Holding my tab in front of me, I whip around. A girl with short brown hair is cowering in the corner of the room. She’s wearing only a T-shirt and her underwear, curled up into the fetal position on a very thin mattress, shivering. She doesn’t move. In fact, although her eyes are open, she’s staring straight ahead, as if she doesn’t even know I’m there.
“Regan!” I hear Josh yell from upstairs.
“Josh!” I scream. “In the basement!”
“I’m coming!” he shouts back. Then I hear him yell up to the second floor of the house. “Avery! In the cellar!”
I kneel beside the girl, pulling off my coat and wrapping it around her fragile body. She’s ice cold and barely conscious. I lean over to see if the girl is attached to an Equip, but all I can see from the light of my tab are deep visor imprint marks on her right cheek near her temple.
Josh bounds down the stairs, his strides wide and frantic.
“Is it her?” he asks with a blend of fear and excitement in his voice. He drops to his knees, as he sees her, the hopefulness in his face evaporating, which could only mean one thing.
She’s not Nora.
There’s a short, agonizing silence that neither one of us dares to break. Then Avery’s voice suddenly shatters the quiet.
“Where is she?”
I look up and see Avery hurrying down the basement steps, so fast she nearly trips.
“Where’s Nora?”
“She’s not here,” Josh says, standing.
“What?” Avery stumbles a bit, as if Josh’s words are an actual physical blow.
He tips his head in my direction, and Avery turns to see me holding the girl who, as selfish as it sounds, we all wished was Nora. I watch helplessly as Avery dissolves into tears in front of me, covering her mouth with trembling hands.
“Oh my God” is all she can say, over and over again.
I can’t help but feel sorry for her. When I lost my dad in Elusion—or hallucinated losing him, or whatever—I felt the pain of his death all over again.
The girl in my arms quivers, and as she starts to blink and moan, I run my palm across her arm a bit, hoping to wake her, but she doesn’t rouse.
“We need to get her to a hospital. Now,” I say.
Josh begins typing on his tab. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
“Wait!” Avery shouts at him.
“We can’t wait, Avery. This girl is in trouble,” he replies.
Avery storms over to me and the girl, crouching down with blazing red-rimmed eyes.
“She knows where Nora is. She needs to tell us.”
“I don’t think she’s in any shape to answer your questions,” I say.
“I don’t give two craps what you think!” she snarls.
“Leave her alone, Avery,” Josh warns.
But Avery doesn’t listen. Instead she puts her hand on the girl’s shoulder and shakes her. “Where’s Nora Heywood? Answer me!”
“Stop it! You’re going to hurt her!” I push Avery away with one strong, forceful hand.
“If you don’t get out of my way, you’re going to regret it,” she threatens.
Josh stalks over to the corner and yanks Avery back by the collar of her coat. “I said leave her alone!”
When Avery falls on her butt, she looks up at Josh, her jaw clenched. “I can’t believe it. Is she more important than your own sister now?”
“That’s enough!” he shouts.
Before I can squeak out a word to either of them, I hear something fall to the floor beneath me. I look down and see a tablet with a neon quilted protective casing, right near the girl’s limp hand. Once Avery sees it, she races over and grabs the tab greedily.
“This is Nora’s,” Avery said, her eyes filling with tears. “She got this from a street vendor in the Merch Sector. She had it engraved. Look!”
When Avery puts it in the palm of Josh’s hand, he smiles a little as he runs his fingers over the embossed initials. “You’re right—it’s Nora’s. Even if she was never here, this girl must have come in contact with her at some point.”
“Can you turn the tab on? Maybe we can see who else she texted,” I say.
Josh presses the power button several times, but no luck. “The battery’s dead.”
“That’s why we have to get information out of her, before it’s too late,” Avery says, pointing at the girl.
I look down at her and bite my lip. Her complexion is quickly losing color. “If we don’t get her to a doctor, she won’t be able to tell anyone anything.”
Josh starts dialing on his tab again. “Regan’s right; we’ve got to call for help.”
“We’ll never get clearance to see her again, especially if they think this is related to Elusion. I’m sure someone at Orexis will see to that,” Avery says, her eyes narrowing at me.
Josh ignores her, putting his tab to his ear and speaking into the mouthpiece. “Yes, we need medical assistance at Forty-Nine Flat Rock Road in the Quartz Sector.”
Avery gnashes her teeth together and snatches Nora’s tab away from Josh. “I’m riding with her in the ambulance. Just in case she comes to.”
Then she stalks up the stairs of the cellar, tears soaking her cheeks. I can’t blame her for being distraught.
“You . . . need . . . to find . . . me,” says a weak, hoarse voice, so faint I can barely hear it over Josh’s conversation with emergency dispatch.
“We found you,” I reassure her. “Everything’s going to be okay.” At least I hope she’s going to be okay. I feel the girl squirm in my arms a little, and I look down, our eyes meeting only for a brief moment because she can’t keep them open for longer than a couple of seconds.
The girl reaches up and takes hold of my hand, very lightly because she’s not strong enough to close her fingers.
“You’re not . . . safe. No one is safe . . . behind the firewall,” she murmurs before succumbing to another wave of all-consuming exhaustion, most likely brought on by nanopsychosis.
At first, I don’t even recognize the words she just said to me. But then when I take her wrist, trying to check her pulse, I see something written on the palm of her hand in black ink. It’s smudged and in small print, but I can tell it’s a number. I hunch over a little more so I can get a closer look at her wrist, and when I do, my lungs are completely drained of air.
5020.
Suddenly, the girl’s voice syncs up with my father’s, and they’re speaking in unison in my mind.
You need to find me.
Behind the firewall.
Fifteen minutes later, Josh and I stand shoulder to shoulder under my umbrella, staring at swirling red lights as the ambulance carrying Avery and the girl drives off down Quartz Street and eventually turns a corner. The only thing illuminating the road is a blinking streetlamp that’s perched a few yards away from the house we just left. Josh kicks a dented aluminum can that’s lying near his feet and it bounces along the sidewalk until it collides with the stump of a dead tree.