Shutdown

by Heather Anastasiu

  “She did it again!” City yelled, pointing at me. “We have to send her away! She’s gonna get us all cracked.”

  I looked down at my hands, then at my body. It didn’t feel like I’d released anything. “I don’t think—” I started to say, right as the techer, who was scanning through console script faster than I could read it, shouted, “It wasn’t Zoe doing it. Henk’s jet just got fired on from overhead.”

  Henk pushed past several people to look at the console screen. The techer turned toward all of us.

  “It’s the external camera feed,” the techer said.

  A fire lit the screen, so bright I could only barely make out the smoldering remains of the jet. Two more transports were beside it, and we all watched in frozen attention as Regs poured out the sides.

  “No,” Henk whispered in disbelief.

  “Everyone, get your emergency packs,” Xona said. “We gotta run again.”

  “Run where?” City’s voice was frantic. “There’s only one way out—through the hatch, and that’s right where the Regs are.”

  “Are there or are there not some badass glitchers here in this room?” Xona asked. “We make a path through.”

  “With the techer’s help, I could probably fly one of the Reg transports if we could get to it,” Cole said.

  I nodded, running over to the hatch and projecting my telek up beyond it. Xona was right. If we couldn’t take care of the Regs, no one would be safe.

  Adrien and several others followed right behind me.

  I closed my eyes. “There are twelve of them.” The hulking Regs crept outwards from their transports in a search pattern, weapons at the ready. “I don’t think they know where the entrance is.”

  “They must not know it’s you either,” Xona said, coming up behind us as she hefted a supply bag over her left shoulder. “Otherwise they’d have sent an armada. It’s probably just the normal response team to anomalous activity caught on the Sat Cams.”

  “But what would they have even seen?” I hissed. “We’ve all been underground.”

  “Not all of us,” City said. She glared at Henk. “He’s been out there. Did you wear the coolant harness when you stumbled in last night?”

  Henk opened his mouth to make a response, but then his face went ashen. “I can’t remember.”

  “Why would they even be monitoring this area?” I asked.

  “It’s not a person. It’s a humanoid-motion-recognition algorithm,” the techer boy said. “The Sat Cam compiles an alert and sends the daily report to the nearest Guard stations, then they send out two transports to investigate.”

  City swore and spun away to get another supply pack.

  “Can you drop them?” Xona whispered to me.

  I nodded. Stretching up with my power like invisible fingers, I reached into the Regulators’ bodies and counted down the notched vertebrae in their spines. Snapping their necks at the C2 vertebrae should keep them from dying, at least if someone did a spinal reattachment surgery in the next twenty-four hours.

  As they dropped to the ground, I felt sick to my stomach. I’d accidentally killed Regs before by doing this. Underneath the metal, they were men. Getting to know Cole had taught me that clearly. But I couldn’t risk the lives of my friends, and at least these Regs had a chance now.

  “It’s done,” I managed to say. City pushed past me and hurried up the ladder. Rand and Henk followed.

  “Adrien, go next,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not till you go.”

  “I’ll be right behind you. And I’ll be able to concentrate better, knowing you’re safe.”

  He reluctantly nodded and took off up the ladder.

  I ran back into the main room.

  “Come on!” Xona called out to us. “Ginni, let’s go.”

  “We’ve gotta get Zoe’s bed,” Ginni said, trying to fold the unwieldy plastic bed in half.

  Cole and the Rez fighters grabbed two heavy packs each, then lined up to climb up the ladder and out of the compound.

  I turned to Ginni as she wrestled with the med container. “It should self-collapse.” I felt along the surface of the lid until I found the right button. It began folding in on itself. Ginni and I stepped back.

  The bed finally finished and I picked up the heavy plastic square, about as big as my chest. I gave it to Ginni. “Take it and go.”

  I looked at Xona. “What else do we need?”

  “My console station,” the techer boy said. He pointed to the big pile of console components, several heavy machines and a mess of cables.

  “What do you absolutely need?” I asked.

  He stared at me as if it was obvious. “All of it.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was true, but since he was the only chance to try contacting other Sectors, I said, “Fine.” I lifted it all with my telek and tugged it along behind me as I ran back to the entryway.

  “Careful!” the techer shouted. “There’s some very sensitive equipment, you can’t just—”

  “Shut up and get up the ladder.” Xona grabbed the boy and pushed him in front of her. He clutched two personal consoles to his chest and made his way awkwardly up the ladder. I sent the rest of his equipment up after him with my telek.

  “Go, Ginni,” I said. She, Xona, and I were the only ones left. “I’ll push my bed up after you so you don’t have to carry it.”

  “Hurry,” Xona said. “We don’t know if those Regs saw something before Zoe took them out. If they com’d in, more could be coming.”

  Ginni nodded and disappeared up the ladder. I sent the bed up after her. The wide rectangle barely fit through the circular hatch opening. Right as I edged it past the metal lip, a red burst above blinded me.

  The roof suddenly began caving in. Big chunks of concrete and red dirt rained down on our heads as the tunnel collapsed on top of us. I threw my telek upward to catch the rubble before it crushed us.

  Another transport must have arrived. I’d been so busy using my telek for other things, I hadn’t thought to check if any more were coming. Stupid.

  “Take my hand,” I yelled to Xona. She took it, and I gritted my teeth as I lifted us up off the ground with my telek. I pushed the rubble up what was left of the chute and we followed it out.

  Red dust swirled all around as I set us on the ground. Xona coughed and covered her face. Even though it was late afternoon, I could only barely see a spiral of electricity shooting out of the end of City’s fingertips through the thick cloud of dust. Rand stood beside her, his arms raised. I couldn’t see exactly what they were doing, but no more laser rounds fired down at us.

  Others crouched among the rocks. Someone was lying flat out on the ground, but I couldn’t make out who it was.

  I put my hand over my eyes and tried to look up. The transport was almost right on top of us now, a sleek round-edged triangle with three blazing propulsion modules on the bottom. It wasn’t quiet like the antigravity models Henk designed. It roared like an ancient monster over our heads.

  City’s electricity wove around the entire thing in an interlocking web. As the cloud of red dust billowed away, I could see part of the bottom was melting off. A huge hissing glob of metal dripped off and plunked to the ground right in front of us. I jumped backward.

  City yelled something at Rand, but I couldn’t hear it over the sound of the transport. I started reaching out with my telek to help them, but just as I did, the shadow around us became bigger. I looked up and saw the transport was dropping out of the sky. It looked graceful as it fell. Until it slammed into the earth with the rippling force of an earthquake.

  Everyone still standing was knocked off their feet by it.

  “Zoe!” Xona’s voice called out. We’d gotten separated when I dropped her hand and ran toward Rand and City.

  “I’m here, Xona!”

  “There’ll be Regs inside,” she called.

  Right. Of course there would be. Everything was happening so quickly, there was barely time to avert one crisis bef
ore another one rose up in its place.

  I cast my telek outwards. There were six Regs in this larger transport, half of them ripped out of their harnesses and collapsed on the floor from the crash. I hurriedly counted down their spines and snapped their necks at the C2 vertebrae right as a couple of them started to stir.

  “It’s clear,” I called. “Cole and the techer, get in one of the Reg transports and see if you can get us flying.”

  “Rand,” I turned to him, “start melting all these transports down, including what’s left of Henk’s jet. If we’re lucky, any more that come to investigate will think the two molten piles are their own transports and assume we got away in the jet. Hopefully it can buy us some time.”

  Rand rubbed his hands together, smiling. “My pleasure.”

  “Everybody else!” I shouted. “Gather up. We’re gonna take one of the Reg transports, and I’m not sure how much of the supplies will fit with us. Grab what you can carry.” There were only six Regs in each transport, and we needed to fit in seventeen people. Granted, one Reg was as big as two normal people, but still it would be a tight fit. “Xona, can you start arranging people inside the transport with only the necessary rations?”

  “Wait,” the techer asked. “Where’s Ginni?”

  The question seemed to knock the breath out of me. I’d been barking orders only because I saw clearly what needed to be done, but he was right, where was she? Ginni had barely made it out of the hatch before the blast that caved in the bunker, and she must have been standing close by when it struck.

  Oh on no. I ran over to the person I’d seen lying on the ground.

  It was Ginni.

  Midway down the shin of her left leg … was gone. Blood gushed from the wound, but not so much that I couldn’t see the splintered bone where her leg had been severed, just inches below her knee. The techer haphazardly put his hands on the wound, trying to stop the blood.

  “What do we do?” I yelled frantically, afraid he was only making it worse.

  Henk pushed us both back. “We gotta stabilize her leg and get a tourniquet on it to stop the bleeding.”

  “Oh, Ginni!” I dropped down beside her and held her hand. All the composure I’d felt a moment ago evaporated. Henk ripped off his belt and wound it tight around her leg.

  “Simin?” she called, her voice high-pitched and hysterical. “What happened?”

  “I’m here,” the techer said. “You’re okay. You’re gonna be all right.”

  “It hurts,” she said in a shocked whimper. Her eyes were wide, shifting all over the place like she couldn’t seem to figure out what was going on. “It hurts so much.”

  “We’re gonna take care of you, don’t you even worry a bit,” I said. Though, looking around, I had no idea what on earth to do. Every minute we stayed here was another minute we made ourselves vulnerable. I tried to keep my face turned down, because I knew Sat Cams would be recording this whole exchange now. I couldn’t let Bright see that it was me when they reviewed the vid feed.

  I cast my telek up and outward, to make sure I sensed any more transports before they arrived. The sky was empty for as far as I could reach. Still, that didn’t mean they weren’t on their way. I looked back down at Ginni.

  “I’ll load her in the transport.” I tried to harden my emotions. My voice trembled anyway. “Simin,” I said, using the name Ginni had just whispered, “the best thing you can do for Ginni right now is figure out how to get us the hell out of here.”

  He nodded, his face pale.

  “Go!” I shouted.

  He finally turned and hurried into the transport.

  I lifted Ginni as gently as I could with my telek, but she screamed out in pain as soon as I pulled her off the ground anyway. I moved her through the air as quickly as I could, then set her down on the cold metallic floor of the transport. The inside was even smaller than I’d feared. There were no seats in the back, just harnesses along the wall where the Regs strapped themselves in during transport. The techer and Cole were already at work on the console in the cockpit. I cleared out all of the fallen Regs, and the rest of the group piled in around Ginni.

  “Where’s the med kit?” I frantically pushed through the packs we’d brought. “We need the healing acceleration gel and some pain meds. She doesn’t need to be awake for any of this.”

  “Here.” Xona pulled a square med kit out of one of the bags. She popped it open.

  “Wait,” Adrien said, putting a hand on her arm to stop her as she lifted the pain relief infuser. “Ginni, is the Chancellor at the same location she was yesterday?”

  “Stop it, Adrien,” I said. “She’s in pain. We’ll figure it all out later—”

  “No,” he all but shouted. “We need to know now.”

  “Yes,” Ginni wheezed out, her teeth gritted against the pain. “She’s in the same place.”

  “We’ll take care of her,” Xona said to me. “Go find out why we aren’t off the ground yet.”

  I nodded once and spun in the direction of the cockpit where Cole and the techer were arguing.

  “I’m telling you, we’ve gotta disable the tracker first,” Cole said. “Otherwise it doesn’t matter how far away we go, they’ll be able to follow us.”

  “And you aren’t hearing me!” Simin yelled, his voice half hysterical. “We can’t. It’s attached to the transport’s central processor. If we fry the tracker, we fry the transport. As in, no more flying, got it? We’ll just be sitting here like a stone, and we have to get Ginni out of here—”

  “Disable the tracker,” I said. “There’s no more time.”

  Simin let out a furious noise. “Did you not just hear what I said—”

  “Do it!” I ordered. “I know a way to get us off the ground.”

  Simin huffed again, but he typed frantically on his console screen. “I can’t break through the firewall to insert a virus. We need an overload of energy, but I don’t have that kind of equipment here!”

  I knew where we could get some. “City,” I called. “We need you.”

  She came up to the cockpit. “Why aren’t we off the ground yet? They’ll be here any second.”

  “I need you to fry the engine, blow all the circuits. Can you do that?”

  She smiled and placed her hand against the console. The space underneath her hand glowed slightly blue and within a few seconds I heard elements snapping and crackling. The smell of smoke filled the cabin. “It’s done,” she said.

  “Great. Brilliant.” The techer threw his hands up in the air. “We’re now officially dead in the water. Now what’s going to happen to Ginni?”

  “Got all the transports and the jet melted down,” Rand shouted from behind us. “I sure can’t tell which ones were theirs and which was ours.”

  “Good job,” I called over my shoulder. “Help everyone get strapped in as best as you can.”

  Simin got up to go check on Ginni and I sat down in his seat. I gripped the armrests, letting my mind expand. I’d never tried moving something this, well, big. In theory, it shouldn’t be a problem … But in reality?

  I let my telek push through my fingertips and imagined the way I’d seen City’s electricity web weave around the other transport. I did the same, but instead of electricity, I laid a web of energy. The projection cube burst to life in my mind and I could sense the entire transport and all seventeen bodies crammed inside. I memorized the feel of it, the slightly acrid smell of smoke in the air and the smooth texture of the steel armrest underneath my fingers. The back door clanged shut. Everyone was inside now.

  And then I whispered, “Up.”

  The people behind me let out surprised yelps and gasps, but I ignored them. I was entirely in my mind now, lifting the triangular object off the ground and up into the sky. Like I’d done when it had just been Adrien and me, I kept my mind’s eye focused on the ground.

  But the physics of flying a transport compared to moving two bodies was a very different thing. For one, the wind resistance was diff
erent. It caught the wings in ways I didn’t expect and sent us tipping left and right. People screamed and yelped behind me. I bit down on my lip and compensated.

  I tried to get a feel of how the wind worked. Right when I thought I’d gotten a handle on it, it would gust at strange times with another updraft.

  After another few minutes, I’d gotten the basics down, at least enough to keep us mostly steady. “Henk, tell me you’ve got another transport hidden somewhere close.”

  “’Course I do.” He came up behind me and put a hand on the back of my chair, staring out through the window. “Can’t believe it. You just made a dead bird up and fly.”

  “I need you to direct me to the other transport. It won’t take them long to realize what happened. The melted transports might throw them off for a little bit, and maybe if we’re lucky they’ll think we took off on foot. But I’m sure soon enough they’ll go back to the Sat Cam logs and watch this one take off. They might already be tracking us.”

  He nodded beside me. He looked at the projected map the techer had set up on his personal console, depicting our position and altitude. “’Kay, you need to turn left, and head straight that way about a hundred miles.”

  I turned the vehicle slightly and hit another updraft that made the whole transport wobble for several long moments before I compensated.

  “Too far,” Henk said. “You gotta adjust back to the right a smidge.”

  I did, more gracefully this time, and then threw all my concentration into gathering speed. Finally the comments and terrified gasps behind me quieted. I hoped I wasn’t banging Ginni around too roughly. I didn’t dare a glance backwards to check. Sweat beaded on my forehead already. I couldn’t split my focus in any more directions.

  Henk and I kept at it, him giving me directions to nudge me one way or another until finally, only ten minutes later, I felt the landscape that had formerly stretched out flat in all directions begin to jut upward. I opened my eyes to look, because I didn’t understand the topography I felt with my telek.

  “You’re taking us into a city?”

  “Look closer,” Henk said. “No one’s lived there for a couple hundred years.” As the transport drew closer, I saw what he meant. What I’d thought at first were normal buildings stretching up into the sky, I could now see were ruins. The whole city looked like it had been burned out. Half the ground was covered in rubble, the other half was made of buildings on the verge of collapse.