Shutdown (Glitch) (15 page)

“I’m good in a fight. There’s a firearm tucked away in my rations pack. I’m a better shot than you. And I’m a good techer.” His face darkened for a moment. “Or at least I will be again, once the doctor’s poisons get out of my system. Besides, in the wilderness, two are always better than one.”

“So what if my allergies become too much of a liability? Then you’d just pack up your things, and, well…” I paused as I tried to wrap my head around his way of thinking, “I guess you’d take my things too at that point and leave me to die?”

He blinked a few times, a slight frown on his face. “I guess there wouldn’t be any logical reason for me to stay…” He looked conflicted, and for a moment I hoped he’d realized the absurdity of what he was saying. But then he continued, “I guess … hypothetically, yes.”

“Oh, really?” I scoffed. “Gonna dump me off the first cliffside you see, then?”

He shook his head. “Of course not. Haven’t you been listening? Your assets are valuable to me. As long as there continues to be an even exchange, we should both be able to make it to the rendezvous site just fine.”

I’d been trying to harden myself against his demeanor, to pretend the things he was saying didn’t hurt. But suddenly I tired of the effort. I rubbed my eyes, then looked up at the tree branches that made a dense ceiling overhead.

“You called it poison. Is that what you really think of Jilia’s treatments?”

He nodded. “They made me sick, and I could never do any intricate coding work afterwards.” I remembered he spent a lot of time in the Security Hub where he liked to work on multiple consoles. At least he had before Jilia had upped his meds so he was getting injections every day.

“We were only trying to
help
you. Your mother and I—” I stopped again at the mention of his mom. The image of the closing blast door flashed in my mind. “I’m sorry. You know, she might have found another way out. Or they could be holding her for questioning. That’s probably what they are doing—”

Something sparked in his eyes, but it wasn’t sorrow or grief. He jumped to his feet. “That is exactly why I don’t want any more of the poisons. You say you were trying to heal me but all you wanted was to make me weak.”

“What?” I asked.

“You all delude yourselves constantly, but
I’m
the one who’s broken and sick? You can’t even tell the truth when it’s obvious to both of us. Sophia is dead. You know it and I know it. I don’t have to hide behind pretty delusions. It’s all lies, all of you trying to shape the world the way you want it to be, instead of seeing it like it really is. And you treat me the same way.”

“What do you mean? We all just want you to get better—”

“No.” He held up a finger sharply, advancing toward me. “That’s another lie. You want me to be him.”

“What?” I put my hands on my waist. “We want you to be you.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You want me to be
him
. Sophia wanted me to be him too,” he said, seeming agitated. He spun and walked away from me. He cast a long dark shadow as he passed in front of the lamp. “She barely knew me. It was him she wanted. All of you are the same, trying to pressure me into pretending to be someone I’m not.”

He turned again to look at me. “I may have his face, but I’m not him. None of you are willing to see it. Not you, not the doctor, and most of all, not the woman who called herself my mother. You kept dunking me in that shunting chamber for weeks at a time, hoping I’d turn back into him, when I’m perfectly healthy as I am.”

“How can you say that?” Angry heat rose in my cheeks. “Your mother sacrificed herself for you because she loved you. If you can’t see that, then you obviously
are
still broken. You’re cold and emotionless. You’re not a whole human being.”

“Emotionless?” His voice rose an octave. “Then what do you call this?” He threw his hands out wide, then brought them back and hit his chest with his palms. “I’m a human being. I feel anger. You’re just upset because I don’t feel what you consider the right emotions—I don’t feel what you
want
me to feel. You all walk around ignoring your most basic human instincts.”

“And what are those?”

“The instinct to survive!” he yelled. “That woman, sacrificing herself for us? She was a fool. All we have is this life and she just threw it away.”

“She was your mother—”

“She should have been trying to save herself!”

I was shocked and taken aback at all the emotion showing so clearly on his face.

“Instead she wasted her life for nothing—for a memory of someone who’s not even here anymore. She didn’t love me. She didn’t even
know
me, and she died for nothing.”

“Don’t you dare say that,” I said, stepping toe to toe with him. “She died for
you
. You grew in her body and she birthed you and she’d die for you no matter what you’ve turned into.”

“She was a fool,” he repeated, his face red. “And I used to be a fool too, back when I thought lumps of flesh had souls.” He threw his hands up in the air. “It’s so obviously the opposite. We are organisms, and like all organisms who are threatened, we adapted to survive. That’s all.”

He moved to turn away from me again, but I grabbed his arm. “No, that’s not all,” I said, even though once I had thought the same thing. When we’d first met, we’d had this argument backward. I didn’t know now if I’d said it because I actually believed it, or if I’d wanted to believe it. “You always said there was more to it. That we matter. That relationships between even just two human beings—that love—can change the world.”

He shook his head. “What you call love is the ultimate lie. It means putting someone else’s needs above your own. Which can get you killed. It got Sophia killed.” He paused and looked straight at me with a burning intensity. “And it got me tortured and lobotomized.”

A lump rose in my throat. All my anger dried up in an instant. I knew what he was saying. It was my fault. Loving me had gotten him tortured within an inch of his life. All that pain and anguish, when it would have been so much easier to relent and give into the Chancellor’s compulsion. He was right. He’d already suffered enough on my account. It would serve me right to be left behind here to die.

I let go of his arm. “I’m so sorry,” I finally managed to whisper, barely able to find my voice. I knew my apology wasn’t enough, would never be near enough. The chasm of all I owed to him, of all he’d gone through, because of me—

“Don’t be,” he said. He closed his eyes, and his heaving chest stilled. “It was my own fault for being weak enough to fall in love in the first place. I know better now. You shouldn’t let useless guilt weigh you down either.”

I stared at him, wanting to pull him close and rest my head on his chest, to listen to his heartbeat. Anything to try to reassure myself that the boy I had loved was still inside the person in front of me somewhere. Instead, I stayed rooted where I stood.

“Why didn’t you say any of this before?”

He pinched his lips together before speaking. “You never asked.”

I took a step toward him involuntarily. “I asked you every day how you were feeling.”

“Exactly,” he shook his head. “How I was
feeling.
You asked about emotions. You wanted some evidence so you could pretend I was starting to become him again. You didn’t want to know about the things I was interested in. I tried telling you about my coding projects. I showed you the exciting math theorems I was working on. But you didn’t want to hear it. All you wanted to talk about was love and souls and emotions, or worse,” he grimaced, “memories of the past.”

“Why is talking about memories a bad thing?” My voice broke and I couldn’t help it. “I was only trying to help you remember who you are.”

“Who I
was
,” he corrected. He’d calmed down some, but his eyes were still lit with intensity in the blue light of the lamp. “I’ve been trying to make you see who I am
now.
”

I stepped back, stunned. He talked about the old Adrien as if he was gone for good. As if that’s the way he wanted it.

I stared at him as he organized and restuffed the packs. It was so obvious he was different. I must have been willingly blinding myself not to see it. The way he ordered things into neat rows, everything in its place, when the old Adrien had been messy. How he read complex math texts for fun when my Adrien would have wanted to go look at the sunset or read a book of poems. Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to keep trying to pretend he was someone else.

No, I tried to tell myself. I looked down at the brown crumpled leaves under my feet. He was still sick. That was all. When he got better …

I squeezed my hands into fists at my sides. I couldn’t think about any of this right now. Right now it was time to push all this emotion under a shadowed stone somewhere deep in my soul and face the situation in front of us. We needed to get to the safe house. That was all.

Adrien finished closing up his pack. I took a moment to steady my voice. “We should get moving.”

Chapter 12

BY LATE AFTERNOON OF THE
next day, we still hadn’t hit the border fence between Sectors Five and Six. We’d flown all morning and hadn’t spoken much. All the words that mattered had been slung last night.

I set us down on the ground. The crunch of our feet on fallen leaves as we walked sounded extraordinarily loud. After a few steps on my weak legs, I barely managed to stay standing. I’d never felt such an allover achy soreness like this before. My shoulder blades felt like they were slicing through my back, and even my eyes felt bruised. It had been over thirty-six hours since I’d last slept.

The afternoon sun was like a spike in my eyes when I opened them. I immediately backed away into the shadow of a tree and rolled my shoulders to stretch them out. I was beyond exhausted. I’d left exhaustion behind hours ago. I felt like I was about to collapse.

I slumped to the ground with my back to a tree. We’d both agreed earlier it would be safer to cross the fence at night and figured we should take the opportunity to rest now during the day. Which meant we had a few hours of rest, or at least as much as I could rest without falling asleep.

Soon it would be over, I reminded myself. We’d get past the border, then into Sector Six. We’d make our way slowly to the rendezvous site. Everyone would be safe and together again. Except for my brother. He was with the Chancellor, under her compulsion. Was she treating him well? If he had a useful enough glitcher Gift, she would, but there was no way to know.

And then there was everyone who hadn’t been able to make it into the pods. I selfishly hoped my friends had all made it to safety and it was the refugees who’d been left behind. I pushed my palms against my eyes as if I could scrub the horrible thought away. I just needed to get Adrien safely there, get some sleep, and then I’d take off on my own so whoever was left could stay protected.

Adrien refilled our bottle with water from the stream we’d been following. It had been an easy way to orient myself and make sure I was headed up the mountain so we’d hit the border fence at a deserted area. I’d flown underneath the overhanging branches of the trees along the shore to avoid detection. Without bushes and brambles snagging at us from below, we’d been able to fly faster.

Adrien handed me the bottle of water and sat down nearby. “I drank at the river, so have as much as you want.”

He pulled out a protein bar he’d halved earlier and began munching. I took a long swallow of the cold water and let out a sigh of pleasure at how good it tasted.

He sat on a large rock and looked outward, his elbows on his knees. I followed his gaze.

We’d come halfway up the nearest mountain. At times it had been so steep we’d almost been flying vertically. We were high enough up that other peaks spread out before us, sloping rises stacked against each other in the late-afternoon sun.

“It’s strange not to see the peaks covered by snow,” he said, looking out. “This one time when Sophia and I spent half a year hiding out in the mountains, the peaks were all covered in white.” A small smile tugged at the edges of his mouth. “She told me the white caps were the mountains’ hats, so they could stay warm all winter.” His smile faltered. “Completely illogical, of course, but at the time it amused me.”

I stared at him, tracing the lines of his face as if I could memorize what it had looked like when he’d smiled. But as quickly as the smile had come, it was gone again. I looked away from him and pulled my hair out of its tie to run my fingers through it and rebraid it.

Now that we’d stopped, the noise I’d been hearing in the background for the past few hours suddenly seemed extremely piercing, a high-pitched chirping sound. It wasn’t anything mechanical, I could tell that much. “What
is
that?”

“What?”

“That constant screeching noise.”

The smile was back. “Cicadas. There’s millions of them out there, all singing to each other. Don’t worry, you’ll get so used to it you won’t even hear it anymore.”

“You really should get some sleep,” I said, my voice abrupt. Seeing him smile pained me in a strange way. It was more evidence that even though he could feel emotion now, he still felt none for me. “No reason for both of us to be sleep deprived.”

I ground my back against the rough bark of the tree to keep myself awake. I was so tired, all I wanted to do was close my eyes. A day and a half might not seem like a long time to be awake, but I’d also been using my powers at maximum. That alone without the sleep deprivation would have exhausted me on a normal day.

I blinked my eyes and forced them open wider. Going to sleep would get me killed. I’d just have to remind myself of that every 0.3 seconds when my eyes started getting heavy again.

Adrien nodded and laid on his side beside the rock, his arms curled up for a pillow. He closed his eyes without another word.

After a few more breaths, he was asleep. I watched his rising and falling chest, the way his mouth slackened slightly in sleep, and the long angles of his face in the soft afternoon light. I wanted so badly to curl up beside him and relax against his wiry frame.