day, doing my videogame geekwad thing a thousand times over. I’m sick of riding hograts through the desert. Come save me from this hole in the ground. I’m waiting, Lu.”
The camera cut back to the interviewer’s sympathetic face. “We’re all waiting,” she said, in that ‘wrap-it-up’ voice. “No one more than these two, but they’re not giving up hope. Because hope never dies—not when love is concerned.”
“It’s hard to listen to that bullshit,” Nate said when the video ended.
“Yes. Gil can project this incredible glow when he wants to,” Elisa said. “He seems so sincere and principled, but he’d tear out your entrails if it suited his purposes.”
“I want to rip his face off whenever he opens his mouth,” Nate said.
Elisa sat down on the couch, close enough to see the laptop screen, and discreetly tugged the bottom of the T-shirt around her thighs.
“How did you end up in Shaw’s Crossing, when you ran?” he asked. “It’s not on the way to anywhere. Except for camping, fishing, hunting, rock-climbing.”
“I went there once as a kid,” she said. “I did a summer camp program there. It was a wonderful summer. Joshie was there, too. I had happy memories.”
“He looks a lot like you,” he said.
She stared down at frozen image on the screen with a bitter laugh. “Yeah, we both have that pale, haunted look right now. He’s nine years younger than me. He was four when our mom died, so I became his mom. As best I could.”
“So you know him better than anyone,” Nate said.
“You could say that,” she agreed.
“He looks like a smart kid.”
“Absolutely brilliant,” Elisa said. “He gets that from Dad. Dad was a software engineering genius. Lucky Josh, that he inherited a talent Dad could appreciate.”
Nate nodded as he digested that. “Hmm. So, if he’s smart, then Josh wouldn’t be one to pass up an opportunity, would you say?”
“What opportunity do you mean?” she asked.
“What he said in that video,” Nate said slowly, still staring at the screen. “It’s strangely worded. It sounds forced. It could just mean he’s tense and miserable and nothing comes naturally. Or it could be…something.”
She was sitting bolt upright. “Something, meaning what?”
Nate dragged the video back to the point where Josh was talking, and set it to play. “Is there anything about the way he speaks, the gestures he’s making, or the words he chooses, that seems out of character for you?”
“Well, yes, of course,” she said. “All of it is strange and stiff and off-kilter. He’s a prisoner, after all. He’s speaking under duress.”
“What exactly seems off-kilter?”
“Well, there’s his tone. It sounds so flat. And the shirt he’s wearing. He’s worn that same shirt in every single video, and it looks stained. Josh is a neatnik, ever since he was little. A total hygiene freak. He always grooms himself carefully. But in this last video, he looks greasy, unshaved, uncombed. I figured he was just depressed.”
“I’m sure he is,” Nate said. “And I can well imagine that they wouldn’t give him access to razor blades.”
He hit ‘play,’ and Josh’s dull, droning tone sounded, so different from his usual lively way of speaking. “I miss you so much, Lu—”
The recording froze, and she heard a click as Nate screenshot it.
“Right there,” he said. “When he hits his chest. Is that something that he does usually? A nervous habit, a tic, something like that?”
“Not that I recall,” she said.
“So that could be something. The shirt?” He enlarged the screenshot, and both of them studied the blurry image on Josh’s chest, which appeared to be some sort of winged creature, like a dragon. One silvery wing was visible. The top part of some letters showed, and a circle of sunset colors behind. “An S, an H, an A, then either a P or an R, and a D or a B. R, for sure,” Nate said, as if talking to himself. “Shards. I think he’s wearing a Shards Of Ruin T-shirt. It’s a popular video game. Ring any bells?”
“I never really paid attention to Josh’s video games,” she said. “They mostly rolled right off my consciousness without sticking.”
“Shards of Ruin,” Nate said thoughtfully. “There was some buzz about that game. I saw the ads for it. It was big in the indie game scene about a year ago. Good graphics, huge landscape, lots of interactive storylines. So Josh games?”
“Heavily,” she said. “It always worried me.”
Nate pulled up a fresh screen and called up information about Shards of Ruin, and scrolled through it, looking