“Save your energy. Don’t try to talk.” Josh’s voice is but a soft whisper.
“Rub her feet. Her lower extremities seem to be responding faster,” my dad tells him. “We need to get her up and walking so we can get you both out of here. The firewall protects us from some of the stimuli, but it’s still dangerous. And with the kind of disruption she’s already suffered, she’s going to have a tough enough time with Aftershock as it is.”
Knuckles knead my arches and the balls of my feet, sending a tingling sensation up through my ankles and straight to my upper thighs.
“We can’t go back,” I hear Josh say. The tension in his throat is unmistakable. “Patrick locked us in here.”
My father’s hand clenches my arm just a little bit tighter as I utilize all my strength to open my eyes. I’m sitting on the barren, marshy ground, my back resting against the trunk of a dead tree. Josh is at my feet and my dad is kneeling beside me, his familiar face lined with concern. He looks like he did when I saw him on the beach—just a little more tired and dirty.
“What are you talking about?” my father asks.
“Patrick was with us in the Escape before our wristbands stopped working. When he left, he was furious, and then there was an administrator lockout, and—”
“Dad,” I whisper, trying to speak once more. He touches a hand to my cheek.
“Shhh,” he says to me.
I feel my eyes starting to spasm a bit and they begin to close, even though I’m fighting to stay awake.
“Let’s get her back to the compound,” Dad says to Josh.
He leans closer, wrapping an arm around my shoulder. And that’s when I notice his eyes. Once a deep brown, they are now the same color as Josh’s: a light, vacant gray. Before I can react, I succumb to the fatigue, drifting beneath the surface once more.
The next time I come to, it’s like I’m waking up in the real world. My body isn’t frozen like a block of ice; my brain doesn’t feel like it’s sunk underwater. Even my leg, with its penetrating wound, looks almost healed. I can sit up and look around, but there isn’t that much to see. I’m inside a small room that seems like it’s made out of stone, kind of like a cave, only the walls here are a bright shade of ivory instead of black. I’m lying on several pieces of starchy fabric with jagged hems, so it looks like they’ve been torn from somewhere.
I glance down and notice that I’m still in the same clothes from the Prairie Escape, but they’re ripped and very faded, like someone has twisted and wrung all the color out of them. My skin is surprisingly clean and I feel refreshed, like I haven’t been running from monsters, breaking through walls, and rolling down hills.
When I glance back up, I notice my father, standing in the corner with his back up against the wall, his arms crossed in front of his chest. He’s wearing the same clothes he wore on the beach, but like mine, they’re practically devoid of color. His smile is kind as ever, and when he takes a step toward me, I leap up and meet him halfway, pulling him into a great big hug the first moment I can.
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I say. Tears of happiness fill my eyes.
“It’s me,” he says softly, resting his chin on top of my head.
“I was so scared that I’d never see you again,” I say.
“I know, I was too,” he replies. “But we’re together now. That’s all that matters.”
I ease myself out of his arms and glance up at him through glistening eyes. “So this is real? Wherever we are?”
“Yes, it’s real.”
He motions to the makeshift bed and we both sit on the edge, just like mom and I had done only last night. Or was it longer? I’ve lost all track of time. I’m so confused and overwhelmed, I’m clinging to his hand like a little girl, but he doesn’t seem to care.
“How’s Mom doing?” he asks, as if reading my mind. “Is she okay?”
I bow my head, wondering if I should tell him the truth, but when I glance up into his eyes, the answer is right in front of me. “Uh-huh. She’s doing fine.”
We’ve all been through enough. Why make matters worse with painful truths?
“What about Josh? How is he?” I ask.
“He’s fine. He’s waiting outside. I wanted to talk to you. Just the two of us.”
My dad is avoiding my eyes, as if he’s about to tell me something I don’t want to hear. In the past, we had a lot of awkward, uncomfortable conversations that began the exact same way. Discussions about my grades, my lack of ambition and drive, and other subjects I’d rather not recall.
“Whatever’s wrong, we can fix it,” I attempt to reassure him. I thought he was dead and now I’ve been given a second chance. I can handle whatever he’s about to tell me.
“I’m not sure that we can.” The pitch of his voice deepens, taking on a somber tone that I’ve rarely heard from him.
“What happened, Dad? Who did this to you?” I plead.
“Josh told me you saw the memo,” he says, casting his eyes away from mine. “So you know that Elusion can cause nanopsychosis in young users. And that we were trying to find a way to adapt the product so it wouldn’t be dangerous.”
“Yes, we do,” I say. “But you need to tell me everything that went down after that. Step by step, and don’t leave anything out. I can take it.”
He exhales and we lock eyes again. Whatever he’s about to say right now, I know in my heart he’s going to be honest.
“Before we submitted Elusion to the CIT, I had Bryce Williams run a bunch of tests on subject groups, monitoring how trypnosis affected the users. Standard protocol for any type of product like ours,” he explains. “I was working on programming and security networks with Patrick, and that was taking up all of my time.”
I nod, vaguely remembering the countless days and nights he spent at the Orexis lab, working on Elusion. “But then Bryce discovered a problem, right?”
“Yes, he did. Something that I’d just never foreseen,” he says. “I didn’t anticipate how someone with a brain chemistry that was still in flux and developing would respond to trypnosis. And when he suggested sodium pentothal, it seemed like a good solution.”
A gasp catches at the base of my throat and I let go of his hand. “So you went ahead anyway? Even though you knew people might be in danger of getting hurt?”
“While Patrick and I focused on the Escape design and the firewalls, Bryce did more studies, verifying that the chemical was effective,” he says. “He even brought the materials to Cathryn and got her to sign off on them. He said she wanted to expedite the process and was satisfied with his results. At first, I thought this was pretty convincing evidence that we were in the clear.”
“And something changed your mind?”
“Yes. For a couple weeks after we started fitting the wristbands with the sodium pentothal, something kept eating at me. We usually approach the entire board of directors and production staff with these types of reports, at special meetings called A and Ms—Assess and Manage. The findings are presented to the group, the documents are thoroughly reviewed, and a Q and A is held. But Bryce went straight to the head of the company to receive clearance. Why would he do that?”