Glitch
Page 19
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Regan
“What are you doing here?” I asked. My voice sounded remarkably calm for someone whose heart was making a very solid attempt to escape her chest.
“Funny,” Callaway said, “I was about to ask you the same thing.” When neither of us said anything, he sighed. “Except I have a very good guess why you’re here. You want to change the past.”
“I’m confused,” Elliot said. “That’s illegal.”
“And there’s the rub,” Callaway said. He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “That simple fact is one that everyone in this mountain has known for their entire lives, but the minute the history we have the power to change is our own, they think rules go up in smoke. Poof.”
“But,” I said as Callaway held up a hand for silence.
“While I appreciate your unique loss in all this, Regan, I would like to remind you that everyone in this mountain has suffered an excruciating loss today, and your mother would be the first one to tell you that protocol can’t be thrown out the window.” Before I could respond, there was the sound of heavy boot steps behind us, and like the partner team we were, Elliot and I whirled as one to see someone coming out of the shadows.
“Officer Salzburg,” Callaway said. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“Who’s Salzburg?” Elliot asked in my ear, and I flapped him away as Salzburg stopped in front of us, a look of surprise on his face. I was instantly transported back to that last formal dinner at my house where he showed off his latest security prototype to my hard-to-impress mother. There was something about that word, prototype, that rang a very faint bell somewhere in the back of my mind, but before I could think more about it, Salzburg was there, extending a hand for me to shake.
“Cadet Fitz,” he said. “I didn’t realize that you were part of the mountain program. Although,” he said, “that isn’t saying much, since I was unaware there was such a thing as a mountain program until yesterday morning.” He shot Callaway a disapproving look that Callaway ignored.
“You should know better than anyone the importance of secrecy to security,” Callaway said.
“I know that full well,” Salzburg said. “However, I didn’t realize that secrets were kept from me.”
Callaway cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable with Salzburg, and turned to us, grateful for the distraction. “Regan and Elliot are some of our newest recruits.” He smiled at us reassuringly. “Officer Salzburg arrived yesterday afternoon to discuss increasing security measures here at the mountain, and considering recent events, we are incredibly relieved to have his services.”
“I’m so sorry about your mother,” Salzburg said, but all I could manage was a quick nod. Any time she was mentioned I suddenly felt like I was trying to swallow a golf ball.
“You two need to go back to your dorm with the rest of the cadets,” Callaway said, his voice uncharacteristically stern. “I know you mean well, and trust me, you aren’t the only ones desperate to fix the unfixable, but you need to trust us to handle this.”
“But the Academy—” I said, my words cut off sharply by Elliot’s elbow in my ribs and Callaway’s disapproving look.
“Good night, Cadet Fitz,” he said sternly, and the formality of that title after weeks of being just Regan stung.
“Follow me,” he said to Salzburg, and together they turned toward the door to the Glitch room. A second later I felt Elliot’s hand on my arm yanking me back around the corner and out of sight. I was about to open my mouth to protest when, for the second time in twenty-four hours, his hand clapped itself firmly over my mouth. I narrowed my eyes at him. He obviously had a very bad memory, and I was about to bite down hard enough to leave a mark he’d remember when I heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway. Twisting my head away from his sweaty hand, I tugged him back into the shadows as a very distracted-looking Professor Tramble came at a trot down the hall, his face mere inches from the tablet he was holding.
He strode past us, oblivious to our presence, and as though we’d decided it beforehand, we silently crept down the hall after him. We peered around the corner as Tramble quickly entered the passcode and placed his hand on the monitor. The door gave an audible click, and he flung it open and strode through. Before I even realized I was doing it, I was in a full sprint for that door, and it was as though I was watching it shut in slow motion. At the last possible second, I lunged and threw my arm out, my fingers sliding between the door and the frame with a painful but utterly satisfying pinch.
“Trust the door will open,” I said. “It’s open.” I carefully clambered to my feet, my fingers never leaving the space between the door and its frame.
“What’s your plan?” Elliot asked. “Storm in there and ask Callaway to be Glitched back to the past?”
“You keep forgetting we don’t have a plan,” I said as I grabbed his arm and slid through the door.
We slipped into the Glitch room unnoticed thanks to the full-scale argument that had every person in the room on their feet and shouting.
Elliot pulled me to the right and down so we sat with our backs against the cold stone wall next to one of the Glitch platforms. It wasn’t a great spot—most of our view was blocked by Glitching equipment and a costume rack—but it wasn’t horrible either. Especially since it successfully hid us from everyone else in the room. I noticed that some of the agents who had been retrieved today in our mission were there as well, with the exception of Agent Chris, who I could only assume was still in the medical wing. I caught sight of Salzburg again, and I felt a pang of regret that he was the one who had come to the mountain for security talks and not my mom. Had she been here, all of this would have felt so much more manageable.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Callaway called, walking into the middle of the room and holding up his hands for quiet. “I leave for five minutes, and you resort to shouting? Please remember to keep this conversation civilized.”
“But we are running out of time,” said the agent who Sam and Serina had rescued. He was young, probably in his early twenties, and his eyes snapped angrily as he glared at Callaway.
“Just because the Academy was destroyed does not give us permission to become the very people who we dedicated our lives to capturing,” Callaway said.
“So apparently our idea wasn’t very original,” Elliot whispered. I nodded, too gripped by the argument taking place in front of me to comment.
“Which is exactly why we can’t risk it,” said another professor in the back. “We only have a handful of people left who can Glitch, and six of them are students! We saw the disaster that was today. Elliot and Regan didn’t even manage to stay together in their Glitch, and Corban and Blake were almost killed. If we are about to be under attack, we can’t risk sending any of our people back.” I shrank down a little at the mention of our poorly executed mission that morning.
“I agree,” Salzburg said. “The past is to be left untampered with. What we need to worry about now is the future.”
“You’re the security expert,” said another professor. “Do you know what happened at the Academy?”
Salzburg lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I am at a loss.”
“So he stinks at his job,” Elliot murmured in my ear. I nodded, remembering how he’d practically trembled in my mom’s presence as he showed off his new Butterfly detector.
“The Academy exploded at around one in the morning,” said one of the techs. “That’s all we need to know to get boots on the ground and stop it from happening.”
Callaway held up his hands and the crowd quieted. “We can’t send the last functioning Glitchers our nation has back to the past to hunt for explosives,” he said. “Even if we did know the nature or the location of the attack, it’s too risky.”
“But it needs to be changed!” said someone, and everyone started talking at once again.
It took Callaway longer to quiet the room this time, and I fidgeted nervously.
This elicited a flurry of protests, and Callaway again began the arduous task of quieting everyone down.
“I have the jump programmed and ready to go,” said Professor McMillan, his eyes flashing defiantly. “It may be a suicide mission, but it may also be one that saves the lives of our friends and colleagues. Don’t you think we owe it to them to at least try?!”
“This isn’t like a normal jump,” Callaway said. “Have you even considered—” but his words were cut off by the blare of an alarm. Everyone jumped and turned to look at the flashing red light on the wall. It was as though someone had pressed the pause button in the room and frozen everyone where they stood. Blood rushed in my ears as I processed what that alarm could possibly mean.
“We’ve been breached,” Callaway yelled over the alarm.
“Impossible,” Salzburg said as he stared in horror at that flashing alarm. A second later there was an ear-shattering boom that momentarily drowned out the alarms. The floor rumbled underneath me as the very walls around us shuddered and creaked, sending torrents of rock dust down onto millions of dollars’ worth of equipment. I threw my hands over my head to protect it as the room erupted in screams. It was as though I was back in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire as equipment got knocked aside, chairs were upended, and everybody made a run for the door. Everyone was shouting at once, shoving one another in their panic to escape. Within seconds, the room was cleared. I stumbled to my feet and realized that Elliot was still beside me, his face and pajamas covered in the fine gray dust of the mountain. Before I could formulate a coherent thought, there was another explosion and the door to the Glitch room slammed shut. We were trapped.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Elliot
I couldn’t believe it. I was going to die like those women in 1911. The ground shook again, and I was about to run for the door when Regan grabbed me by the arm and pulled me backward. A second later, a huge chunk of the ceiling came loose and crashed to the ground exactly where I’d been standing.
Regan didn’t give me time to scream or vomit, which was probably good since I wasn’t sure which was the best option. She yanked me backward again, but this time it was to one of the abandoned computers.
“What are you doing?” I yelled. “We have to get out of here!”
“There isn’t a way out,” she yelled back. “But I know how we save ourselves.” She jabbed her finger at the screen, and I could see that Professor McMillan hadn’t been kidding earlier—he really had already programmed the Glitch back to the Academy on the night it was destroyed.
“Come on,” she yelled. “We have to do this. It’s the only way.”
I nodded, and for once, I actually agreed. The mountain would eventually crumble under whatever onslaught it was under, and we’d die. I had no clue what would happen if the equipment we were going to Glitch on was destroyed, or how we could ever come back to this exact moment without it, but none of that mattered now. The lights flickered and Regan dug her nails into my arm. If we lost power, it was all over.
Lunging forward, I hit the activation button and by some miracle the platform in front of us lit up. The computer screen started counting down from ten, and together we raced for the platform, leaping over fallen equipment and rubble that got in our way. We skidded to a stop dead center, and as though we’d planned it, we reached out at the same time to grab hands. More chunks of rock were falling from the ceiling, and I looked across the room just in time to see the door of the Glitch room open and Officer Salzburg burst through, his eyes wide as he spotted us. There was the sound of another explosion and the platform shook under our feet as everything went black.
For the second time in less than twenty-four hours I had the disturbing sensation that I was melting, and a second later, I opened my eyes at the Academy. I stared at the green lawn, the silence of the night almost deafening after the chaos of the last few seconds. I sagged in relief, my knees buckled, and I sat down hard on the dew-damp grass.
“We aren’t dead,” Regan said, sinking down to sit beside me.
“We aren’t,” I confirmed. “At least I don’t think so.”
“When everything went black, I gave us a fifty-fifty shot of being dead,” Regan said, and then she sniffed and turned to me. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“No.”
“Me either,” she said. “In hindsight, that was a really dumb question. Sorry.”
“Forgiven,” I said, looking around. We’d landed in the grass on the edge of the Academy’s large open green space in the center of campus that everyone called the Mall. It was one of my favorite parts of campus, and I’d thought I’d never see it again. I wondered if it would be too dramatic to bend down to kiss the grass like a sailor kisses the shore after surviving a shipwreck.
“What time is it?” Regan asked, pulling me from my dazed preoccupation with the beauty of the place I’d called home for most of my life. I glanced over to the end of the Mall where the Edison Building sat with its huge clock tower illuminated on top.
“It’s midnight,” I said, and then all the warm fuzzy feelings I’d been having evaporated instantaneously. “Wait a minute,” I said, vaulting to my feet, my weak knees forgotten as my mind raced ahead. “Didn’t Callaway say that the Academy was destroyed at approximately one a.m.?”
“Professor McMillan only gave us an hour?!” Regan said, her face pale in the moonlight. “There is no way we can figure this out in an hour. This place is gigantic.”
“We don’t have a choice,” I said, already pacing back and forth as I willed myself to think fast. “We obviously can’t go back. There is probably no back to go to. The electricity was about to go out and the mountain was seconds from folding in on itself.” I shoved my hands into my hair and pulled it in frustration as I whirled on Regan. “What were we thinking?” I said.
“Okay, you just lost me,” she said.
“The letter,” I said. “The stupid stupid STUPID Cocoon. Why in the world didn’t we put, ‘Oh, and by the way, the mountain is going to fall down on your heads’?”
“If we’d told ourselves that the mountain was going to get attacked, do you think we would have stayed inside of it?” she asked, and the tirade I was about to go on about how irresponsible our future selves were dried up in my throat.
“No,” I said, “we wouldn’t have. We would have tried to evacuate everyone.”
“And we wouldn’t have been in the Glitch room with a preprogrammed computer,” Regan said.
“Our future selves wanted to make sure that we’d end up here,” I said, looking around the dark campus.
“Right,” Regan said.
“Well, couldn’t they have at least figured out how to give us a bit more time?” I fumed, not ready to let my anger go just yet.
“One hour must be enough,” Regan said. “It has to be.”
“There is just no way,” I said, unable to help myself. “Are we looking for a person carrying explosives? Or lots of people? Or even people? Maybe robots are going to come zooming over the wall at any moment. We don’t know anything about this. There isn’t research to work off, nothing to reference. No wonder Salzburg thought this was a bad idea,” I said.
“If he thought it was such a bad idea, why did he come back into the Glitch room?” Regan asked, her forehead creased.
“Probably because there was no way out of the mountain,” I said. “With the way things were falling down around our ears, I wouldn’t be surprised if the tunnels all collapsed.” I paced away from Regan and then paced back, unable to stand still. Regan, meanwhile, stood like a statue, her face twisted into an odd expression I’d never seen before. I stopped my pacing to peer at her. “Why do you look like your brain hurts?” I said.
“Nothing,” Regan said, waving a hand. “What we need to focus on now is our mission.”
“You mean the one Callaway called a suicide mission?” I shook my head as my eyes flicked from building to building, recounting the classes I’d taken in them, the professors I’d met, the staff I’d befriended, and worst of all, the kids sleeping in their dorm rooms at that very moment. I’d be so much better at this if it were in the 1800s. I was seconds away from what was sure to be an impressive panic attack when Regan snapped her head up.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
“Hear what? My brain screaming? Yeah, that’s coming in loud and clear, thanks.”
“Shhhh,” she said, flapping a hand at me, and then I heard it too. Someone was coming our way.
“We have to hide,” she whispered, her eyes wide.
“I forgot it’s past curfew,” I said, glancing back at the clock, which was ticking down with a speed that didn’t seem quite fair.
Regan shook her head, her eyes wide. “That’s not all,” she said. “Don’t you get it? We’re Butterflies now.” I was still processing this when she grabbed my hand and hauled me backward and into the shrubbery that edged the Academy Mall. There was a shout, and the slash of a flashlight followed us into the bushes. We’d been spotted.
Chapter Thirty
Regan
I wasn’t sure where I was leading us, but my main goal was to get some distance from the security guards. Elliot and I zigged and zagged down the campus paths, ducking through shrubbery and doubling back on ourselves whenever possible. This was so not a good start to things, and even as we ran, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much time this was wasting—time we didn’t have. We hurtled around a corner and skidded to a stop in front of the Trevi Fountain replica. I blinked at it for a second, confused. I could have sworn that we were on the opposite side of campus from this, but it didn’t matter now. Elliot was one step ahead of me, already vaulting over the edge of the fountain and into the water. I followed, and we tucked ourselves into the tiny maintenance bay we’d used the last time we were almost caught by security.