Elusion(87)

I shake my head. “I’m not going anywhere without you,” I say, repeating what he told Avery when we were about to leave the carousel.

Josh exhales and his breath almost freezes in the air. The temperature is dropping by the second. Any colder and the emerald rain will turn into snow. I shiver as I look up at the lockout message, but it has totally disappeared.

“We’ve lost our North Star!” I shout over the next deafening clap of thunder.

“We don’t need it!” Josh yells, pointing.

The rain has done something unexpected—it’s lifted the fog and allowed us to see the dark, towering wall in the distance.


The stone fortress looms above us, looking like it has been standing in the same dismal patch of land for centuries. Soaked and muddy, we hold our ground in front of it, shielding our eyes from the rain as we scan upward toward the heavens, following the outline of the barrier against the sky, which is going berserk with lightning.

The wind continues to howl in protest as Josh takes a step forward, pressing his hand against the dirty, stained exterior. The wall appears to be made from roughly hewed stone bricks, each about six inches in diameter and length.

“Can we climb it?” I ask, my teeth chattering.

Josh runs his fingers around the edge of the rock, but can’t get a grip. “Looks like there’s some sort of ledge up there.” He takes a running leap and throws his body up at an indentation in the bricks above us. He ricochets off the wall, falling backward into the mud.

He flips himself upward, his hands resting on his hips as he surveys the firewall, thinking. “Ping tunnels,” he says, quickly turning toward me, his eyes blazing. “In the computer world, there’s this trick hackers use. One server sends an echo signal to a proxy server, and it acts kind of like a trip wire, allowing a user to tunnel through a security network to the side of the program that’s been blocked off.”


“So it’s kind of like locking the door and keeping the front window open?” I ask, rubbing my arms to keep warm. “The entrance to the firewall is a ping tunnel?”

Josh glances back toward the wall. “Maybe.”

I scan the brick wall looming in front of me. There’s no tunnel in sight. In fact, each brick looks wedged into place, as if it has been there a thousand years. “Why don’t we split up and look for it?” I offer. “I’ll take the left, you go right.”

He wipes the rain away from his eyes with the back of his hand. “We’re not separating.”

After I nod, he runs his hand around the mortar, trailing his fingers over a brick. His torn-up shirt is soaked, clinging to his chest like a second skin. “It’s probably not easy to find; otherwise more people would know about it. So look for something unusual. A hidden button. A removable brick. Anything.”

Balancing my weight on my strong leg, I move slightly to the left, running my hands over the bricks. They’re cold and damp, the insides rough with deep grooves, as if someone chiseled them from blocks of stone by hand. I keep going, my fingers getting covered in soot as I move from brick to brick, trailing my fingers around the edges. If we keep at our current pace, this will take forever.

I touch my fingers to another brick and notice a slight indentation that feels different from the others. More deliberate. I lean forward, peering at it closely. A letter is etched in the middle of the brick.

“Josh!” I call out.

He rushes over, his boots kicking up wet gunk from the ground.

“Is that what I think it is?” I ask.

“It’s an A,” he says hopefully, pressing his hand against it. “It feels loose.” He traces the A with his finger, then yanks his hand away. The letter begins to glow, bright blue rays shining out from behind.

“Did it burn you?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “No, just caught me off guard.”

“What do you think it means?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, his eyes searching the bricks around the A. “But maybe there are more like this.”

We carefully scour the bricks, moving farther and farther away from each other, as we scramble to find another brick that has something unusual on it.

“Regan,” Josh says, his voice hoarse from yelling above the rain. I limp over to him. He’s standing in front of a brick with a glowing E in the middle, like a window into the world beyond.

“You have to trace the letter to get it to glow,” he says. I nod and continue searching, working faster and faster as the downpour continues.

I look over my shoulder and see that Josh is standing in front of a glowing T.

A, E, T

We look at each other. Even through the rain, I can see his eyes dance with excitement. We both know we’re on to something.

Swiping the soggy hair away from my eyes, I focus back on the wall as I continue my search. I’m only a few feet away from Josh when I scrape a piece of particularly stubborn moss off a brick and see some familiar etching. It’s the letter H. I trace it with my finger and it begins to glow.

The wall groans, and loose pieces of concrete spill down from above. “Watch out!” I warn Josh as I jump back, instinctively covering my head. The wall shudders and heaves as if it’s about to bury us in an avalanche of bricks. But instead of collapsing, the bricks in the wall begin to shift, sliding around and changing position until each letter is neatly stacked on top of another, resting against the muddy ground and looking like they’ve been there for thousands of years. I inhale sharply as I read the word the stacked letters now spell: “HATE.”