When I shift my eyes back to Josh, his fair complexion has gone a little pale and his mouth is hanging open in shock.
“What’s wrong?”
He turns his laptop toward me, and a video clip is pulled up on the screen. It’s posted on the New Associated Press site, with the headline “Do You Know This Child?” Josh clicks on the Play button and the news story begins to roll. A young woman with a brunette bob and a microphone headset is standing outside a hospital’s emergency-room ambulance bay. She begins:
“This afternoon, police found a comatose boy on the streets of Miami. He was rushed to the hospital, where he is being treated for severe malnourishment and possible head-related trauma.”
“Turn it up,” I say, dropping my legs to the ground with a thud.
Josh immediately increases the volume.
“The young man had no picture ID or passcard, so he has been admitted as a John Doe. He appears to be fifteen years old, six feet tall, and about one hundred sixty-five pounds.”
The image of the reporter dims and a photo suddenly appears in her place. It’s a snapshot of the boy in question. His eyes are closed and he’s in a hospital gown, so the picture must have been taken once the doctors stabilized him. His cheekbones are sharp and raised, and he has a narrow chin. His coppery hair is very greasy at the roots, and he has a bit of acne in a thin line across his brow.
“If you recognize this person, please contact the Florida State Bureau of—”
Josh hits the pause button, freezing the photo in front of us before the camera cuts away.
“Notice anything strange about that kid’s face?” he asks me.
I search the picture with a steady gaze, and at first I don’t see anything unusual, but then Josh expands the viewing window on the screen so the image is much larger. There seems to be a deep circular impression near his left temple. It doesn’t appear to be a scar, because it’s too perfectly shaped.
“I saw those marks on Nora’s friends at the factory,” he explains. “I think they’re from the Equip visors.”
As soon as he says that, my body reacts with a systemic tremble, like my blood sugar just dropped a thousand points.
“So you think this kid is in a coma because he hijacked Elusion?” I brace myself for his answer by folding my hands in my lap and locking my fingers together so tightly my skin is turning white.
“Only one way to know,” he says. “We have to check out that firewall again.”
I want to get to the bottom of this confounding mystery as much as Josh does, but as much as it pains me to admit, when I look at this boy in the hospital and think of what happened in the Thai Beach Escape, a stroke of fear hits me.
“What if it’s not safe?”
As soon as I reflect on what my father said in Elusion, all I can think is:
You have to find me.
It packs a shot of resolve into my arm—I hope there’s more where that came from.
“We have no choice,” Josh says, turning off his laptop. “We aren’t making enough headway with the clues we have in reality.”
And in reality, time is running out.
I force down the bubble of anxiety that’s lodged in my throat and rise to my feet.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Josh stands along with me, casting a tall shadow on the floor of the capsule. “Where to?”
“My house,” I reply. “We should wait until my mom’s an hour or two into her shift, though, so we’re not interrupted like last time.”
“What about when we’re inside Elusion? Should we go back to the beach where your dad—”
“No, I already did that—and he wasn’t there. Patrick told me that the firewalls run through all the Escapes. They’re all connected. I’m not sure what Nora and her friends expect to find on the other side, but if Pat’s right, that means they’d just run into another Escape.”
“So where should we go?”
I smile. I have just the place in mind.
A few hours later, my head buzzes and my palms tingle with thin strips of kinetic energy. I push back the fur-trimmed hood of my neon-green parka so that I can look up at the sky, which is a pumpkin orange, lit up by an electric blue sun. I no longer feel scared—about the boy I saw on the news bulletin, or the realization that the people closest to me might not be who I thought they were. Each molecule of hurt that lingered in my body is being soaked up by the spongelike hold trypnosis has on my emotions, and I feel absolutely protected here.
Best of all, I have someone by my side. Someone who I really want to trust—and who looks amazing in a thick winter coat.
Josh and I are now inside the Mount Arvon Escape, perched on a narrow plateau off the mountain, towering above patches of fluffy cinnamon clouds. Everything around us is covered in glittering cherry-blossom-pinkcolored snow, and the sun is giving off a magnificent spectrum of sheer rainbow-tinted light. Way, way down below are two rippling rivers of grape that wind their way through a valley that appears to be made out of layers of delicate eggshells. In the distance, the rivers fuse together into a glistening purple lake.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I hear Josh say, his voice utterly breathless.
I inhale the cool, crisp air and exhale a turquoise-colored mist. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”
Josh smiles as he unzips his black down coat to reveal a worn-in red flannel shirt. He stares at the snowcovered trees, the tension from earlier completely gone from his eyes. “Why’d you pick this Escape again?”
I bend down, running my gloved fingers through the pink, fluffy snow. “There was a reason,” I say. “I just have to think about it for a minute.”
“Take your time,” Josh says, throwing a backpack on the ground. “I have to figure out what this is for.”
As I watch Josh dig through the bag, setting out pieces of climbing gear, I concentrate hard on the sense of purpose that’s niggling at the back of my thoughts, which are still pretty gauzy at best. I try to grasp at my most recent memories, but it feels like my entire head is covered in layers of soft, delicate fur.
Josh holds up a large, sharp, J-shaped ice tool and smirks. “Cool, huh?”
Suddenly, a recollection is triggered. I’ve seen that object before, not more than a few months ago.
“Ah, now I get it. I was here with my dad right before he died,” I say, rolling a handful of snow into a big gumdrop-looking ball.
“So are you retracing his steps?” Josh asks.
“That seems like the logical thing to do, right?”
“Logic doesn’t matter here; that’s why everyone loves it.”
I smile at him, the cold on my cheeks fading away when I do. “Hey, you should be thanking me for figuring out why we’re in these mountains.”
Josh laughs, playfully throwing some snow in my direction. “Yeah, well, I wish I remembered what we’re supposed to do here. Other than climb something.”