His skepticism is obvious. I stand up and walk to the other side of the room in a huff, but since that only takes a few steps, it’s a lot less dramatic than I intended it to be.
“Why are you being so dismissive? I thought you’d be more understanding. Especially since Patrick didn’t believe you when you told him what was going on at the factory.”
Josh leans back on the couch and crosses his arms over his chest. “That’s a different situation.”
“Oh, really? How so?”
“Well . . . you’re jumping to conclusions, and I saw what I saw.”
I open my mouth to counter him and then realize he has a good point. Josh was actually a witness—he saw his sister and his friends inside the factory, hijacking Elusion. But all I have are these strange fragments of my father’s life, and a vision of him in a make-believe world.
“I know what it’s like,” Josh says, snapping my attention back to him. “There have been times when I thought I had all the facts, but they were really just assumptions. Anyway, when you lose someone, you try to make sense of it however you can.”
My hands begin to tremble when I admit to myself that my dad’s passcard and the drugs could probably be explained away, but I’m not ready to accept that reality is entirely black-and-white like Josh is suggesting.
Especially since it seems Patrick wants to keep us from thinking anything is really wrong with Elusion.
“Don’t you see? This isn’t just wishful thinking on my part,” I plead. “I’ve wanted my dad alive since the day I came home and found out about the accident. But if I’m right, and my father didn’t die on that plane, and my mother helped him fool everyone somehow,” I say, swallowing hard, “that means my dad abandoned me and my mom’s a liar. Why would I choose to believe that?”
“Because this way, there’s hope,” Josh says, getting up from the couch and walking toward me. “Hope that you might see your dad again. Wouldn’t blame you for wanting that to be true.”
“But this isn’t just about my dad anymore,” I say, hands tightening into fists, standing my ground. “Fifty-twenty. That’s something we both saw, Josh. Isn’t that reason enough to believe?”
“Believe what?”
“Whether he’s dead or alive, somehow my dad is connected to Nora and her friends.”
“Can’t argue with that,” he says, a wary smile forming on his lips. “But the real question is, do we believe in Patrick?”
The muscles in my legs start to give when I begin to contemplate that question for the hundredth time. What my heart wants to believe and what my instincts are telling me have been at war for the past twenty-four hours, and the fighting only became worse after Josh told me he reached out to Patrick for help and was refused. Unfortunately, my instincts are close to victory and my heart is about to be crushed in defeat.
“When he was at my house, he said the problems I experienced with Elusion, and the number fifty-twenty, could be related to a downloading issue with the upgraded app, but—”
“Okay, that’s a lie,” Josh says, cutting me off. “If there was any kind of downloading error with the new app, you wouldn’t have been able to open the program and get to Elusion in the first place.”
“Are you sure?”
Josh cocks his head to the side and grimaces.
“Sorry. I forgot about the computer mastery thing.”
“Listen, I know Patrick’s your friend. He used to be mine, too. But if there’s something wrong with Elusion, who knows how many people might get caught in the crossfire?”
“Then we need to find out what fifty-twenty means,” I say. “It’s the only clue we have that links our stories together.”
Josh paces back and forth, his strides small and clipped because of how tiny the room is. “What if fifty-twenty is part of some numeric source code?”
“I don’t know. Programming code is really intricate stuff. Especially the kind Patrick and my dad were doing for Elusion.”
“It’s still worth looking into,” he says. “Did your dad leave his tab behind?”
“No, but it wouldn’t matter. He kept all his files on his work computer, for security reasons. That’s why he spent so much time at Orexis; everything he needed was in his lab or at his office.” I clap my hands together once all my synapses start firing in unison. “The office. Patrick moved into my dad’s office, which means—”
“He’s using your father’s computer.” Josh finishes my sentence, his eyes brightening. “A three-panel quantum with touch recognition. Am I right?”
I recoil from him a little bit, mostly because I’m freaked out by how precise his guess was. “How’d you know that?”
“Patrick likes to brag. Told me all about it at the party,” he explains. “Five feet long with a multitouch surface desk and four-foot screens. Not bad.”
“I know. Pretty sophisticated.” I tuck my hair behind my ears and try to listen to the ideas bubbling inside my mind. “Do you think we could hack into it? Get the data that way?”
“No, the security on their servers is really tough to break through,” he says after a pause. “And I bet they have other secure servers contracted, just to be used in an emergency, in case the main server at Orexis goes down for any reason.”
Even though I’m a little discouraged by Josh’s response, I press on, determined to find a way into the dark recesses of my dad’s computer banks.
“Okay, what if the computer was broken into by hand?” I suggest. “The files could be sent to a remote cloud where we could access them and—”
“Hold on—all of those files are going to be encrypted and too large to send,” he interjects. “And there’s the touch recognition, too. The only way around that is to use a QuTap.”
My heart sinks as a sigh of frustration escapes my lips. Magnetic-surge devices like QuTaps were taken off the market almost two years ago. I remember it being all over the Net. QuTaps are the only thing capable of disabling elaborate computer security systems.
“So it’s impossible, then,” I say, hating the defeated tone of my voice.
“I didn’t say that,” Josh replies.
I look at him, surprised. “Are you saying you can get one?”
“The one perk of being an academy boy is the military contacts,” he says with a shy grin.
“How long would it take?” I know I sound impatient, but that’s because we have no time to waste.
Josh reaches into his pocket and pulls out his tab, holding it firmly in his hand and gazing at me as if he’s standing by for an order. “I think I could track one down in a few hours.”
Without even thinking—about betraying Patrick, or breaking the law—I say, “Do it.”
The next morning, I stand shoulder to shoulder with at least a hundred Orexis employees hurrying to get to their desks for the start of the Standard 7 shift.
It’s a madhouse—exactly as I’d hoped.