He flips himself upward, his hands resting on his hips as he surveys the firewall, thinking. There’s so much going on behind his deep-set eyes that even though almost nothing is changing on the surface of his face, I can see him going from angry to worried to despairing to thoughtful to determined to furious to resolved. “Ping tunnels,” he says, quickly turning toward me, his eyes blazing. “In the computer world, there’s this trick hackers use. One server sends an echo signal to a proxy server, and it acts kind of like a trip wire, allowing a user to tunnel through a security network to the side of the program that’s been blocked off.”
“So it’s kind of like locking the door and keeping the front window open?” I ask, rubbing my arms to keep warm. “The entrance to the firewall is a ping tunnel?”
Josh glances back toward the wall. “Maybe just a tunnel.”
I scan at the brick wall looming in front of me. There’s no tunnel in sight. In fact, each brick looks wedged into place, as if it has been there a thousand years. “Why don’t we split up and look for it?” I offer. “I’ll take the left, you go right.”
He wipes the rain away from his eyes with the back of his hand. “We’re not separating.”
After I nod, he runs his hand around the mortar, trailing his fingers over a brick. His torn-up shirt is soaked, clinging to his arms like a second skin. “It’s probably not easy to find; otherwise more people would know about it. So look for something unusual. A hidden button. A removable brick. Anything.”
Balancing my weight on my strong leg, I move slightly to the left, running my hands over the bricks. They’re cold and damp, the insides rough with deep grooves, as if someone chiseled them from blocks of stone by hand. I keep going, my fingers getting covered in soot as I move from brick to brick, trailing my fingers around the edges. If we keep at our current pace, this will take forever.
I touch my fingers to another brick and notice a slight indentation that feels different from the others. More deliberate. I lean forward, peering at it closely. A letter is etched in the middle of the brick.
“Josh!” I call out.
He rushes over, his boots kicking up wet gunk from the ground.
“Is that what I think it is?” I ask.
“It’s an A,” he says hopefully, pressing his hand against it. “It feels loose.” He traces the A with his finger then yanks his hand away. The letter begins to glow, bright blue rays shining out from behind.
“Did it burn you?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No, just caught me off guard.”
“What do you think it means?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says, his eyes searching the bricks around the A. “But maybe there are more like this.”
We carefully scour the bricks, moving farther and farther away from each other, as we scramble to find another brick that has something unusual on it.
“Regan,” Josh says, his voice hoarse from yelling above the rain. I limp over to him. He’s standing in front of a brick with a glowing E in the middle, like a window into the world beyond.
“You have to trace the letter to get it to glow,” he says. I nod and continue searching, working faster and faster as the downpour continues
I look over my shoulder and see that Josh is standing in front of a glowing T.
A, E, T
We look at each other. Even through the rain, I can see his eyes dance with excitement. We both know we’re on to something.
Swiping the soggy hair away from my eyes, I focus back on the wall as I continue my search. I’m about forty feet away from Josh when I scrape a piece of particularly stubborn moss off a brick and see the familiar etching deep inside. Using my sleeve, I wipe away the soot. It’s the letter H. I trace it with my finger and it begins to glow.
The wall groans, and loose pieces of concrete spill down from above. “Watch out!” I warn Josh as I jump back, instinctively covering my head. The wall shudders and heaves as if it’s about to bury us in an avalanche of bricks. But instead of collapsing, the bricks in the wall begin to shift, sliding around and changing position until each letter is neatly stacked on top of another, resting against the muddy ground and looking like they’ve been there for thousands of years. I inhale sharply as I read the word the vertical letters now spelclass="underline" “HATE.”
I think of the piece of paper that Josh found in the warehouse: Nora’s note with Hate Our New Land scrawled all over, the anagram that translated to Thoreau and Walden. Did she write it because she saw those words on the wall herself?
“I think this might have something to do with Nora’s note,” I say, purposely being cryptic in case Patrick is watching us. “It would make sense, with the anagram and all.”
Josh’s eyes light up, and he gives me a brief nod.
We work in silence for a few more minutes, scrambling to find other bricks with letters. And soon we find an R and then an O.
The rain pounds against us as the wind continues to howl. We work in tandem, each feeling our way. I scrape off more moss and find an U.
Once again, the bricks begin to quiver. There’s a deep grinding sound as each brick breaks away and realigns itself like a puzzle, stopping when “OUR” is lined up horizontally, with the O on top of the E in “HATE.”
It’s as if we have the top and side to a door. My breath catches in my throat. Is this a way into the firewall? Did my dad make some sort of key with the anagram for Thoreau and Walden? I think so. If I’m right, and we need to spell out the words “Hate Our New Land,” we’re almost there.
We keep looking. Soon, we have the letters A, W, E and N.
The wall begins to shake and Josh and I step back as we witness another reconfiguration. The A stays in place, but the W, E, and N begin to move, the wall realigning until N is situated next to the R from the word “OUR.” So far, we’ve spelled out “Hate Our New,” outlining the side and top of what I think will be the door. But how is this going to work? There’s only one word left to spell the last part of Nora’s sentence: “land.” And even if the word “land” drops vertically from the W and forms the other side of the door, the bricks in the middle will still be solid.
But I don’t let my confusion slow me down. We keep going, more and more frantic as the storm continues to rage around us, the green rain forming deep, cold puddles that drench our feet. Soon we have two more letters: L and N.
I move farther and farther away from Josh, my arms beginning to ache from stretching and reaching and pushing against the stone bricks. The cold rain turns to sleet and lightning bolts cross the sky, every now and then slamming the ground behind us as if firing a warning shot. But I barely feel the cold or my once-throbbing leg. Adrenaline is heating my limbs and encouraging me on.
I scan the wall, searching. There has to be a D hidden here somewhere.
And then I see it. A brick located just below eye level, splattered with mud. I can only make out the top of a straightedged line, but still I run toward it, scraping off the soggy dirt and the layer of fur and fuzz underneath. I drop to my knees, brushing the bricks clean, or clean enough. There’s definitely a D under here. “I’ve got it!” I yell. And then I hear the roar of a train.