“When’s the last time you were in here?”
I feel Josh’s eyes on me, but I don’t turn around when I answer him. I guess I’m a little afraid that my composure might crack if I see his face.
“Six months ago, I think.” I walk over to Dad’s chair and graze my fingers along one of the padded armrests. “I woke up at three o’clock in the morning and wandered downstairs to the kitchen for glass of water. On my way upstairs, I saw a light peeking out through a slit at the bottom of the study door.”
I risk a glance at Josh, and I see his lips are turned up in a sweet yet concerned smile, like he regrets asking me this question. I look away before I can think too much about how Josh makes me feel. I need to focus, concentrate, and believe that what I’m about to do is right.
“Dad and I didn’t see each other much back then. He was always at the Orexis lab, working on Elusion, and when he was home, he was too tired for anything but small talk.” I sit down in my father’s chair. “I knew I shouldn’t disturb him. He treated this room like a private library. But I came in anyway and”—I cover my mouth after letting out a laugh—“he was just sitting here, doing these stupid word puzzles on his tab.”
Josh chuckles. “Sounds like top secret work to me.”
“We wound up solving a ton of them together. We didn’t even notice the sunrise through the window.”
Suddenly my eyes fill up with tears, and I quickly swivel around so that my back is to Josh.
“What do you think we’ll find in here?” Josh asks after a brief pause. I know he realizes I’m upset, and I appreciate him not forcing the subject.
I glance at the closet at the far left of the room. On a top shelf, there is a silver box with the Orexis logo emblazoned on the side. In it are Dad’s personal items, which Patrick brought over to the house a week after my father’s accident. My mother hid the box away because she couldn’t bring herself to go through it.
But I have to. I don’t have a choice. Something is wrong with Elusion, and this box is the only remaining unexamined piece of the life my dad left behind.
“I’m not sure,” I murmur. “But hopefully there’s something that will give us answers.”
I get up from the chair and walk toward the closet, which opens the moment I step in front of the motion sensors. I stand up on my tiptoes and stretch, grabbing the box.
“Do you need help with that?” Josh asks, reaching up to assist me.
But when I pull it down, I’m surprised by its lightness.
“No, I’m okay. This thing is, like, less than a pound,” I say.
Josh takes the box out of my hands, holding it at different angles and inspecting it carefully. “Yeah, this looks like metal, but it’s probably made of something like carbon-fiber polymer. Where do you want me to put this?”
I point to my dad’s desk and Josh sets the box down. My heart in my throat, I take a laser pen out of his top desk drawer and shave through the thick strip of quick-seal across the top of the box. I take a deep breath and open it up, expecting to find something useful, like a portable hard drive or a small motherboard collection. But there are only a handful of items, and one of them I’ve already seen before.
Tucked underneath a mug with my picture printed on it is a paperback edition of Walden.
At first glance, it looks like the exact same copy Patrick and I found in the lockbox, but as soon as I open it, I notice a difference. On the upper left inside corner of the cover, my father has written in neat black script:
Please return to Regan Welch.
“I love that book,” I hear Josh say, and then I notice the warmth of his breath on the back of my neck. He must be reading over my shoulder.
“Are the transcendentalists big at the academy?” I reply, craning my head a little just in time to see him smile.
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s not all fun and games there, you know.”
I grin and turn my attention back to the book, planning to skim through paragraph after paragraph in search of markings or notes. As I start to flip through the beginning, Josh says, “Wait,” and puts one of his hands on mine, sending a charge of crackling energy straight to my heart.
“There’s something on the copyright page,” he adds.
He’s right. The title of the book, Walden, is highlighted in a bold yellow strike, along with the last word in the author’s name, Thoreau.
“Why’d your dad highlight the title and the author?”
I shrug. “Beats me. Let’s flip through the rest of it and see if there’s more.”
I bend the spine of the book a bit so I can flip through the pages quickly and easily. There aren’t any other highlighted portions, but when I reach chapter 3, something falls out and lands on the floor. Josh squats down to pick the object up, his sweater creeping up a bit so I catch a flash of his fair skin above his belt. When he stands up, he hands me a passcard with my father’s social security number stamped on the lower right-hand corner.
“What is my dad’s passcard doing in here?”
“I don’t know. You think he would’ve had it on him when he—” Josh cuts himself off, realizing that he’s about to tread on hallowed ground. “Want me to empty the box?”
I manage a nod as I think back to the day Mom and I listened to the audio files from the HyperSoar Flight Commission, which investigated my dad’s accident. There was a sudden change in weather conditions. A wind sear formed in the stratosphere just as my dad was reentering from the mesosphere, causing an explosion in one of the HS-12’s engines, leading to IMD—instant matter disintegration.
Nothing was left. Not one trace.
But Josh is on to something—no one in Detroit goes anywhere without their passcard. People use them to start their cars, for Christ’s sake. Why would he have left it at Orexis? And how did he even get to the HyperSoar hangar without it?
After staring at it in my palm for a moment, I put it in my back pocket and place the book on the table, where Josh has lined up four digital photocubes. I pick up one and shake it as hundreds of pictures of me flash before my eyes. Dressed up as an old-fashioned rag doll for Halloween, Mom’s hand in mine. Smiling over a bowl of ice cream when I was five. Me and Dad watching a movie on the day he activated our first InstaComm. I hold it close to my chest and look at the other items that Josh unpacked—a small collection of ties my father kept in the office in case he was called into a meeting, a fine-toothed comb, and several multicolored earbuds.
I look over at Josh to ask him if this is everything, and that’s when I see him staring at something too.
A blue pill bottle that bears a strong resemblance to the one we found at the abandoned factory earlier.