Shutdown (Glitch) (29 page)

I let my telek push through my fingertips and imagined the way I’d seen City’s electricity web weave around the other transport. I did the same, but instead of electricity, I laid a web of energy. The projection cube burst to life in my mind and I could sense the entire transport and all seventeen bodies crammed inside. I memorized the feel of it, the slightly acrid smell of smoke in the air and the smooth texture of the steel armrest underneath my fingers. The back door clanged shut. Everyone was inside now.

And then I whispered, “
Up
.”

The people behind me let out surprised yelps and gasps, but I ignored them. I was entirely in my mind now, lifting the triangular object off the ground and up into the sky. Like I’d done when it had just been Adrien and me, I kept my mind’s eye focused on the ground.

But the physics of flying a transport compared to moving two bodies was a very different thing. For one, the wind resistance was different. It caught the wings in ways I didn’t expect and sent us tipping left and right. People screamed and yelped behind me. I bit down on my lip and compensated.

I tried to get a feel of how the wind worked. Right when I thought I’d gotten a handle on it, it would gust at strange times with another updraft.

After another few minutes, I’d gotten the basics down, at least enough to keep us mostly steady. “Henk, tell me you’ve got another transport hidden somewhere close.”

“’Course I do.” He came up behind me and put a hand on the back of my chair, staring out through the window. “Can’t believe it. You just made a dead bird up and fly.”

“I need you to direct me to the other transport. It won’t take them long to realize what happened. The melted transports might throw them off for a little bit, and maybe if we’re lucky they’ll think we took off on foot. But I’m sure soon enough they’ll go back to the Sat Cam logs and watch this one take off. They might already be tracking us.”

He nodded beside me. He looked at the projected map the techer had set up on his personal console, depicting our position and altitude. “’Kay, you need to turn left, and head straight that way about a hundred miles.”

I turned the vehicle slightly and hit another updraft that made the whole transport wobble for several long moments before I compensated.

“Too far,” Henk said. “You gotta adjust back to the right a smidge.”

I did, more gracefully this time, and then threw all my concentration into gathering speed. Finally the comments and terrified gasps behind me quieted. I hoped I wasn’t banging Ginni around too roughly. I didn’t dare a glance backwards to check. Sweat beaded on my forehead already. I couldn’t split my focus in any more directions.

Henk and I kept at it, him giving me directions to nudge me one way or another until finally, only ten minutes later, I felt the landscape that had formerly stretched out flat in all directions begin to jut upward. I opened my eyes to look, because I didn’t understand the topography I felt with my telek.

“You’re taking us into a city?”

“Look closer,” Henk said. “No one’s lived there for a couple hundred years.” As the transport drew closer, I saw what he meant. What I’d thought at first were normal buildings stretching up into the sky, I could now see were ruins. The whole city looked like it had been burned out. Half the ground was covered in rubble, the other half was made of buildings on the verge of collapse.

“What is this place?”

“Used to be a tourist destination in the Old World. It was one of the few cities that actually got hit with a bomb on D-Day. Since it’s out in the middle of the desert, it never got rebuilt. It’s just been fallin’ to bits since. Makes for a good hiding place though. Look,” he said, and pointed to an area that was clear of debris. “Drop altitude and settle down in that flat bit o’ ground down there. You see it?”

I nodded, then closed my eyes again. I needed to do more than see it.

“I feel it.” I tried to decelerate the transport as gently as I could but still heard some
oof
s from behind me. I ignored them and set us down in the tall grasses that sprouted from the concrete.

“No time for restin’,” Henk said. “We gotta get into the next transport fast or they’ll be on us. It’s not much roomier, but it’s got cloaking. We’ll be invisible as soon as we’re off.” He looked up into the sky as the others opened the back hatch. “Frankly I’m surprised we ain’t seen no one yet.”

Almost as soon as he’d said it, I felt them coming. “Two more transports are headed this way.”

“If they get one good blast at us, we’re all dead,” Henk said.

That decided it then.

I cast my telek out, latching onto the transports as they blasted nearer. I thought about the beating hearts inside of the Regulators who had once been men. And then I pushed that thought away and, using their own momentum, yanked them off course. Their transports flew straight into the ground at full speed and exploded with an earth-shaking
boom
. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek, trying to ignore the rush of emotions flooding me.

When Xona dropped the back hatch open, the air was warm and ashy from the exploded transports. Rand and Xona lifted Ginni down. Henk dropped after them, taking huge strides with his lanky legs and motioning us to follow. Simin hurried beside them, holding Ginni’s hand while I searched the rest of the sky. It was clear. No one else was coming. Yet.

We ran down an alleyway between two teetering bombed-out buildings. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows that covered the alley, and we had to be careful to avoid tripping over chunks of concrete and junk that had piled up on the ground.

“Is the new transport close?” Cole asked. “Next time they won’t just send two investigative units. They’ll send an armada.”

“We’ll be long gone by then,” Henk said. He pushed ahead of us and then banged open a rusty door with his shoulder.

“Is this safe?” City asked.

Henk didn’t respond, he just disappeared into the darkness beyond the door. I paused and let the others who were carrying Ginni pass.

We all hurried after Henk. The windows on the opposite side of the building had been blown out. Henk ran across the debris-strewn floor and led us to an old stairwell, blackened by fire and covered in dust.

“I’ve got Ginni,” I said, grabbing her body and lifting her with my telek so we could all get up the stairs faster. We ran up the four flights and Cole helped Henk kick open another door.

And there it was. A pristine transport, perched on two slabs of concrete. The floor looked mostly solid, even though everything else in the room was demolished down to the steel girders. The walls were completely gone, open to the sky.

As we all hurried out onto the floor, the whole building above us creaked loudly.

“Shunting hell, Henk,” City said. “Is this building even stable for us to be in?”

“’Course not,” he said with a grin. “That’s why it made such a good hiding place for my flier. So walk lightly. Whole bloomin’ thing’s like to fall on top of your heads.”

“Ignore him,” I hissed. “Focus on the task at hand. Henk, get the rear door open.”

The building overhead gave a long
creeeeeeeak
. Rand let out a high-pitched yelp of fear. If we weren’t in such a life or death situation, I was sure City would have teased him about it mercilessly. But then the structure around us shuddered. The girders began to visibly vibrate.

“Everyone
in
,” I yelled. I didn’t know how Henk had managed to get a flier in through the narrow struts of the open wall, or if the floor was as steady as I’d first thought. Maybe when I’d crashed the incoming fliers, the vibrations had weakened the building more than it had been when Henk had first hidden the transport here.

Now if we could just get out again before the building collapsed on top of us.

Henk jumped to the front console. Adrien joined him since they both had the most experience flying. I helped everyone else in behind us, glad to relax into a hard metal seat for a moment. But I kept my telek split three ways between my mast cells, the building on top of us, and out into the air searching for more approaching fliers. I closed my eyes hard against the strain of trying to keep it all together in my head.

Xona strapped herself in beside me, and I looked at Ginni, lying on the floor. For a second, I let my eyes travel down to her stump leg.

“Is she gonna be okay?” I asked.

Xona pursed her lips and looked at the ceiling. “The bleeding in her leg stopped, so that’s a good sign. And she’s been out ever since we gave her the meds.”

“Good.” I leaned my head back against the hard wall of the transport. No lush comfort chairs here; this transport was all hard metal lines and chairs meant to efficiently pack in the greatest number of people.

I spared a glance toward the front. Henk was hunched over the console intently. He pushed a button and it roared to life beneath us. “All right,” he said, raising the vehicle up off the ground.

But the transport bumped into the ceiling overhead accidently, and the building that had been only previously creaking in disagreement suddenly began to crack. The girders in front of us buckled, and loud popping noises sounded on all sides.

I tried to cast my telek out to hold it up, but the building was so
huge.

“It’s coming down on top of us!” City yelled, but Henk didn’t flinch. He leaned hard on the maneuvering stick. The next second we were in motion, shooting out the side of the building right as we heard the huge roar of steel beams breaking. As we zoomed out into the night sky, I glanced back and saw the building crumbling in on itself, throwing off huge pluming clouds of dust and debris as it sank.

“Wow, Henk, you might as well have handed them a map and a written invitation,” City said tightly.

“Won’t matter,” Henk said as the transport cut expertly through the sky. “Got the cloaking on, there’ll be no trail to track.”

I breathed out and relaxed my body into the hard seat. A few moments of reprieve. I’d been barking off orders like I knew what I was doing, and maybe at the time, I had. I shook my head and blinked hard. Had it finally happened then? I’d finally turned into a leader? Everyone had listened to me, even City. It felt unreal. I pinched my hands around the bottom of the chair until the sharp edge cut into my skin.

We were nowhere near safe. Would everyone keep looking to me now? Could I do it? Maybe after a good night’s rest, I’d feel more up to it—

My eyes flew open. I hadn’t thought about it until now, but when that blast had hit the entrance to the compound, my med container had been destroyed too.

There would be no night’s rest for me.

“Adrien,” I called out. His head swiveled back from the front seat to look at me. I waved him over. “Come here, I need to ask you something.”

He frowned and chewed on his lip a moment before unbuckling and making his way back to where I sat, stepping carefully over Ginni. He crouched in front of me since there were no open chairs nearby.

“You asked Ginni if the Chancellor was still at the same location. You think it’s supposed to happen soon, don’t you?”

He looked up at me, a tortured expression on his face. “Yes,” he finally whispered. “But the Chancellor’s always on the move. She could be gone by now.”

I looked down at him sharply. “You don’t really think so. You know my sleep container was destroyed. You know what that means.” I saw in his eyes he knew exactly what it meant: I had to try now, before I was weakened again by several days of sleep deprivation.

“No.” He put a hand on my leg. “There’s every chance you’ll not die. I just found you again. I lost my mom, I can’t lose you too.” He leaned forward and pulled me into a hug. He spoke into my ear. “We’ll find another place to hide, find another oxy-safe med container. We’ll hide out and be together.” His voice was low and rough. “I don’t care if the whole world crumbles so long as I have you.”

It was what I wanted too. All that I wanted. But then I remembered another boy who’d asked that of me. It was what Max had always said, that the problems in the world were too big for us, small as we were, to make any difference against.

At the time, I’d been so sure that we still had to try and change it anyway, no matter what. The Chancellor had offered me something similar too—a place at her table with other glitchers in her employ, living safe with the people I loved while she ruled over all the drones.

And I’d asked myself the same question I did now: How could we, when so many others were suffering? How could we live happy and free when the rest of the world was enslaved?

But I’d been so young and naïve back in the beginning. I hadn’t seen the world, hadn’t yet experienced how crushingly difficult life could be. I hadn’t known what a lucky and precious thing it was to have someone who loved you by your side, or how quickly you could lose them.

And now? The idea of going somewhere quiet, hiding out, having Adrien hold me every night …

I was so, so tempted.

But there was a chance I could make his first vision come true. I could kill the Chancellor and save my brother. It might not free everyone like I’d always hoped, but without her, the Rez could have a chance to rebuild. We could start rescuing glitchers again and try to come up with another plan to subvert the Link system that enslaved so many. If I survived.

“Right, then,” I said. My throat felt suddenly dry. I looked around at all the faces of the people gathered around us. I knew what I had to do.

“No, Zoe,” Adrien pleaded. “Don’t.”

“What?” Xona asked, looking back and forth between us. “I don’t get it.”

I clenched my jaw. “I’m going to go kill the Chancellor.”

Chapter 24

“
JUST DROP DOWN ANYWHERE,
H
ENK
. I can fly myself there.”

Adrien turned away, as if he couldn’t look at me. I steeled myself against all my riotous emotions. Surely he knew I wasn’t rejecting
him
. This was something I had to do. Something I was maybe even destined to do.

“Zoe, we’re on the other side of the Sector right now,” Henk said. “At least let us fly you within a hundred miles so you can save your energy. We’ll drop you then.”