Shutdown (Glitch) (20 page)

“So there’s no way to escape it?” I scoffed, putting the cap back on the water bottle and standing up. “I’m just supposed to accept that if I step outside of this cave then I’m doomed to die in a city somewhere?”

“No, no, no,” he said quickly, still pacing. “That’s not what I mean. I’m still hoping that I was right about the visions being simultaneous moments on two separate forked futures. But look at the facts.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “We don’t have any more epi infusions. The anti-infrared harnesses have enough coolant for maybe two more nights, at most. Then what? We have shelter here. The lake outside is spring-fed so we have fresh water. You’ve got the biosuit and I can head into the city by myself to steal you some more oxy tanks.”

“But we have to try to get in contact with the Rez as soon as we can,” I argued.

“Do you think Rez cells advertise with a sign outside their door? They’re impossible to find, and you more than anyone know that being with the Rez is probably the least safe place to be these days. The Chancellor turns all the Rez agents she captures with her compulsion. Whoever she captured at the Foundation will have told her about the last few cells.” He shook his head and finally stopped pacing. “No, the safest place is out here, off the grid. Besides I’m good at slipping in and out of cities. I can get us the supplies we need.”

“So, what?” I asked slowly, trying to wrap my head around all he was saying. “You mean we just
live
out here?”

“Yeah. For a while anyway.”

“But,” I sputtered. “We can’t. We have to—”

“What?” he interrupted, his voice hard. “Go start a revolution? Fight against the Chancellor? We’re beat, Zoe. When are you gonna see that? The Rez is cracked, done for. Maybe there are a few cells left here or there, but they’ll have scattered once news of what happened at the Foundation gets out. We’ll never be able to find them.”

“But you’re a techer,” I said. “I know you all have a secret signal you put out if something like this happens. If we could get the right equipment, then you could—”

“And what if no one’s left out there?” His jaw was tight. “What then?”

“The Chancellor has my brother,” I barreled on. “And there were plenty of people who couldn’t get on the escape pods out of the Foundation. Some of them have valuable Gifts. The Chancellor would have imprisoned them. If I take her out, then everyone under her compulsion will be free. I could gather all the glitchers together—”

“Do you even hear yourself?” he scoffed, his voice raising an octave. “You’re going to go up against thousands of Regs just by yourself? And what if she has that power-blocking girl there?”

I waved a hand dismissively. “The Chancellor would never risk keeping the girl around her. All of her control over others depends on being able to compel them, and the girl’s presence would make her impotent. Besides, if I save up my strength, I could take on the Regs—”

“You’ve got a death wish then,” he said, throwing up his hands. “That’s what this is. You’re letting that ridiculous guilt you carry with you everywhere drive you to an early grave. When are you gonna see that guilt’s nothing more than the repression of your genuine desires? You’ve created this net of morals around you to strangle your most basic instincts. To
survive
.”

“Some things are more important than survival,” I shot back. “Like making your life count. Sacrifice for a worthy cause
means
something. It’s the best of what makes us human. You used to understand that.”

“Well, then I’m triply glad I’m not that shunting idiot anymore!” he yelled, his face red. His voice echoed throughout the cave. “I don’t even know why I bothered coming back for you if you’re so bound and determined to die.”

“So why did you?” I asked, pushing closer until our chests were almost touching. “Why come back for me if you’re only supposed to think about your own survival?”

His jaw tensed, but he didn’t say anything. He just pulled away and stomped away farther into the dark depths of the cave.

“I thought so!” I yelled after him and kicked my blanket against the wall, not even knowing what I meant. All the peace I’d felt on waking was shattered.

We went the entire day without speaking. He slept through the night, which I spent pacing and feeling caged. I was so frustrated at him, but the farthest we could get from each other was only the twenty feet or so that we’d explored of the cave.

Half of me knew I was getting angry at him for things that weren’t his fault. It was how his mind worked now—logically, not emotionally. And I was finally beginning to see him as himself instead of searching for the old Adrien in his every act and expression.

But he still baffled me. Because as different as he was now, sometimes I’d swear he still cared for me. He claimed he looked at the world with a strictly logical lens, but coming back for me … and then planning to risk his life to go back into the city to try to find me an oxygen tank—none of that was logical.

Or maybe to him it was. If he could keep me alive, then he’d still have use for me. I could fly us out of a bad situation. Then again, he’d already proven he could steal a vehicle without problem. So why had he come back? Why? The question kept pinging in my brain throughout the long night.

I looked down at Adrien. Even in sleep he looked different than the old Adrien had. As if his features weren’t quite relaxed. Was he having a bad dream? The scars across his head gave him a slightly menacing look. Maybe he was only here because he’d seen himself present in the vision of the cave, so he was staying in order to fulfill it? But he’d had that vision
after
coming back for me.

I suddenly felt inordinately tired again. I had a feeling the boy on the ground in front of me was a mystery I might never truly figure out.

My clothes felt crunchy, having dried on my body after the storm. I tried running my fingers through my hair to rebraid it, but it was dirty with clumps of mud from dropping into the ditch yesterday. I picked out the dried mud for half an hour before I gave up and sat back against one of the mounded cave formations on the ground.

No matter what Adrien said, I wasn’t going to stay here forever. I wasn’t going to just wait around safe and sound while my brother was still caught in the Chancellor’s snare. I should have gotten him out of the Community before she moved him to her personal estate.

At the same time, I wasn’t foolish enough to leave yet in case Adrien was right about the second vision still possibly coming true. I’d just have to trust that his first instinct about his new visions happening simultaneously had been right. I’d give it two weeks at the most to make sure we averted the second vision.

Adrien finally woke up a few hours later. He glanced in my direction, but didn’t say anything. After the hours of quiet throughout the night, though, I’d had enough silence. I went over and plunked myself beside him while he reached for half of a protein bar for breakfast.

“So if we’re going to be stuck here, we might as well talk to help the hours pass.”

He looked over the water bottle at me, as if suspicious of how nice I was being after our fight. “Talk about what?”

I shrugged. “Anything.”

He just stared at me.

“How’d you sleep?” I finally prodded.

“Fine.”

“Now you ask me something.”

He raised an eyebrow and gave me a half smirk. “Trying to teach me to converse like a normal human?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m only trying to fill the silence. It’ll help the time pass quicker.”

“I didn’t notice the time was passing slowly.”

“You’re going to make this difficult, aren’t you?”

The smirk was in full force now. “It’s my style.”

I laughed and sat back with my elbows on my knees. “Okay, I’ll try another tactic. How about a hypothetical? What would you do if the war was over and you could do anything?”

His jaw tightened. “You know I have his memories. He played this little game with you before.”

“I know,” I said softly. “That’s why I’m asking. I know what his answer was. But now I want to know
yours
.”

“Oh.” His face softened lightly in surprise. “Well, um. You go first. You never did tell him yours.”

I looked out the cave entrance at the bright midmorning sunlight sparkling on the lake. “I’ve thought about it sometimes since then. I’d want a really big house.”

“Really?” He sounded surprised. “I didn’t figure you for the materialistic sort.”

“If you’d let me finish, I was going to say that I’d want a big house where all my family and closest friends would live. Markan would be there with me.” I swallowed hard at the mention of my brother’s name, then went on. “Kind of like the Foundation, but everyone would be there because they wanted to be. They’d all go out to their separate jobs every day, but we’d all meet together for dinner every night. There’d be this huge table and we’d all sit together with mounds of good food and talk and laugh for hours every night.”

“And what about the rest of the day?” he asked. His voice had lost its mocking tone. “What would you do?”

I smiled and closed my eyes, imagining it. “I’d buy a hundred canvases and fill each one. There would be academies just for artists, and I’d go and learn to paint all day.

“So what about you?” I opened my eyes. “What would you do?”

His voice was hesitant at first. “I’d be a mathematician. But we’d be doing the kind of math that leaves numbers behind. That happens when you get deep enough into studying it. It’s more about theories than facts. Actually, it starts becoming a little like philosophy.”

“Really?”

“Both math and philosophy are asking the same question. Why? Then they use reasoning to try to discover the answers.” He nodded to himself. “They make sense when so little else does.”

“Is that why you’ve spent so much time studying them?”

He looked up at me, then down at his folded hands again. “Partly. After what the Chancellor did…” He swallowed. “Everything felt alien. All the people around me, you all felt … not just like strangers…” He paused as if looking for the right way to explain it. I was suprised he was actually opening up and didn’t say anything in case it made him clam up again. “It was like you were all a different species. You and Sophia were always crying whenever you visited me. You asked me questions I never knew the answers to. I didn’t know how to communicate with you. I genuinely didn’t understand what was going on around me at a very basic level.”

His face contorted. “And on top of it all, I was being put through those strange and painful treatments. It was all so confusing. But around the second month, I started reading. I began with philosophy because I had that memory of you calling me a philosopher. At the beginning, you see,” he looked up at me, his eyes both searching and sad, “I genuinely wanted to go back to being him. It’s what you all told me I should be trying for, so I did.”

Wow. I sat a little stunned. I hadn’t known any of that was going on in his head. I’d been so desperate for him to go back to being normal during those afternoon visits, I hadn’t seen how much he’d been struggling.

He shrugged his shoulders. “But I never could. When I started working my way through the philosophy texts, though, I felt this rush of recognition because here,
finally
, were people speaking a language I could understand.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely curious. I hadn’t listened closely enough back then, but I could now. I accepted he was different, I just still didn’t understand why or how deeply the differences went.

He looked upwards, as if sorting through his memory. “They were asking questions like: how do you know what you think you know? Is it because you trust in the power of reason to work your way to an answer? Or can you only know the things you personally experience through your five senses? And even if you trust in only what you yourself experience, aren’t those experiences filtered by the mind anyway? So is reality merely what you
think
it is?”

My brain seemed to twist in on itself as I tried to follow him. “That all seems really complicated. I’m not sure I understand.”

A half smile tugged at his lips. “I didn’t either, not at first, but slowly the puzzle pieces started falling into place. It was like the philosophers were turning life into math problems. With enough time, I could start breaking each one down into manageable chunks to start solving some of the equations.”

“So what did you find out?” I leaned in. “What’s the answer to
why
?”

His face clouded over a little. “That’s the thing. At a certain point, it gets beyond logic, or at least the human ability to reason it out. It’s true of both math and philosophy. Like I said earlier, there’s always a point where things stop being facts and start to become theories about the way the world works. Like this.” He reached in his pocket and rummaged around for a moment, then pulled out a tiny object.

“It’s a snail shell I found by the lake when I was gathering water last night.” He slid over closer until he was sitting beside me. He held up the shell closer. “See these tiny spirals all over the shell?” He traced the spiraling line with the tip of his forefinger.

I nodded.

“This shell and others all throughout the world follow the same mathematical sequence. Flower petals and pinecones and shells all grow according to this identical pattern. Even the ratios of the bones in the human body are related.” He held up his hand. “We see these patterns everywhere, but we don’t know
why
they happen.”

He looked back up at me, his gray eyes bright. It was a surreal sight. I’d seen Adrien excited about ideas like this in the past, but it was different now, and not just because the blue-green color was gone from his eyes.

He continued, oblivious to my scrutiny. “I mean, it’s an efficient growth pattern. But how do the plants
know
it’s the most efficient? Millions of years of evolution, of trial and error, I guess. But still. Why, across multiple species and multiple millennia, do they all follow the exact same pattern? And that’s not even getting into humankind’s most recent adaptation with all these powers we glitchers have developed. The smartest minds throughout history haven’t been able to even make a dent at solving some of the great whys of the universe.” He shook his head, looking out toward the cave entrance. “It’s all this insane mixture of order and chaos. The more I understand, the less I understand.”