wrist, trying to check her pulse, I see something written on the palm of her hand in black ink. It’s smudged and in small print, but I can tell it’s a number. I hunch over a little more so I can get a closer look, and when I do, my lungs are completely drained of air.

5020.

Suddenly, the girl’s voice syncs up with my father’s, and they’re speaking in unison in my mind.

You need to find me.

Behind the firewall.


Fifteen minutes later, Josh and I stand shoulder to shoulder under my umbrella, staring at swirling red lights as the ambulance carrying Avery and the girl drives off down Quartz Street and eventually turns a corner. The only thing illuminating the road is a blinking streetlamp that’s perched a few yards away from the house we just left. Josh kicks a dented aluminum can that’s lying near his feet and it bounces along the sidewalk until it collides with the stump of a dead tree.

“Nora was only a few blocks away from Flynn’s trailer,” he says, rubbing his eyes with the balls of his hands. “We were so close, and now we’re back to square one.”

“Actually, I don’t think we are,” I reply.

Josh bows his head and mutters, “Stop it, Regan. She’s gone.”


“Listen to me. That girl woke up for a minute and said practically the exact same thing my father did when I saw him in Elusion,” I say, latching on to his elbow and turning him toward me. “She talked about the firewall. And I saw the number fifty-twenty written on her hand.” I let go of his arm and tuck wet strands of hair behind my ears. “We can’t give up, Josh. This is just too coincidental to be ignored. There’s something in Elusion that we have to figure out, and we keep seeing the same clues. We have to keep pushing forward and believe that we’ll find the answers. Together.”

“But we’re at a dead end,” he snaps. “The best chance we had was with the files Avery cracked; we still don’t know what the significance of the anagram is, or why that number keeps showing up.”