Shutdown

by Heather Anastasiu

  “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?”

  I frowned. “I don’t know.” I shifted a little so that I could look up at him. “I can’t imagine a world outside this one.” I smiled and kissed him. “You’re the dreamer. What would you do?”

  “Okay, I’ll go first,” he said, relenting. “But don’t think I’m not gonna come back to the question.”

  I laughed. “Okay. But you tell me first, so I know what kinds of things you mean.”

  He laid back on my bed, his hands under his head, elbows out. He looked up at the ceiling, but the way his blue-green eyes glistened with possibility, I could tell he wasn’t seeing just a ceiling.

  “I’d own a house by a river. A small river, not one of those big ones that boats would go down. And there would be woods nearby. Thick woods that I’d be able to see out my window when I woke up each morning.”

  “And what would you do in this house in the woods by a river?” I asked, half teasing. But he didn’t take the bait; he just kept that goofy grin on his face.

  “Well, first of all, you’d be there beside me waking up each morning.” He moved so quickly I didn’t have time to register, grabbing me around the waist and pulling me down so that I was lying beside him, my back to his chest. He wrapped his arms around the front of my waist and pulled me into him. I’d never felt safer or more secure in my life. I let out a small contented sigh.

  “And what would we do every day after we woke up and looked at the woods?”

  “I’d spend hours reading,” he said. “I’d read the great philosophers and poets, and then I’d take a transport into a small city where I would be a professor. I’d ask the students questions and get them engaged, and we’d spend hours talking about ideas from the books we’d read.” He nuzzled his chin into my hair. “We’d discover new things about ideas we thought we already knew or understood. And then we’d leave class with our heads full of new thoughts and new ways of seeing the world. That would be my job. Talking about ideas all day. But only a few days a week.”

  “And the other days?”

  He flipped me over until I was lying on my back, his body suspended over mine. The grin was gone, replaced by a shy intensity. He looked down, and his cheeks reddened a moment before meeting my eyes again. “The rest of the time we’d spend all day in bed.”

  It was my turn for my face to redden. We spent hours kissing whenever he came by on these rare visits, but hadn’t pushed it further to discover the mysteries of what happened when all
the clothes came off.

  A small alarm had beeped right then, signaling it was time for him to leave again so he’d be gone in plenty of time before the rest of the lab workers came in.

  He’d spent several more minutes ignoring the alarm anyway, holding me close and kissing me. But then, like always, he’d had to leave.

  I lifted my other hand to the side of the tank. Leaving. He was always leaving me. Even now when he was here, it was like he was gone.

  The tears I hadn’t allowed earlier now slipped down both cheeks. Adrien’s eyes shifted slightly to look at my hands pressed against the glass.

  But he didn’t even seem curious, much less engaged in anything that was happening to him. I wanted to pull him out of this stupid tank and hold him in my arms. Even if he didn’t feel anything for me, couldn’t feel anything, it would make me feel better to hold him. I pulled back, trying to tamp down my selfish impulses. I had to think of his health, his recovery.

  “I miss you.” I swiped at the tears on both cheeks with my forearm. “The mission failed. I seem to be doing that a lot lately. Failing, letting people down. But obviously you know that better than anyone.”

  I leaned my forehead against the tank. “I love you,” I whispered.

  He blinked and one of his hands shot out to touch the glass in the same spot my hand had been earlier.

  I lifted my hand to meet his. “Adrien?”

  Our hands were together, so close to touching except for the barrier of glass between us. His eyes met mine and for a second I’d swear there was a zinging flash of recognition. His eyebrows furrowed together and he looked so profoundly sad as he gazed out at me.

  “Adrien?” My voice echoed loudly in the empty room. My heartbeat ramped up and I put my other hand up anxiously to the glass. Anything to try to grab hold of this moment of connection. “Adrien?”

  But then his hand released, relaxing limply into the gel again. His gaze drifted back to the ceiling. As if I wasn’t even there.

  Chapter 6

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE calm and absurdly normal. In the mornings, I switched off between doing physical training with my old glitcher task force and having administrative meetings with either the on-site Rez soldiers or the representative who’d been appointed to speak on behalf of refugee affairs. The afternoons were similarly split between administrative duties and joining in for Gifted Training when I could afford the time.

  Today, I followed the rest of my friends to lunch after a morning training session. We’d run stairs. Most days I groaned like everyone else when Tyryn announced it was a stairs day, but today I’d enjoyed the pounding physicality of it. I’d even welcomed the pain burning through my thighs. Here, finally, was something I could control, something I could do right.

  “God, Rand,” City scrunched up her nose. “Don’t you know showers after training shouldn’t be optional? Especially for you.”

  Rand only grinned, jogging backwards down the hall so he could face her. “It’s all about the pheromones. I’m letting the Rand musk run free, so it can overwhelm all the female senses.”

  Xona scoffed. “The only thing it’s overwhelming is the air quality.” She punched Rand hard in the arm.

  Saminsa smiled as she walked behind them. She’d been opening up over the past few months. She was still far from talkative, but she seemed to enjoy observing everyone else and simply being part of the group.

  “Ow!” Rand said, rubbing his arm. Then he leaned in to her. “You seem riled up, Xona. Maybe the pheromones are working on you and you don’t even know it.”

  Xona rolled her eyes and hurried down the hallway to catch up with Cole. I stared for a moment as she talked with the hulking ex-Reg. He leaned down to hear what she said and then let out a hearty laugh. I watched with surprise. It still startled me anytime he laughed. He’d always fought hard for his humanity, but in the past six months, ever since he’d saved Xona’s life and she’d finally stopped hating him, he’d positively flourished.

  I watched the pair of them walk down the hallway. Her laughing response echoed off the walls.

  “Don’t think your pheromones are gonna work on her,” Ginni said with a giggle.

  Rand didn’t look daunted. “Well, there’s still you fine ladies,” he said, putting his arms around City and Ginni.

  “Gross!” City shouted, pulling away from him and making a big show of gagging. “Can’t you smell how much you reek?”

  “Aw, you don’t mean that,” Rand said with an impish grin. “Stop trying to fight your primordial attraction to me.”

  “The only attraction I feel for you,” City said with a falsely ingenuous smile, “is the electrical kind.” She reached out a fingertip and the tiniest spiral of electricity hit Rand between the eyebrows.

  “Shunting hell, Citz,” Rand cried out, rubbing his forehead. “That hurt!”

  City only smiled back as we came to the entrance to the Caf. I followed in beside Ginni until I looked up and saw Molla and Max at the central table with their baby son.

  He was only let out of his cell for lunchtime and for Gifted Training, because as much as everyone disliked and distrusted him, we couldn’t deny that his power was incredibly useful. Adrien’s mother always locked herself away in her room during this part of the day to keep herself from attacking him.

  Most of the time I handled seeing him with a degree of equilibrium, but today I paused as sudden intense rage flooded through me. It wasn’t fair. Max was a horrible person who had done horrible things, and yet here he was, free except for his ankle monitor, playing with his cooing son. Molla loved him too, in spite of everything. Her eyes were wide and adoring as she watched Max play with the baby’s fingers.

  Max had a family. All the while Adrien was stuck in a sensory deprivation tank trying to regrow parts of his brain. Because of Max.

  The image of Adrien’s hand meeting mine on the glass of his tank rose like a mocking ghost. Because I knew, as much as I wanted it to be otherwise, the moment had only been the illusion of connection, not the real thing.

  I set my jaw and forced myself to look away from Max as I got in line for food.

  The memory of Adrien in the tank last night made an icy spike of loneliness stab through me. Adrien had been my family, the only one I had after leaving my younger brother Markan behind in the Community. My parents were lost to the adult V-chip. Adrien had been the one person in the world who cared about me more than any of the other people scattered over the earth. My friends cared, sure. Even loved me. I looked over at the table where they were gathered. Rand was making some exaggerated gesture that had Ginni and City laughing. Xona just shook her head and went back to her conversation with Cole.

  They cared, but I wasn’t first in their consideration—they didn’t put me above all others. Losing that connection made me feel so disconnected from the world around me. I could disappear or be killed and people would mourn me (or mourn the loss of my Gift, at least), but it was a wound they’d get over in time. It wouldn’t tear a hole in anyone’s heart like losing Adrien had done to me.

  I stepped forward in line, averting my eyes from my friends.

  No, I reminded myself firmly. Adrien wasn’t lost. Not yet. And neither was my brother Markan. He was years away from the adult V-chip. I made a mental note to ask Ginni to track his location for me later. Her glitcher ability let her locate anyone, anywhere on the earth. I usually asked her every week to make sure my brother was still at the Academy or my old housing unit, but I hadn’t checked in on him since before leaving for the mission. It always reassured me to know he was safe, or as safe as he could be under the Chancellor’s constant observation. She’d be ready to pounce if he ever started displaying glitcher traits.

  I tapped my foot impatiently. The line was taking forever today. I looked around and realized the line was far longer than it had been when I’d left on the mission. But then, I knew another group of refugees had come seeking shelter. With the Chancellor’s hefty increase on raids, people who’
d lived free in the Rez their whole lives had suddenly found themselves with no safe place to go. Whenever she cracked a Rez safe house, she imprisoned the leaders and chipped the rest to turn them into drones.

  We’d already been rationing our food stocks before the new group had even arrived. It was getting harder and harder to acquire supplies. Everyone was running scared these days.

  Last month the Chancellor had captured a supplier who’d told them we were piggybacking on Comm Corp trains to move supplies, so now there were heavy inspections on all the trains. Worse, even though no one could remember the exact location of the Foundation because of the techer boy’s Gift that made people forget it, the Chancellor had still figured out that our hideout was in the south. After all, the informants she turned could still tell her the direction the train cars full of supplies were headed. We always had them delivered several hundred miles away and then picked them up from there, but still. There was more air traffic buzzing overhead than ever before. We even had to put a stop to groups going up to the Surface to get fresh air every day. Which had, of course, become another source of complaints. I was used to being underground, but lots of the people in the Rez who’d lived out in the open found it claustrophobic inside our mountain hideout.

  I finally got to the front of the line and looked at the picked-over food in the steaming bins. I reached to spear one of the few protein patties left, then paused and glanced behind me at the still-long line. A tiny girl stood at the end of the line, her eyes huge and hungry. I pulled my hand back and shoveled a small bit of sweet potato and brown rice on my tray instead. I’d tell the cook to cut the protein patties in two tomorrow so everyone could get some.

  But how long could we keep this up? I rubbed my tired eyes before picking up my tray. The cafeteria was crowded. For a moment, I looked longingly at the table where my friends were all gathered. Then I headed to the table where Tyryn, Jilia, Henk, and the top platoon leader of the Rez soldiers sat.