Shutdown (Glitch) (2 page)

Which meant, even with stringent rationing, soon we wouldn’t be able to feed the people who’d taken refuge here. Some of the refugees were already grumbling about the smaller portions. Last week we’d found several men breaking into the pantry, trying to steal food.

I shook my head and took a deep breath. It wouldn’t be a problem, I told myself. After the mission next week, everything would change.

I finally located Adrien among all the other people. He sat at a small table in the corner, reading from his tablet. I paused for a moment, watching him. It was a picture I wanted to take with me.

The way he hunched over when he read was so familiar I was stung by memories. For just a moment I could pretend that when I walked in and called his name, he’d look up and a smile would light his face. That special smile he used to save only for me.

I stepped in, wishing I could lengthen out the space of this moment, so full of potential, when hope was still alive that today might be the day I’d see that smile.

But then I came closer and he shifted his head, showing the angry red scars tracing across the left side of his skull. Evidence that nothing could ever go back to normal, not after what the Chancellor had done to him. At least his hair was finally growing back in, short and wavy against his head except where the scars were.

I swallowed hard and then sat beside him like I always did. Every afternoon, no matter how busy I was or how many demands were made of me as the ranking officer at the Foundation, I made sure to stop whatever I was doing and spend an hour with him. He used to let me take his hand, but for the past few weeks, he hadn’t. I didn’t know if this was a good thing—that he was developing a will of his own again, or a bad thing, because the Adrien I knew would never give up a chance to touch and connect with me.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Nauseous and weak.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. Is it the treatment?”

“It’s the injections the doctor gives me. I don’t like taking them.”

I reached for his hand, but he put it under the table before I could make contact. I stared for a second. All month he’d deliberately moved away from me whenever I reached for him. I tried to still my quivering voice. “But the injections will help make you feel better,” I said. “They’re helping stimulate the new amygdala tissue that’s been grown.”

He didn’t say anything, just stared at his tablet.

I tried another approach. “What about your emotions?” I asked. “How are you feeling emotionally today?”

Again, he didn’t say anything. He never did when I asked him that question.

“What are you reading?” I tried instead, desperate to hear more than a cursory answer from him. Usually when I visited him I spent most of the hour talking since he rarely gave more than one-word responses. But I missed the sound of his voice. Sometimes I was afraid I was forgetting what it sounded like, just like I was afraid of forgetting what it used to feel like when his eyes brightened when I walked in the room, or the way he looked at me when he said the three most magical words in the English language:
I love you.

He looked up briefly, then back at his text. “One time you called me a philosopher,” he said. “So I’m reading philosophy.”

I brightened. He remembered. I knew Jilia said he had all his memories—it was attaching emotion to the memories that was the problem. I kept hoping that the more he remembered, the more he’d be able to draw those emotional connections himself. I’d called him a philosopher during one of our first conversations when he was trying to convince me that people had souls, that we weren’t only base physical parts strung together with electrical impulses.

“So what’s it about?” I asked.

He finally met my gaze for more than a passing glance. “It’s about the myth of Sisyphus. Do you know it?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t read much beyond what the Professor assigned in Humanities. “Tell me about it.” Anything was better than the math theorems he usually liked to study. He’d tried to explain them a couple times during past visits. Not only could I never follow, but he’d become so meticulous and absorbed in the problems on the page, I felt like he barely noticed I was even there.

He paused, and for a second it seemed like his eyes softened. “It’s the story of this man who’s in the Greek mythological version of hell. You know what hell is?”

An uneasy shiver went down my spine. I didn’t like where this was going, but I tried to tell myself it was encouraging that he was engaging with me and actually asking questions. “Um, isn’t that the bad place people in the Old World thought people went after … after they died?”

He nodded. “So this man is in hell, and they were very creative with their punishments there. They knew that it wasn’t just unending pain that could torture a man.”

“So what did they do to him?” My voice was barely more than a whisper. I’d wanted to get Adrien talking, but now I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear what he had to say.

“All day long and every night without rest, he had to push a rock up a hill. Then when he got it to the top of the hill, the rock would roll back down, and he’d have to push it up again. Over and over and over again. For all eternity.”

“You know that’s only a story, right?” I said uneasily. “That never really happened.”

Adrien lifted his tablet briefly. “Well, I’m reading this philosopher named Camus who says that this is really what all our lives are like. Useless, monotonous. That we’re lying to ourselves if we think anything different.”

“No,” I said, edging closer to him. My heart hurt in my chest at the things he was saying. “That’s not all there is. There’s love and beauty and courage.”

He averted his gaze from mine. “Camus says love is a fiction. Make-believe. A story weak men tell themselves so they can believe there is something more to their pointless lives. He says it’s courageous to look at life in the face and call it what it is. All of us uselessly pushing our boulders up the hill.”

“Adrien,” I said, putting my hand on his forearm, but he pulled away again.

“Maybe I’m not as broken as you all think. Maybe I’m just one of the few people who can see clearly now.” His voice was calm. It sounded like he thought it was a good thing not to be able to feel anything.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I wanted to yell at him that he was wrong, to grab his shoulders and shake him until he remembered how to love me. Instead I got up and started walking away, not wanting him to see my tears. Because unlike him, I
could
still feel emotion, and he was breaking my heart.

I turned back at the doorway. “Okay, well, I’m going on a mission tomorrow. See you next week, when I get back.”

He didn’t nod or acknowledge me. He looked absorbed again in what he was reading. It was like that sometimes. He’d seem aware and engaged one moment and then gone the next.

It wasn’t his fault he was like this.

Jilia said the neural pathways had to reconfigure themselves, that hopefully his body would teach itself to make those connections again. But it had been six months already with absolutely no change. I tried to stay positive and hopeful, at least in front of him. He had loved me once, but now he looked at me with no more interest than he would a stranger.

After so long with no evidence of emotion, even Jilia’s assurances carried a tinge of doubt. She tried to hide it, but everyone could tell. No one had ever tried to repair the kind of damage Adrien had. There were no guarantees it would work. He might be like this forever. The Adrien we’d known and loved might be lost to the caged spaces of our memories. Adrien’s mother, Sophia, looked haunted and drawn whenever I saw her, which wasn’t often. She made sure to visit Adrien in the mornings so we never crossed paths.

So yes. I understood hatred now. I hated the people who had done this to him—I hated the Chancellor, I hated Max, and I hated the system that gave the Chancellor so much power. But most of all, in the darkness of night alone in bed with nothing else to distract my thoughts, I hated myself.

Because how could I have let it ever happen? How had I been so self-involved I hadn’t noticed when Max switched places with Adrien? Max might have the power to disguise himself and impersonate other people, but I should have known. I thought back to that night of our “date.” At the time, I’d been so happy to have Adrien communicating and being open with me again, I hadn’t noticed anything off about the way he held me and kissed me. I shuddered at the thought that it had been Max, not Adrien, touching me so intimately. I should have recognized it right away, and we could have rescued Adrien before it was too late.

But as had happened so many times before, I’d failed when it counted most. First with getting my older brother killed, then not finding a way to sneak my younger brother Markan out of the Community before the Chancellor set a twenty-four-hour watch on him, and now with Adrien. I knew that even if I succeeded in this mission, I couldn’t atone for it all. My jaw clenched with determination. Still, maybe I could save others, even if they weren’t the ones I loved most. As General Taylor had once told me, there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who knows they have nothing left to lose.

Chapter 2

“
DARL, DO HAVE SOME MORE
of the bubbles.” Max offered a full sparkling glass to me.

I tried to smile as if I thought everything at this overly lavish Uppers party was perfectly delightful and fun.
Fun
. I choked down the impulse to punch the especially fat man beside me who kept leaning over and talking at me with his mouth full of food. Sometimes little bits of spit shot out as he spoke, and I felt like I’d need to take an hour-long shower with blasting hot water when this was all over.

Last night we’d successfully infiltrated Central City by posing as the Uppers couple Henk’s team had captured. The expansion of Max’s powers allowed him to project the vapid socialite’s face onto mine. As long as I stayed within a thousand feet of him, people would look at me and see her.

“Really, Darl,
darl
ing, bubbly makes you laugh, and everybody loves to hear your laugh,” said Max, sounding greatly amused with the bad pun on the name of the woman I was impersonating.

I reached to accept the glass, and smiled tightly at him. Of course Max had suggested we take on the shapes of
this
particular couple back when the Rez started researching the perfect way to infiltrate the Uppers circle in Central City. Darl and Nihem Westermin were the optimal choice because of their connections, their wealth, and the fact that their partying ways would make them the last people on earth the Uppers would suspect as planning to sabotage the Link.

The fact that they were traveling to Central City at the same time Chancellor Bright would be absent had cinched it. Central City was the only place that had the mainframes capable of uploading the Rez’s hack. We would disable the Link that connected billions of people together through the hardware chips in their heads that turned them into mindless slaves.

I’d been hoping for a nice sibling pair to impersonate—being a married couple meant I had to share a room with Max. Or better yet, I’d wanted to just slip into the city invisible, since Max’s power had expanded so that he could do that too. But we’d discovered part of the security protocol for entering the city was a complete vehicle scan to make sure there were no hidden bodies on board trying to sneak into the city. Invisibility was out.

So instead we impersonated Darl and Nihem. Max gave us their faces, and we passed the retinal scan with the tiny film Henk had us put in our eyes before we left. We’d prepped for the DNA prick by pooling some of Darl and Nihem’s blood under false pads on our fingertips. When we arrived inside the gates, we were met by the party organizer, who was asked to personally identify us before we were allowed past the last barricade into the city. Darl and Nihem were well known to him, so he allowed us in with only a passing glance. They took no chances when it came to security in Central City. Once you made it inside, though, there were far fewer precautions.

I put the glass of champagne to my lips and pretended to drink. I needed to be clearheaded tonight if I was going to manage my part of the mission. I would get my target alone, then flash the device Henk had given us in his eyes, and during the moment he was stunned, slip the key drive off the chain over his neck and replace it with the duplicate. The way the stunner worked, he would only feel a little disoriented, but wouldn’t remember anything from the last few minutes and would most likely just shrug it off as a momentary lapse in concentration.

I hoped no one would notice if my glass stayed full all night. Apparently Darl was a notorious drinker, preferring the extra mind-altering vintages where the vines had been crossbred with opium. I looked down at my glittering dress and momentarily hated the person I had to be.

Max-as-Nihem leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You need to drink at least a sip. People are starting to notice you’re not drunk. Now, there’s your target.” He nodded slightly to the right. I peeked up for a moment and saw the rotund, red-faced man he was looking at, Harole Warnost.

“And here’s the red wine.” He slid the goblet into my hand, smoothly exchanging it with my untouched champagne. “Make sure to douse him good with it. Then follow him to the bathroom and make the switch.”

I smiled widely, pretending my husband was whispering something sweet in my ear. I barely kept myself from rolling my eyes. I was the one who’d come up with the plan, I didn’t need a reminder of the specifics. All I had to do was follow my target to the bathroom. Max would make me invisible right after I stepped out of the party.

“And do take a sip,” Max whispered. “Darl would never walk around with a completely full glass. Everyone expects her to be drunk by this point in the night.”

Max pulled back, and I reluctantly took a small sip of the wine. I half choked with how strong the stuff was, but tried to turn it into a laugh instead.

“That’s my Darl,” Max said with a loud laugh before moving away, no doubt seeking out his own target. Tonight we’d get the two key drives, and tomorrow we’d infiltrate the programming station while everyone else was at the fight. “Drink up like a good little girl.”