Shutdown (Glitch) (16 page)

Instead, I took off my outer shirt so I’d feel the cool breeze of the afternoon wind more sharply to keep me from dozing off. At least I didn’t have to worry about another overload like what happened with the earthquake back at the Foundation. It only occurred when I had too much power stored up inside me. I was using it constantly now so that wouldn’t be a problem. I focused my telek senses on the continuous task of keeping my mast cells in check. When even that became a repetitive lull teasing me toward sleep, I paced a path under the tree cover. My steps slowed with each pass.

I sat down, putting several sharp rocks underneath me so I wouldn’t get comfortable. I tried to think of my training with Jilia. She said people could meditate quietly for hours, even days. I had to think like that. That I was just training my body. I wondered if there was a way to meditate where I could go into a restful state without actually falling asleep. Now probably wasn’t the best time to be experimenting though, considering it could cost me my life.

I looked at the ferns and shrubs all over the ground, then up at the tree trunks, then finally to the dots of sky visible through the tree tops. The leaves undulated and shook in the wind. There was so much life all around me. And noise, especially the continuous screech of the cicadas and the musiclike trill of what I assumed was a bird—I’d never seen or heard one up close before. Occasionally another bird would respond with a low guttural call that ended in a squawk. It made the hairs on my arms stand up. I wondered what other living things were out there hidden among the trees—I remembered Adrien’s comment about bears and shuddered.

But eventually, not even my worry about hungry forest animals could keep me awake. It had been easier when we were moving, but sitting still like this, staying awake was becoming impossible. I’d find my eyes slowly closing, only blinking them rapidly before they dropped shut completely. So I tried closing one eye at a time, hoping that would help. Instead, it only made me more aware of how
good
it would feel to close both my eyes.

I jumped to my feet to avoid the temptation of letting my eyes fall shut. At this point I don’t think even lying on a bed of nails would keep me awake for long. Nothing was going to really help except actual sleep. I paced again. I just had to keep moving, that was the trick.

I didn’t know how long I’d been at it, a few hours maybe, when Adrien suddenly cried out.

I hurried over to him in the dim light of the setting sun. He sat straight up and gasped as if he couldn’t get a breath. An animal-like noise came from his throat.

I dropped down beside him. “What’s wrong?”

He didn’t answer. Had something bitten him? An insect or snake? I did a quick survey of his body, examining each limb, then his torso and head. But there was nothing. He just kept rocking back and forth, clutching his arms to his chest. Finally I realized he wasn’t hurt.

He was crying. Adrien was crying.

“Adrien.” I hurriedly wrapped my arms around his shaking shoulders. “Shh, it’s okay, it was only a dream.”

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he moved his head a tiny bit so that it rested on my shoulder as his sobs slowed.

“It’s okay,” I kept murmuring. I gently stroked his hair, clutching him closer. “It’s okay now. You’re safe.”

“I dreamed of Sophia dying.” His voice was barely a whisper. “The Regulators smashed her face in. I saw her head explode like a melon and there was so much blood…”

“Shhhhh,” I said. “Shh, it’s gonna be okay. We’re going to be okay.” The mumbled words were all I could think to say. It was the first time I’d seen Adrien cry since the lobotomy. Over the past few months, I’d assumed that he wasn’t capable of emotions anymore, but maybe that was only because he hadn’t let me see. When had he started being able to
feel
again? It was a month ago that he’d stopped letting me take his hand when I visited in the afternoons. Had it been that long?

“I hate it when I cry.” The way he said it made it sound like this wasn’t the first time. He pulled away from me finally and swiped angrily at his eyes. “It’s completely illogical.”

“Not everything is about logic. You’re crying because you loved her,” I said.

“Impossible,” he said vehemently. “I barely even knew her.”

“You said you had your memories. You remember what it felt like when she held you as a child. You remember what it felt like when you were scared and she was there to comfort you.”

“That’s just it.” He pursed his lips tightly together. “That’s what none of you understand. I have the memories you talk about, but thinking about them is like watching strangers in a projection vid. It doesn’t feel like they happened to
me
. I never loved her.
He
loved her. She meant nothing to me.”

“Then why are you crying?” My voice went high-pitched as my emotions bubbled up in spite of my determination to stay patient. I was tired of his cold reasoning.”She obviously does mean something to you. You have emotions even if you don’t want them. You can feel love and hate and sadness and passion. Even if you’ve changed, your soul is still the same—”

“Souls don’t exist!” His eerily translucent eyes flashed up at me. “The entire notion is ridiculous. The body is a machine, that is all.”

“Then what’s the point of living?” I cried. I took a deep breath to calm myself down before continuing. “I’m explaining it badly. The soul is just a word you always used to describe that part of us that is something more than just our flesh and bones and the electrical synapses in our brains. It’s the part of us that makes us human.”

“Well, that’s one more thing he was a fool about,” Adrien said, his voice turning bitter. He swiped at his eyes one last time. “If souls were located somewhere other than the flesh, then mine couldn’t have been cut out of me when they hacked into my brain. But it was. I felt nothing,
nothing
,” he repeated vehemently, “for months. And when I did begin to feel things again, it was all sadness and pain and the realization that I wasn’t the person everyone wanted me to be. I was better off beforehand.”

He looked away. “The sun is down. We should get going so we can make it to the fence tonight.”

“But Adrien—”

He grabbed his pack and stood with his back to me. “We should get moving.”

I sighed and rubbed my tired eyes. A headache was blooming across my skull. Like a fool, I’d gotten my hopes up when I saw his tears—thought for a second maybe there was a way he could find his way back to who he had been. Back to me. Instead, like always, I was just seeing what I wanted to see. I looked back at him before quickly averting my eyes again. I was terrified that someday soon, I was going to have to stop pretending to see the light of the Adrien I’d loved in the eyes of the stranger in front of me.

Chapter 13

I LOOKED OVER AT ADRIEN
when we next stopped, right before we got to the border fence. I was so exhausted, my vision was getting blurry. In the light of Adrien’s arm panel, it looked like he had two heads. I blinked several times until the two overlapping images settled back into one. I slumped against a nearby tree, ignoring the bark stabbing at my back as I slid down to the ground. It was the middle of the night now and the fight to stay awake was getting more and more impossible. It felt like every cell in my body was screaming at me to sleep.

“Get your coolant harness out,” Adrien said. His voice was cold, mechanical almost. He’d been like this all day, the few times he was forced to speak to me. Almost as if, by becoming completely robotic now, he could erase the memory of his earlier emotional outburst. “We’ll be exposed to the Infrared Sat Cams while we’re crossing the fence.”

My hands felt thick and clumsy as I sorted through my pack. The headache from earlier had only gotten worse. I swallowed another couple of pain pills from the med kit and rubbed my temple.

“Actually we’ll be fine with just my harness,” Adrien said, frowning as he watched me swallow the medicine. “It’ll cover our heat signatures for a four-foot radius as long as we stay close.” He put his arms through the harness and clasped it around his stomach. Then he clicked the button and the straps of the harness began to inflate. Luminescent nano-infused coolant gel began flowing through the inflated straps like water through pipes.

Adrien craned his head to look up. “There’s no moon out tonight. That should help us cross without detection.”

I closed my eyes for a long moment, then jerked them open again right as I felt myself start nodding off. My arms began to prickle from the momentary lapse in concentration controlling my mast cells. I swallowed hard as I focused my telek again. I couldn’t afford to let my attention slip. Not now.

He checked the map on his arm panel. “Perfect. The fence is right past those trees. We’ll have to fly over it,” Adrien said.

“I already know that,” I snapped, the exhaustion making me irritable.

“I meant that we’ll have to fly far up and over it. It’s not just electrified, there are motion sensors on every inch of it, eyes without eyes.”

“So?” My befuddled mind wasn’t following whatever point he was trying to make.

“So I’m saying we’ll have to fly
far
overhead to avoid triggering it. Motion detectors can usually sense anything in a hundred-foot radius.”

“Oh.” I got his meaning now. It wouldn’t be just a quick hop over the fence. We’d have to fly up high into the sky. I sighed, tired even thinking about it. I was only getting the hang of flying
because
of all the things surrounding us. Having objects on all four sides meant I had a lot of solid points of references I could then maneuver us through. But the open sky?

Adrien came near and I stumbled as I tried to get to my feet. He held out a hand to help me, but again my vision blurred and it looked like two hands. I shook my head and held on to the tree instead as I finally got my feet under me. Adrien didn’t say anything, just wrapped his arms around me from behind. I took a deep breath, then I raised us up off the ground again.

Or rather, I tried. Each time I lifted off now, it took longer and longer for my power to buzz to life. I used to be able to easily split my concentration between focusing on my mast cells and on external objects, but it was getting more and more difficult with each passing hour. Not to mention that without sleep, I was running through my supply of telek energy. We could only hope that I was able to get us to the rendezvous site before I was totally depleted.

We rose in the air, higher and higher. The solid shape of the ground beneath us got farther away. My heart beat faster with every foot we rose. The sudden adrenaline sharpened my focus and cleared away some of the fog in my brain.

“Just a little farther,” Adrien said, “then we should be clear.”

But the ground was already so far away. I struggled to find something to hold on to, some shape or object I could use as a guide to steady us.

All I felt was emptiness, all around.

I lost my grip.

We tumbled forward suddenly, then dropped like a stone.

“Find the ground,” Adrien shouted in my ear. “Use that to focus your telek!”

I cast outward again and finally found the floor beneath us. The trees swayed in the wind, but they were firm. I tried to feel all the way down to their roots planted in the unmoving earth.

I finally caught us again and held us steady. I could feel the pumping of Adrien’s chest behind me as he tried to catch his breath. Neither of us said anything though, and we began to rise again. I kept my concentration firmly rooted in the ground with the trees.

After a few more seconds, Adrien said, his voice still unsteady, “We’re high enough. Now go north.”

“Which way is north?”

He lifted his arm panel, looking over my shoulder to see it. His breath was hot on my neck and I shivered. “To your left.”

I nodded, closing my eyes. The stars were bright and I didn’t think I could handle seeing just how far we had to drop if I faltered. I gritted my teeth, then pushed us forward in the direction Adrien had indicated.

We flew fast. Far faster than we had when we stayed below the tree line. Up here there were no obstructions, nothing to block my path and nothing I had to be careful to maneuver around. It seemed like only a second later when Adrien said we’d cleared the fence without any problem.

I nodded my head but didn’t say anything else. In my determination to fight through my exhaustion, I’d pierced my bottom lip with my teeth. I tasted blood, but I wasn’t about to stop now. This was the only way we’d have a hope of making up the distance to the rendezvous site before I collapsed from exhaustion.

I pressed forward through the night sky. The wind got louder and louder in my ears as we gathered speed until it was all I could hear. The contours of the trees below blurred together as I pushed faster still. I cut out all other thought and feeling and sensation. I was an arrow in the wind.

“It’s almost morning,” Adrien said in my ear after a long while.

I opened my eyes in surprise and saw the sky around us had turned from solid black to a murky gray. A heavy morning fog coated the ground below us. I’d gone into almost a trance as I flew, thinking of nothing except pushing forward.

Our forward motion hiccupped, and I lost control again.

Adrien’s body was ripped away from mine and we both plummeted down through the foggy clouds, end over end. I had no idea which was up and which was down.

“Zoe!” Adrien shouted.

I cast outward to where I thought the ground should be, but it was only more air. I tried another direction—still just the endless sky. I must have drifted up far higher than I’d meant to without realizing it.

“Zoe!”

There! I felt the ground. I threw all my telek force at it and managed to catch hold again. Our bodies were yanked up roughly like we’d been attached to the end of a rope that had suddenly run out.

The ground was only a few feet below. I shuddered. If we’d tumbled out of the sky over the treetops instead of a small open field, we’d have been—

I cut off the thought and gently set us down the last few feet, then promptly collapsed. I laid flat on my stomach, panting for several long moments with my face against the grass.