Patrick reaches for my arm and I yank it away. “Keep your hands off me!” I shout.
“I’m taking you home, Ree!” This time he succeeds in grabbing my arm and reaches for my wristband.
He wants to send me home just like he did after I saw my dad. There’s no way I’m letting him do it again.
“No!” I yell.
Josh rips Patrick’s hand away from me, tossing him aside as he steps in between us. Patrick lunges at Josh, but Josh ducks, dodging the blow. Patrick lands face-first on the gritty, gold-colored ground, rolling a few feet over crushed stalks before landing flat on his back.
“Give it up,” Josh says to Patrick, his tone hushed and intense. It’s obviously taking all of his effort to stay calm. “This all needs to stop.”
“I decide when things stop,” Patrick snorts, rushing Josh again and slamming into him. Both of them are knocked to the ground. My shoulders tense and my sides ache from my quick breathing when Josh flips Patrick over, pinning down his arms and incapacitating him.
“Have you thought about what releasing the QuTap will do to Regan?” Patrick shouts as he writhes under Josh. “You don’t care what happens to her, do you? You only care about yourself.”
The ground rumbles below our feet, and suddenly the prairie begins to morph into a wasteland as the golden stalks multiply, rising upward and transforming into giant black pillars of rock. A piece breaks away and hits me in the back, knocking me down.
Josh jumps up from Patrick and comes to my aide. “Are you okay?” he asks.
“The Escape is being destroyed,” I say, clutching his hands as he pulls me to my feet. “It’s like what happened on Mount Arvon!” Before he can respond, Patrick hits Josh with a sucker punch from behind, causing him to fall to the ground. Patrick is about to go at Josh again, but I throw myself at him, grabbing on to him with both hands, holding him away from Josh.
“Are you insane?” I yell to Patrick. “Stop!”
My protest seems to slap him back to reality, if only for a moment, and he wrestles away from me.
I dash back to Josh and help him to his knees, gently cradling his head in my hands.
“So this is the way it is, Ree?” Patrick shouts. “You choose him?”
The golden wheat field is almost gone, rotting away before our eyes as if it’s being consumed by some terrible disease.
Patrick’s face is so red and filled with hatred I barely recognize him. “I’m not going to stand in your way, Regan. I just hope you realize what you’re doing.”
Then he looks away from me, pressing a button on his wristband. And just like that he’s gone, vanishing into a large blast of radiant white light.
The quakes from below are becoming more frequent and intense. “We need to get to the firewall.” I say, glancing at my wristband. My heart stops when I see that the dial is flashing a red warning that I’ve never seen before.
TIME EXPIRED
“Something’s wrong,” I breathe. “My wristband is saying that our time expired.”
Josh shoves up his sleeve, looking at his wristband. His jaw drops. “Mine says the same thing,” he says.
“This can’t be right,” I say, giving the face of my wristband a little tap, as if that might help reset it. “We haven’t been here longer than an hour—have we?”
“Press your emergency escape, Regan. Now!”
I press the button. Nothing happens.
Josh presses the button on his own wristband.
Once.
Twice.
Nothing.
“This Escape is under construction,” I say, trying to keep calm. “Maybe the emergency button isn’t connected—”
“Or maybe he disabled it,” Josh interjects. His voice shakes a little, but I can’t tell if he’s frightened or furious. I can see sweat glistening on his forehead.
“No, he wouldn’t, would he?”
“Could he have done something to your wristband when he grabbed you?”
“If you’re right, then maybe the fight with you was just a ruse so he could get to your wristband too. Or maybe he did it by remote, disabling our wristbands somehow?”
But when?
The next shift of the earth beneath us sends us tumbling onto our backs. As I look up, I see that the crimson clouds have all but vanished, but the numbers in the night sky are brighter than when I first got here. They begin to flicker erratically, and then one by one grow crazy bright, each one popping like a lightbulb when it receives too much current.
“What’s happening?” I can’t hide how freaked out I sound.
Josh swallows, and I can see the fear on his face. “Those numbers look like source codes. I think we’re reading what the programmer is logging in.”
Right now.
Someone in the real world is typing in a code.
Someone who wants to hurt us.
Someone who wants to cause us pain.
The speed of the exploding numbers gets faster and faster until there are none left and the whole sky goes from ink black to angel white. When Josh and I come up to our knees, there’s just a hazy afterglow as all the light fades. For a second, the world around us is cast into total blackness. It’s as if I’m suddenly blind, as if Patrick has buried us alive. And then suddenly a sequence of white letters appears in the dark sky above us.
ADMINISTRATOR LOCKOUT.
The letters stay frozen in place, our only source of light.
“This was all a trap,” Josh murmurs. “I think he planned this from the start!”
At first I don’t believe it, but as I stare at those words, I’m chilled to the core by the truth. I want to scream at the sky, cursing Patrick’s name, but suddenly the earth shifts so violently Josh and I are torn apart from each other, flying through the air. I land on my side, my leg scraping against a sharp rock. I feel a stab of pain as deep magenta-colored blood oozes out of a nasty-looking gash.
A pain that only gets worse when I hear my father’s voice from long ago, assuring me, You can’t get hurt in Elusion.
“Regan!” Josh yells. He’s been thrown hundreds of feet away, but he’s already picked himself up and is running back toward me.
“You’re bleeding,” he says.
I push myself up, wiping away the blood that is trickling down my leg. It feels wet against my hand, dripping down onto my arm.
“Does it hurt?”
“It’s just a scratch,” I say. I attempt to stand, but my leg folds in pain.
Josh grabs me by the waist, steadying me as he eases us back to the ground, his eyes focused on my wounded leg. “It’s more than a scratch.”