Shutdown

by Heather Anastasiu

  * * *

  We flew until I simply couldn’t anymore. We continued heading north, trying to put as much distance between ourselves and the safe house as possible. Adrien checked his arm panel every so often to tell me which way to turn and by how many degrees so that we’d stay in the mountains. I had no idea where we were, or where we were going. I didn’t let my thoughts stray from the task at hand. The trees remained thick, that was all that mattered. We wouldn’t be seen. Adrien would be safe.

  But I’d been awake going on two and a half days now, and suddenly I just couldn’t do it any longer. All the other thoughts I’d been keeping at bay suddenly rushed back in. The smoking cabin. Wondering if all that was left of my friends were charred bones. The trees started swirling around me again, and the air seemed like liquid, like the edges of everything seeped into one another. I slowed down and dropped us to the ground.

  Adrien checked his arm panel the moment his feet touched the earth. “Good,” he said. “We’re near a city. I can probably slip inside without any problem.”

  I noticed he said I, not we. He was going to leave me.

  I was too tired to even feel hurt by it. All chance of me getting to an allergen-safe chamber in time was gone now. I was dead weight, just like the broken bodies of everyone who’d been in the safe house.

  So of course Adrien was going to leave and save himself. What had he called it? Survival instincts? I swallowed hard with the realization. When I leaned over, it felt like my ribs were knifing into my lungs. My shoulders ached raw in their sockets.

  At least he’d be safe. At least I’d gotten him this far. I closed my eyes for a long blink, until the itchiness biting its way up my arms woke me abruptly a second later. I immediately got hold of my mast cells again with my telek. But when I finally got the allergy attack under control and opened my eyes, Adrien was gone.

  He’d left without even saying good-bye.

  Chapter 15

  I PROPPED MYSELF UP AGAINST a tree. I grabbed a sharp rock and ground it into my thigh in an attempt to keep myself awake. I looked out at the forest. The sounds seemed inordinately loud to my exhausted ears. Above every other noise was the weirdly rhythmic high-pitched screech of cicadas. I put my hands on my ears to try to block out the sound, but it was no use. This was how I was going to die then. All alone with a million insects screaming out my death knell.

  I knew the world was so much larger than this, so much bigger than my personal tragedy. I wasn’t the first to lose a loved one in this war and certainly wasn’t the first to lose my own life. I thought again of the smoking remains of the cabin.

  All year I’d worried about bad things happening to faceless Rez operatives and the nameless families who hadn’t been able to flee the cities in time. But now it was happening to me. I couldn’t hold off sleep much longer, and the allergies would descend the moment I closed my eyes.

  It would be a quick but painful way to die. I was sure I’d wake up every few seconds and use my telek to fight against the allergy attack, then inevitably grow weary with exhaustion and fall back asleep again. I wondered how many times I’d wake up again and push it back before not even my Gift would be able to stop the onslaught of released histamines.

  A sob shook my chest. I looked at the now empty spot where Adrien had stood.

  Had it all really been for nothing then? I’d believed so passionately that the Resistance had a destiny and that, in the end, good would overcome evil. Even if the road was difficult and the sacrifices severe. Maybe they still would go on and manage to win the war, without me.

  Or did this new Adrien have it right? Were hope and love merely lies we told ourselves to try to create meaning where there was none? And if we were brave, we’d just look in the face of it and call hope what it truly was: a delusion to make the cold nothingness of life seem less dark and futile.

  Surely that was the lesson of this moment. I’d failed everyone. My power, which was supposed to save people, had led instead to the destruction of the Rez’s last safe haven. If it hadn’t been for the earthquake I’d caused, the Foundation never would have been discovered. From both my brothers to Adrien, to the people dead at the burned-out cabin, to all the others who hadn’t made it out of the Foundation in the first place—my presence had been nothing but a beacon leading straight to the destruction of the people I cared for most.

  I hugged my arms hard to my stomach. I’d hoped so hard that I’d have a chance to atone for it all. That if I could just manage to free the drones from the power of the Link, or take down the Chancellor once and for all, then it would have all had some twisted kind of meaning.

  But it didn’t. It had all been for nothing.

  Bitterness and sorrow were thick on my tongue like ash. I swallowed hard and stared up at the sky through the tree branches. Thick clouds hid the light of the sun.

  I wanted it to end quickly now. Could I have that last, small mercy? Blocking my mast cells was second nature now, almost instinct. But maybe I could purposefully let the allergy attack take me the first time I fell asleep. Maybe it was possible to stop myself from fighting against it. A quick death.

  I breathed in and out rapidly, trying to psych myself up to it. I looked around me, feeling half-delirious as I watched the strange world dip and spin around me through my exhausted eyes.

  I couldn’t do it.

  I’d fight until the bitter end no matter what. Survival instincts, right? I could probably manage to keep the allergies at bay for another few hours, even if I was only prolonging the inevitable. I dug the rock in harder to my thigh.

  Hours later, I used some thin brambly vines to tie several sharp rocks to a stick that I grated over my skin like a torture device whenever my heavy eyes dropped shut for too long. The sky darkened above. I blinked, confused. Was it night already? I couldn’t see much through the treetops—just the blue slowly replaced by gray.

  Gray. It was how I’d lived most of my life as a drone, and it was how I was going to die. No one would know that a girl named Zoe had once loved a boy named Adrien. No one would know about the beauty of all the conversations we’d had and the zinging electricity his touch sent through my limbs. We’d been a brief flame that had sputtered out like the now darkening day.

  Another blink, and I’d be gone.

  * * *

  I walked up a staircase. It was completely dark. I swiveled my head back and forth but couldn’t see anything, not even my own hand. I kept going upwards because I couldn’t stand the thought of going back. I’d already come this far. Surely I was almost there. My thighs felt leaden with the effort and my throat burned. When was the last time I’d had a drink of water? Why was my body so heavy? It seemed like every footstep got heavier, and the slower I went, the further away I was from ever getting to the top.

  And then, in the middle of the darkest black, a crack of light appeared. It grew wider and wider like a door opening above me. I stumbled toward it, now barely able to breathe at all. I reached out my hand, trying to touch the light.

  Someone shouted my name, and it echoed out from the blinding light. I still couldn’t get close enough. I couldn’t breathe. I collapsed, my hands at my throat.

  “Zoe! Wake up!” The voice was louder than before.

  I blinked my swollen eyes and tried to sit up, but I could barely move. The realization hit all at once. I was still in the forest.

  I must have fallen asleep, and I was in the middle of an allergy attack. It had been going on for at least a few minutes already, because when I frantically wheezed in trying to get a breath, no air made it through the closed-up passage of my throat.

  The buzzing of my telek burned to life in my brain. But when I reached inward to flood the cells of my body with my power, the cells felt different. They were all wrong. The mast cells were swollen, spewing histamines like tiny geysers. I tried desperately to use my power to plug them, but I was too tired and confused. I couldn’t repair the damage already done.

  I dropped sideways to the gr
ound from where I’d been sitting against a tree. Crunchy leaves and pine needles stabbed my face. My body spasmed. Every inch of my skin felt on fire, and my lungs squeezed in on themselves, unable to get that next lifesaving breath.

  I wasn’t so far gone though that I couldn’t feel hands gripping my arms. Someone had flipped me onto my back. My eyes were so swollen I could barely see through tiny slits, and I could only make out the vague outline of a figure standing over me. The pain was so excruciating now, I could barely tell what was going on.

  But I did feel the sharp bite of the needle being shoved into my thigh. I thrashed against the figure straddling my body, but the held me down. A jolting spike of adrenaline shuddered throughout my body. I sat up with the suddenness of it and cracked the person on top of me straight in the forehead, then fell backwards again.

  I blinked in shock and was even more stunned to be able to open my eyes wider than I had before. I gasped in another desperate breath and air finally flooded my lungs.

  When I looked up again, I could see a person who was rubbing their forehead and looking down at me anxiously.

  It was Adrien. An opened med kit sat on the ground beside him, along with a used epi infuser.

  He’d come back for me.

  Chapter 16

  ADRIEN WRAPPED ONE OF THE silver med blankets from the pack around me, but I shrugged it off after a few minutes. I was still sweating from all the exertion my body had just gone through, even though the air had a chill to it now. The wind blew harder, making an eerie whistling sound through the tree branches.

  With the shot of epi, I was breathing fine now. Other than the leftover rash on some of my skin, I felt better too. But none of that mattered.

  Adrien had come back. I couldn’t stop staring at him.

  He was still leaning over me, one hand on my cheek as he pushed back the matted hair from my face. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I nodded, befuddled. I reached up my hand to cover his, but he suddenly sat back and started rifling through his rations pack. “You should eat something.”

  “You came back,” I whispered, still not believing it.

  “Of course I came back.” His eyebrows furrowed as he held my gaze a moment, then he looked away again. “It was easy. We’re close to Driward. A couple hours down the mountain I was able to hack and steal a transport to get me closer to the city. It’s a big factory town, and I know it pretty well. There’s a quick way in and out through one of the off-site packaging facilities. I thought one of the other factories might have what we needed.”

  “Needed for what?” My mind was still swimming from exhaustion, and nothing he said made sense.

  He frowned down at me as if I was the one not making any sense. “For your allergy. So you can sleep. Then when I got the epi, I snuck back out of the city and put the transport back where I found it. They probably won’t even know it was missing. Well, except for my muddy footprints all over it.”

  I continued staring at him. He’d gone to get help for me?

  “The inside of the factories are almost all automated,” he went on, “so there weren’t many people on the floor to see me. But I knew that all of them have fully stocked med kits near the offices. So I snuck in between drone shift changes and grabbed the kit. There was only one epi infuser, but look what else I found.” A smile lit his face. It looked simultaneously foreign and so achingly familiar. “I had to almost empty out my pack to make it fit.”

  He pulled out a bunch of crinkling, bulky material. I’d seen something like this before.

  “You found a biosuit!” It was one of the bulky kind, not the slim tribound polysutrate that had been designed for me, but it would still work fine.

  Adrien grinned. “Complete with a four-hour oxy tank. The factory works with dangerous chemicals. I knew they always keep these around in case of spills. But right now you’ll be fine with just the long-release epi shot. You’ve got twelve free hours without going into an attack.”

  I shook my head, dizzy and delirious and not able to think much beyond the happy thought of: he came back for me. I tried to focus on what he was saying.

  “Wait, so you mean, I can sleep? Right now?”

  “Right now.” He smiled back. He seemed to be smiling a lot all of a sudden. I shook my head. I really was still delirious.

  “Okay, then.” I laughed. “Let’s find some place for me to curl up and sleep.”

  A loud booming rumble suddenly sounded overhead. I let out a surprised scream and looked up. “What was that?”

  Maybe they’d found us, and it was one of the propulsion-fueled transports roaring closer. My heartbeat ratcheted up several notches.

  “It’s only thunder.” Adrien said as a fat raindrop plopped on my nose. “The storm’s been rolling in all aftern—” Suddenly Adrien clutched his head and fell to his knees.

  “Adrien!” I stumbled over to him.

  He curled up in a ball on the ground. His eyes bulged wildly, like he was in excruciating pain.

  “Adrien, what’s wrong?” I grabbed his shoulders, trying to get him to look at me. “Talk to me!” But he stayed in the same position, shaking violently. I held on to him tighter, wishing I’d had more classes on med assistance. Maybe he was having a seizure because of what the Chancellor had done to his brain?

  But then, as suddenly as it had hit, his shaking stilled. He blinked his eyes and they seemed to come back into focus. Another couple of raindrops splattered on his face.

  “Are you okay?” I helped him sit up. His eyes wide, he lifted a hand to his forehead.

  “I had a vision.” His voice was low, terrified.

  “But.” I frowned. “You don’t have visions anymore.” That part of him was broken, never to return. Jilia had said so.

  But then, Jilia had never dealt with anyone with as extensive brain damage, much less a glitcher receiving experimental tissue regrowth treatments.

  “Like, a vision vision?” I’d watched him have plenty of visions in the past, and they’d never ended up with him on the ground clutching his head.

  He shook his head, his face pale. “It wasn’t like they used to be. This was different. It was fractured.” His troubled gaze finally met mine. “I saw two separate futures.”

  I frowned. “Like two separate events that happen in the future?”

  He shook his head, slowly running his hand through his hair. It was such an Adrien thing to do. “I don’t think so. It was like … like I saw things that were happening at the same time, but I saw it two different ways. As if the future could diverge into two paths, and I saw each one.”

  “What happened in the visions?” I asked. My voice was small. It seemed nothing was simple anymore, not even his visions of the future.

  “I saw us. In the first vision, you and I are in a cave.” He frowned. “When I used to get visions, it was just images, but this…”

  “What?”

  He looked back up at me. “This time it was like I was jumping into my future body for a few moments. I could smell the damp air inside the cave, and I could tell that we’d been there at least a few days. We were alone and scared.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. It switched to the other vision.”

  “We were back in the cave again,” he started. “But this time we left it. I skipped in and out of my body as the days passed. We made a run into a city together, I don’t know which one. But we were caught. The Regs grabbed you and then…”

  He stopped.

  “And then what?” I prodded.

  “And then I watched you die.” His words came out only as a whisper. A drop of water rolled down his face. At first I thought it was a tear, but then I realized it was only the rain dripping off the tree branches overhead. It was coming down harder now. “And I wasn’t just watching it happen as a bystander like my visions used to be. I was in my own body, I could feel everything.” His voice broke. “Feel the anguish of losing you.”

  I paused for a moment as my
exhausted mind tried to soak in everything he was saying. “So which one is the real vision?” My voice was quiet. He’d foreseen my death. I didn’t know what to say to that. “Or are they both possible?”

  “Maybe,” he said, frowning and chewing on his bottom lip as he thought, “they hinge on some decision someone makes. Even how we decide to respond to the foreknowledge from the vision.”

  “But in both visions we end up in some cave?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know where it is though. If we find it, then it’s clear we should stay there.” The raindrops fell faster and heavier. He stood up and held out a hand to help me up. “Come on, let’s start looking for it. Maybe it’s nearby.”

  “No,” I responded immediately, getting clumsily to my feet.

  He scrunched his eyebrows. “Why not?”

  “Because if we do, we’re just making the vision come true,” I said. “Both visions start in the cave. If we go there, that means the other vision where I die becomes possible. I’m not walking into a trap like that.” I shook my head. “We should go somewhere else, get out of the mountains. Now we know I can fly faster at night; we could go to one of the cities after I get some sleep, try to track down some Rez operatives. You said yourself it was easy getting into Driwald.”

  “Easy for an in-and-out supply run, maybe,” he said. “But just because we don’t go to the cave doesn’t mean the rest of the vision won’t come true. We can’t risk taking you into a city. Besides, we don’t know where any of the Rez operatives are. Half the safe houses have been cracked in the last six months. We’d be in enemy territory without any idea where to go. Our safest bet is out here where no one can find us.”

  “I’m not going in a cave!” I said, all but stomping my foot. “I’ve seen people do things because your visions said it would happen. Commander Taylor died because of it. You got lobotomized. No, I’m not going anywhere near—”