Shutdown (Glitch) (35 page)

These people were only the beginning. I slowly pulled my energy back into myself and then let go of Markan’s hand. I thought I’d feel an extreme exhaustion as soon as I lost connection with him, but to my surprise, I felt fine. It was as if the power I used while connected to him sapped only as much strength as it did when I was on my own in my normal smaller sphere of control.

I blinked my eyes open. Henk and Markan were both watching me.

“It’s begun,” I said. I grabbed Markan’s hand again. Henk turned back to his controls and we lifted off the ground and flew out of the wide bay. Saminsa’s bright blue shield vibrated in front of us as we approached the perimeter.

Henk spoke into his arm com. “Release it, Saminsa.”

The blue orb suddenly exploded outward, dissipating as it went. There were no more transports in range, so everyone still in the building would be safe for the several moments it took us to fly up and out of the compound.

*   *   *

For the next three hours we covered the entire country, all of Sector Six. By the end, I’d crushed at least a hundred million pre-adult V-chips, maybe more.

“More incoming,” Henk shouted from the driver’s seat. A loud beeping filled the transport as another missile that had been fired at us came into our air space. We’d been fielding them almost incessantly since we took off.

Henk swore loudly. “This one’s a nuke. Mother of god.”

In spite of the fact that I’d been fielding missiles for the last few hours, my heart still jumped into my throat. With the previous missiles, I’d just detonated them by ramming them against each other, into the ocean, or into the ground in secluded areas. When Adrien had told me his vision, I’d balked, saying surely no one would be foolish enough to release a nuke, no matter what. But here we were, flying over a huge metropolis no less, with nukes headed toward us. I was infinitely glad Adrien had made us bring Lundris along.

“It’s coming on fast, Zoe,” Henk shouted. “Tell me you’ve got it.”

I abandoned my control over the subjects in the city below and gripped Markan’s hand tight as I surrounded the nuke instead and gently slowed its momentum, bringing it to a stop right outside the back hull.

“Two more are in range now,” Henk said.

I reached and plucked them out of the air as well. “Got them.” I held them completely still in the air, feeling along the contours of their long, cold shells with repulsion. “Open the back hatch,” I called to Henk, then stood, dragging Markan along behind me and signaling to Lundris.

“You know what you have to do?” I asked the towheaded boy. He nodded. Henk had brought the transport to a hovering standstill as the back hatch opened. It was surreal to see the deadly warheads bobbing mere feet away from us.

I took Lundris’s hand as well, and lifted all three of us up off the floor of the plane, flying through the air so we could get close enough to the nuke to touch it. The wind was calm today, and since we were hovering still, there was only a cold breeze tugging at our tunics. Markan’s eyes went wide as he took a quick look down at the empty air below us. Then he squeezed his eyes shut hard.

Lundris was calmer. His gaze was focused only on the nuke in front of us. I held my breath as he reached out his thin fingers toward the metal casing. I winced when he made contact, but nothing happened. I’d known in my head a simple touch wouldn’t be enough to detonate them, but still …

Then, before my eyes, the gleaming metal turned to solid gray stone. Lundris could manipulate the molecular structure of any object he touched. And he’d just turned a deadly warhead into a warhead-shaped lump of rock. He repeated the procedure with the other two, then I sent them to rest gently on the ground a thousand feet below.

When we got back in the transport, I marched up to the front where Henk was sitting. “Who launched the nuke?” I asked, my voice cold. An icy fury swept through me that anyone would risk the kind of destruction a nuclear weapon promised.

“Sector Five, looks like.”

I sat back down. “Then we’ll be heading to Sector Five next. We’ll shut down the V-chips in every country that has nuclear capability first.”

Henk looked back at me, a frown on his face. “That’s six out of the eight worldwide Sectors.”

I met his eyes with a steely gaze. “We end this today. For everyone.”

Epilogue

Three months later

A knock on the top of my sleep pod woke me. I took one last deep breath of safe air, then surrounded my mast cells with my telek and pushed the release button. Jilia said we’d try immunotherapy again to help my allergies once everything settled down, though she didn’t know if it would work or not. Like so many things these days, it was an unknown. In the meantime, I slept in the med container. The top pulled up and slowly retracted. I smiled when I saw it was Adrien, and then smiled even wider when I saw the tray full of food behind him.

“You got in late last night. Are you sure you don’t want to sleep a little longer?”

I stepped out over the side of the med container. “Too much to do today.”

He laughed. “Every day, you mean. But still, you need to eat.” He held out a chair for me. We’d stayed at the Chancellor’s compound. It made for a good base of operations and had lush personal quarters on the top floor. One wall of the room was made entirely of windows that overlooked the ocean, but I couldn’t see anything much since it was still dark out.

“Have you gotten the daily reports yet?” I asked.

“Not yet.” He smiled. “Most people don’t get up as early as you.”

“You do.”

He reached, almost shyly, and took my hand. “I like your face to be one of the first things I see every day.”

I blushed and looked down. It had been three months since I’d freed all the drones young enough to handle their V-chips being destroyed. It had been chaos at first. The freed people didn’t know what to do without the V-chip directing their actions and emotions. The intensity of suddenly being able to feel had resulted in a lot of violence initially. We’d quickly released all the imprisoned Rez cell leaders and positioned them around the Sector to gather as many recruits as they could from among the newly released subjects. In large part, they’d been able to gather the former drones and pretty easily convinced them to direct their anger at the Uppers instead of uselessly against each other.

I ran my finger around the tip of my coffee cup and looked out at the slowly lightening earth. It had been far from a bloodless revolution. There was still heavy fighting going on in some of the other Sectors around the world. After I’d freed all of the drones with the pre-18 V-chip, Resistance factions in each global Sector had led revolutions with varying success. The Community Corporation that had ruled the world for two hundred and fifty years was decimated and each of the eight Chancellor Supremes had been deposed. But in some poorer countries like Sector Four, there was still heavy fighting going on among the survivors about who would rule next.

Here in Sector Six we’d had a wide, unified Rez presence after we emptied the Community prisons, so the fighting had mostly died down. Xona and Cole led the army that took control of the Southern front a few weeks ago, where the Uppers had made their last stand. While pockets of violence still occasionally erupted, we’d subdued and imprisoned most Uppers and taken charge of the government. Many of the Uppers had surrendered in the end, especially after Simin finally accessed the Regulators’ separate Link programming channel and ordered them to stop fighting.

The challenge now was to rebuild.

“I didn’t get to talk to Jilia yesterday. Any developments in her research with the adult V-chips?”

Adrien took a bite of his omelet. “Not yet. But she has better research facilities than ever before, not to mention the best minds in the country are on her team working on it.”

I nodded. I knew it might take a long time before we could figure out a solution to free the adults from the V-chip as well. Maybe someday even my own parents. At least the next generation would grow up free, and the generation after that would be born and never have any hardware put in their heads at all. Adrien often reminded me of that. That even if we never found a way to free the adults, we’d given their children a future, and their children’s children.

In the meantime, as much as I hated to think it, it was helpful to have all the adults continue working so the infrastructure of the country didn’t collapse. We lessened their work hours and the techer boy had taken over the Link programming.

I’d hoped that introducing vids over the Link of what was really happening instead of the lies the drones had been fed all their lives might help, but they still mindlessly performed their tasks. There was no way we could explain how to
feel
while the V-chip still controlled their limbic systems.

On the upside, it also meant that small children who’d been freed were still being cared for by their parents, food was still being produced, and necessary products were still shipped around the Sector. I was working with other Rez leaders to begin introducing a system of commerce so we could pay them for their work.

Ginni was recovering well with her new bionic leg and had started a daily news hour that was broadcast both over the Link and the external networks. It finally put her gossip impulse to good use as she tracked down stories and tried to cover the revolution both here and across the globe. She was also investigating what was happening to glitchers worldwide. In some Sectors, it had been protocol to immediately deactivate any subjects who started showing anomalies. Sectors One and Two were the only others that had a significant glitcher population. After the fighting died down, they’d begun setting up schools similar to the Foundation.

Everything moved slower than I wanted. I wished I could just wake up one morning to the new world already fashioned and working. Disputes about the divvying up of land and resources were already cropping up. And everyone looked to me for answers. It was my face being plastered on the vid screens as savior and leader. Ginni said people needed a figurehead and that seeing the face of their leader helped them feel safe, so I went along with it.

“How did the negotiations go yesterday?”

“Diederich was less than willing to agree to our entrance into his weapons facility.” Diederich was the leader of Sector One now, the largest Sector in the world. He was the highest-ranking officer in their Resistance movement, but he’d been hardened by his losses over the years. “He outright refused when I said I was coming to take away his nukes.”

Adrien lifted an eyebrow. “And yet you managed to persuade him?”

“Markan went with me.” I skewered a dripping peach on the end of my fork. It wasn’t the reunion I’d imagined with my brother. We spent almost every day together lately, fighting in our Sector and traveling all over the world to help out when other Sectors needed it. Facing hordes of Regs together did create its own kind of intimacy, and we’d had a couple good conversations while we hunkered down on some battlefield or other. But still, I hoped someday soon we could get to know each other without the threat of danger around every corner.

“So I froze all three hundred people in the facility where they stood while Lundris did his thing,” I continued.

Adrien choked on the orange juice he’d been drinking. “I thought we agreed we needed them as allies.”

“Not at the cost of letting them keep nuclear weapons,” I said, my voice hard. “They can rule themselves, that’s fine, I won’t interfere. But I refuse to let another D-Day happen. There’s already been so much blood.” I put my fork down, my appetite suddenly gone. In the spirit of free press, there’d been plenty of vid footage of the rebellion. And I’d witnessed far too much firsthand as well.

So much violence. All started because of me. I’d been naïve not to realize at the beginning what it would take. During the heaviest periods of fighting, like back when we were trying to take Central City, I was on call constantly to push back armadas of Regs. Cole was busy rehabilitating the younger Regs-in-training who hadn’t gotten the final V-chip installation yet. He hated sending them back out into the fighting, especially when they’d have to face off against their own, but in the end, he agreed it was the best way to achieve peace long-term.

Even with Markan at my side, I couldn’t be everywhere at once. Inevitably, whenever I arrived on a scene, dead bodies already littered the ground. It kept me up at night, until I’d asked Jilia for the strongest sleeping meds she could give me. We couldn’t afford for me to have a nightmare that accidently unleashed my power and ripped our compound apart. Because I was using so much of my telek reserve every day, I didn’t think I’d have enough leftover to erupt at night. And it seemed like my power was finally leveling off, like the eruptions had just been part of my growing pains. But I didn’t want to take any chances.

I couldn’t take back the blood, and I couldn’t give life back to the dead, but I
could
do everything possible to make sure another D-Day never happened. As much blood as had been spilled, no nuclear weapons had been fired in the worldwide revolution. I intended it to stay that way.

“Hey,” Adrien said gently, reaching over and taking my hand. He had an uncanny ability to know what I was thinking about, especially when dark moods struck. “It’s okay. Let’s just think about all the good we’ll do today. Only today matters, not yesterday, not tomorrow.”

I looked over at Adrien. We were taking things slowly as well, but I didn’t mind. As long as he was by my side. His logical mind had become invaluable as I tried to solve problems and mediate disputes.

He was different from the boy I’d first known. But every day I got to know the new him more and more. And I thought maybe, just maybe, he was starting to completely believe me when I told him I loved him. His hand lazily held mine, rubbing gentle circles with his thumb. The touch sent a warm tingling sensation all the way down to my toes. I closed my eyes for a moment and focused only on it. No yesterday. No tomorrow. Just now, this moment.