Elusion(94)

“So what did you do?”

He gets up off the ground, his body tense and rigid. “I called them both to an after-hours meeting. Room number fifty-twenty.” He pauses and clenches his hands into fists. “When they showed up, I gave them an ultimatum—either withdraw Elusion from the CIT review and stop the initial distribution of the Equips and apps, or I was going to destroy Elusion.” He stops, as if remembering.

“What did Cathryn do?”

“She laughed. She didn’t think I was serious. She thought that since Elusion was made up of separate entities, these Escapes, it was indestructible. And that’s when I told them that each one of the Escapes was armed with a fail-safe mechanism that could destroy the entire program. No one knew about it but me.”

“Oh my God,” I breathe.

“Cathryn started screaming about how she would do anything to prevent me from sabotaging this project, and then Bryce attacked me,” he says, gritting his teeth. “He got me in a pretty good choke hold, but I broke free of him, grabbed my tab, and activated the destruction mechanism.”

My eyes widen with surprise. “So you did it? You took down the network with the malware?”

“Not quite,” he says. “The Elusion system is very complex, and it takes . . .” He looks at me and pauses for a minute, as if searching for the right word. “Time,” he says finally. “But the moment they realized what had happened, they both subdued me, hooked me up to an Equip, and forced me into Elusion. Bryce most likely put an override on all the safety features so he could keep me here as long as they liked. And I’m sure Cathryn is paying him a lot of money to keep me alive, too.”

“I don’t understand. Why would they want to keep you in Elusion?”

“I know they told everyone I’m dead, and I’m sure they would kill me if they could. The only reason I’m still alive is because they can’t find the destruction mechanism. I’m guessing they’ve found just enough proof to know that I’m telling the truth. They probably think they can scare my subconscious into telling them where it is. But it won’t do them any good. I’ll never tell.”

I really can’t believe what I’m hearing. “What about administrator access to Elusion? Does Patrick have that?”


“No way,” my dad says. “He’s a great programmer and can code an amazing Escape design, but he’s too young for that kind of responsibility. Bryce is the only other person besides me with administrator access.”

“So Patrick didn’t lock Josh and me in here?”

My dad shakes his head.

“But how did Bryce even know where we were?”

“I don’t know,” my dad says.

That pang of guilt over Patrick is back and it’s even stronger than before, and I’m still confused. There are so many more questions that I want to ask my dad—about Walden and the anagram—but I’m too engrossed in his story to get derailed right now.

I stand up and meet him, eye to eye. “So Elusion is going to self-destruct?”

“Yes. And the destabilization of the Escapes you experienced will be nothing compared to D-day.”

My blood runs cold. If Elusion is going to destroy itself while he, Josh, and I are here, we’ll most likely die. Then again, we might die anyway.

“That’s why you told me it wasn’t safe. That’s why you asked me to find you,” I say, my voice shaking with disappointment. The numbers, his message—I misinterpreted his clues, and now we’re all trapped.

“It’s not your fault. When I’m behind the firewall, the only messages I can get out are numbers, kind of like communicating in computer code—”

“Why didn’t you just tell me all this when you saw me on the beach? Or in the ice cave?” I swallow and force myself to admit the thought that’s tearing me apart. “I was at Orexis,” I say. “I could’ve found you!”

“Even though I can get into Elusion, it’s extremely dangerous for me to stay there more than a few minutes. The stimuli in Elusion are too powerful for our brains to handle—the longer a user stays inside, the more damage it causes. This place provides some protection, but it’s very dangerous to be in Elusion. All of my trips there are timed, and then I’m pulled back through ping tunnels.”

“But how’d you know where I was in the first place?” I ask. “And how can you control anything here?”

My dad pauses a moment, like he’s unsure of the facts himself. He flashed this smirk at Patrick all the damn time.

“There’s a tracking sensor on your Equip wristband,” he answers. “I can access the signal in here because of the ping tunnels. The blue and green lights you saw inside the tunnel are kind of like a homing device, which only I can read.”

“Wow,” I say.

“As with any program, there are hundreds of ping tunnels that can be hidden by the programmer, but every time we use one to get to Elusion, it seals shut,” he adds. “At this point, there are only a few tunnels left here for us to use.”

“You keep saying ‘here,’ but I have no idea what that means,” I say, rubbing my temples. “I know we’re behind the firewall, but from the looks of that monster, we seem anything but safe.”