Shutdown

by Heather Anastasiu

  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.

  “If you’re trying to deactivate us,” Adrien said as he lay beside me, breathing heavily, “there are more pleasant ways to die than plummeting to the earth.” Then he laughed. The noise echoed oddly in the air. “When I was a kid I always dreamed about flying. I think I’m cured of it now.”

  If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I’d have been surprised at the laugh. As it was, all I could do was giggle in response. I was so deliriously tired, it seemed like the funniest thing I’d ever heard. His laugh sounded so … so Adrien.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll have to work on the landings.” I rolled over onto my back. My body felt so heavy, like rocks had been sewn into my skin. The sun was rising. Everything around me seemed to glow, indistinct and blurry around the edges because of the early morning fog. It was hard to tell where the light ended and the trees began.

  I giggled again at how pretty it all was. I put a hand over my mouth but couldn’t stifle the high-pitched laughter, even though Adrien was looking at me strangely. Part of me knew this was just the sleep deprivation getting to me, but I was too distracted to care.

  “The light,” I said, pointing. “It’s so beautiful.”

  The fog tumbled along the ground. I reached out to touch it, imagining it would feel like cotton. But my fingers passed right through. I looked over at Adrien. The fog curled around him, and suddenly I had the strangest fear that he was a ghost. Adrien had read to me about them once, a long time ago. I
ntangible spirits who took the shape of people you’d loved and lost.

  And then suddenly, instead of laughing, I wanted to cry. Because that was what Adrien felt like to me now. A hollow echo who took the shape of the boy I’d loved, the boy who’d died all those months ago. I reached out for him, terrified my fingers would pass through him like they had the fog.

  But he was solid. I almost choked with relief. He wasn’t a ghost. He was still here. He was my Adrien, and he always would be. I didn’t care what he said.

  I rolled myself toward him and kissed his lips. He blinked in surprise, but didn’t pull away. I kissed him harder, pressing my lips against his. Then, almost without thinking, I wrapped my arms around his body, pulling him into me. For a moment, just a moment, I could pretend that he was my Adrien.

  With my hand on his chest, I could feel his heart starting to beat faster. After a long moment, his lips responded to mine.

  I was delirious with joy or lack of sleep, I didn’t care which. Adrien was kissing me again. Adrien loved me. Some small part of my brain registered that his kisses felt strange. Even though they were the same lips, he used them differently. His mouth was clumsy, as if he’d never done this before.

  I pushed him back so that he was on the ground, but kept my mouth connected to his, always connected. He moved beneath me and my body responded. Matching his perfectly. I’d always thought we were two parts of a puzzle that only clicked into place when we were with each other. Even though he responded slightly differently now, it was still the only thing that felt right on this entire earth.

  But then he broke away, panting hard. His eyes were wide, wild even. He stared at me several long moments before lifting me by the waist and depositing me on the ground beside him. “You’re exhausted. You’re forgetting I’m not him.”

  He bolted to his feet and walked away a few steps, lacing his fingers behind his head and hiding his face in his elbows for several long seconds.

  When he turned back to me, his face was a hard mask. “We should check the map. See how close we are.” He started tapping away at his arm panel.

  I stared at him in disbelief, and the illusion was instantly broken.

  I tried to get to my feet, wanting to shove him or punch him or do something to make him remember who he was. But I tripped on a bush when I tried to stand up and managed to catch myself on my elbows when I fell, only narrowly avoiding slamming my face into the ground.

  When I looked over at him, my exhausted eyes were seeing doubles again. It looked like there were two Adriens standing side by side—the old and the new. The old Adrien would have caught me when I stumbled a moment earlier, would have thrown himself underneath me to break my fall. He would have wanted to kiss me for hours until our lips were numb and our bodies flushed.

  But the new Adrien didn’t even ask if I was okay. He just moved away from me and promptly clicked through the maps on his arm panel. Tears leaked out of my eyes. The two images before me settled back into one, and I finally understood for certain that it was not my Adrien left standing.

  “Look,” he said, pointing at his arm and coming over to show me. I didn’t want to look. I wanted to curl up into a ball and sob. Even if the person standing in front of me wasn’t a ghost, my Adrien was dead. A thick wave of grief slammed into me.

  “It’s what I thought,” he continued, as if nothing was wrong, as if my entire world wasn’t crashing to pieces. “We’re very close. I’ve been watching the map on my arm panel, calculating our speed. I think we’re right here.”

  I still wouldn’t look.

  “Zoe,” he said softly, his voice pitched low. He reached out to touch my arm, but I yanked it away.

  “Look, Zoe, we’re less than a mile away from the safe house. We made it to the rendezvous site.”

  I looked at him in confusion. That couldn’t be right.

  “Just a mile?” I finally looked at the map. Indeed, the tiny beacon that indicated our position was blinking right beside the location for the rendezvous site. “But we were hundreds of miles away a few hours ago. It doesn’t make any sense—” I tried to wrap my befuddled mind around it.

  “You flew much faster in the open air. We’ll be there soon, and you can finally sleep.”

  I blinked and then blinked again. My eyes felt like sandpaper in their sockets. Sleep. Yes, that would be very good. I could shut my eyes and forget the sharp grief that was tearing its way through my stomach.

  I got to my feet and lurched awkwardly, the mix of adrenaline and exhaustion tipping me one way, then the next. I held my arms out and the breeze seemed to lift me up, like I was as light as a leaf, and I’d be carried along easily instead of having to work so hard. I’d lift right up out of this world with all its sadness and pain.

  “I don’t think you should be flying anymore,” Adrien said. “Not in your condition.”

  I dropped my arms to my sides and they felt extremely heavy again. I looked around in confusion. I tried to focus on what Adrien was saying. “It will take forever if we don’t fly,” I finally managed to say, though my words came out a little garbled. “We don’t have forever. We need to get there now.”

  He put a restraining hand on my arm right as I lifted off the ground. “If by forever you mean about fifteen minutes.”

  I tugged my arm away, but landed back on the ground. And stumbled again. Why was the earth all tilted funny? It was impossible to stand straight. Gravity was really a ridiculous thing. The world would be far better off without it. Objects shouldn’t be tethered to the ground. It wasn’t fair.

  “Yeah, you definitely shouldn’t be flying,” Adrien said, holding me upright. “I’m not even sure you should be standing. Here, take my arm.” He held out his arm.

  “Oh, what do you care?” I asked, choked again by a dark mixture of anger and sadness. “I’m just a liability.” I lurched forward again on the word.

  He held out a hand to steady me.

  “I don’t need your help.” I pushed away from him.

  And then I ran into a tree.

  “Clearly,” he said, taking my arm and putting it around his waist to help stabilize me.

  My legs felt rubbery, but with his support I was able to walk, only tripping occasionally on logs and brush. I couldn’t tell how long we walked. It took all my energy to stay upright and keep my telek loosely focused on stemming my mast cells from an allergy attack. Adrien checked the map again, squinting at his arm as we neared a rise in the forest. The fog was thick overhead. The air smelled a little funny, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on where I’d smelled it before.

  “Zoe,” he said, sounding excited, “we made it. The rendezvous site is right over that rise.”

  I grinned and felt a wave of adrenaline pour through my body. I grabbed his hand and started to run with a sudden burst of energy. Adrien easily kept pace beside me. We topped the rise and looked down at the valley below.

  And then my legs dropped out from under me. Because the cabin was gone. It wasn’t just more fog ahead I’d seen, and the funny smell suddenly made sense too.

  It was smoke.

  All that was left of the place where all my friends and everyone else at the Foundation were supposed to be waiting for us was the smoking remains of a building that had been blasted to bits.

  Chapter 14

  ADRIEN IMMEDIATELY PULLED ME BACKWARD. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he whispered, dragging me back farther into the forest, away from the ridge.

  But I could only stare ahead, unseeing. No, it couldn’t be. I tried to fight off Adrien’s hold for a moment so I could go look again. I had to have seen wrong. There was no way the rendezvous site could have been cracked. No one knew the coordinates other than those who had been in the pods … a wave of nausea hit and I grabbed my stomach. They must have tracked one of the pods itself somehow, in spite of Henk’s cloaking tech.

  All those people. I thought of everyone who’d made it in the first pod that launched. Tyryn. All the refugees. Molla and th
e baby.

  “No, they can’t be dead,” I whispered, stumbling back from Adrien’s grip. “It can’t be.”

  “We don’t know anything,” Adrien said, coming up to me again. “Except that we need to get out of here. They probably know it’s a rendezvous site, so they’ll be watching to see if anyone else shows.”

  My eyes strayed back to the ridge as a sob choked its way out of me. I’d urged everyone to get in the pods thinking it would save them, when really I’d been sending them straight to their deaths. Over a hundred people. Dead because of me.

  “It can’t be, I just need to look again.” I tried to lurch back toward the top of the hill, but Adrien grabbed my arms again.

  “We saw it wrong.” I wrestled to get out of his grasp. “We saw it wrong!”

  “Stop it, Zoe.” Adrien took my face in both hands and forced me to look at him. His eyes searched back and forth between mine. “You need to focus and fly us out of here. Right now. I know you’re tired. But you have to do this. They’ll kill us if they find us. Do you understand? You’ll die.”

  I shook my head. No. I didn’t understand anything. None of this made sense. I ground my palms into my eyes.

  “Fine, if you don’t care about saving yourself, then think about me.” Adrien’s voice was sharp like a slap. “If you don’t get me out of here, they’ll find us and kill me. Is that what you want, to get me killed?”

  My head snapped up. Of course. I was his only escape route. It stung, but he was right. I couldn’t let him get hurt anymore because of me.

  I breathed out. Empty mind, empty mind, I intoned to myself. Just like back in meditation practice. I couldn’t think about what might have happened to everyone. I was the reason Adrien was a shell of his former self. I owed it to him to get him safely away from here. The thought sharpened my mind to a single focus. There was nothing else in the world except this moment right now: objects filling space and the feel of the wind against our faces as I lifted us off the ground. Somehow I managed to pull from wells of energy reserves I didn’t know I had.

  We flew up, up, up until we were right below the tops of the trees. And then I propelled us forward. For once, I succeeded at clearing my mind of any thoughts. I was truly emptied out. But it didn’t feel a thing like being at peace.