Shutdown (Glitch) (7 page)

And then I felt fury. We had failed in our mission, we didn’t know how many people were in danger, and he was taking this opportunity to steal a kiss when he knew I couldn’t hurtle him across the room like I wanted to? Max hadn’t changed at all.

I pushed him hard on the chest instead, conscious that I couldn’t say everything I wanted because of the attendant. “You act like you’ve been forgiven already.”

“You have to forgive me someday,” he whispered, his eyes searching mine.

I bit my tongue to keep myself from saying more, pushed off the wall, and headed for our transport. I slid into the driver’s side. Max made some joke with the attendant that I couldn’t hear and then jumped in the other door. My telek buzzed loudly in my head now. So much had gone wrong, and so much still could.

But then the doors of the transport garage opened up and we lifted into the sky.

We’d made it out.

*   *   *

I stood under the allergen wash shower back at the Foundation with my hand against the wall as the heavy spray beat down on my head and shoulders.

I’d failed.

This had been our big plan, and it had failed so utterly and completely that I had no idea what to do next. I’d sent the abort signal out once we were far enough away from Central City, but some cells still may have gotten cracked.

“Zoe, oh my gosh, are you okay?” Ginni asked as soon as I stepped out of the shower with a towel wrapped around me. “Simin said it didn’t work.”

“I’m fine,” I said, gritting my teeth when I saw the rest of my team and several high-ranking Rez soldiers waiting for me. “I’ll debrief everyone later about what happened. But yes, the mission was a failure.”

“What happened?” Ginni asked.

“I’ll debrief you all later,” I repeated, my voice more snappish than I intended. Xona put a hand on Ginni’s shoulder and led her away. I rubbed my eyes tiredly, then went to change in the dressing room.

All I wanted was to sink into my bed and forget the failure that weighed so heavy on my chest it felt like I could barely breathe. But I knew the other Colonels were waiting for me in the Sat Com office, and I was anxious to find out if everyone was safe.

Henk had set up the teleconference room in what used to be Taylor’s office, at my request. I knew the Professor hadn’t wanted me to—he’d wanted to leave all her things just as they’d been. But it was a luxury we couldn’t afford in this underground bunker; space was too precious, especially now that we were flooded with refugees. Every closet doubled as an office, every dorm was at triple occupancy.

And now what would we do with them all? How long would we be able to feed them? I wondered if Henk had been able to get more supplies while I was gone. Another thing I’d have to check on before I slept.

I sat down at the desk with a bay of four projection screens around me, each screen displaying the face of a different Colonel in the Rez. They were camped out at the few other Rez hideouts that were still left scattered in and around Sector Six. None of us knew exactly where the others were stationed. It was safer that way.

I rubbed my face in my hands for a few long moments, trying to gather myself. But they were waiting for me, so I shook my hands out and took a deep breath before clicking on the camera so they could see me too.

“Did everyone get the message to abort in time?” I asked immediately.

“Two cells didn’t, and Reg armadas discovered them before they could flee,” said the redheaded woman, Sanyez. “A high-security alert must have gone out after the central mission failed. Reg armadas have been scouring the skies for hours.”

“Just two cells?” asked Garabex. He was an older man with a thick gray beard. “That’s less catastrophic than I expected, considering what a mess was made of the mission.”

“At least if the cell leaders are interrogated,” Sanyez said, “they were told nothing of Project Reboot or the Foundation. All they knew was that they were to be ready for a planned attack, details to be messaged at the last moment if it was a go.”

“If they only cracked two cells, that means the kill disk probably worked,” I said. “The programmer will tell his superiors what we were trying to do, but they shouldn’t be able to recover any of the code itself.”

Garabex leaned forward. “You fool, why didn’t you eliminate the programmer?”

“That was never part of the plan,” I snapped back.

“Well, nothing about the
plan
actually worked, did it? Any elementary corporal knows to cut losses and minimize damage.” He directed his attention to the others. “Why are we even listening to this little girl?”

Talon, the next youngest lieutenant, spoke up. “Taylor explicitly left Zoe in charge of the glitcher unit. The plan was solid—we’d all agreed it was the best option.”

“We’ve just never been close enough to gather intel on how the Link programming is disseminated,” I said. “The code isn’t uploaded at a single port in the Central City mainframe system like we thought. Our techers were basing their assumptions on what was probably false intel circulated by the Community, as an added security measure.”

“The girl is right,” said Lonyi, a short-haired woman. “Now is no time to assign blame. We all agreed on the plan. It failed. Now we reassess and move on.”

“Fine,” said Garabex. “But we don’t know how much time we have. One of our Rez spies reported about what we think is a new weapon the Chancellor has acquired. He only saw the name of a file. Something called an ‘Amplifier.’ He wasn’t able to find any more details. We need to go back to the EMP option so we can strike first—”

“No!” I said, then pulled back and tried to mask my emotions again. “We cannot go forward with a plan that kills so many innocent people.”

Garabex scoffed loudly and threw up his hands. “Will someone please remove this
child
from the council?”

I balled my hands into fists to keep myself from reacting to his words. The only way I’d earn my place at this table was by not letting myself be baited.

“We are all that’s left of the Resistance,” Garabex continued. “Just five command posts and a paltry amount of small scattered cells whose members are often on the run. Any one of us could be cracked at any moment. The Rez is hanging on by the thinnest of threads. We must act before it is too late and that thread snaps. I refuse to let a two-hundred-year-old movement crumble to dust on my watch!”

“The EMP option is unacceptable,” I said firmly. “There’s collateral damage and then there’s mass murder. If we plan to rebuild a world better than this one, we better know the difference.”

Talon and Sanyez nodded. Garabex and Lonyi looked unconvinced.

Sanyez addressed the rest of the council. “Nothing will be decided today on this issue. We need to regroup after today’s events, recoup losses, and keep our heads down. As Colonel Garabex said, we’re barely managing to survive as it is. Being too hasty at this point would only jeopardize the tenuous grip we still have. And when we
do
reach the point where we can consider new proposals on how to proceed, keep in mind the Council must agree unanimously before any action is taken.”

Garabex scowled. “We
were
in unison about the EMP option before this upstart showed up. It was Taylor’s idea in the first place. It’s her vote that should count, even from beyond the grave.”

“The fact that she appointed me in her place is proof enough that she had doubts about the plan.” I wasn’t sure if it was true, but it sounded good. Besides, I knew some of the others had hesitations about the EMP option. They wouldn’t want it back on the table unless there was absolutely nothing left to try.

Garabex looked like he was about to launch into another tirade, but Lonyi spoke up before he could. “What do we do then? The Rez is the smallest it’s ever been. Underchancellor Bright is cracking safe houses right as we set them up. She always seems three steps ahead of us. We’ve already tried having Zoe crush the V-chips of small populations at a time, but that didn’t work.”

I grimaced, remembering the experiment. With my telek, I was able to reach and crush the tiny embedded chips in about a hundred people at a time. So we’d infiltrated an Academy, hoping we could add to our diminishing ranks, but Regs had quickly descended and captured all the confused teenagers right after I’d freed them from the V-chip. We’d only been able to rescue a few before having to escape ourselves.

“If we don’t do something,” Lonyi continued, her voice impassioned, “then there will be no Rez left to speak of soon. We have to act now before we don’t have the manpower to enact any plans we come up with!”

“The Underchancellor is the problem,” Talon said. “It’s her we need to take out.”

I nodded. He was right. Every attempt we’d made so far had failed. She was surrounded at all times by fifty Regs and an impressive band of glitchers she’d collected.

But there was still one thing we hadn’t tried—sending me in alone to try to assassinate her.

It would be risky. Maybe even a suicide mission. I’d wanted to exhaust every other possibility before I suggested it, but if it was that or letting them go ahead with the EMP option …

Sanyez held up her hand. “We can talk about that next week when we reconvene. Right now we need to recoup, count our losses, and rest. Ali will send you the encryption pattern an hour before the next meeting as always. We must be more vigilant than ever about security protocols. Next year in freedom,” she finished, the standard council salutation.

“Freedom for all,” we all responded back. Everyone in the Rez had grown up with the saying. It was always
next
year, never now.

After I switched off the camera I sighed out a long breath and ran my hands through my still-wet hair. When I got up to walk to the Med Center, my steps were heavy. My whole body felt like lead. I didn’t want to think about any of it, any of the responsibilities of knowing the Rez was getting smaller every day or worrying about the refugees who would no doubt come clamoring to me tomorrow with more problems I didn’t have a solution to. I wished I had an off switch so I could stop caring about all of it.

In spite of how I’d just avowed how important life and morality was, sometimes I worried that I was turning into General Taylor. I remembered when I first met her, I’d been shocked by her coldness. She seemed callous, uncaring about other people’s feelings, and, in the end, unconcerned with sacrificing millions of people. But she hadn’t been afraid of death either. She took on her duty as a mantle to the last moment when she’d decided to come with me against the Chancellor. Her last thought had been for the future of the Rez.

I headed into the hallway and heard other footsteps echoing down the parallel corridor. I knew even without seeing him that it was the Professor. He paced the hallways now at night, like a ghost. He must hear me too on the nights I couldn’t sleep, but we kept to our separate hallways and never spoke of it. We insomniacs kept each other’s secrets.

I listened to him now, aimlessly walking back and forth. I’d always thought of the General as a project of his, another person to save. But now I wondered if it wasn’t the other way around. He barely functioned without her. Did that mean he loved her more than she did him? If it had been the reverse, and he’d died, I knew she’d have gone on as if nothing had happened. Seeing Henry so broken made me wonder if her way wasn’t better. Maybe it was better not to love anything too much.

But that didn’t stop me from walking to the darkened Med Center where Adrien lay submerged in the chamber in the corner. The sides were made of glass, and it was lit from underneath, which made the blue regrowth gel look luminescent. Otherworldly.

Adrien’s slim form, wearing a tight bodysuit, seemed just as alien.

An oxygen mask covered the lower half of his face, and wired patches were placed at strategic points around his body and all over his head. His eyes were closed.

I put a hand to the side of the tank.

His head moved so quickly to look at me, I almost fell over backwards. He stared at me, but nothing registered on his face. It was as if he was staring past me at the wall. His eyes seemed focused, but nothing else from his expression would suggest he knew me. I swallowed hard and leaned forward again. It was just the heavy sedatives Jilia had given him, I tried to reassure myself. The sessions in the chamber always lasted five days, and it was better if he could sleep through most of it. I placed my hand where it had been before.

The gel inside was warm, I could feel the heat through the glass. But seeing Adrien suspended in this sensory deprivation tank still made me feel cold. Jilia believed it would help his neural patterns learn to rewire themselves if he started from a blank slate of stimulus and response, at least during periods of amygdala tissue regrowth. I’d known he was going in for another session, but I had hoped he’d be out by the time I got back.

Of course, I’d planned to be out starting a revolution right now. In my secret dreams, I’d envisioned the world free of the Link. Sure, I’d known it would be a long fight. But I’d dreamed of its end; maybe a year from now we would have captured enough strategic points to install a new government. And the regrowth therapy would have finally begun working and Adrien would stand by my side as we looked out on a new world.

I thought back to one of the times he’d visited me in the lab hideout where I’d spent several months last year.

He’d been sitting beside me, wrapping one of my long curls round and round his finger. “What would you do if the war was over and you could do anything?” he asked.

“Hmm,” I said languorously, dropping my head to his shoulder and relaxing against him. “I guess we’d be working every day to help people who’d been freed from the Link. We’d have to make sure that food production didn’t waver and that basic utilities continued so everything didn’t descend into chaos and—”

“Not like that,” Adrien laughed. “I mean, what would you do if there was no war? Like if you lived back in the Old World and were free and there was no government telling you what you had to do. Or if we lived in some alternate universe where instead of Comm Corp coming to power, everyone was free and at peace with each other. What would you do then?”